Agrarianism and the Nature of Early States

Agriculture, and particularly grain agriculture, arose independently in a few regions around the world over the last 10,000 years—relatively recently if we consider the roughly 200,000 year history of anatomically modern humans. The first states arise even more recently— only about 5,000 years ago. The classical tradition of western political thought, from Aristotle to Machiavelli to Hobbes and Locke, suggested that fear of violence and the desire for security were key to the logic of state formation. States, that is, arise as defensive alliances. However, most modern theories about the origins of the state have considered the advent of agriculture to be closely associated with it. These two lines of reasoning are not mutually exclusive. The intensive cultivation of cereal grains could lead to state formation precisely because settled grain-rich communities needed to provide for the common defense against raiders from the outside who sought to enjoy the fruits without the labor. However, agriculture could also lead to the state for non-security-related reasons. It could be simply that grain production led to population increases in sedentary societies, which then leads “naturally” to state formation as population density rises to a certain “critical mass.” Other theories connecting agriculture to state formation include the idea that the state arose to organize complex irrigation systems and distribute water rights, or because grain storage and distribution necessitated a similar organizational system. 

Archeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence indicates, however, that agriculture does not lead inexorably to state formation any more than patterns of intergroup violence do. James C. Scott makes a point of this in his recent book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. A central insight of the book is that there were, in the ancient world at least, no yam or taro states. Root crops did not lend themselves to taxation, centralized storage and large scale redistribution, and therefore, wherever root crops became the dominant agricultural staple, the state did not arise. (Scott 2018) Cereal agriculture therefore appears to be a necessary antecedent to the earliest states. (The Incan Empire and earlier Andean civilizations are a conspicuous counter-example, as agriculture there was based largely on potatoes. But then, the Andes, says one prominent archaeologist, "is where theories of state formation go to die.) But even if necessary, cereal agriculture is also not an efficient cause of the earliest states. As Scott points out, settled cereal-growing communities predate the earliest states by at least a few millennia. (2018) Grain agriculture, while it may be necessary to the earliest states, does not in any meaningful sense “lead to” the state. 

This is evidenced in the fertile crescent, where there appears to have been a flowering and then a decline of what archaeologists have begun to call "mega-villages" during the three or four millennia prior to the appearance of the first states in Egypt and Mesopotamia. The largest of these mega-villages yet discovered was unearthed at the site of Catal Hoyuk in modern-day Turkey. We could call the Catal Hoyuk settlement a city based on population size and density. At its height, about 9,000 years ago, it housed over 10,000 people in close proximity. And yet, in spite of what was clearly a settled society with some degree of agricultural surplus, there exists in the archaeological record, which spans over two thousand years of near-continuous occupation, no evidence of any social stratification, no monumental architecture, no ceremonial center, no centralized grain storage. In fact, there is no centralized anything. Cities of comparable population size and even lower densities in the Classic Mayan or early Mesopotamian civilization could, by contrast, make claims to full-fledged city-state-hood, with ruling monarchs, a hierarchy of social classes, and bureaucratic organizations, all abundantly evidenced in the archaeological record. The architectural contrast between these city-states and the Catal Hoyuk mega-village is striking. Houses at Catal Hoyuk were all of comparable size, and were built directly adjacent to one another. Doorways were in the ceiling, and rooftops were the only thoroughfares, giving the settlement a "honeycomb" like structure. (Hodder)

That such late neolithic mega-villages arose, prospered, expanded, developed technologically, and persisted for many centuries before dispersing, indicates not only that a certain kind of “urbanism” can persist without bureaucratic organization, but also that densely populated, settled societies that are at least partially agricultural can arise and persist for long periods without becoming states. However, while the earliest states did not invent agriculture, and while agriculture does not produce states with any linear regularity, the state form does have a special relationship with farming, and in almost every case it transformed and expanded agriculture in sociologically significant ways. 

According to Norman Yoffee, a leading scholar of early state formation, one of the dramatic effects of the appearance of the fist city-states is what he calls the “ruralization” of the surrounding landscape.

For many of the earliest cities, the urban demographic implosion was accompanied by an equally important creation of the countryside. This process of ruralization can be observed in two dimensions. First, existing towns and villages became networked to urban places. The social and economic roles of non-urban dwellers were tied to decisions made in the cities; specialized institutions of production and consumption in the countryside (e.g. T. J. Wilkinson 2003) were altered by the demands of urban rulers and elites, and ranks of urban officials were conceived precisely to carry out new activities. Second, countrysides became relatively depopulated as many people became incorporated in the new cities, […] Subsequently new villages, towns and hamlets arose in the backdraft of urbanization. This condition also led to the intensification of specialized activities, such as pastoralism and nomadism, which flourished not only to supply goods and services to cities but also served as refuges for urban flight. (Yoffee)

Ruralization in the Mesopotamian context, for example, entailed the geographical expansion of a relatively intensively cultivated and irrigated agricultural hinterland, mainly extending upstream and downstream from the city-states. Some workers would have made daily pilgrimages, orchestrated by leaders, from the city to work the nearer fields. But farther out there would have been small settlements of agricultural workers, and further afield still the isolated, semipermanent habitations of herders and perhaps some outlying farmers. 

Almost all early states depended upon agricultural surplus, and similar patterns of ruralization can be discerned in other early-emerging civilizations. (Possible exceptions to Scott's "grain-states-only" thesis would include the Chico Valley civilizations in Peru and Calusa in south Florida, both of which show heirarchical and proto-bureaucratic characteristics and may have been based on marine foraging rather than grain agriculture.) In this ruralized space surrounding the early states we can discern interesting patterns of difference from the agricultural space of non-state societies. Prior to the advent of city-states in Mesopotamia, populations were concentrated in small but densely populated villages, and cultivation was generally carried on in close proximity to these settlements (Scott). This is a pattern that is also discernible in contemporary non-state agricultural societies, in the highlands of Indonesia for example.

The density of very small village settlements in non-state or pre-state societies may be explained by simple human sociality. However, as the transitional villages of the late Neolithic become larger and more reliant on cultivation, the density or "nucleation" of these settlements may require additional explanation. With other considerations aside more dispersed dwellings characteristic of later ruralized territories have practical advantages for farmers. Violence and insecurity likely provide at least a partial explanation for these nucleated pre-state settlement patterns. Even in the case of Catal Hoyuk, which is otherwise conspicuously devoid of any evidence of violence, some archaeologists have speculated that the extreme density of this populous settlement, and the architectural peculiarity of rooftop entrances, may suggest a society that lived in fear of hostile outsiders. Whether or not this is the case, many other similar neolithic farming villages show evidence of rudimentary defensive fortifications, often separating dwellings from the fields. 

Archaeological evidence from the North American proto-state of Cahokia (circa 1000 CE) indicates the dynamics that may have generally characterized the transformation from pre-state agricultural villages to a ruralized landscape under the dominion of early states. Shortly after the building and settlement of Cahokia, the patterns of settlement in the surrounding areas, apparently even including areas quite distant from the city, changed significantly as violence subsided and agriculture intensified. Fortified villages, which entail dense nucleated clusters of often communal dwellings, were replaced by settlements without defensive palisades, consisting of what seem to be single-family “spatially discrete farmsteads situated on bottomland ridge crests and slopes.” (Milner 1986) This relatively pacified, “ruralized” Mississippian space is coeval with an intensification of agriculture. It appears to have persisted only for a short time—a period of one or two hundred years, which some have referred to as the Pax Cahokiana, after which Cahokia declined, rival chiefdoms arose throughout the greater Mississippi valley, and a period of hostility resumed characterized by inter-polity, inter-ethnic, and inter-village conflict. 

According to Bruce Trigger's Understanding Early Civilizations, a similar dynamic is indicated in the evolution of the Incan Empire, which had enough of a pacifying influence in the Andean valleys to allow farmers to expand into what had been unoccupied hinterlands at higher elevations. “The Inka state greatly benefitted highland farmers," he writes, "by abolishing local warfare, thus permitting them to leave their hill-forts and resettle near the thirty-five-hundred-meter-line where they could grown the widest possible array of crops.” (300) These cases seem to indicate that pacification is likely one of the mechanisms at work in the “ruralization” that Yoffee points to in the archaeological record, not only in the Mesopotamian context, but also in many other sites of early state emergence, including Wari, a pre-Inca Andean civilization, and the pre-Aztec metropolis of Teotihuacan. (ibid 52)

With these observations, I do not intend to adopt an uncritical attitude to the state. If anything, I am sympathetic with the normative thrust of Scott’s book, “Against the Grain” which is to say, against the state. However, my aim here is not to adjudicate the merits or demerits of early states or even the state form of society in general. At least not directly. Rather, what interests me is what we might call the environmental hermeneutics of the early state. That is, how might the experience of the landscape and the perception of the landscape change under these changing conditions, as the landscape itself is changed and occupied differently? Environmental theorists have often postulated a significant break in human consciousness of the natural world at the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. As Max Oelshlager writes, 

“The onset of Neolithic culture forever altered both intellectual and material culture […] Rather than attempting to live in harmony with wild nature, as hunter-gatherers had done since time immemorial, farmers literally rose up and attempted to dominate the wilderness. Boundaries were drawn between the natural and the cultural and conceptual restructuring was inevitable.” (The Idea of Wilderness, 28)

Timothy Morton, whose post-natural approach to eco-criticism is otherwise at odds with Oelschlager's defense of wilderness, comes to much the same conclusion, arguing that the Neolithic Revolution erected a "massive firewall between humans and nonhumans." (Being Ecological, 59) This is by now a familiar narrative, but it may be questioned. Although arguable, it is not obvious that stabbing animals to death with stone-tipped spears or driving them over cliffs or burning forests to create game openings is more harmonious mode of relation to the non-human world than slashing and burning and planting manioc. Furthermore, the earliest agrarians certainly combined limited farming with hunting and gathering wild foods. In Neolithic farming villages in the fertile crescent, artifacts suggest more cultural continuity with the hunters who painted the walls of Lascaux cave than with their fellow farmers in the early city-states of Mesopotamia. (Hodder) The rise of the state seems to be a more significant and decisive moment in the history of environmental consciousness. 

But, rather than marking a break with nature, the advent of the state may be seen as producing nature—in the sense of bringing about new modes of relation to the non-human world that comprise an important part of what we today mean by the term “nature” and even by the term “wilderness.” The ruralization of space by early states, which I am suggesting can be seen as a pacification of a space of subsistence, would seem to make possible new, and in some ways more intimate, even if also more geographically limited, modes of interaction with the biotic landscape. One of the classical senses of the Greek term phusis and the Latin natura is the simple contrast with artifice. Nature is that which is not made, willed, or caused by humans. Ruralized space bears the physical stamp of the human will, of course, but I suspect it is easy for contemporary environmental theorists to over-estimate the extent to which, in an eco-phenomenological sense, the pre-agricultural wilderness is an inhuman space. The nature in which hunter-gatherers and pre-state agriculturalists were immersed was, it seems, very often a space characterized by the ever-present threat posed by potentially hostile neighboring bands of humans. The idea of nature, as contemporary environmentalism conceives it, is a space of the non-human, but also importantly, and I contend relatedly, a space of peace. It is a space of peace and freedom, precisely because it is a space of escape from the human world. 

Bill McKibben, in the opening pages of The End of Nature, tells a story about how his restorative walks in the Vermont woods are occasionally ruined by the sound of a nearby chainsaw—an obtrusive, even violent sound of human artifice. To put a finer point on it, the sound doesn’t even have to be actually heard to ruin the experience of nature. Just the anticipation of the sound, the awareness of its possibility, has much the same denaturalizing effect. For McKibben, the point of this story is to illustrate the sense in which the global systemic alteration of the environment by humans, from global warming to stratospheric pollution, marks the death of nature in precisely this eco-phenomenological sense. Even if you don’t see the difference, you know it’s there. And of course it is there, physically, materially—and so sometimes you do in fact see it, or feel it. When the jonquils bloom in January or when you recognize the effects of acid rain on a stand of spruce. It is now, McKibben writes, as if the chainsaw is always in the woods… But how much, really, does this post-natural environmental hermeneutic of the Anthropocene environmentalist differ from the pre-natural one of the Pleistocene hunter-gatherer? 

-Jake Greear