 Good evening and welcome to this distinguished lecture, which is co-organized by the Food Studies Center and the Agrarian Change and Development Research Cluster, both here at SOAS. The SOAS Food Studies Center is committed to the study of the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of food, and more specifically to the dynamic interaction between these dimensions, whether in the past, present, or future, from production through to consumption, not only in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but also in the rest of the world. The Center fosters the teaching of food-related courses at SOAS, facilitates supervision of research theses, and builds networks between scholars with an interest in food at SOAS and beyond. More than 40 members of SOAS staff belong to the Center, as do more than 20 SOAS research students, and more than 100 students on talk courses at the school and alumni of these courses. Its several hundred associate members include students and academics from other universities, policy makers, activists, journalists, and makers and vendors of food. Among its most important public functions are the weekly SOAS food forum and distinguished lectures such as tonight's. Should anyone wish to join the Center as an associate member, which is free of charge, and to be placed on our email list, please send an email to soasfoodstudies at soas.ac.uk. The agrarian change and development research, the agrarian change and development research cluster encourages investigation of the social relations and dynamics of production, property, and power in agrarian formations, and their processes of change, both historical and contemporary. It works within a comparative, within a broad interdisciplinary framework, informed by theory, and generates rigorous comparative analysis and scholarly debate on agrarian structures and change, past and present, in different parts of the world. The cluster functions as a reading group and a sounding board for the ideas and interests of its members who are drawn from the departments of development studies and economics at SOAS. The cluster meets several times each term and members, including staff and research students, discuss early drafts of papers, pieces they've recently published, or texts that have attracted their attention. The cluster works in tandem with the agrarian change seminar, convened it so as by the editors of the Journal of Agrarian Change, which serves as a more formal public venue for the presentation of research papers. So on behalf of my colleagues in the Food Studies Center and the Agrarian Change and Development Research Cluster, I wish to thank the Centers and Programs Office here at SOAS, especially Nena and Jane, for all of their hard work in organizing the event tonight. We also wish to acknowledge the support provided by the Journal of Agrarian Change, as well as by Gastronomica, the Journal of Critical Food Studies. For those of you who are not yet aware of it, this evening's speaker will be back tomorrow from one o'clock to three o'clock in the Khalili Lecture Theater to respond to questions about his work, which have been submitted in advance by SOAS students. Should you be interested, you are most welcome to attend. So let me now introduce our speaker. James Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian societies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution, Southeast Asia, theories of class relations, and anarchism. He studied political science at Williams College, where he took his BA, and then after time spent studying economics at Rangoon University in Burma, and political science at the Institut des Sciences Politiques in Paris, he took an MA and then a PhD in political science at Yale. He first lectured at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. He then spent time at the University of Wisconsin in Madison before returning to Yale, where he became the founding director of the program in agrarian studies. He is author and editor of a great many books and scholarly articles. His major publications include The Moral Economy of the Peasant, published in 1976, Weapons of the Week, Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, published in 1980, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, published in 1985, Seeing Like a State, How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed in 1998, The Art of Not Being Governed, An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, published in 2008, and most recently, Two Cheers for Anarchism, published in 2012. Sorry, another book decoding the subaltern, Ideology, Disguise and Resistance in Agrarian Politics, also 2012. He's held numerous scholarships and fellowships. He has served as president of the Association of Asian Studies from 1997 to 1998, and he was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993. According to his vita, he is also a member of the Connecticut Sheep Breeders Association. Yes, Jim, I was paying attention. Those who know Jim have long valued not only his scholarship, which is at once meticulous and engaging, empirically grounded and theoretically stimulating, but also his generosity in sharing his time and ideas, whether as a teacher, as a colleague, or as a mentor of young scholars who for decades have nestled into the program in agrarian studies, often to write their first books in this intellectually fertile niche. So it gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor James Scott. Thank you, I'm delighted to be here, and also to be at an event sponsored by the SOAS Food and Agriculture program. I think of it like many others as the children of agrarian studies at Yale now in its 22nd year, and most of these children, I should add, have far outstripped their parents, right, in terms of their reach and their intellectual influence, and I think it's what every parent hopes for from their children. The talk I'm giving tonight is from a yet uncompleted book that was inspired by my realization that everything that I thought I knew about early states and the domestication of grain and sedenturization was basically wrong, and this is my effort to provide an account that's more satisfactory for myself and hopefully for others. The other potential title of this talk could be the late Neolithic multi-species resettlement camp. Little by little, I've tried to develop an account of how we get agrarian societies in the first place. After all, Homo sapiens has been around for about 200,000 years, and only 60,000 maximum of those years out of Africa. The first agrarian states by then just a mere smudge on the map and a rounding error in the world's population appear at a generous estimate roughly 6,500 years ago. They represent just a shade over 3% of our history as a species, and I was somewhat surprised to learn evidence of domesticated food plants and livestock occurs several thousand years before anything that we could call an agrarian state pops into archeological view, and it's this gap of 4,000 years that in part preoccupies me. How might one tell the story of how we as a species, having spent virtually our whole span on planet Earth as hunters and gatherers, were assembled in great clumps, growing grain, tending livestock, and governed by the political units we call states and empires? One option and the one I choose to exploit here is to examine the preconditions that made it even conceivable that we should gather or be gathered in substantial numbers in a single place and not immediately starve. These preconditions are, I believe, the result of three world-altering domestications, fire plants and animals. Each of these three domestications brought us closer together, reshaped the natural world, and in turn reshaped us as well. In domesticating much of the natural world, we in turn domesticated ourselves. Only in the context of these domestications did we become suitable raw material for the critical concentrated mass of foodstuffs and manpower that state formation requires. The state is, as we shall see, both the beneficiary and the forcing house of these domestications. What fire meant for hominids and for the rest of the natural world is thrown into sharp relief by a cave excavation in South Africa. At the deepest and therefore oldest strata of this cave, there are no carbon deposits and hence no fire. Here, one finds full skeletal remains of large cats and fragmentary bone shards bearing tooth marks of many fauna among which Homo erectus. At a higher and later stratum, one finds carbon deposits signifying fire. Here, there are full skeletal remains of Homo erectus and fragmentary bone shards of various mammals, reptiles, and birds, among which a few gnawed bones of large cats. The change in cave ownership and the reversal in who was apparently eating whom testify eloquently to the power of fire for the species that first learned to use it. At the very least, fire provided warmth, light, and relative safety, as well as a precursor to the domus or the hearth. The case for the domestication of fire being the decisive great transformation in the fortunes of hominids is, I think, convincing. It's been mankind's oldest and greatest tool for reshaping the natural world. Our ancestors could not have failed to notice how natural wildfires transformed the landscape, how they cleared older vegetation and encouraged a host of quick colonizing grasses and shrubs. Many of them bearing desired fruits, berries, and nuts. They could also not have failed to notice that a fire drove fleeing game from its path. Exposed hidden burrows and nests, and more important, later stimulated the brows and mushrooms that attracted game. In native North America, this would mean elk, beaver, hare, porcupine, turkey, quail, rupt grass, for example. Native Americans were harvesting, if you like, a suite of wild game that they had attracted by their use of fire. Once in control of fire, early mankind, until today, hunters and gatherers and swidden farmers, have used fire to transform the landscape more to their liking. They encouraged the flora and fauna they desired and discouraged those they didn't. Until roughly 100 years ago when fire was declared, at least in America, an enemy on public lands, it was scarcely, there was scarcely any part of the globe, including the rainforests of Amazonia that had not been remade by human, that is to say anthropogenic fire, and hardly a landscape that was not fire adapted. Here I just wanted to show very briefly, this is a print of the hunting of kangaroo by Australian aborigines, early in Australia's European history of Australia. This is a burned swidden. This is, of course, a swidden fire. And finally, this is a landscape that shows you the swiddens that are recently cleared and fallow for different periods of time. We best understand this massive human intervention in the natural world, I believe, as low intensity farming and animal husbandry. It is a kind of horticulture done over millennia over a long, long period of time that in the long, although by imperceptible degrees, completely transforms the landscape. For our purposes, however, the wielding of fire has the effect of assembling, gathering, and concentrating selected resources closer at hand. Fire acts as a powerful magnet, bringing a suite of desirable flora and fauna closer to the hearth. We're a very long way, of course, from the grain field or the livestock corral here, but on a very long view, one can see the centripetal force of fire accelerating the reorganization of the natural world for the convenience of Homo sapiens. Fire served then as the plow and harness of biotic domestication for about 500 millennia before what we know as the Neolithic revolutions of farming and animal husbandry proper. Rather than roaming far and wide for naturally occurring food, mankind has now so rearranged the world, so as to surround herself and put her needs closer to hand. Concentrating foodstuffs and game reduces in proportion the necessary radius of hunting and gathering. As the carrying capacity of a given landscape grows, the population potentially becomes slightly more dense and potentially more settled. Fire powerfully concentrates people in yet another way, cooking. It's virtually impossible to exaggerate the importance of cooking in human evolution. The application of fire to raw food externalizes the digestive process. It gelatinizes starch and denatrous protein. The chemical disassembly of raw food, which in chimpanzees requires a gut roughly three times the size of our own, allows Homo sapiens to eat far less food and expend far fewer calories extracting nutrition from it. The effects are enormous. It allowed early man to gather and eat a far wider range of foods than before. Plants with thorns, thick skins and bark could be open, peeled and detoxified by cooking hard seeds and fibrous foods that would not have repaid the caloric costs of digesting them became palatable. We extract, if we eat raw grains, for example, the diet of most Homo sapiens, if we eat wild grains, excuse me, domesticated grains raw without cooking, we can extract only 10 to 15% of their nutritional value. They need to be cooked in order to provide us with the nutrition we require. Even before the advent of cooking, Homo sapiens was a broad spectrum omnivore, pounding and mashing raw meat and plants, but with fire, the range of foods that could be digested rose exponentially. As testimony to that range, an archeological site in the Rift Valley dated 23,000 years ago, gives evidence of a diet spanning four food webs, water, woodland, grassland and arid zones, encompassing at least 20 large and small animals, 16 families of birds and 140 kinds of fruits, nuts, seeds and pulses, as well as plants for medicinal and craft purposes. Fire for cooking was at least as important as fire as landscape architect for the concentration of population. The latter placed more desirable foods within easier reach while the former rendered a whole range of hitherto indigestible foods now both nutritious and palatable. The radius of a meal, you could say, was greatly reduced. Not only that, but softer cooked foods as a form of external premastication allowed earlier weaning and was almost certainly responsible as long with sedentism for the enormous demographic expansion of agricultural people's vis-a-vis hunters and gatherers. The genetic and physiological effects of at least a half a million years of cooking have been enormous. Compared to our primate cousins, as I mentioned, our gut is well less than half their size, our teeth are far smaller, and we spend far fewer calories chewing and digesting. The gains in nutritional efficiency, it is claimed, largely account for the fact that our brains are three times the size one would expect by comparison with other mammals. In the archeological record, the surge in brain size, I read, coincides with hearts and the remains of meals. Morphological changes of this magnitude have been known to occur in other animals in as little as 20,000 years following a dramatic shift in diet and ecological niche. Fire, one might say, is our trump card as a species, a monopoly that largely accounts for our reproductive success as the world's most successful invasive. Much as trees, plants, and fungi, we too are fire-adapted species, pyrophytes. We have adopted our habits, our diet, our body, to the characteristics of fire, and having done so, we are chained, as it were, to its care and feeding. If the litmus test for a domesticated plant or animal is that it cannot propagate itself without our assistance, then by the same token, we have adapted so massively to fire that our species would have no future without it. One small but telling piece of evidence is that raw foodists who insist on cooking nothing invariably lose weight. Amir, that's a fact that satisfies me. Amir, 10,000 years ago, all Homo sapiens, roughly 4 million of them, some people judge, were all hunters and gatherers. Between 60 and 80% of our diet came from plant sources supplemented by nutritionally valuable high protein foods from hunting, fishing, and shellfish gathering. Not long afterwards, there's evidence for the domestication of wheat, barley, millet, maize, lentils, potatoes, and peas from a relatively few centers where their wild ancestors are found in the Fertile Crescent, Southwest China, the Andes, Central America, and Ethiopia, and here are just for purposes of illustration. This is emmer wheat, the sort of earliest wheat found along with einkorn in the Middle East. Here is a demonstration of the difference between wild emmer wheat on your left, which shatters easily and therefore does not wait for the harvester and has a very brittle rachis and a domesticated emmer, which has a less brittle rachis, which means it doesn't shatter and can be brought back and thrashed by Homo sapiens. You can see the differences also in the size of the grain. The little box in the middle is the, where the earliest wheats are found and then the rest of the red represents the major wheat growing areas subsequently. And finally, this is an American quarter for size of comparison, of the comparison to the Teosinte plant, which is the wild ancestor of maize, and then the sort of modern maize plant and you get some idea for both the enormous increase in the numbers of seeds and their size over time and the changes in the plant. We'll talk later. This is an example of flood retreat agriculture, which is the easiest possible agriculture to practice historically, and this is sorghum growing there. These domestications that I mentioned did not precipitate the rise of agrarian civilizations. In fact, as I mentioned, it would take at least four millennia before these grains would become the staples of the first agrarian kingdoms. This long interim is crucial. Not only did the domestication of plant foods long predate agrarian states, but all of the 12 to 15 crops that today dominate world commerce were domesticated by the sophisticated applied botanists, also known as our Neolithic ancestors. Historical man has added virtually nothing to this achievement. What is perhaps most astounding about our diets in the subsequent 10,000 years is how narrow they have become. To the point where they are dominated, I think 60% of the total calories consumed by humans today are dominated by the three major grains of rice, maize, and wheat. As someone said, we've all become parrots. The question of why early farming was taken up is intrinsically more interesting than how it was invented. Mankind has been cultivating and changing the landscape for a very long time, and the act of domestication in terms of dropping a seed in a small hole in the ground, the more you take that as the decisive rubicon of domestication, the more trivial it seems when looked at the transformation of landscape and the cultivation and weeding and care of wild plants over time and their transplantation. It's not obvious why hunters and gatherers provided with the bounty of the natural world and made more accessible by fire would choose voluntarily to move toward farming with its far more demanding regimen of labor. Even in the 20th century, Marshall Solombs has reminded us that foragers and hunters who are in marginal zones that are disfavored by agriculturalists that they could still be described as the original affluent society. They typically spend less than half of their waking hours in what we might call work, and the rest of the time in repose and in what an anthropologist might call cultural elaboration. The dominant though not entirely convincing explanation is that farming was adopted in those settings where population pressure on natural sources had increased to the point where it became necessary to extract more calories from the same territory. A theory famously laid out by Esther Bosrop nearly a half century ago. Three pieces of fragmentary evidence appear to bear out this reasoning, which I think is still quite disputable. First, in the two millennia or so before farming was established, foraging populations all over the world seemed to have grown substantially, and this is often calculated to be a result of the end of the cold snap known as the Younger Dryas, which ended in 9,600 years ago, after which conditions became warmer and wetter and very quickly and population expanded. This mini-population boom was accompanied by more intensive gathering of plant foods, nuts, grains, tubers, at the expense of meat and large game, which was presumably becoming more scarce. Starchy foods were becoming a staple before they were cultivated. A second straw in the wind is the fact that a good many sites of early agriculture were settings where crops could be sown with a minimum of labor. The most striking case is what is known as flood retreat agriculture, or Décrue in the French version. Broadcasting seed on soft and fertile silt left on a river bank by the receding annual floods. This, of course, was the Nile Valley practice from the beginning. Finally, there's abundant evidence from many sites that wherever there has been a dramatic drop in population because of epidemics, war, or famine, the remaining population typically shifts toward less intensive labor-saving means of subsistence now that the pressure on resources has plummeted. Thus, many Native American groups moved back to hunting and gathering after catastrophic epidemics brought by the Europeans. Similarly, following the black plague of the 14th century, areas once intensively cultivated were abandoned in favor of less intensive slash and burn swidden cultivation. The driving principle of Beausrop's account is the economic principle of the least effort for a given output. A principle documented in brilliant detail by Cheyanov in his study of the Russian small-holding peasants. Precisely because intensive farming generally involves higher labor costs per unit output, it's avoided so long as less onerous forms of subsistence are available. It's taken up reluctantly by hard-pressed foragers who have reached, who know how to plant crops, but have reached the carrying capacity of their environment. On this account, the adoption of farming calls into question any simple narrative of human progression from hunting and foraging to swiddening and then to agriculture proper. Agriculture almost certainly entailed a large increase in drudgery and, as we shall see, declines in health and life expectancy. Looking backward, farming seems to be man's first major step toward civilization. It cannot, however, have looked that way to those who first embarked on it. I think I have, yes, just as an attract, this is a Rosa Bonner painting of oxen cultivation, the most labor-intensive when you take into account the care and feeding and fodder required for the oxen as well as the plows as well as the work of turning over thick loam soils. I think the standard narrative historically and the narrative that I was a captive of, if you like, was that the domestication of grains and irrigation provided the first premise for widespread sedentarization and that sedentarization provided the possibility for larger concentrations of population, the division of labor, towns, and eventually the state. Now, this is the sort of narrative that I think every schoolgirl and schoolboy kind of learn implicitly or explicitly. And it beggars the imagination that through a 12-step detoxification program that you would need to get this out of people's brains, but I hope in this little book to make a start on that detox regimen. Settentarization does not require domesticated field crops. State formation does. Settentarization begins in the southern Mesopotamian wetlands. These are areas that, although now they are dry and arid, were flooded 9,000 years ago and water came all the way to Nasseria and to the doorstep of ore and iridu and uruk. The water level was much higher and civilization began, or sedentarization began. Let's put it that way. Settentarization began in these wetlands on what some people call turtlebacks, known in New Orleans and Louisiana as Shedye, these small little deposits of sand and silt that build up above the flood level, often only by a meter or so. These areas were unbelievably rich in terms of being at the seam of saltwater, marine environments, and freshwater environments, each of which had all series of subsistence resources that were different from one another. And if you lived in the tidal zone, you could say that the saline ecotone moved past you every day and then receded as the tide receded and the freshwater intruded again. The same was true on an annual basis. The area was inundated in the early part of the year and starting in May, it started to dry out, which produced an enormous amount of fodder for the sheep and goats that the people in this area had already domesticated. It was then a kind of, as some people have said, this was the Garden of Eden from which we get the sort of historical biblical story. And only later did it become an arid zone. And this history has been now, I think, documented in great detail by remote sensing, by the reading of sediments and soils. One can reconstruct both the sort of activity of foraging, of the gathering of reeds and so on from this early period. There were towns, but there were no states. There were towns of 1,000, 2,000 people that lasted for the better part of a millennium. The graves that we find are graves in which there are no differentials in grave goods, so they appear to be a relatively unstratified society. And of course these people were building with reeds and they left no monumental architecture for the archeologists to obsess over. The, I will return to the, this is the new air and the cattle. They're out of water, I'm afraid. So this is a very bad kind of slide of the area that I'm talking about in south of Basra in contemporary Iraq. It shows the marshy areas most recently and historically as well. And this is an earlier depiction of the areas that were heavily flooded historically and the alluvial fans that provided such rich soil. Area looks much like this, like this. Here you can see the marsh Arabs living in the remnant of the ecology that I'm describing. You can see the wild pigs, if you look carefully, right? In the foreground and you can see the reed buildings in the back. Here's another picture of this area. This is again, marsh Arab dwellings all built out of reeds. Many of them floating islands and some of them on these turtlebacks or chenille. You can imagine how difficult and impossible this was for the state to administer or to control. And this is a Sheik's Hall. I thought it was a mosque first, but it's a Sheik's Hall. It's a magnificent architecture all built with reeds and they have to put a new layer of floor in of reeds every year because the bottom is always being, is rotting because it's essentially a floating building on extremely wet soil. But the architecture is mind-bogglingly beautiful. After Saddam Hussein drained the marshes, this is what it looks like. I added some shellfish middens, which are very common in this area as well. This is not from the Mesopotamia, but you get some idea for the enormous depth of people who live as gatherers on the strands of marine environments that shellfish are enormously important as a part of their diet. And it was another sort of middening which archeologists are busy working. Everywhere the adoption of agriculture was protracted and halting. Domesticated cereals have been known for at least 10,000 years, but in most places it took several thousand years before they were systematically planted in tilled fields. Barley and wheat were only planted in Britain 5,000 years ago. It's not as if once shown the magic of farming, foragers and hunters rushed to embrace the advantages of agriculture. The principal reason was that a subsistence spread across several food techniques and food webs was far more stable and reliable than an exclusive reliance on planting. Early farmers might do some planting, but it was likely to be overshadowed by foraging of wild foods, collecting shellfish, trapping fish and hunting. With such a balanced portfolio, their subsistence risks were spread in a way that protected them from the failure of a single source of food. They were unlikely to give up this source of security until they were forced to. Left to their own devices, they avoided intensive agriculture until they pressed hard against the carrying capacity of their environment. When obliged to cultivate, they first opted for forms of agriculture like flood retreat agriculture that involved the highest return for the least labor. Depending on the context, they might move then to shifting cultivation or fire field cultivation with long fallow. If pressed still further, they might shorten the fallow and at last resort would take to the plow. Throughout this long transition, there was much oscillation back and forth depending on the conditions of wildlife, depending on the conditions of wild subsistence food and their availability. And whenever the pressure on land was relieved, usually because of catastrophic mortality, the survivors returned to letting fire do the work of the plow or even to hunting and foraging. The early agricultural field is a vastly more simplified and cultivated zone than the world outside it. It represents a kind of floral zoo. The purpose of the cultivated field and of the garden is precisely to eliminate most of the variables that would compete against the culture. In this artificial environment, other flora exterminated for a time by fire or the plow or opportunistic weeds pulled out by their roots or hode, birds rodents and browsers scared off or fenced out, perhaps carefully watered and fertilized, we make a nearly ideal world in which our favorites will thrive. Steadily by cuddling the plant and rigorously favoring those varieties and only those varieties that meet our needs, we often create a fully domesticated plant. Fully domesticated means simply that it is in effect our creation. It can no longer survive without our attentions. In evolutionary terms, a fully domesticated plant has become a super specialized floral basket case and its future is entirely dependent on our own. If it ceases to please us, it will be banished and almost certainly perish. We think of ourselves homo sapiens as the agent in this narrative. We domesticated the potato, we domesticated maize, rice, et cetera. But if we squint at the matter from a slightly different angle, it's we who have become domesticated. Michael Pollan puts it roughly this way in his sudden appersu while he's gardening. As he is weeding and hoeing around his tomato plants, it dawns on him that he has become the slave of the tomato. Here he is on his hands day after day, weeding, fertilizing, protecting and in general, reshaping the immediate environment to the utopian expectations of his tomato plants. Who is doing the bidding of whom becomes almost a problem in metaphysics? It's useful I think to appreciate in a larger sense how the domestication of plants as farming enmeshed us in an elaborate annual set of routines that organized our work life, our settlement patterns, our social structures and our ritual life. From field clearing and preparation by fire, plow and harrow to sowing, cultivation, weeding, to constant vigilance as the field ripens, the crop organizes much of our timetable. The harvest itself sets in train another sequence of routines. In the case of cereal crops, cutting, bundling, threshing, gleaning, separation of straw, raking, winnowing, sieving, drying, sorting, most of which has historically been coated as women's work. And by the way, if you want to know what whether the skeletal remains that you find as an archeologist were skeletal remains of women from grain civilizations, as opposed to outside of grain civilizations, all you have to do is to look at their toes because all of the women in grain civilizations spent a lot of their time on their hands and knees, rocking back and forth, grinding grain with their toes curled under, and there's a particular arthritic condition that those toes acquire over time that is characteristic of women in grain civilizations. The daily preparation of grains for consumption, pounding, grinding, fire, fire-making, cooking, and baking throughout the year sets the tempo of the domus. These meticulous, demanding, interlocked, mandatory annual and daily routines, I would argue, belong at the very center of a comprehensive account of the civilizing process. They strap us to a minutely choreographed routine of dance steps. They shape our physical bodies. They shape the architecture of the domus. They insist, as it were, on certain patterns of cooperation and coordination. Once Homo sapiens takes that fateful step into agriculture, she enters an austere monastery whose taskmaster consists mostly of the demanding genetic clockwork of the plant itself. Norbert Elias writes convincingly of the growing chains of dependency among ever denser populations that made for mutual accommodation and restraint that he calls the civilizing process. But literally thousands of years before the changes Elias describes, man was already disciplined and subordinated by the metronome of his own crops. Compare this, by the way, this single metronome of the crop to the life of hunters and gatherers who are, in a sense, judging and observing and responding to the clocks of many different forms of grain and plants and mass fruiting and so on. That is a world that, if you like, is there's not a single metronome, but there are hundreds of different metronomes that coordinate the activities of hunters and gatherers who have this wide web of subsistence resources that they avail themselves of. If fire served to concentrate more food resources within an easy reach, the transition to farming marked an accentuation of this trend. Like a powerful magnet, fire and planting shifted foodstuffs in denser and denser rings around the habitation. The planted field itself is a herbarium, adapted to the special needs of the coltogen, being nursed to maturity, and kept separate from surrounding nature at a great cost in labor. Most of this is defensive labor, if you like, to the degree that the crop is fully domesticated, the more it needs in the way of defensive work to prevent it from being overwhelmed by disease, weeds, and vermin. The shift in emphasis from pure hunting and gathering to shifting slash and burn cultivation to sedentary fixed field farming is a shift biotically from relative complexity to relative simplicity. The hunter-gatherer encourages, usually by fire, certain plants and animals he or she aims to harvest. The swidden cultivator, also using fire, encourages and plants a great variety of crops and may very well use the field as a hunting ground. In these respects, the tempo of the hunter-gatherers and swindlers is attuned to these various tempos I mentioned. From the early Neolithic domestications of grains until the advent of major grain civilizations, a very long period, people moved back and forth between these different food webs as circumstances dictated. The move toward more intensive fixed field farming was, however, a qualitative change. Subsistence production came to depend on a few staple crops that required careful tending. As food production and diet became narrower and simpler, it became by the same token more fragile. The fate of more and more people rested on the annual fate of a handful of staple crops. We had trained to live in our jealously guarded herbarium. The best way to look at domestication of animals is in the context of our concern with concentration and sedentaryism, and that is to see it through the lens of cooking. What cooking does is to allow us to eat things we otherwise could not and for less caloric expenditure. Most domesticated animals do exactly the same for us. They are our dedicated four-footed foragers, well in the case of chicken, ducks, and geese, two-footed foragers. We, in effect, send them out to forage on our behalf. They range farther than we might, and most important they eat and find, digest plants, nuts, fungi, and insects that we either cannot find or will not eat. They metabolize all of these products of nature and turn them into protein and fat, which we crave and consume. It's as if we had a large number of servant foragers scouring the environment and processing its offerings, in effect metabolizing or cooking it up and bringing it back to the hearth. In principle, the domesticated animal does no more for us than the animal brought down by a hunter. A deer provides much the same service. On the other hand, the domesticated animal, however, extend beyond the uses of the slain animal. We also make use of the domesticated animal's reproductive functions. Cattle, zebu, water buffalo, yak, goat, sheep, reindeer, dromedary, bactrian, camel, horse, and ass are all or were once milk animals. That milk could be preserved by turning it into such products as yogurt, butter, and cheese. In the case of poultry, the unhatched eggs could be regularly eaten. From the fur-bearing animals, especially sheep, the wool could be taken to process or weave into rugs, garments, or felt. One can skin an animal only once, but one can shear it annually. The systematic use of products of the living animal, particularly its reproductive functions, is what sets animal domestications apart from intensified hunting. And although I don't have time to make the argument here, I think I might argue that the way to understand domestication is the way in which Homo sapiens takes over and manages the reproductive functions of plants and animals that are domesticated. That is to say, to change the reproduction and control it of plants in order to produce the seeds and fruits that are desired to, in a sense, take over what had been wild animals, herd animals, and to organize their reproductive functions so as to maximize the amount of wheat or other products, or, excuse me, meat or other products that they produce. And I would argue that if we are to understand domestication as the control over reproduction, it is fruitful to extend it to the first agrarian societies in which you have property relations in the patriarchal family, in which the reproductive services of women become extremely central and their productivity in producing laborers and, if you like, domesticated animals for the patriarchal family is absolutely central as well. And it's when you get the domus and you get the statues of women in which their reproductive functions are exaggeratedly represented in the sort of neolithic statues of women that, I think, points in that direction. As with plants, the gradual incorporation of herd animals into the extended household is best, perhaps, described as a mutual domestication, recalling the domus in domestication, and selecting continually for the traits that we desired, particularly docility, we end by creating, as with domestic plants, a species that would be hard pressed to survive on its own in the wild. As a sheep breeder myself, thank you for mentioning that, Harry, for more than 20 years, I've always been personally offended when sheep are used as a synonym for cowardly crowd behavior and a lack of individuality. We have, after all, for the last 8,000 years been selecting among sheep for tractability, slaughtering the most aggressive ones who broke out of the corral first. How dare we then turn around and slander a species for some combination of normal herd behavior and for precisely those characteristics for which we have selected for 8,000 years? It's, I am indignant on behalf of sheep. In turn, we have been as shaped by our domesticated animals as by our domesticated plants. We prepare corrals, mangers, bedding, and stalls for them, and when necessary, bring them fodder. We tend and protect their vulnerable offspring. We milk, shear, and medicate them. Having taken them in and transformed them, we become, in a sense, their servants as well. They depend on us as we on them, like grain farming, stock rearing, sets in motion, a whole set of routines that choreographs our day and our year. Here, we're showing the new air. That's in a magnificent tableau of the new air and their cattle, and this, I'm afraid, is a dinka, dinka and dinka cattle, and since the new air and dinka don't exactly get along these days, maybe it's inappropriate of me, but it's an incredible image of dinka cattle who are like new air cattle. Here, I want to quote Evans Prichard, and if you will think back to what Michael Pollan said about his relation to the tomato plant, you will see the precise parallel. Evans Prichard wrote in the new air, quote, it has been remarked that the new air might be called parasites of the cow, but it might be said with equal force that the cow is a parasite of the new air, whose lives are spent in ensuring its welfare. They build buyers, kindle fires, and clear crowds for its comfort, move from villages to camps, from camp to camp, and from camps back to villages for its health. They defy wild beasts for its protection and fashion ornaments for its adornment. It lives its gentle, indolent, sluggish life thanks to the new air's devotion. At this point, a full suite of civilizing domestications, fire, plants, and animals is in place. So too for this reason are the critical conditions for the concentration of resources that make sedentaryization feasible on a large scale. If you will forgive anachronistic impiety, instead of Muhammad going to the mountain, this mountain actually came to Muhammad. Fire cleared the land and reorganized its plant and animal life. It made more of those plants and animals palatable. Domesticated grains, which are only palatable when cooked, brought plant life previously gathered where it occurred into a tighter circle around the domus. And domesticated animals brought game and its products virtually to the front door. At about this time, unmistakable signs of sedentaryism appear in the archeological record, pots and granaries. I'm going to end just with a gesture in the direction of some of the themes that I hope to develop. The concentration of people and domesticated animals in grain in a single spot, of course, was a perfect epidemiological storm. That is to say, almost all of our infectious diseases are zoonoses that move between domesticated animals and human beings. Many of these diseases, including measles and mumps and diphtheria, simply did not, and chicken pox and so on, did not exist before the Neolithic concentration of large numbers of people and domesticated animals in one place. And the Neolithic resettlement cap, multi-species settlement cap also brought in its train all of those hangers-on or uninvited guests like sparrows and rats and mice who found the domus and the grain and the granary and the domesticated animals all the way down to the ticks and mites and fleas and so on. This was a completely unprecedented concentration of vectors of potential disease and it explains why the Neolithic resettlement cap was a very unhealthy place to be. Mortality rates were extremely high. These diseases over time became endemic rather than epidemic, of course, but in the short run, mortality was higher and most of these populations only grew by bringing more people in from the countryside, from outside, rather than growing demographically from its own sources. What is, however, important is that these grain civilizations did have enormously high rates of fertility and these came about by virtue of the fact that the distance between births was shortened, weaning could take place earlier and whereas hunters and gatherers normally waited four years between births, agriculturalists had waited two to two and a half years between births and the result of this was a kind of, over time, a demographic advantage of agriculturalists over hunters and gatherers such that agriculturalists became the expansive imperialist population movement pushing hunters and gatherers to the periphery. So in the long run, the expansion of agricultural peoples became an absolutely crucial function and it required both high rates of fertility and it also required the concentration of population, many of whom were captured populations since most of these early wars are about capturing population and bringing them in and settling them down so that their production and corvée labor can be used. There is, then, a kind of agroecology of the state. The early state did not invent domesticated plants, it did not domesticate animals, of course, or fixed-field agriculture or irrigation, for that matter, irrigation existed before any of these states, but these states exaggerated and amplified all of these agricultural characteristics that were necessary for the thriving and expansion of the state. There is, a state needs a kind of simplified agroeconomy in order to persist and it has a kind of elective affinity. The state is incubated in agroecological settings characterized above all by grain agriculture. This means rich alluvium or Lewis soils and this can even be in places like the Andes at higher altitudes if there happens to be alluvial fans that create a lot of arable land. It's surely striking that virtually all classical states are based on grain, including millets. A rare partial exception is the Inca state relying on maize and potatoes. History records no cassava states, no sego states, no yam states, no taro states, no plantain states, no breadfruit straits, or sweet potato states. There are banana republics, but that doesn't count. Why are grassy grain crops? Typically barley, rye, wheat, rice, maize, and millets. So closely associated with the earliest states. My guess is that only grains are suited to the concentrated production tax assessment and cadastral surveys, storage and rationing. Contrast in this respect, my favorite contrast with grain is maniac or yucca or cassava. Wheat grows above ground. It usually ripens at about the same time. It's easily gathered and stored. It has relatively high value per unit weight and volume. If the state wants your wheat, it just has to come when it's ripe and can take it. Or if it doesn't like you, it can burn you out when the crop is ripe and therefore dry. Or better yet, it waits until you have threshed the crop and it takes the threshed wheat from your granary. On suitable soil, it provides the agroecology for dense concentrations of human subjects. Cassava, on the other hand, grows below ground, requires little care, ripens in a year, and most important can safely be left in the ground. And it remains edible for another two years. If the state wants your cassava, it will have to come and dig out the tubers one by one. And then it has a cartload of tubers of great weight and little value. If we were evaluating crops from the perspective of a pre-modern tax man, the major grains above all irrigated rice would be among the most preferred and roots and tubers among the least preferred. That was pointed out to me that lots of legumes like chickpeas and lentils and peas, they can also be dried as well. And it seems to me the disadvantage of these legumes as a tax crop is that they can be picked all along. They don't have a determinant harvest like wheat or the major grains. They could just be picked throughout much of their life cycle. And therefore it's very hard for the kind of tax man to ascertain and assess a harvest of any of these legumes. It follows, I think, that state formation becomes possible only when there are few alternatives to a diet dominated by domesticated grains. So long as subsistence has spread across several food webs, as it is for hunters and gatherers, sweden cultivators and marine faragers, the state is unlikely to arise. And as much as there is no readily accessible and accessible staple to serve as the basis of appropriation. Nor is it just a matter of the difficulty of dominating a population which is itinerant. The state also requires or prefers a narrow band of subsistence food, fixed fields and cadastral surveys, concentrated population. And again, rice, irrigated rice is absolutely the best for concentrating population. Historically, I think it often requires at least a large portion of an unfree population. And if it can extend irrigation, it then can control access to water and therefore increase its control over the population. If we compare this to the wetlands agriculture or the wetlands subsistence of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium, there's such a wide variety of wild plants, fruits and nuts and berries, fish and game, migrations, shellfish, small mammals that it's almost impossible for its production to be assessed and to also be taxed and appropriated. And the same is true for slash and burn cultivation as well. So it explains, I think, why the wetlands subsistence of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium was a terrain for sedentarization and population growth but not of state formation until much later. And that swidden cultivators, let alone hunters and foragers, are not a population in which one can expect state formation to take place. So the state has a kind of agroecology which it tries to amplify because it's the agroecology in which it thrives to collect people, to open new lands, to extend irrigation. The last theme that I hope to develop as well is that I think there's a period of the early states when the early states are actually quite weak and the people outside the state are still very numerous. And it's a period that lasts for a greater or lesser period of time, depending on which part of the world we're looking at. And I call this the sort of golden age of barbarians. It's in a sense that period in which very weak states are prone to, and sedentary settlements, are prone to raiding, kidnapping to the seizure of their grain and valuables in which they are more likely to be paying, if you like, a tribute to more mobile pastoralists or hunters and gatherers who can prey on them because the growth of sedentary communities is rather like one-stop foraging, if you like, for mobile barbarians. And until the states become quite strong, it is a period in which states are often not safe, they disintegrate very frequently and it's difficult to have them grow again. I think I'll shall stop there. Thank you very much.