A very interesting analysis of early state forms and the proliferation of sedentary agricultural economies. Scott works hard to dispel common myths about agricultural versus forager economies while simultaneously explaining how the development of the state was dependent upon the development of sedentary agriculture (and vice versa), which came at a great cost. Scott's analysis suffers from his narrow scope (he only examines Mesopotamia), but nonetheless this is a great piece of economic history.

It brought me some interesting perspectives with what is happening in the world today - Covid19.

The book presented in many ways the failures one crop farming and state-led life was not such a great thing for man. Sure we have all these awesome ancient cultures but they came at a heavy life loss especially for the non-1%.

Could there have been another option for man? I dunno. Thats a conversation I would love to have with someone else who has read the book.

I recommend this book definitely for conversation purposes especially the latter half of the book.

Dit boek is een verwerping van Hobbes.

Alle conventionele ideeën over het ontstaan van de eerste staten worden structureel ontkracht, en dat ook nog met een zeer fijne verteltrant. Toch interessant om te zien hoe (en hoe langzaam en waarschijnlijk onvrijwillig) we slaven van het graan zijn geworden.

Interesting overview of early states, and it's a cool coincidence that all of the most reliable archeological evidence we have supports James C. Scott's general world-view.

This is a self-described “nonstate history” book. It aims to push back on the state-centrism of much academic history. This is sensible because there’s a huge availability bias in archaeology; nomads with only biodegradable remains are harder to recover and account for. Further, early states has a huge incentive to paint themselves as superior to nonstate peoples, which the author identifies and is trying to correct for here. I picked this up because a long time ago I read a review of the book that described a fascinating account of how grains are uniquely suited as crops to form a tax-collecting society around. This book delivered that, plus engrossing descriptions of other main factors influencing the earliest developments of state power.

A main argument is that nomadic lifestyles shouldn’t be viewed as a developmental stage that happened before the clearly superior state lifestyle, but a cooccurring mode that could actually have been preferable to “civilized” lives for several reasons, including: war, famine/crop failures, the emergence of epidemic disease, rigid and overreaching state taxes.

Some of the drawbacks of this book are that it’s a bit more polemical than I expected, like the author has a score to settle, but not distractingly so. Another is that it didn’t answer one of the questions I think should be core and kept coming to mind as I read: where did the first tax collector, the first elite class come from? No path of the *mechanics* of transitioning from a non-state settlement to a state settlement is described, and even conjecture would have been illuminating. Finally I found it lacking a conclusion. If the author wants to drive home the point about the worth of barbarian livelihoods, he could have made that more forcefully - given slaves, war, and things like ritual sacrifices existed in both modes, a closer look at how prevalent these things were would be convincing. I still sort of buy his argument though. As a novice I can’t truly evaluate his citations but he does at least clearly state which parts of his assertions are speculative.

Overall this was quite an insightful read, and thankfully short and approachable enough for someone with very little historical knowledge to pick up and learn from. It does not suffer at all from the stereotype of nonfiction books being repetitive and 3x longer than they need to be.

Me gustó! Una mirada distinta de las primeras civilizaciones en su desarrollo, características y algunos puntos interesantes sobre las relaciones con sus vecinos "barbaros"