Against the Grain - James C. Scott (2017) Summary PDF

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This is a summary of the 2017 book, Against the Grain, which focuses on the economic development of Mesopotamia, looking at the impact of mass settlement and the establishment of city states on development outcomes....

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Against the Grain – Notes relating to Mesopotamian history Chapter 1 -

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What might have been an earlier trend toward population growth and settlement in the Fertile Crescent (includes Mesopotamia) owing to warmer and wetter conditions ended abruptly around 10,800 BCE. This was due to a cold period 9600 BCE – cold snap breaks, scattered evidence of sites in the Southern Levant (‘prepottery stage’), Neolithic villages occurring in water rich areas. Mostly hunter gather with some evidence of horticulture/livestock 8000-6000 BCE – Four founder crops planted, domestication of goats, sheep, pigs Marks the ‘beginning of civilisation’ Permanent proto-urban settlements in southern alluvium around 6500 BCE Urban agglomorations at the mouth of Euphrates (Southern Mesopotamia) go on to become first states 7-6th millennia BCE – Southern Mesopotamia a wetland Ubaid Period (6500-3800 BCE) diet made up of fish, birds, turtles. Villages established that took advantage of the seam of different ecological zone A key advantage of settling in these costal zones was the reduced friction in waterborne transport relative to overland transport for trade. Movement by water exponentially more efficient These early villages were not autarkic – they traded obsidian and prestige goods over substantial distances (facilitated by waterborne transport) Wetlands could not be easily monopolised by one central authority Having already domesticated some cereals and legumes, as well as goats and sheep, the people of the Mesopotamian alluvium were already agriculturalists and pastoralists as well as hunter-gatherers

Chapter 2 -

by 5,000 BCE there were hundreds of villages in the Fertile Crescent cultivating fully domesticated grains as their main staple

Chapter 3 -

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Theory – cold snap (10500-96000 BCE) forced ancient Mesopotamians to change from hunter-gathering to agropastoralism (hotly contested) Other theory is that the move to agropastoralism came over thousands of years, driven by a number of factors Population grew little from 10,000 BCE to 5,000 BCE – said that in Mesopotamia this was down to the effects of the Neolithic revolution which made Mesopotamia a focal point for chronic disease Early written sources suggest Mesopotamians understood the principle of contagion, suggesting epidemic diseases would have been prevalent Devastating epidemic at Mari on the Euphrates in 1,800 BCE amongst many others 3,200 BCE Uruk is the biggest city in the world (from 25-50 thousand inhabitants) Southern alluvium the most densely populated area, made it a hotspot for epidemics Growth of large villages and small towns in the Mesopotamian alluvium represented a tento twentyfold increase in the population density over anything Homo sapiens had previously experienced

Chapter 4 -

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First states begin to appear around 3,300 BCE Prior, earliest towns are, Jennifer Pournelle reminds us, "better imagined as islands embedded in a marshy plain, situated on the borders and in the heart of vast deltaic marshlands." "Their waterways served less as irrigation canals than as transportation routes." Although there were earlier proto-urban settlements elsewhere in the region outside the southern alluvium, it seems clear that urbanism, thanks to wetland abundance, was more persistent, durable, and resilient in the alluvium than anywhere else No ‘state’ State of Uruk firmly in place by 3,200 BCE – 3200-2800 the period of high civilisation in the Near East, Babylonia had most complex social, political and economic structures Wall built at Uruk by Sumerians between 3,300 and 3000 BCE Uruk was the pioneer of the state form that would be replicated throughout the Mesopotamian alluvium by roughly twenty other competing city-states or "peer polities." Uruk's walls appear to have enclosed an area of 250 hectares, twice the size of classical Athens nearly three millennia later 3500-2500 BCE marked by a steep decline in sea level & water volume in Euphrates, led to increasingly concentrated population around water channels With state, came taxation, which increased fragility The evidence for frequent warfare among rival polities in the southern alluvium is abundant Only richest soils productive enough to sustain population and produce a taxable surplus, Mesopotamian states depended also on products that originated in their ecological zones too: timber, firewood, leather, obsidian, copper, tin, gold and silver, and honey. In exchange, the small statelets might trade pottery, cloth, grain, and artisanal products. Most of these goods had to move by water rather than overland Being located near the bottom of the Tigris-Euphrates watershed, the earliest alluvial states could also take advantage of the current to float bulk commodities such as timber, with minimum expenditure of labour Commonality across early states – grain states (due to the fact that cereal grains grow above ground and ripen at the same time, making taxpayers jobs easier One account of the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III late third millennium BCE) claims that barges carried fully half of the entire barley harvest of the Ur region to royal depots Grain states restricted to a narrow ecological niche that favoured agriculture Towns in Mesopotamian alluvium walled by 3rd millennium BCE (to protect food cultivated, but also for state preservation) Southern alluvium site of many state-making experiments from 3300 to 2350 BCE This is roughly when writing makes its first appearance, in the form of cuneiform tablets Why? States need writing for bookkeeping purposes, this was the first function of writing Literature, mythology etc only came more than half a millennium after Earliest administrative tablets from Uruk (circa 3300-3100 BCE) Writing not originally devised as a means of representing speech, rather measurement

Chapter 5 -

Warfare in Mesopotamian alluvium begins in the late Uruk period (3500-3100 BCE) not about the conquest of territory but rather about the assembling of populations at the state's grain core

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Mostly petty wars between polities to capture smaller independent communities to augment the labour core (Seth Richardson) States did not invent slavery, but allowed for its scaling up Certainly existed in early, less documented Mesopotamian city polities, made up only a small fraction of the economy Prisoners of war were a main group of slaves Uruk population estimated at around 40-45 thousand in 3000 BCE Late periods of Ur III when cuneiform texts are more abundant give a better picture of the existence of slaves and the management, the poor conditions they lived in "the Uruk Expansion" - the discovery of Uruk cultural artifacts in the hinterlands and in the Zagros Mountains -represents, it seems, a foray to create or guard trade routes for vital goods not available in the alluvium place names Ur, Uruk, and Eridu are not Sumerian in origin hints at the possibility of an incursion- or the seizure of control by the militarized faction of an existing agrarian society

Chapter 6 -

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Timeline: The general recession of whatever modest fixed settlements existed before 10,500 BCE was almost surely due to the Younger Dryas cold snap- "the big freeze." Another sudden and widespread demise around 6,000 BCE of a cultural complex associated with settlement, documented for the Jordan Valley and known as the Pre-pottery Neolithic Phase B (PPNB), has been variously attributed to climate change, disease, soil depletion, shrinking water sources, and demographic pressure Third Dynasty of Ur – 5 kings succeed each other within 100 years, before collapsing around 2000 BCE, dispersing into smaller settlements and villages From roughly 11800 until 700 BCE-more than a millennium- settlements in Mesopotamia covered less than a quarter of their previous area, and urban settlements were only onesixteenth as frequent as during the previous millennium No consensus on what exactly caused this, but ruralisation dominated Mesopotamia following Ur III Students of early trade Guillermo Algaze and David Wengrow go so far as to refer to the "Uruk world system" around 3 1500 to 3,200 BCE as an integrated world of trade and exchange stretching from the Caucasus in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south and from the Iranian Plateau in the east to the Eastern Mediterranean in the west Uruk + other states traded materials that weren’t available in the alluvium - alluvium: copper and tin for tools, weapons, armour, and both decorative and utilitarian objects; timber and charcoal; limestone and quarried rock for building; silver, gold, and gems for sumptuary display. In exchange for these goods the statelets of the alluvium dispatched textiles, grain, pottery, and artisanal products to their trading partners With this also came increased disease transmission Southern Mesopotamian alluvium was the natural erosive product of the Tigris and Euphrates, moving soil and depositing it on the floodplain, providing nutrients downstream Ecological impacts of state deforestation States liable to fall to ‘sudden death’ (eg Larsa 1720 BCE) due to epidemics, floods etc

Chapter 6

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Polities of Ur, Uruk made possible by trade and the waterborne transport networks which allowed for the arrival of products from higher altitudes (stone, ores, oils, timber etc) ‘Barbarians’ traded with small states Barry Cunliffe notes that by around 1,500 BCE, major centres of population in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia were major consumers of products from distant markets Trade not new – Neolithic period saw trade across long distances, however bulk commodities were increasingly commonly traded...