While I didn’t find this book as comprehensive or innovative as his other works, I do think it is a worthy complement to them. I place this book in the same realm as David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 book, "The Dawn of Everything," which aims to restructure “big history.” Just like Graeber and Wengrow’s book, Scott pushes back against the idea that the transition into an agricultural society was not only a natural progression but also a desirable one. In fact, Scott spends most of the book outlining why sedentary agricultural states were extremely problematic for the plants, animals, and people living within them and notes that the only reason agricultural societies soon became dominant was due to their higher birth rate compared to non-agricultural states.

Another thing I enjoyed was Scott’s focus on the co-constitutive nature of the acts of landscaping and domestication. He first shows how fire was in fact the first landscaping tool. However, I found his echoing of Michael Pollan more poignant. Building off Pollan, Scott shows how in the act of domesticating a crop or animal, the person themselves are transformed, particularly in relation to something that now needs constant attention to survive.

Furthermore, I enjoyed Scott’s continued focus on the role of the state in all of this. His typology of what constitutes a state was both enlightening and enjoyable. For example, his emphasis on the state’s central focus on revenue collection and how walls were created not just to keep invaders out, but to keep taxable subjects in, was extremely interesting. Also, his focus on the concreteness of grain as a source of taxation due to its ease of transport, durability, and predictability in terms of its output and visibility in the field, as opposed to cassava or potatoes, which are underground and need to be dug up, was insightful. To build on this, as Scott notes, roaming armies can easily steal or burn a field of grain, but cannot do the same with root plants.

A final point of interest is Scott’s last chapter, which builds off his book "The Art of Not Being Governed," focusing on non-state people. These are people who not only seek to evade the state’s controlling mechanisms but may also actively resist, rebel against, or raid the state. He looks at the state and non-state people as being co-constitutive, and the different methods through which non-state people are incorporated by the state.

That said, there are some issues with the book, and I was extremely fortunate to be able to talk to a sociology graduate student at Binghamton University who had read it and pointed some out, further crystallizing my thoughts. The first thing he pointed out was the issue of causality: Was it agriculture that brought about the state, or was it vice versa? While this is a question that Scott focuses on, he seems to constantly switch his stance throughout the book. The second issue was the historical specificity of his case studies. Throughout the introduction, Scott notes that he will be focusing his analysis on the early states of Mesopotamia, namely Uruk, Ur, and Eridu. While he does focus on these states throughout, his argument at times becomes extremely general as he moves from the Americas to Asia, to Europe, and the Mediterranean. In other words, the book lacks historical specificity despite promising it.

Despite these problems, I would still recommend this book to those of you who are interested in both ancient history and “big history” and the debates surrounding them.