For the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest State
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James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States is a spirited and sophisticated attack on settled society, agriculturalism, and state formations. Scott’s wager is that all three developments were welfare reducing for the bulk of the populace. Sedentism, the concentration of hitherto dispersed people, animals, plants, insects, and microbes between 10,000 and 5,000 BCE, into what he calls “Late-Neolithic multi-species resettlement camps” was an epidemiological disaster (for the higher species). The domesticated beasts and no less domesticated men of these camps had higher mortality rates and were of lower stature (perhaps even had smaller brains) than their wandering and dispersed counterparts who continued to occupy most of the landmass of the Earth. Fixed-field farming, which arose some two thousand years
For the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest State
For the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest…
For the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest State
James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States is a spirited and sophisticated attack on settled society, agriculturalism, and state formations. Scott’s wager is that all three developments were welfare reducing for the bulk of the populace. Sedentism, the concentration of hitherto dispersed people, animals, plants, insects, and microbes between 10,000 and 5,000 BCE, into what he calls “Late-Neolithic multi-species resettlement camps” was an epidemiological disaster (for the higher species). The domesticated beasts and no less domesticated men of these camps had higher mortality rates and were of lower stature (perhaps even had smaller brains) than their wandering and dispersed counterparts who continued to occupy most of the landmass of the Earth. Fixed-field farming, which arose some two thousand years