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James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 336 pp. “We have had a lot of governments here at _________, but none of them has ever done a damn thing for us: we think that government is a bad ide.” a This was the unsolicited response of a group of New Guinea highlanders to a query as to who might have burned down the government station. Highland Papua New Guinea people were among the first on earth to originate a regime of agricultural food- production, complete with irrigation, fertilization, and field management, and they did so about 9,000 years ago, with no help from the outside. At no time in the ensuing 9,000 years, until the colonial government arrived, did they have anything that even faintly resembled a centralized state structure or, for t - hat mat ter, a centralized anything. We have no solid evidence from anywhere in the world that food-produ ction economies (or even economic necessity, whatever that might mean) lead directly or even indirectly to centralized state structures, and most of the evidence we do have from state societies is projected backward from
Common Knowledge – Duke University Press
Published: Jan 1, 2020
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