Gregory's ServerIn 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
So I would conclude by proposing this: that the spread and ultimate dominance of agriculture was not some function of agriculture itself, but rather of intentional state violence. Coercing people into being settled, taxable, conscriptable, and *controllable* farmers would also have produced the added benefit of creating a population entirely dependent on a single, easily controlled food supply, rendering us even more docile.
This would explain the transition from agriculture as a flexible option that people sometimes adopted, abandoned, or lived alongside without transforming themselves, into what we live with today—industrial agriculture as the sole source of food for the vast majority of people alive.
This is just a hunch, but one that feels intuitively true. From the Assyrian and Incan Empires to the indigenous reserves of the modern US and Australia, states have always and everywhere been obsessed with settling nomads and transforming foragers into farmers.
11/
So I would conclude by proposing this: that the spread and ultimate dominance of agriculture was not some function of agriculture itself, but rather of intentional state violence. Coercing people into being settled, taxable, conscriptable, and *controllable* farmers would also have produced the added benefit of creating a population entirely dependent on a single, easily controlled food supply, rendering us even more docile.