Thread: the spread of agriculture and the rise of the state.
You have probably heard some variation of this argument:
“Humans are bad in some way—violent, rapacious, hierarchical, etc—because bad social structures outcompete good social structures.”
Violent societies outfight and conquer peaceful societies. Agricultural societies outbreed and swamp non-agricultural societies. Hierarchical societies mobilize more labor and resources and bludgeon egalitarian societies. It’s a sort of folk-Game Theory argument that’s quite popular in certain misanthropic circles, especially among people who enjoy feeling holier-than-thou without explicitly resorting to racist myths or social Darwinism.
1/12
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“As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It's not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their lifestyle, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't want.”
A variation on this is Stephen Hawkings’ warning about meeting alien species: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race
2/12
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
Jared Diamond (Discover Magazine)Archeologists wondered for a long time if agriculture spread by adoption—if these foragers took up farming. But, thanks to genetic studies, we now know that agriculture spread into Europe mostly by migration as early farmers from Anatolia migrated first into what is now Greece and then into the rest of the continent.
These Neolithic farmers brought with them cereal crops, like wheat, and domesticated animals, like cattle, that had originated in the ancient Near East. They resembled modern Sardinians, the modern community with the highest percentage of these Neolithic farmers among their ancestors.
(Basically, if you have ancestors from Europe, your ancestors almost certainly included people from both of these foragers and these farmers.)
These two communities, rather than clashing, co-existed with each other throughout Europe for thousands of years. They sometimes interbred, but for the most part they left each other alone, each preferring very different environments.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/ancient-face-cheddar-man-reconstructed-dna-spd
3/12
Britain's Dark-Skinned, Blue-Eyed Ancestor Explained
Sarah Gibbens (History)The first were hunter-gatherers, based on both their genomes and the stable isotopes in their teeth and bones, which revealed a diet of wild game. The second group also belonged to the same genetic population as the first, but ate a diet heavy in freshwater fish. And the third were agriculturalists, descended primarily from those Anatolian farmers but with some hunter-gatherer ancestors as well. This last group ate a diet heavy in domesticated animals.
So three very different communities, with different but overlapping ancestries and very different ways of life, lived side-by-side, sometimes intermarrying, and using the same cave to bury their dead. And, based on radiocarbon dating, they continued to do so for 2,000 years after the arrival of agriculture.
It’s hard to square 2,000 years of co-existence with Diamond’s Just So story about the inexorable and mechanical expansion of farming at the expense of hunter-gatherers.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257648697_2000_Years_of_Parallel_Societies_in_Stone_Age_Central_Europe
4/12
But, several centuries after agriculture arrived, the evidence for farming starts to drop off in the archeological record and doesn’t reappear for almost another thousand years. Chris Stevens and Dorian Fuller argued in the journal Antiquity in 2012 (sorry, no full text link) that “cereal cultivation was abandoned throughout many parts of the British Isles in favour of increased reliance on pastoralism and wild resources during the Middle to Late Neolithic.”
People seem to have abandoned the growing of crops like wheat in favor of gathering wild hazelnuts, the shells of which show up in large quantities at sites throughout this period, and herding domesticated animals. Stevens and Fuller note that this period also coincides with population decline, which they suggest was driven by a worsening climate but which I wonder might not have been a product of the plague (genetic evidence for which shows up all across Europe around this time).
But the authors also note that this is the period during which monumental stone architecture, like Stonehenge, was constructed. So clearly the people of Britain were still able to coordinate and mobilize for massively complex undertakings, even if they had abandoned agriculture for a long while. It’s hard to square a thousand-year abandonment of agriculture by a sophisticated and energetic society with a teleological story about agriculture’s inevitable advance and structural advantages over foraging.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/abs/did-neolithic-farming-fail-the-case-for-a-bronze-age-agricultural-revolution-in-the-british-isles/DDC019088534FB8D35AF356D346842E1
5/12
“…the shift away from settled agriculture towards mobile pastoralism, characterising much of peninsular India from the end of the Chalcolithic (1200–900 BC)…”
“In the Gansu region of north-west China, the Dadiwan Neolithic pursued low-level millet cultivation for five centuries or more during the sixth millennium BC, before apparently fading away, with a hiatus of more than five centuries prior to the influx of more permanent millet-pig agriculture associated with the immigrant Yangshao tradition.”
“A further case is seen in the shift from sedentary agriculturalists to nomadic-pastoralism in Late Bronze Age Mongolia, associated both with the appearance of stone monuments and possible climatic change.”
In other words, this was a phenomenon that happened not just in Britain but all over the world. People sometimes adopted agriculture, and then their descendants abandoned it, only for their descendants to pick it back up again. Some farmers lived alongside foragers for *thousands of years* without swamping the foragers.
6/12
The Bell Beaker Phenomenon was a sort of archeological package—distinct artifacts, like the bell-shaped cups that give this phenomenon its name, as well as new burial practices. Stevens and Fuller also note that the time period of their arrival also coincides with the re-emergence of agriculture in Britain.
Archeologists debated for years as to whether this represented a population movement from continental Europe or merely the adoption of a new material culture by Britain’s Neolithic population. We now know from genetic studies that there was indeed a migration into Britain, and that it resulted in a near-total population turnover—some 90% of the subsequent ancestry in Britain derived from these Bronze Age newcomers, rather than the indigenous Neolithic community.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/neolithization-and-population-replacement-in-britain-an-alternative-view/128FA814D030CAFCDE3D2F8AE6CC45A7
7/12
Neolithization and Population Replacement in Britain: An Alternative View | Cambridge Archaeological Journal | Cambridge Core
Cambridge CoreExcept that, strangely, there’s no evidence for a violent take-over. No mass graves, no battle sites. The skeletal remains found during this period show no increase in injuries that would indicate interpersonal violence. The newcomers intermarried with the indigenous population. The newcomers began using and maintaining the same sacred sites as the indigenous community, including Stonehenge.
Whatever happened during this period, it seems like it was a lot more complicated than Diamond’s conquest story.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/return-of-the-beaker-folk-rethinking-migration-and-population-change-in-british-prehistory/ABF13307796A0476353FA8D2DA38A21A
8/12
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
Against the Grain
The Anarchist Library“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
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/
This is if and only if you are in a comfortable position to spend any unnecessary money and you don’t have mutual aid requests you were thinking about funding.
(Yes, I realize this thread would probably be easier to read as a long form essay. I’m planning to replace my now-defunct laptop but, until then, all of these will be here on Fedi and typed out with my awkward thumbs.)
https://buymeacoffee.com/heavenlypossum
12/12
Heavenly Possum
Buy Me a CoffeeAlso, the argument that there were natural forces that drove us to this current situation, and therefore this is "good" is obviously idiotic.
I don’t know how I could have “shifted the Darwinian argument to states vs non-states”
If we all farm because we all have governments that prefer farming, why do we all have governments?
Because the people who run states really like using violence to stay in charge of those states.
I don't understand your actual position vs the above statement you were arguing against.
People use violence and they win.
I think that is bad, but mostly true throughout history so far.
I am critical of that statement, which is a summary of arguments I have encountered.
I believe it is a teleological argument, an effort to update old, racialist Social Darwinist ideas about the march of history.
The fact that things *are* a certain way does not tell us that things *must* have been that way.
Hopefully if you ever go into as much detail about states as you did about agriculture I will have a chance to learn something.
I fully agree—I’m just arguing here that certain outcomes, like global state dominance, are not inevitable or unchangeable. States fail and collapse all the time, and they struggled for millennia to defeat and subordinate nonstate peoples. Things could have just as easily gone very differently.
I certainly think that the difference between states prior to ~1500, which were incredibly fragile, and after, when they are much more robust, has to do with their incorporation of most of the globe under state rule.
I think this is why modern states invest so much into maintaining a global state system, propping up failing states and supporting state elites against substate challengers.
But again, that doesn’t mean this outcome was inevitable or that it’s permanent.
We can and should dream of constructed societies, not because they are achievable, but because they can help achieve improved real outcomes. Even pragmatic realists need help from idealists
The problem with treating any social outcome as inevitable is that people are socially self-constructing. If everyone simultaneously chose the implausible but very real option of “not being a state,” the state would cease to exist instantaneously. People are fully capable of choosing otherwise than the status quo.
I’m not suggesting that material realities don’t inform social structures, but there is no mechanical one-to-one correspondence and no material determinism. Our uniqueness as a species is our capacity to choose social responses to material conditions. There are no biological or physical conditions that implacably drive coercive state hierarchies.
I believe we can improve, incrementally. Any improvement that relies only on collective intelligence is doomed however
"All of us is dumber than any of us"
Ok
That’s overwrought for a casual conversation on Fedi
Thank you for the clarification!
There have been a handful of state-like societies among foragers—for example, the indigenous peoples of the North American Pacific Northwest, who had very hierarchical societies and subsisted primarily off salmon harvesting.
I don’t fully agree with Scott’s conclusion that states only emerge with grain, but it certainly seems *easier* to sustain a state off agriculture and specifically grain agriculture.
Maybe we can think in cybernetic terms. So we know states fail all the time whether from internal conflicts or external shocks, but agriculture lowers the information gathering overheads of the bureaucracy so there’s more slack in the system to absorb shocks. Then over long periods we’d expect the more ‘robust’ agricultural states to dominate over more fragile non-ag states
This is a great paper by Wengrow and Graeber that ended up as a chapter in “The Dawn of Everything” that addresses the hierarchical societies in the PNW and the societies to their south which entirely rejected that way of life:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-many-seasons-ago
It’s a perfect bite-sized portion to start digging in
So saying a society of farmers immigrated to a society of hunter gatherers is just talking about two societies, with different farming and hunting practices.
Thank you! This is an excellent point. People did and could move much more fluidly between different subsistence strategies. I suspect that only when we are coerced do people become “locked into” particular subsistence patterns, establishing a hard line between farming and foraging.
Yes! I strongly suspect that private property first emerged in land in Mesopotamia as a tool of state taxation.
Associating a particular plot of land with a particular person at a particular value is precisely the sort of thing a state would need to efficiently tax people.
To an extent—an army marching with grain or bread will consume those rations as quickly as an army carrying anything else as rations.
Until very recently, the vast majority of armies relied on foraging, pillaging, or—sometimes—purchasing food locally rather than carrying food with them.
Well, one example we could point to is medieval Europe on the eve of the Black Death. Population growth and feudal rents pushed farmers onto smaller plots and more marginal farmland, which contributed to famine that probably facilitated the lethality of the plague.
It didn’t really collapse farming, but did drive massive changes in the feudal structure of medieval Europe.
*Governance* is not a synonym for the state, and we’re perfectly capable of doing all those things without state coercion. The state is, always and everywhere, aggression.
It also seems that you are presupposing your conclusion with such a definition. We don't need any discussion at all about agrarian vs hunter-gatherer structures if we declare that "the state" is oppressive & coercive at the outset. It's making the same mistake (but in the opposite direction) as your interlocutor.🤷🏼♂️
I’m using the term “state” in a specific political science sense. I realize this is not how people tend to colloquially think about the state, but that’s to their own detriment.
I do not declare states oppressive and coercive at the outset, but rather by surveying the history of states, which readily reveals that all of them are always oppressive and coercive. 🤷♂️
https://www.britannica.com/topic/state-sovereign-political-entity
State | Definition, History, Figures, & Facts
Encyclopedia Britannica> “You continue making the same mistake of pretending the worst examples are representative.”
I don’t know how you could infer that I am relying on “the worst examples” when I just referred to surveying the history of all states.
> “Doubling down on the same doesn't strengthen your argument.”
I didn’t “double down” on anything, I explained to you my methodology.
> “If you're not comfortable w/ criticisms of your flawed thesis, then what else can I say?”
Chief, you keep replying to me in response to a thread that I wrote. You do whatever you want but don’t pretend that I’m forcing you to say anything.
> “I would nevertheless encourage you to do some reflecting on your own just-so narrative. Because I think you can do better.”
Thanks for your confidence in me!
“You see the problem with your opposition.”
I don’t, because the entirety of your argument seems to be “not all states are bad” when I know factually that’s not true. 👍
Thanks for stopping by to be a condescending asshole
Which states do not assert control over people?
808 State
(afaik... those guys might be assholes, I don't know them personally)
well, i currently live in an evil regime bent on controlling others, established a few centuries ago as a genocidal colony by another evil regime bent on controlling others, both of which claim to be the intellectual descendants of a far more ancient evil regime bent on controlling others (which went through like 4 different forms of government while maintaining its own evil-regime-ness)
so that's quite a lot of ambient evil regime particles
Professional posters call this “moving the goal post”
do i have a "viable solution" to what?
the historic observation that i live in an evil regime?
Yes
Why respond to things I said when he could instead respond to things he imagines I said
Elinor Ostrom has shown cooperation has occurred
This sounds like more hypothetical idealism, or is there a functioning example in the world that evades all the negative aspects of the "state" that anarchists dislike? Perhaps more to the point, you mentioned "voluntary democratic groups [which] collectively sanction bad actors."
This is pretty much exactly how the three branches in the U.S. government operate, and generally speaking, how all laws work in democratic "states." 🤷🏼♂️
The US government isn't voluntary.
The democratic groups I describe are non-territorial and don't have a monopoly on the use of force in a geographic region. They are just voluntary groups. Each individual can and should be part of multiple groups
As for your other claim, does this exist anywhere other than a hypothetical ideal?
If you’re going to criticize the anarchist theory of the state, it would help to know even the tiniest thing about the anarchist theory of the state.
FWIW, I've always felt (all just speculation ofc) that the dominance of agriculture and the idea of "war" were probably both tightly coupled to the emergence of reliable metal-forming.
(Disclaimer: This is an "extended phenotype is destiny" argument from a biologist, so add all the salt you want. 😁)
I always appreciate your long posts. They resonate with what I've come to learn and believe myself.