|
Product Description
An account of all the new and surprising evidence now available for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations that contradict the standard narrativeWhy 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
- The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia: Rebellion and Subsistence in South East Asia
- Fire: A Brief History (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books)
- Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security (City Lights Open Media)
- Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
- Potosi: The Silver City That Changed the World (California World History Library Book 27)
- The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)
- 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 (The Institution for Social and Policy St)
- Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future
- Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Canto Classics)
*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 24, 2024 23:59 +08.