Via No Tech Magazine:
Quoted from: Scott, James C. Against the grain: A deep history of the earliest states. Yale University Press, 2017.
Why deplore “collapse,” when the situation it depicts is most often the disaggregation of a complex, fragile, and typically oppressive state into smaller, decentralized fragments? One simple and not entirely superficial reason why collapse is deplored is that it deprives all those scholars and professionals whose mission it has been to document ancient civilizations of the raw materials they require… There are splendid and instructive documentaries on archaic Greece, Old Kingdom Egypt, and mid-third millennium Uruk, but one will search in vein for a portrayal of the obscure periods that followed them: the “Dark Age” of Greece, the “First Intermediate Period” of Egypt, and the decline of Uruk under the Akkadian Empire. Yet there is a strong case to make that such “vacant” periods represented a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare.
What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order. We should, I believe, aim to “normalize” collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order… The “collapse” of an ancient state center is implicitly, but often falsely, associated with a number of human tragedies, such as high death toll. To be sure, an invasion, a war or an epidemic may cause large-scale fatalities, but it is just as common for the abandonment of a state center to entail little if any loss of life.
Such cases are better considered a redistribution of population, and, in the case of a war or epidemic, it is often the case that abandoning the city for the countryside spares many lives that would otherwise have been lost… What is lost culturally when a large state center is abandoned or destroyed is thus an empirical question. Surely it is likely to have an effect on the division of labor, and scale of trade, and on monumental architecture. On the other hand, it is just as likely that the culture will survive — and be developed — in multiple smaller centers no longer in thrall to the center. One must never confound culture with state centers or the apex of a court culture with its broader foundations....
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Previous visits with Professor Scott:
Disease, Famine, Drudgery, Bondage: A Lively Look at the Birth of the Modern
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A first rate review of James Scott's "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States" by George Scialabba, contributing Editor at The Baffler.
From Inference Magazine:
Great Scott
A Whiggish history is a narrative of social or intellectual progress whose terminus is more or less the social or intellectual location of that history’s narrator. For obvious reasons, Whiggish histories should be regarded with a measure of suspicion. Not all of them, of course, are self-serving or deluded. The history of science, in most versions, is a narrative of progress, and rightly so. Notwithstanding its exploitation in all too many destructive technologies, the edifice of scientific thought, eliciting near-universal and uncoerced assent, remains one of humankind’s few unambiguous cultural triumphs.Is Government a Protection Racket? How Wheat and Taxes Built the Ancient States
From the Los Angeles Review of Books, January 6:
THE DEVELOPMENT OF the state is the most important event in human political history. Before then, all human societies were organized by kinship alone. Differences between individuals were restricted to those of age, gender, and personal ability. Beginning around 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia and independently thereafter in Egypt, south Asia, China, Mesoamerica, Andean South America, and as recently as three centuries ago in Hawaii, simple kinship-organized societies were replaced by complex class societies with intensified systems of production, differential access to resources, an elaborate division of labor, hereditary differences in wealth and power between households, and a political organization involving an army, a state religion, and a fiscal bureaucracy that administers the tribute collected to maintain the above. We live in this world today.....
