|
Product Description
An account of all the new and surprising evidence now available that contradicts the standard narrative for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations
Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today’s states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family—all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction.
Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the “barbarians” who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.
Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today’s states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family—all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction.
Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the “barbarians” who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Fire: A Brief History (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)
- The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance from Scratch
- A Plague of Sheep (Studies in Environment and History)
- Potosi: The Silver City That Changed the World (Volume 27) (California World History Library)
- Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (City Lights Open Media)
- The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)
- Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
- Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future
- Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play
- Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
*If this is not the "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 3, 2024 18:31 +08.