Who Were the Sea Peoples?

James C. Scott closes Against the Grain with a chapter entitled "The Golden Age of the Barbarians." In it, he notes how geographically insignificant was the area controlled by states, up until perhaps 1600 CE. For millennia after the rise of the first states, the vast majority of the globe's population lived outside of states. But among those non-state peoples, a few took on special status as "barbarians": they were the non-state people at the periphery of a state. They were the "dark twin" of the "civilized" people who lived within states, and their lives and their economies were deeply intertwined with those of their state-dwelling counterparts. At times, they interacted with their neighbor states simply by raiding. But this risked destroying the state which was producing the agricultural surplus that was the target of their raids. More often, they sought to achieve a more stable arrangement: in return for agreeing to abjure raiding, th...

"As with sedentism and the domestication of grain that also predated state formation, the early state elaborated and scaled up the institution of slavery as an essential means to maximize its productive population and the surplus it could appropriate." -- James C. Scott, Against the Grain , p. 155 Scott present a number of facts highlighting the importance of slaves in early states: "the most valuable cargo of Malay traders in insular Southeast Asia were, until the late nineteenth century, slaves" (p. 156). "Slaves represented a clear majority -- perhaps as much as two-thirds -- of Athenian society" (p. 156). "Imperial Rome... turned much of the Mediterranean basin into a massive slave emporium... By one estimate, the Gallic Wars yielded nearly a million new slaves..." (pp. 156-157). But note: slavery pre-existed the state. 

"The imperative of collecting people, settling them close to the core of power, holding them there, and having them produce a surplus in excess of their own needs animates much of early statecraft... The means by which a population is assembled and then made to produce a surplus... is less important... than the fact that it does produce a surplus available to non-producing elites." -- James C. Scott, Against the Grain , p. 151 There are two problems I see in this passage: 1) The "needs" of the people are regarded as a fixed amount of goods, and they have to be "made" to produce more. Now, undoubtedly taxes and other coercive measures might make people produce more than they otherwise would, but also they might have already been producing a "surplus" that attracted state formation in the first place. My point here is simply that there is no obvious criteria for what constitutes a surplus, other than "what the state can take," which,...

We often view the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as "primitive," and see the adoption of farming as an "advance" over it. But James C. Scott notes that this conclusion is not obvious if we look at the cognitive skills necessary to cope in those different ways of life: "It is no exaggeration to say that hunting and foraging are, in terms of complexity, as different from cereal-grain farming as cereal-grain farming is, in turn, removed from repetitive work on a modern assembly line. Each step represents a substantial narrowing of focus and a simplification of tasks." ( Against the Grain , p. 90) In fact, hunter-gatherers had the whole toolkit of early agriculturalists (since they were harvesting wild grains), plus tools for collecting, trapping, hunting, building weirs, netting, and more.

In terms of long-term impact on the environment, James C. Scott notes that the harnessing of fire and its use over the last 400,000 to alter the landscape might "overwhelm crop and livestock domestication" (p. 38). In fact, Native Americans were such prolifigate users of fire that its "volume in North America was such that when it stopped abruptly, due to the devastating epidemic that came with the Europeans, the newly unchecked growth of forest created the illusion among white settlers that North America was a virtually untouched, primeval forest" ( Against the Grain , p. 39). In fact, the cessation of the CO 2 output from such burning may have caused the Little Ice Age!

"Then, around 9,600 BCE, the cold snap broke and it became warmer and wetter again -- and fast. The average temperature may have increased as much as seven degrees Celsius within a single decade." (James. C. Scott, Against the Grain , p. 43) The high end of present global warming predictions seems to be around four or five degrees Celsius in a century: that pales compared to seven degrees in a decade!

"Extrinsic causes -- say, drought or climate change... -- may in fact be more important overall in state collapse, but intrinsic causes tell us more about the self-limiting aspects of early states. To this end, I speculate on three fault lines that are by-products of state formation itself. The first are the disease effects of the unprecedented concentrations of crops, people, and livestock together with their attendant parasites and pathogens... More insidious are two ecological effects of urbanism and intensive irrigated agriculture. The former resulted in steady deforestation of the upstream watershed of riverine states and subsequent siltation and floods. The latter resulted in well-documented salinization of the soil, lower yields, and eventual abandonment of arable land." ( Against the Grain , p. 31)

I am now reviewing Against the Grain by James C. Scott. The first thing I wish to note, relative to this review (but which won't actually make it into the review itself): some twerp named William Buckner decided to slander Scott on the website Quillette , where he wrote . "It’s not often that you see a 50-year-old paper repeatedly referenced in mainstream publications, but you can find mentions of Lee’s work pretty much everywhere today. In the Guardian , the New York Times , the London Review of Books , the Financial Times , and Salon , among others. Much of this attention has to do with two recently published books, Against the Grain by James C. Scott and Affluence without Abundance by James Suzman, both of which are informed by Lee and Sahlins’s conception of hunter-gatherer affluence." OK, the first significant thing here is that Buckner cites a bunch of reviews of Scott and Suzman that happen to cite Lee and Sahlin, but he never actually cites Scott or Suzm...