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Books by James C. Scott
Against the Grain
by James C. Scott
· published 2017 · read 2020-10-18
★★★☆☆
Impressive and intriguing: Against the Grain tells the story of early state-building as a story of agriculture – that's not new. What's new is that James Scott has spent years aggregating the current insights of history and archaeology to paint the same idea from a new angle: What if early states did not naturally arise with the cultivation of grain – what if they required a food staple as grain (divisible, countable, and with a strict yearly cycle) to establish a bureaucracy?