There is a conventional, widely
held and well-understood story about the progress of humanity from pre-history
to the present. After starting as a hunter-gatherer society after the end of
the last ice age around 15,000 BCE (in Before the Current Era notation), the
beginning of farming from 10,000 BCE led to the first villages of the Neolithic
period. By 7,000 BCE the early agricultural societies in Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica
and China had emerged, followed a few thousand years later by the first Bronze
Age city states, which in turn led to civilization as we understand it today,
as a form of social organization with advanced technological capabilities.
In the conventional narrative,
farming saved humanity from a primitive hunter gatherer existence, allowing us
to settle down and build villages, which over time became the city states that
were the centres of these early civilisations. City populations grew as people
took advantage of the security from raiders and the cultural and economic
opportunities living inside the city walls created. By 3000 BCE Mesopotamian
cities like Ur, Nippur and Lagash had populations as large as 50,000 people,
enclosed by enormous city walls, behind which society was organised with a
king/emperor at the top and classes of priests, administrators, warriors,
merchants and peasants or slaves. Most of the thousands of clay tablets, the
earliest evidence of writing, found in the stone ruins of these cities are tax
records of grain harvests, and thousands of small bowls used to dole out
rations have also been found.
The historical record also shows
the periodic collapse of these city states, usually attributed to disease,
barbarian invasions or insurgency, plunging ancient civilisations in
Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica into periods called ‘Dark Ages’ during
which the cities with their cultures and civilizations slowly get rebuilt. Thus,
under the story told by the conventional narrative, civilizations rose and fell
in a cyclical pattern with the growth and decline of these city-states. There
is, however, a lot more to the story than this, and these cycles of history are
not really an explanation of the frequency and severity of collapses of ancient
civilizations.
*
In an unintended coincidence I
started and finished 2017 with two books about ancient history. The first was
Eric Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year
Civilization Collapsed (2014), which looks at the sudden end, after
centuries of stability, of the civilized world of the Bronze Age. The sophisticated
economies and cultures of the late second millennium BCE stretched from Greece
to Egypt and Mesopotamia, with the eight major kingdoms of Egyptians, Hittites,
Canaanites, Cypriots, Minoans, Mycenaeans, Assyrians and Babylonians linked by extensive
diplomacy, commerce, trade and intermarriage. This interdependent world and its
writing systems, technology, and monumental architecture suddenly ceased to
exist as all the kingdoms collapsed over the course of a few decades. Over
fifty years at the beginning of the twelfth century BCE almost every
significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed,
many of them never to be occupied again. Then followed a few centuries of a
‘Dark Age’ after the collapse of these Bronze Age civilizations, before Iron
Age societies emerged, first in Greece and later Rome
The commonly accepted reason for
the collapse was invasion and sacking of these cities by the Sea Peoples,
marauders from the Western Mediterranean, but Cline presents evidence to
support a argument of multiple interconnected failures, as more than one
natural and man-made cataclysm caused the disintegration and fall of these ‘empires
and globalized peoples’. Because they were so strongly linked together and
interdependent, the collapse of one of the kingdoms led to the decline and
collapse of the others. He concludes the primary cause of the collapse was
climate change, which led to social breakdown and internal rebellions by an
underclass of peasant populations facing severe food shortages, as well as
invasions by migrating peoples fleeing the effects of climate change in their
homelands. There was also a series of earthquakes from around 1225 to 1175 BCE.
These, together with the famines and droughts and the cutting off of
international trade routes, undermined the societies of the time and led to a
widespread general collapse of civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean.
*
It was the striking parallels
with our present situation that led me to Cline’s book. Climate change induced
war in the Middle East explains Syria today, where
the civil war started in 2012 after the worst drought in hundreds of years of
records (according to NASA
the worst drought in 900 years), and we have mass migration from the Middle
East and the Sahel as a consequence of famine and drought. The only historical
example of the collapse of a political system of great powers that are
economically interdependent as a consequence of rapid climate change seems
particularly relevant to the present. What was striking about the collapse was
how fast it happened once the tipping point was reached.
One has to take care when
extrapolating from the past to the present or the future. However, this history
does bring one of the most important and salient issues currently facing us
into focus, climate change and migration. In the world today there are no
unpopulated inhabitable regions left, and those areas of low population density
where migrants escaping state collapse might settle and rebuild are owned and
controlled by other states that are not prepared to cede sovereignty. This
makes forced migration a political issue, and today most people who leave their
country of origin without a legal destination (with a visa or permit) due to
conflict, war or persecution are cared for by the United Nations. According to
the UNHCR in
June 2017 there were 65.6 million forcibly displaced people, a record number,
of whom 22.5 million were refugees.
The potential for climate change
to cause large-scale and widespread displacement and migration has been
recognised for many years, although the more alarmist numbers lack credibility.
The Paris
Agreement established a task force to develop recommendations on
displacement, and an earlier draft included the creation of a coordination
facility with more powers, which was removed in the last days of the summit. Regardless
of how seriously one takes the risk of climate change, the precautionary
principle suggests that the links between climate change, displacement and
migration need to be better understood and international and national policy
responses better coordinated. There are straightforward responses to climate
change that would allow people to adapt and stay in place, like irrigation or
changing crops and repairing damaged infrastructure after storms and floods, but
rapid change would bring many challenges and potentially many victims.
*
The evidence that cities are
more productive, more inventive, and have higher incomes and better outcomes
for their inhabitants is overwhelming, and larger cities have more of these
than smaller ones. This leads to the view that cities are the greatest invention
of humanity, because they are the necessary enabler of the stability,
technology and culture that progress depends on. At a time of rapid urbanization,
when the majority of the world’s population for the first time live in cities,
a narrative that emphasises the beneficial role of cities and urbanization has
great appeal. Therefore a book that challenges this view is highly unusual and
very distinctive.
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017) by
James Scott challenges this conventional view, and rethinks the origins of
civilization and the development of society in Mesopotamia, which is the
geographical focus of the book. He takes a new look at the implications of the
historical change from hunting and gathering to farming and the cultivation of
crops and livestock. Scott is a political scientist who challenges orthodoxy
and the narrative of progress, arguing the foundation of early states was not
consent but violence, their rise led to a decline in living standards and less healthy
populations, and they all eventually collapsed.
Scott argues that the
conventional view of the history of humanity is fundamentally wrong in certain
key respects, and bases his argument on a wide range of recent research. He
does not claim that the discovery of fire and later the change from hunting and
gathering to farming, and eventually industrialization and the development of
modern society, are not transformational, because obviously they are, but he
does claim that there were unintended and misunderstood consequences when we
changed from a hunting and gathering lifestyle to farming. This is not a weak
argument, there are many facts from many places around the world that support
his view that this progress did not come without costs, and his book collects
evidence not just from history and archaeology but also from fields as diverse
as epidemiology, biology, demography, geography and climate science to support
his view.
Neolithic villages were often
abandoned, it is thought because of endemic disease caused by their unsanitary
conditions. Their people were less healthy than hunter-gathers because their
diet was more restricted and the work harder and more repetitive. However, sedentary
farming allowed much higher fertility rates than hunter gathering, and over
time higher fertility allowed populations to increase. Eventually economic and
demographic conditions were right for the emergence of city states and the seizing
of power by their leaders. Scott believes this happened around 3,500 BCE, in the
flat wetlands of the Fertile Crescent, and it was due to the link between food
production and the development of state power.
Ancient city states were agricultural
and dependent on cereals for food, like wheat and barley in Mesopotamia, millet
in China, and maize in Mesoamerica. Cereals are easy to tax, they ripen at
predictable times, the size of the harvest can be accurately assessed and the
grain can be easily transported, stored and distributed in measured rations by
weight and volume. Thus the early city states had tax collectors responsible
for managing the harvest, its storage and distribution. It is much more
difficult to tax merchants and trade, or crops that ripen slowly or can remain
in the ground, like tubers. Significantly, the earliest (preserved) writing on
clay tablets is for recording harvests and allotments. Scott argues that the
state controlled food supply through taxation and producers became subjects,
with the agricultural surplus used to feed the non-productive elites who
emerged in this system, the priests and administrators, as well as the workers
who did the harvesting and built the walls that surrounded their cities
Research by Tim Kohler and his
colleagues on prehistoric inequality supports Scott in this. They studied 63
archaeological sites and estimated the levels of wealth inequality in the
societies whose remains were dug up, by using the distributions of house sizes.
The researchers suggested agriculture was to blame, because a nomadic lifestyle
is cooperative and not conducive to wealth accumulation. After humans switched
to farming people began to acquire material riches and inequality rose steadily
with the shift to settled agriculture. In the Americas inequality levelled out after
about 2,500 years, but inequality continued climbing for several millennia In Eurasia,
which was richer in large mammals that could be domesticated. Horses and oxen
greatly improved farm productivity, but livestock were mainly owned by the rich.
Timothy A. Kohler, Michael E.
Smith, Amy Bogaard, Gary M. Feinman et al., 2017. Greater post-Neolithic wealth
disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica. Nature 551:619-623.
Inequality was the outcome of
slavery, because these were slave societies, which was the norm for
agricultural economies for most of human history. Reversing conventional
wisdom, Scott believes that the walls built around city states may have been to
keep people in, so they could be controlled and compelled to work, rather than to
keep others out. Wars were fought with smaller, weaker states to capture their
people and add to the working population, and replace the many workers constantly
lost through escape and mortality. With static technology, “The total
population of a grain state, assuming it controlled sufficient fertile land,
was a reliable, if not infallible, indicator of its relative wealth and
military prowess.” Slavery maximized production and the agricultural surplus
and “It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the centrality, in one form or
another, of bondage in the development of the state”.
He argues the story of the
development of city states is also a story about development of political
elites in very specific locations, where fertile soil and river transport
allowed concentration of people who could be forced to produce a grain surplus.
The elite seize power when the opportunity arises from settled populations
growing easily managed and taxed crops. They then control the labour and
fertility of those populations to increase the yield of the crops their society
depends on. His is a bleak picture, with these cities filled with slave or unpaid
labour forced to toil in fields and workshops under constant supervision and
the threat of punishment. On the other hand, many slaves ran away and had to be
replaced, as they escaped to join the barbarian tribes who lived beyond the limited
reach of the cities’ power. Also, over time slaves became citizens, as generations
of surviving slaves became assimilated and often acquired new captives as
slaves for themselves.
These ancient city states were
fragile, and regularly went through collapses, and often a series of collapses.
The Old Kingdom of Egypt collapsed around 2100 BCE and the Middle Kingdom around
1650 BCE, the Minoan palaces around 1450 BCE, and there was the twelfth century
BCE when the Bronze Age came to an end due to climate change and other
catastrophes, as argued by Cline. Whatever the reason, these early states did
not survive permanently, with episodes of collapse punctuating their historical
records. Three common reasons for collapse Scott gives are:
1. The unhealthy environment, lack of sewerage and the consequent diseases. With urbanization came new infectious diseases such as
cholera, smallpox and measles, and epidemics spread by transmission through trade and warfare as
people moved from place to place.
2. Deforestation
caused by cutting down forests and excessive grazing by goats led to flooding and
erosion, and with irrigation came salinity and declining yields.This also led to the drying out of the Middle East and climate change.
3. Warfare between states and internal conflicts, with battles for succession,
slave rebellions, civil wars and insurrections.
Scott sees collapse not as a
disaster but as an opportunity, and this is where he rethinks the story of the origins of the state and the roots of civilization in the ruins of these cities. The oppressive state system is dismantled and
the population disperses, redistributing itself across a wider territory. In
the case of epidemics, flight and dispersion were the only options for the
populace of an infected city. This dispersed population did not leave any
records mainly because they were ungoverned, outside any city-state or grain
empire and therefore not counted. They did not need the monumental architecture
and clay tablets found in the ruins of the ancient cities, they were nomadic or
semi-nomadic and their buildings were not made of stone. Because there are no
records from these periods when people live outside city-states they are called
dark ages, i.e. without information. “There may well be, then, a great deal to
be said on behalf of classical dark ages in terms of human well-being. Much of
the dispersion that characterises them is likely to be a flight from taxes,
war, epidemics, crop failures, and conscription.”
Against
the Grain is not just a rethinking of ancient history, it is also a
re-evaluation of the state’s role in political thought. History has privileged
states because they leave a record for archaeologists of ‘invariably
state-centric texts: taxes, work units, tribute lists, royal genealogies,
founding myths, laws’, while much of the world’s population, the ‘barbarians’,
lived outside their borders, where they left little in the archaeological record
of their activities, villages, culture and worldviews. Our understanding of
early statecraft is about the management of large cities with a slave-based
economy in fertile basins growing grain. In fact, during the first few thousand
years of recorded history the majority of people have lived outside the borders
of states. Scott’s view is that this barbarian age ended as recently as 400
years ago, when the power of the state finally became overwhelming, in part due
to the invention of gunpowder.
Barbarian was the term used to
describe people living outside the control of city states, despite the fact
that they were varied and little more than loose assemblies of tribes. In
Scott’s view barbarians and city states were dependent on each other, they rose
and fell together, and he uses as examples the Huns and the Romans and the Sea
People and Egyptians. For him the period of these early city states was a
golden age for barbarians, because they could prey on states as a resource for
hunting or harvesting, or they could trade with them, or become mercenary
warriors, and sometimes invaded and conquered to become the new ruling class.
Importantly, for the great part
of recorded history the majority of people lived on the frontier, in the
barbarian world, a far less regimented world than in the cities and developing
nation states. Away from fertile river basins like Mesopotamia and Egypt, or
China and India, were many other cultures and civilizations, many of which also
existed for hundreds of years. Until quite recently there has always been a
frontier where people could go to escape civilization, but the spread of
nation states across the world means that frontier no longer exists.
*
It seems to me the lessons from
the deep past on this are twofold. Firstly, state collapse in the past was
often rapid, whether due to disease, climate change, civil war or natural
disasters. The ancient agricultural empires based on fortified cities ended in
periods where trade, technology and writing were lost, called dark ages because
little archaeological information survives from those periods, and few survived
more than a century or two. There appears to have been a tipping point at the
end of the Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean when the effects of invasion,
climate change and natural disasters on food supply caused the sudden collapse
of a complex, interconnected civilization of eight kingdoms. That example, of a
world with a number of deeply linked great powers, is particularly relevant I
think, because the collapse of one weakens the others. This point is easily
lost in a time of populist politics and economic transition.
In the past, when epidemics, climate
change or state collapse displaced people, there was always the alternative of
the frontier. People could leave the cities and become fishermen, foragers or
hunters, pastoralists and herders, or start slash and burn farming (or more
likely a combination of these). Today, however, there is no longer a frontier
where people can go if their city or society collapses. In our world of
nation-states and the associated doctrine of territorial integrity, a frontier
beyond the reach of the power of the state no longer exists. (Space may be the new
frontier, or possibly seasteading,
but these are not viable options for large numbers of people).
Second, insurrection and
revolution was often a cause collapse of state control in the deep past, and
increased inequality made ancient societies and states less resilient, with
insurrection and revolution more likely. In the Pueblo civilization in Mesoamerica
there were several revolutions
that followed droughts and food shortages between 500 and 1400 CE, just as
droughts contributed to collapse in twelfth century Mesopotamia BCE and
twenty-first century Syria today. State power and control of the population did
not survive climate change in the ancient world. Applying history to present issues,
or to the unfolding of the future, is always problematic. However, this history
does provides a perspective on the fragility of civilization.
The political argument
underlying Against the Grain is that the
origins of the state have been misunderstood, because ancient city-states were
ruled with coercion, not consent. Given these were slave societies that is not
surprising, and Scott does not really challenge the contractual view of
politics that emerged as private property, markets and parliaments became more
common after the 16th century with examples from ancient history. Also,
there are two other significant factors the modern world has that the ancient
world lacked.
The modern nation state has a
far more extensive and effective range of powers and resources, both coercive
and civil, than city-states ever had. Collapse is much less probable, and some
causes like disease and natural disaster no longer apply because the state is
expected to deal with them. What would most threaten collapse today is severe
disruption to food supply. On the other hand, without a frontier to disappear
into, malcontents, misfits and others likely to oppose the state have nowhere
to go, and in many places the state is becoming more authoritarian and coercive
over time.
The other key point of
difference between now and the deep past is the level of technology. On one
level this is obvious, but technology can addresses fragility in many ways. For example, high-tech foods such as home grown meat
and local food production are in the early stages of development. Local food is
taking off in many major cities, like the Square
Roots container farms in New York. If the most likely cause of a
contemporary collapse is food shortages then technology is an answer. A similar
argument can be made for technologies like carbon capture (e.g. Climeworks)
and geoengineering.
The idea that the role of
‘barbarians’ living outside city-states on the frontier has been misunderstood
and downplayed because these people left little behind that can be studied,
like stone monuments and cay tablets, seems right. In Scott’s view this was the
great majority of people for most of history, and he portrays the deep past as
a mixture of powerful cities with substantial populations of up to 50,000
people, dominated by an elite of priests and administrators, and the
egalitarian and cooperative cultures found in less settled cultures. The
ancient cities were located in fertile river basins where the rivers provided
transport and an agricultural surplus could be produced by a slave or servile
population. Only grain crops like wheat and barley in Mesopotamia, millet in
China and maize in Mesoamerica allowed this surplus to be controlled by the
elite. Beyond these specific locations was the frontier, which was nonetheless
strongly connected to the cities by trade, particularly in slaves, and
commerce.
Scott's view of history has these two distinct populations of people. One lives in a heirarchical, highly regulated urban environment with a restricted diet and repetitive work. The other lives in a more cooperative and egalitarian culture, learns many diverse skills to build, hunt and cook, has a varied diet and significant free time. Some things never change.
