Gregory's ServerThese historical and archeological examples point to a much more flexible, dynamic process than Diamond claimed. There was no one-way process of expansion and conquest. They were not trapped; they did not inevitably conflict with each other because of structural imperatives. People could and did make choices.
So why do we live in a world now in which virtually everyone is fed by agriculture, descended from a global society in which virtually everyone was a farmer?
If we reject Diamond’s teleological argument—that this world of ours was *inevitable*—then I would point a theme from the works of recently-deceased James Scott as a tentative alternative: the state’s obsession with order, predictability, and legibility.
From the earliest states to the present, states have tried to settle foragers and convert them to agriculturalists. Foragers tend to move around, resist authority, and create diverse surpluses. They are, in short, hard to rule, hard to count, hard to conscript, and hard to tax.
But farmers are the opposite: they tend to stay in one spot, close to their crops. They can be associated with fixed locations and discrete units of territory. And they tend to produce—or can be coerced into—regular and uniform surpluses.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/james-c-scott-against-the-grain
9/12
In particular, Scott blamed cereal grain agriculture for the rise of states, because cereal grains are uniquely suited for taxation: “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and 'rationable.'”
“The fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any would-be taxman that much easier. If the army or the tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and confiscate the entire harvest in one operation. For a hostile army, cereal grains make a scorched-earth policy that much simpler; they can burn the harvest-ready grain fields and reduce the cultivators to flight or starvation. Better yet, a tax collector or enemy can simply wait until the crop has been threshed and stored and confiscate the entire contents of the granary…”
“The 'aboveground' simultaneous ripening of cereal grains has the inestimable advantage of being legible and assessable by the state tax collectors. These characteristics are what make wheat, barley, rice, millet, and maize the premier political crops. A tax assessor typically classifies fields in terms of soil quality and, knowing the average yield of a particular grain from such soil, is able to estimate a tax. If a year-to-year adjustment is required, fields can be surveyed and crop cuttings taken from a representative patch just before harvest to arrive at an estimated yield for that particular crop year. As we shall see, state officials tried to raise crop yields and taxes in kind by mandating techniques of cultivation…The point is that with cereal grains and soil preparation, the planting, the condition of the crop, and the ultimate yield were more visible and assessable.”
Not only are the products of cereal agriculture suited for taxation, but the farming itself is too. A farmer who works the same plot year year has a fixed “address.” The state knows where they live, what their name is, how much their land should produce each year, and how much it can extract as taxes.
10/12
In particular, Scott blamed cereal grain agriculture for the rise of states, because cereal grains are uniquely suited for taxation: “visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and 'rationable.'”
“The fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at roughly the same time makes the job of any would-be taxman that much easier. If the army or the tax officials arrive at the right time, they can cut, thresh, and confiscate the entire harvest in one operation. For a hostile army, cereal...