 Thank you all for coming. Good evening and welcome to the second centenary lecture of the Department of Politics and International Studies Today delivered by Professor James Scott from Yale University. Now, we are very happy to have you here We know that you're basically having also lots of exams and we're competing against the nice weather outside as well And so I appreciate you all coming. So my name is Michael Bueller. I'm going to chair tonight's session now before we basically have The talk delivered by Professor James Scott. I just want to say a few things With regard to future events and then a couple of announcements as well So professor James Scott will talk for about 50 minutes and then we'll have a Q&A for about 30 minutes after that We have a reception upstairs to which you're all invited So it's just one floor up in this very same building and that will follow Q&A now We also actually have a third centenary lecture planned for the fall semester It's going to be on the 28th of November if that's correct and James Piscatori will actually talk Here at SOAS in this very same room now the details are not finalized yet But if you're interested in coming to the next lecture, I encourage you to sign up to the SOAS Facebook page or the SOAS Calendar and there you will then see these Announcements now What I also need to say is that basically tonight's event would not have been possible without the help of a couple of people most importantly Marina English actually who has worked countless hours To make this event happen now last time she was hiding outside. I don't know if she's here tonight or if she's Where? She's outside. All right. She's hide. She's hiding outside But like basically she's in charge and she is responsible and we're very very happy and fortunate to actually here she is I would also like to thank the technicians who are here tonight and I want to just remind you that this event is being filmed So by base basically being here you have given us our your consent to to to being filmed and I also want to Emphasize that the Q&A is being filmed as well. So if you have a very Important question, you will see yourself on YouTube in a couple of days from now So this is basically all I have to say in terms of announcements or the technicalities of tonight's talk I'll now hand over to Mark Laffy the head of the politics department who will introduce our speaker Good evening. It's my pleasure and privilege this evening to introduce our centennial speaker Professor James Scott of Yale University Mr. Scott, I think it's fair to say as one of the most distinguished and influential social scientists in the world It's an honor to have him with us today. Of course such a person really needs no introduction Nonetheless, I've been tasked to do so. So I'll try to keep this short and to the point Professor Scott received his PhD in political science from Yale University in 1967 Subsequently, he moved the University of Wisconsin Madison before returning to Yale in 1976 and he has taught there ever since He is currently the sterling professor of political science and professor anthropology and director of the agrarian studies program a role Which he's held since 1991 Professor Scott is the author of eight books including such influential works as the moral economy of the peasant Rebellion and subsistence in Southeast Asia weapons of the weak everyday forms of peasant resistance Domination and the arts of resistance hidden transcripts and seeing like a state how certain schemes to improve the human condition failed More recently his work has taken an anarchist turn leading to work such as the art of not being governed an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia and two chairs for anarchism six easy pieces on autonomy dignity and meaningful work and play Mr. Scott does not believe in citation indexes which he lampoons in two chairs for anarchism, which I thoroughly recommend But they do provide a crude measure of his influence. So if you'll allow me The moral economy of the peasant has been cited over 5,000 times weapons of the weak almost 10,000 times Domination and the arts of resistance almost 9,000 times and seeing like a state the most recent of these works over 11,000 times By any measure, this is a scholarly life of richness and creativity Indeed it's a mark of how influential his writings have been that many of the ideas they contain such as the weapons of the weak hidden transcripts seeing like a state Have become part of the everyday language of the social sciences and humanities far beyond the study of Southeast Asia peasants and political science Indeed Professor Scott's career He means impact of his studies of how power works not least for those at the bottom of the social scale Stands as a striking counterpoint to many of the defining features of the field of which he is nevertheless a distinguished professor In the past Professor Scott has talked about writing a boring dissertation at Yale one which he said sank without a trace Indeed, he's also suggested probably joking, but perhaps not that he'd the basis for a class-action suit against political science They're having bungled his education His real education began he said when he moved to Wisconsin in 1967 as a Southeast Asianist at the height of Vietnam War in his own words There were demonstrations every day at the University with tear gas etc And I found myself teaching courses on the Vietnam War with 800 students I taught with a friend who's a China specialist Ed Friedman. We taught a course on peasant revolution We would give a lecture and 60 or 70 students who thought we were insufficiently progressive Would go away after the lecture write a rebuttal of our lecture, which they would then hand out to all the students of the next class You have my students in here no ideas, okay This continued for the entire semester and was quite extraordinary Professor Scott's first book the moral economy of a peasant grew directly out of his experience of teaching Southeast Asian politics at Wisconsin in the midst of a Southeast Asian war It was his attempt to understand peasant rebellion In his own words, I decided about that time that since peasants were the most numerous class in world history It seemed to me that you could have a worthy life studying the peasantry If development is about anything it ought to be about peasant livelihoods and the improvement of peasant lives more generally They also stand at the origins of wars of national liberation as the Vietnam War was for the Vietnamese One of the abiding features of professor Scott's work is a commitment to an interpretive and Phenomenological understanding of social science the still to some surprising idea that non-elites Workers women Vietnamese peasants are themselves political thinkers with their own purposes values and practices When I was working on the moral economy of the peasant I read all the peasant novels I can get my hands on all the oral histories in short as much as I could stuff from the outside of political science If you want to understand peasants in other words or indeed people is Rational liberating animals you have to talk to them to see the world as they do To understand how they interpret the situation they face to take seriously the world as they encounter and experience it One can see here the openings to what a more ethnographic engagement with the study of peasants and a politics more generally And what about political science? In his own words, that was the point where my intellectual agenda was increasingly less dependent on political science Most of my colleagues don't consider me to be a real political scientist And if you ask people who didn't know what I was most would say I was an anthropologist I like the idea of not being a member of any discipline. That's a better description would be to see professor Scott as undisciplined But not unsystematic or lacking in method Of course, this doesn't mean that what peasants or indeed anyone else has to say should be taken at face value As if it was the last word and much professor Scott's work has been about precisely this The many and varied ways in which power and meaning intersect in the micro politics of everyday life There's been about the ways in which domination and resistance manifest themselves the level of lived experience of shared and contested meanings of What he refers to as public and private transcripts Over the years the ideas experiences and histories of the peasants with whom professor Scott has collaborated as he explored the workings of power And so many forms have traveled a long way from Southeast Asia Indeed, they've traveled around the world Illuminating and informing your understanding It is taken together a model example of what a scholarly life a life committed to thinking and then thinking again and a bit harder can achieve Professor Scott, it's an honest welcome you to service. Thank you. That was perhaps the most generous introduction I've ever had and I think maybe I should just stop while I'm ahead The this is my second Talk in this room, which I like a lot and the first was I think devoted to trying to understand what I call the late neolithic multi species resettlement camp which is the kind of early sedentary communities in the Middle East and I'm trying Since I'm reasonably apocalyptic about our environmental situation I thought it would be interesting to go back and find out how we came to live as we did in Great heaps of people and domesticated animals and domesticated plants And governed by units we call states And so this talk today is from the last chapter of a little book That's my effort to understand the early agrarian states not I'm not adding anything Original I am Essentially going back and reading what we now know about the early states and the last chapter is called partly Tongue-in-cheek the golden age of barbarians, but only partly tongue-in-cheek. So I want to begin with an epigram an anonymous epigram The history of the peasantry is written by the townsmen The history of the nomads is written by the settled The history of the hunter-gatherer is written by the farmer The history of the non-state peoples is written by the court scribes All may be found in the archives cataloged under barbarian histories Looked at from outer space in 2500 BC The very earliest states Mesopotamia Egypt in the Indus Valley Harapan Would have been scarcely visible I don't have any images that I'm going to show but imagine a picture of the globe with his tiny little dots of the very earliest states In say 1500 BC There would have been a few more centers The early Mayan kingdoms and the Yellow River kingdoms along the Yellow River But their overall geographical presence may actually have shrunk Even at the height of the Roman and the early Han super-states the area of their effective control would have been stunningly modest With respect to population the great majority throughout this period and arguably up until 1680 were still non-state peoples by which I mean hunters and gatherers Marine collectors Swindlers pastoralists and a good governor taxed by any state The frontier even in the old world was sufficiently capacious to beckon those who wished to keep the state at arm's length States being largely agrarian phenomenon would with the exception of some intermontane valleys have looked like small little alluvial Archipelagos located on the flood plains of a handful of major rivers again I ask you to imagine right the location of the early agrarian kingdoms all in river valleys and located on flood plains Powerful as they might become their sway was ecologically confined to the well-watered rich soils that could support The concentration of labor and grain that is a basis of their power. I call this the grain manpower module Outside this ecological sweet spot in arid lands and swamps and marshes in the mountains. They could not rule Were non-state spaces These states might mount punitive expeditions and win an engagement or two But rule was another thing for the most part states did not seek to rule such areas These areas were fiscally sterile They would not repay the cost of effectively governing them instead states sought military allies and Proxies in the hinterland and traded to obtain the scarce raw materials that they needed The hinterland was not simply an Ungoverned or better put a not yet governed zone, but rather a zone governed from the their perspective by barbarians and savages Though hardly precise Linnaean categories barbarians Often denoted a hostile pastoral people who posed a military threat to the states, but who might under certain circumstances be incorporated Savages on the other hand were seen as foraging and hunting bands not suitable raw material for civilization at all Who might be ignored killed or enslaved? When Aristotle wrote of slaves as tools Like animals beasts of burden one imagines that he had in mind savages Rather than the barbarian Persians who were quite as civilized as were the Greeks I should make it crystal clear once again that I'm of course using the term barbarian with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek The early state was radically unstable for internal structural epidemiological and political reasons It was also vulnerable to predation from other states But I wish to argue here that the threat posed by barbarians was perhaps the single most important factor Limiting the growth of states for a period measured not in centuries, but actually in millennia From the Amorite incursions into Mesopotamia through the Greek dark age The fragmentation of the Roman Empire the Yuan dynasty in China and perhaps beyond The barbarian presence was the greatest danger to the state's existence and at the very least the crucial constraint on its growth I'm speaking less of the barbarian stars the Mongols the Manchu the Huns the moguls Osman Then of the countless bands of non-state peoples who with their raids relentlessly nod on sedentary grain farming communities Many non-state raiding peoples were of course themselves semi sedentary such as the Patans the Kurds and the Berbers The way we can best conceptualize this activity I think is to see it as an advanced and lucrative form of hunting and gathering Sedentary communities represented for mobile foragers an irresistible site for concentrated gathering Some idea of the pickings that they offered can be gained by this inventory of the loot From a large hill raid on a lowland settlement in the in western India in late colonial times 72 bullocks 106 cows 55 calves 11 female buffaloes important to the sex for reproduction Brass and copper of 54 brass and copper pots 50 pieces of clothing nine blankets 19 iron plows 65 axes ornaments and grain The period between the first appearance of states and their very recent hegemony over non-state peoples represented I believe something of a golden age of barbarians what I mean Is that it was in many ways better? To be a barbarian because there were states so long as those states were not too strong States were juicy sites for plunder and tribute just think of the labor that had gone into the loot that I listed in this earlier raid Justice the state required sedentary grain growing population for its predations So did this concentration of settled people with their grain livestock manpower and goods Serve as a site of extraction for mobile predators When the predators mobility was enhanced by camels horses stirrups were by swift boats of shallow draft The range and effectiveness of their raids was greatly extended The returns to barbarian life would have been far less attractive in the absence of these concentrated foraging sites If we think of the carrying capacity of barbarian ecology My argument is that it was enhanced by the existence of petty states in much the same way that it would have been enhanced By a proficient stand of wild cereals or a migration of game It would be hard to tell whether the Micro parasites that is that to say the disease vectors of sedentary communities or the outbreaks of macro parasitic raiders Contributed most of the limits on the growth of states and their populations Setting precise dates to this golden age of barbarians is a waste of our time. I think But I will argue briefly that it might extend up to at least 1600 The amorite incursions in Mesopotamia around 2100 may have represented a notable peak of barbarian troubles But it was surely not the only occasion on which the Mesopotamian city states faced trouble from their hinterlands And here we should recall that virtually all our knowledge of barbarian threats comes of course from state sources Sources that might well have self-interested reasons to either exaggerate or downplay the danger that came from the barbarian sector conscious of the complexities Barry Cunliffe Bravely ventures to propose that in the Mediterranean at least the barbarian disruption of the ancient state world lasted for more than a millennium until 200 BCE within this period he identifies particularly the century between 1250 and 1150 as a time when the whole edifice of centralized bureaucratic Palace-based exchange fell apart the virtual abandonment abandonment of many city centers state centers at this time is Often attributed to the so-called sea people invaders Perhaps of Mycenaean or Philistine origin about whom very little is still known They raided Egypt in 1224 and again in 1186 along with nomads from the desert to the west of the Nile At about the same time fortifications and towers proliferate in the northern Mediterranean Presumably to defend against raiders moving by land and by sea Over the course of this long millennium a large proportion of the Mediterranean population had been displaced not once but several times At the end of this period on the other side of the Eurasian continent the Chin and Han Dynasties were having their own troubles with its young new tribal confederacy over control of the lands in the Ordos loop of the Yellow River In the middle of Eurasia Bennett Bronson claims that the relative absence of any strong states in the Indian subcontinent Was due largely to the the many powerful nomadic raiding groups who prevented states from consolidating From 1000 BC to 800 AD he argues the entire northern two-thirds of the subcontinent Produced exactly two moderately durable region spanning states the Chandragupta and the mobile neither of these nor any of the smaller northern states lasted longer than two centuries and Anarchical into regna were everywhere prolonged and severe oh and latimore My hero I might add and the pioneer of border studies in the context of China's relationship with its powerful militarized Nomadic fringe sees a more general continental pattern He points to state walls and fortifications against non-state peoples springing up from Western Europe through Central Asia to China and Lasting until the mobile invasions of Europe in the 13th century. It seems a rather extravagant claim But coming as it does from oh and latimore it merits pondering and I'm going to quote him here He writes there was a linked chain of fortified northern frontiers of the ancient world from the Pacific to the Atlantic The earliest frontier walls appeared have been in the Iranian sector the walled frontiers of the Western Roman Empire and Britain and on the Rhine and Danube faced forest upland and meadow tribes now pastoral nomads the the greatest boon that the appearance of states provided to barbarians however was Less as sites for predation that I've so far emphasized than as trading posts Because states represented such narrow agro ecologies that is to say flood plains alluvial soils and river bottoms They relied on a host of products from outside the alluvium in order to survive State and non-state peoples were natural trading partners as a state grew in population and wealth So did it's did its commercial exchange with nearby barbarians in the last millennium BC There was a veritable explosion in seaborne commerce in the Mediterranean that exponentially increased the volume and value of the trade The greater part of the barbarian economy in this context was devoted to supplying lowland markets with raw materials and goods that they required Much of which was in turn destined for re-export to other ports a good part of what they supplied Was livestock in the most expansive sense of the term cattle sheep and above all slaves They also provided many of the basic metals and minerals that the states Required in return. They received textiles grain worked iron and worked copper pottery and artisan luxury Articles much of it too from international trade Barbarian groups have controlled one or more of the major trading routes Usually a navigable river to a major lowland center could reap huge rewards and Became in turn conspicuous sites of luxury talent and if you will civilization Plunder of trade with the state then made economic life on the state's my margins more viable and lucrative Then it could otherwise have been But plunder and trade were not simply alternative modes of appropriation as we'll see They were very effectively combined in ways that mimicked certain forms of statecraft Now one can characterize state ecology in terms of the alluvial soils the possibility of growing cereal grains And all of this all of the classical states incidentally are all grain states. That is to say there are There are no potato states. They're no cassava states. They're no chickpea states They're no lentil states all of the classical states are cereal grains that all ripen at the same time millets rice wheat barley And maize which constitutes more than 50 percent of the total world consumption of calories today So we've all been turned into parrots by this history of civilization It's much more difficult to describe barbarian ecology because it's essentially a Residual category of all of those Ecologies that are not suitable for the concentration of population in cereal grains and the Appropriation of surplus value from the population that lives there The figurative and often a literal limits of the state's reach was often demarcated by a physical boundary between civilized and barbarian zones The first great wall of this kind, which is often forgotten given Chinese hegemony and world history if you like was the 250 kilometer long wall of the land built by command of Sumerian King Sugi Around 2000 BC between the Tigris and Freydis your Tigris and your Freydis where the distance between them is It's a narrow waist of the of land where the distance is at a minimum Although it's typically described as a wall to keep out the barbarian amorites Which it failed I might add and Porter and others believe that had the additional purpose of keeping the southern Mesopotamian tax-paying cultivators in For the early Roman Empire Barbarians began on the East Bank of the Rhine Which the Roman legions never ventured beyond after the catastrophic defeat in the battle of Tutteberg Forest in 9 AD It's kind of some interesting to do an historical Account of Exactly where in different times the barbarians begin, you know that used to be said by the English Aristocrats that the wogs begin at Calais, right and then for the French it begins at the Rhine and for the Germans have began at the Eiter-Niesel line And then when you get to China the whole thing flips back and the barbarians are all to the all to the West Barbarian and civilized zones were also often understood as forms of subsistence activity and particularly of diet as well that is to say it was extremely important for the Romans to understand themselves as Eating a diet of grain where as compared to the Gallic diet of meat and dairy products The barbarians might even plant some grain and often did and eat it But grain was unlikely to be their dominant staple as it was for state projects Excuse me state subjects. They were by virtue of their mobility their diverse livelihoods and their dispersal unsuitable raw material or appropriation or state building The civilizational narratives of early states imply if they don't state directly that some primitives through luck or cleverness managed to domesticate crops and animals found Sedentary communities and went on from there to create towns and states They let primitivism behind for state and civilization the barbarians on this account are the ones who didn't make the transition Those who remained outside after this great divergence There were two spheres the civilized sphere of settlement towns and states on the one hand and the primitive sphere of mobile dispersed foragers hunters and pastures The membrane between these two spheres was permeable, but only in one direction Primitives might enter the sphere of civilization This was after all the grand narrative of being drawn to the light to the city and to civilization But it was inconceivable that the civilized could ever revert to primitivism We know now this view to be on historical evidence fundamentally wrong. There are long long periods In which it's quite obvious that the state is disgorging subjects as readily as it is absorbing subjects periods of collapse of epidemics of wars of excessive Corvée Pressure often led to flight and to the collapse of states And so the people who became the barbarians were increasingly as the history of the state progressed People who had left the state area by design or by the desperation of the collapse of a particular state and they were in a sense you could call them Barbarians by design and the areas which they then ended up living in for the most part were what Richard White memorably calls shatter zones often zones of tremendous linguistic and cultural complexity Because they were the non-state areas in which people fleeing the states accumulated over long periods of time And they reflected in a sense the fragmentation of many many earlier states and that that lent a kind of complexity to these Shatter zones So far from being seen as a regrettable backsliding and privation Exit from the state may well have been experienced as a marked improvement in safety nutrition and social order Becoming a barbarian was often a bid to improve one's lot and here I quote Christopher Beckwith who's examined this I think better than anyone else. He writes and I quote Nomads were in general much better fed and Led easier longer lives than the inhabitants of the large agricultural states There was a constant drain of peoples escaping from China to the realms of the eastern steppe Where they did not hesitate to proclaim the superiority of the nomad lifestyle Similarly many Greeks and Romans joined the Huns and other central Eurasian peoples Where they lived better and were treated better than they had been back home such voluntary Self-nomadization was neither rare nor isolating For China's Mongol frontier Oh, and a lot of more has made the case most forcefully that the purpose of the Great Walls of China were mostly to keep Farming taxpayers inside the wall rather than to keep the barbarians outside the wall Excuse me while I skipped I want to return to the theme of raiding After a raid by people from beyond the alluvium Well-to-do resident of or one of the great cities along with Uruk and iridu and so on in the Mesopotamian alluvium the earliest cities in the world Resident of or wrote the following lament following this raid quote He who came from the Highland has carried my possessions back to the Highlands the swamp has swallowed my possessions Men ignorant of silver have filled their hands with my silver men ignorant of gems have fastened my gems around their necks Well the density of grain population in livestock in a concentrated space is the source of the state's power It's also of course the source of its potentially fatal vulnerability to mobile raiders to be sure The state is often no richer than its periphery But as we have seen the decisive difference is the state or any sedentary community's wealth is all conveniently Stacked up in a confined space while the wealth of the periphery is widely dispersed Mobile raiders, especially if they're mounted to have the military initiative They can arrive at a time and place of their choosing an insufficient number to overwhelm the weakest point of a settled community Or intercept a trading caravan if they're numerous enough they can take a fortified community their advantage lies in lightning raids Under pre-modern conditions and perhaps even until the era of cannons Mobile armies of pastoralists have proven superior to aristocratic and peasant armies of states Even in regions without pastoralists horses the general pattern seems to be that more mobile peoples hunters and gather Swinners boat people tend to dominate and extract tribute from sedentary horticulturalists and farmers the well-known Berber saying that Rating is our agriculture Gestures I think in the direction of an important truth about the parasitic quality of raiding The granaries of a sedentary community may represent two or more years of agrarian toil that raiders can appropriate in a flash Why wouldn't you want to spend two years growing a grain when you could just come to the granary right and take it? Penned or corralled livestock are in the same sense living granaries that can be confiscated and Since the booty of a raid also typically included slaves to ransom keep or sell They too represented a concentrated store of value and productivity Reared at considerable expense that could be taken away in a day Like domesticated animals capable of reproducing progeny for the raiding group itself From an even broader perspective one might say that one parasite was displacing another In as much as the raiders were confiscating and dispersing the accumulated assets of what had been until then a Concentrated site of appropriation reserved exclusively for state elites Barbarian raiders were for their part relatively safe from retaliation by the state being mobile and dispersed They could simply melt away up into the hills swamps trackless grasslands or the On the water Where state armies or navies followed up their peril State armies might be effective against fixed objectives in sedentary communities, but were largely helpless Campaigning against acephalous bands with no central authority another way of putting this as Latimore does is that the Mongolian steps lacked nerve centers There was nothing in particular to capture the people who he might want to punish Simply could disperse successfully If we are to believe the words that Herodotus puts in the mouth of a Scythian interlocutor I think he's making this up, but he understands the basic ecology. I think No mad raiders were quite conscious of the military advantage of having no fixed property And here are the words that Herodotus gives to the Scythian for we Scythians have no towns or planted lands That we might sooner meet thee in battle Otherwise we would fear that our towns be taken and our crops wasted The same can be said for sea-born raiders for piracy for the famous Orang Laut of the of Southeast Asia and the Sunda shelf for Vikings and Buccaneers There is however a deep and fundamental contradiction to raiding which once grasped suggests why raiding is a radically unstable mode of subsistence One that is unlikely That is likely under most circumstances to evolve into something quite different Carried to its logical conclusion raiding is self-liquidating That is to say if you successfully take everything that passes through a straight As to say a water straight in which commerce goes and you sack every boat and take everything pretty soon The trade routes will disappear and the commerce will dry up the same for land routes and caravans And if you could sack a city repeatedly the city will essentially disappear and the population of it will disperse And you have in that sense Killed the goose that lays the golden egg So generally what happens over time is that Raiders establishes rather the way germs become endemic in a population In terms of disease What happens is that raiders establish a stable equilibrium The parasite and the host to establish a stable equilibrium in which the raiders collect a toll in return for protecting the trade Every boat that sails through the state that passes on this trade route will be taxed and the and and tribute will be Exacted from them and So here we have commerce being regularly taxed From my anarchist perspective that looks pretty much like a state already Which is as Charles Tilly has argued is a protection racket in any case and The and in fact this protection racket became in the Tong dynasty a Huge drain on the Chinese treasury in terms of silk and so on that were given to the barbarians in order not to raid the process is something that is Some colleagues of mine and political science who I'm occasionally listen to call Throffers, which is the combination of a threat with an offer or in Mavio Matheozo style and offer you can't refuse If we step back and widen the lens Barbarian state relations can be seen as a contest between two parties for the right to appropriate surplus from sedentary grain and manpower modules It's this module that is the basis for state formation and equally essential to barbarian accumulation It is the prize One-time plunder rating is likely to kill the host altogether While a stable protection racket racket mimics the process of state appropriation and is compatible With the long-run productivity of the grain core The earliest substantial communities Were already dependent on trade in exchange with other ecological zones the consolidation of larger states only increased this dependence Given the early constraints on transportation The juxtaposition excuse me the juxtaposition in Mesopotamia and the fertile Crescent of High Plateau intermountain valleys Piedmont Stap and alluvium along with navigable water made possible a kind of vertical economy of Beneficial exchange or an uruk were possible only by virtue of the products from higher altitudes Stone ore oils timber limestone soapstone silver lead copper Grindstones gemstones gold and not least slaves and captives Most of these products were floated down water courses the longer and more navigable the river the larger the potential polity Smaller Mediterranean polities were miniature replicas of this is near as I can tell they were typically located on the alluvium of A river near to the coast an adjacent uplands and could thereby Command trade in exchange for the whole watershed. These are water shed polities if you like on the order of the Hulu heli or Classical Malay states this combination was favored over time. Thanks to its unrivaled ability to Integrate the food mobilizing and wealth acquiring openings of both land and sea The barbarian stars as I've called them best known to history were no different in kind Than earlier and smaller non-state peoples hunters and gatherers swindlers coastal foragers and herdsmen Who raided small states and also traded with them? What was unique was the unprecedented magnification of scale of the confederations of mounted warriors of the wealth of lowland states was much greater And of the volume and reach of trade the emphasis on raiding in most histories is Understandable in view of the terror it evoked among the elites of the threatened states who after all provide us with the written sources for the most part This perspective overlooks the centrality of trade and the degree to which raiding was often a means rather than an end itself Again, I quote Christopher Beckwith who I think is instructive on this. He writes Chinese Greek and Arab historical sources agree that the steppe peoples were above all interested in trade the careful manner in which central Eurasians Generally undertook their conquests is revealing. They attempted to avoid conflict and Tried to get cities to submit peacefully only when they resisted or rebelled was retribution necessary The central Eurasian's conquests were designed to acquire trade routes and to acquire trading cities But the reason for the acquisition was to secure occupied territory That could then be taxed in order to pay for the ruler's sociopolitical infrastructure If all this sounds exactly like what a sedentary peripheral state was doing itself It's because it was in fact the same thing the early agrarian states and the barbarian polities had broadly similar aims Both sought to dominate the grain and manpower core with its surplus Both sought to dominate the trade that was when the re within reach Both were slaving and raiding states in which the major booty of war and major commodity in trade were human beings Hard I don't have time this evening to emphasize the fact that all early states were slave states and slaving states including Mesopotamia in which it's the sometime disputed in this respect They were competing protection rackets The linkage between raiding and trading is reflected in the Celtic fringe of the Roman Empire Especially in Gaul in Republican Rome the Celts as noted were often paid off in gold for not raiding Over time the Celtic towns the Opeda became in effect multi-ethnic trading posts along river routes to the Empire dominating trade in that sector in Return for grain oil wine fine cloth and prestige goods They might send raw materials woolen's leather salt pork trained dogs and cheeses to the Romans The potential rewards for dominating land and waterborne trade expanded exponentially as the trade itself expanded trade over long distances was hardly new even before the Neolithic Valued commodities so long as they were small and light were exchanged over great distances like Obsidian and semi precious stones and gold and carnelian beads What was new was not so much the range of trade, but the fact that it had become It come increasingly to include bulk commodities moved over much longer distances Egypt became the breadbasket of the Western Mediterranean Shipping grain to Greece and later the Rome What's crucial as well is that the market for goods that were raised grown and Foraged outside the agrarian core had an exponentially larger potential market Goods from the mountains the high plateaus the marine fringes and marshes that might previously have only circulated locally Were now traded worldwide For example beeswax aromatic wood such as camperwood and sandalwood as well as resins such as Aromatic residents such as frankincense and myrrh were much prized would be hard to over emphasize the importance of this transformation Suddenly the periphery the semi periphery of early states Were sites of valuable commodities for which there was now a worldwide market? foraging hunting and marine collecting became lucrative commercial activities it said that before the end of the first millennium AD that Borneo was almost unoccupied and that it became occupied because of the Chinese luxury market and People from all over the Indonesian archipelago realized that it was an incredibly valuable place for foraging the products that could be taken to the coast And which would then enter world trade and that's why one finds dong sung drums and luxury goods way up in the Borneo Highlands and that it was if you like These people ought not to be con these people ought to be considered commercial traders Waiting for their main chance not sort of subsistence farmers That this was in a sense the commercial Exploitation that was responsible in large part for the peopeling of Borneo think for example of the way in which the ivory trade made commodities enormously valuable that were previously only Circulated locally the beaver pelts and how it transformed relations among Native Americans Today the the trade in ginseng root in caterpillar fungus and matzotaki mushrooms things that are Wild foraged and had this now tremendous value if you get fresh matzotaki in in basically 48 hours on a high-end plate in in Tokyo a Yakuza gangster boss Will be able to please his girlfriend or his boss with a $1,500 plate of matzotaki mushrooms. This was not available Traditionally Central Asia Central Eurasia had a wealth of products to trade for goods from the varying states especially when shipping open-distance market Distant markets Beckwith provides an extensive list of such products Traded by early travelers the list is enormous, but an abbreviated List will give you some sense of its variety Copper iron horses mules furs hides wax amber swords armor fabrics cotton It's good to also be in the low rounds as well, but wool Wool carpets blanket cloth felt tents stirrups bows fine woods linseed nuts and never absent from the list slaves So what was it really always is important to realize it among the one the major commodity being gathered in the hills or slaves? Rating by nomadic groups which resembled warfare by agrarian states is best understood as a means of acquiring tributary communities as I mentioned and dominating the trade that's circulated through them It was not a result of nomadic poverty still less a desire for shiny objects All nomadic societies were complex in the sense that they practice some agriculture as well as herding and how to substantial artisan class Let us to just look at the court of Mingus Khan So that they were not normally in need of staple cereals or technical expertise from agrarian states The barbarians probably understood were perhaps uniquely positioned to take advantage in many cases direct charge of The explosion in trade they were after all by virtue of their mobility and dispersion across several ecological zones the commercial connective tissue between the various sedentary Serial intensive states as trade grew Mobile non-state peoples were able to dominate the arteries and arteries and couplaries of this trade an exact tribute for doing so I think of these states and their Parasitic nomadic peoples as dark twins State and non-state peoples are dark twins both in reality and semi-autically Each member of the pair conjures up its partner and despite abundant historical evidence to the contrary the people who have Historically identified themselves as belonging to the ostensibly more evolved member of this pair that is to say State people agricultural as the civilized They've taken their identity as essential permanent and superior the most Tendentious of these pairs the civilized the barbarian pair are born together as twins Latimore has articulated this dark twin thesis most clearly. I think he writes and I quote Not only the frontier between civilization and barbarism, but barbarian societies themselves were in large measure Created by the growth and geographical spread of the great ancient civilizations It is proper to speak of the barbarians as primitive only in that remote time when no Civilization yet existed and when the forebears of civilized peoples were also primitive From the moment civilization began to evolve it recruited into civilization some of the peoples who had land and Deplaced displaced others and the effect on those who were displaced Was that they modified their own economic practices and experimented with new kinds of specialization? that they also and they also evolved new forms of social cohesion and Political organization and new ways of fighting Civilization itself created its own barbarian plague Although a lot of more or ignores the millions of non-state foragers swindlers and marine cultivators and concentrates on pastoralists Given the area that he specialized in but he does capture the parallel evolution of nomadism in states These nomads most especially those on horseback who plagued state centers are best seen simply as the strongest competitors of The state for control over the Arabian surplus Hunters and gatherers or swindlers might nibble at the state when politically mobilized in large confederations Nomads were a kind of state in waiting or as Thomas barfield puts it a shadow Empire The relationship between nomadic periphery and adjacent state could take any number of forms And was in any case highly volatile at the predatory end it might consist of occasional raids punctuated by retaliatory expeditions by state armies Seizures seizures brutal campaigns and gall might be considered a rare example of a successful expedition That despite many subsequent uprisings extended Roman rule. It's estimated that a million galls were Killed in the process of seizures conquest most of them by Gallic mercenary troops as I'll get to In other cases such as young new Uighurs and Huns the relationship might involve bribes subsidies and a kind of reverse Tribute such arrangements under which barbarians receive part of the proceeds of the sedentary grain complex in return for not raiding ought to be thought of I think as a kind of Deva de facto joint sovereignty by state and barbarians Under relatively stable conditions such an equilibrium might approximate the frontier protection racket I described earlier Conditions, however, were rarely so stable either with respect to statecraft Or with respect to the other fragmented fractious nomadic polities Two other solutions were possible each of which in effect dissolved the dichotomy itself The first of course was that for the nomadic barbarians to conquer the state or empire and become the new ruling class Such was the case at least twice in China's history with the Yuan and Qing or Manchu Dynasties also the case with Osman founder of the Ottoman Empire as The Chinese proverb has it you can conquer a kingdom on horseback, but to rule it you have to get off the horse The second alternative is far more common, but much less remarked upon and That is for nomads to become the cavalry and mercenaries of the state patrolling the marches and keeping the other barbarians in check In fact, it's the very rare state or empire that has not recruited units from among the barbarians Often in return for trade and privilege and local autonomy Caesar's pacification of gold was accomplished largely with Gallic troops, and I think I understand I understand that the Scots were basically Conquered by Welsh troops I'm not sure that's exactly the case In this case Rather than conquering the state the barbarians became part of the military arm of an existing state along the line Say of the Cossacks or the Gurkhas This pattern in the colonial setting has been called indigenous sub-empirialism On a large scale the use of mercenaries poses its own risks for a sedentary state as the tongue decided When they in effect hired the Turkic Uighurs to print to suppress the huge An Lushan rebellion The consensus among most barbarian specialists, I guess I could consider myself now to be a barbarian specialist Seems to be that nomadic pastoralists require sedentary communities as a depot of manpower and revenue as well as a trading outlet Nomadic pastoralists have been known to forcibly resettle agrarian populations in order to create such depots Founders of civilizations, you come here and you plant crops and we'll be by every year to take our tax. Thank you Further they contend that barbarian confederations operate as shadow empires adjacent to and parasitic on large sedentary polities Their quasi-derivative status is emphasized by the fact that they tend to disappear when their host collapses Among the pairs that rise and fall together might be included the Shang Nui and the Han, the Turkish Kaganat and the Tang The Huns and the Romans, the Sea People and the Egyptians and perhaps the Amorites and the Mesopotamian city-states Presumably the Yuan and Manchu dynasties did not count in the series as they swallowed the sedentary kingdom rather than disappearing It's all too characteristic, though no less deplorable, that much ink is devoted to the barbarian states and empires they bedeviled Like a capital city that dominates the news, they dominate the historical coverage A more even-handed history would be able to chronicle the relationship of hundreds of smaller states with thousands of nearby non-state peoples Not to mention the relationship of predation and alliance between non-state peoples In his account of Athens and the Peloponnesian Wars, for example, the Synodys discusses dozens and dozens of different hill and valley peoples Those with kings, those without kings, those with whom Athens has relations of alliances, tribute or enmity Each of these pairs have their own histories, they add immeasurably to our understanding of the relationship between states and their non-state neighbors To close, I want to make the case for the Golden Age briefly There is, I believe, a long period, measured, as I said, not in centuries but in millennia, between the earliest appearance of states And lasting until perhaps only four centuries ago that might be called the Golden Age of Barbarians And for non-state peoples in general For much of this long epoch, the political enclosure movement represented by a modern nation state did not yet exist Physical movement, flux and open frontier and mixed subsistence strategies were the hallmark of this entire period Even the exceptional and short-lived empires of this long epoch, the Roman, the Han, the Ming, and the New World, the Mayan, the Pure Polities, the Inca Could not impede large-scale population movements in and out of their political orbit While the increase in population would have by itself encouraged more intensive subsistence strategies The fragility of the state, its exposure to epidemics, and large non-state peripheries would not have allowed us to discern anything like a state hegemony until around perhaps 1600 AD Until then, a very large share of the world's population had never seen a routine tax collector, or if they had seen one, they still had the option of making themselves scarce There's no particular need to insist on this quasi-arbitrary date It roughly marks the end of the Great Eurasian Barbarian Waves The seaborne Vikings from the 8th to the 11th centuries Tamerlane's great kingdom of the late 14th century and the conquest of Osman and his immediate successors Between them they destroyed, plundered, and conquered hundreds of polities large and small and displaced millions of people They were also great sliding expeditions Among the major prizes of such campaigns were precious metals and human beings for sale It's not so much that such rating mixed with trade disappeared after 1600 As that it became more fragmented and smaller in scale Edward Gibbon, a comparatively rare voice with something good to say on behalf of Pagans Wondered whether there were any barbarians left in Europe in the late 18th century From my perspective, he might have considered the barbaric pirates, Macedonia, the highland Scots Or he might actually have noticed that the Europeans had joined the Arabs in scouring the African continent for slaves Predation was still going on, it was just at a different level Outside Europe and the Mediterranean, the pattern of raiding, trading, and slaving remained a major activity in the Malay world In upland Southeast Asia, among hill peoples, people in northern Thailand and Orangusli in Malaysia Can remember their grandparents talking about running away from slave raids today As states and durable gunpowder regimes grew The ability of non-state peoples to raid and dominate small states shrank The pace that depended greatly on the region and the geography The earlier states, because of their opportunities they opened for trade supplemented by raiding and protection records Represented a qualitatively new environment for non-state peoples Now a good deal of the world around them was valuable They could participate fully in the new opportunities for trade without becoming a subject of the state There would have been periods when leaving behind the plow of a state's subject To take up foraging, pastoralism, and marine collecting would have represented a rational economic calculation As well as a bolt for freedom Many of the things that archaeologists call the collapse of a traditional civilization Is actually a redistribution, I think, of population because of disease or political collapse at the apex And because there are not a lot of stones atop stones and a populated center That can be represented in the British Museum around the corner It's seen as the collapse of everything that's valuable In such moments it's likely that the proportion of barbarians vis-à-vis state subjects would have grown Because life at the periphery had become more, not less attractive Life of late barbarians would on balance have been rather good Their subsistence was still spread across several food webs being dispersed They would have been less vulnerable to the failures of a single food source They were more likely to be healthier and live longer Especially if they were female Because the grain center created a high rate of mortality, particularly for women More advantageous trade made for more leisure Thus further widening the leisure drudgery ratio between foragers and farmers Finally, and by no means trivial, barbarians were not subordinated or domesticated to the hierarchical social order of sedentary agriculture in the state They were, in almost every respect, freer than the celebrated yeoman farmer It's not a bad balance sheet for a class of barbarians over whom the waves of history were supposed to have rolled several long ago There are, however, and in closing, two deeply melancholy aspects of the Golden Age of Barbarians They have each directly to do with the ecologically given political fragmentation of barbarian life As I said, many of the trade goods brought to the trading states were, of course, other non-state peoples who could be sold into bondage at the state core This is stored in Southeast Asia, in Africa, and elsewhere So perverse and pervasive was this practice in mainland Southeast Asia That one can identify something like a chain of predation in which more strategically located and powerful groups rated weaker and more dispersed neighbors In doing so, they reinforced the state core at the expense of their fellow barbarians A second melancholy aspect of the new livelihoods that the periphery, afforded by states, was, as I noted, the sale of their martial skills to states as mercenaries One would be hard put to find an early state that didn't enlist non-state peoples, sometimes wholesale In their armies, to catch runaway slaves, to repress revolts among their own restive population This is a practice also taken up by colonial regimes, I might add Barbarian levies had as much to do with building states as to plundering them By systematically replenishing the state's manpower base by slaving and by protecting and expanding the state with its military services The barbarians quite willingly dug their own grave Thank you So we have some time for questions, if there are any, there's two microphones Any takers? Yeah, there's one down here, right there Hi, thank you very much, it helped me think through many issues in Indian history, I had a couple of quick questions Reading against the grain, would you say that you now see the state in a more sympathetic light than you did in some of your earlier work? Say that again, please The last sentence Do you see the state, or do you see the implication of what you've argued as rendering the state, seeing the state in a more sympathetic light than has been the case in some of your earlier work So that's the first question The second is with regard to the barbarian civilized distinction, which is very interesting But certainly, it's been sort of well known in many historical circles, certainly of South Asian historians and elsewhere That the more barbaric regime has conquered the more civilized peoples, because the complexity and the agility that barbarians have isn't matched by the more civilized So, my second question was what you see the talk today as contributing to in our understanding of the long-dury of history as being a supplanting of more civilized regimes by more barbaric ones Okay, thank you There's a question down there, second row from the front Okay, right there Okay, thank you very much for this extremely thought provoking talk Barbarians sound like they're having great fun, and we would all like to be barbarians if we have the chance, perhaps, or some of us But the question is you've, I think, must be in the writing and you would have touched on that The question is how to do with weapons, weaponry, martial arts and so on And so modes of violence and the kind of capacities, skills and so on And in your presentation, are these static, how do they change, and in their change then, you know, barbarians as well do change What happens to barbarians, when these capacities, these skills and so on But there was the other thing that you talked about towards the end, which is barbarians becoming mercenaries And you didn't really touch on the normative dimensions The fact that they constate the barbarians for a long time must be based on uncertain norms, codes of honor and so on And what changes for them to become civilized but really barbarians? Thank you Thanks Professor Scott, I think one of the most interesting things about your speeches and your books is the counter-intuitive idea That life under a nation's state may not be all that people think it is And here I think you've implied that, plausibly that under the age of barbarians, for many people it was better off living in a stateless condition I was just wondering what you might make of the thesis that people like Stephen Pinker have put forth Well, isn't it great now we live under states and it's a lot more peaceful that apparently critical science has found that people die a lot less And so just as a kind of devil's advocate, I think Pinker would say, well, this is all very well and nice But Bill, we're dying in droves and now we live in a much more peaceful state-led age I was just wondering what your response to the Pinker thesis might be I'm in danger of losing track of all the things that have been put on the table, so I'd like to take up some of this anyway The general comment I wanted to make about the first two questions is that I've obviously failed I wanted to destroy the barbarian civilized dichotomy and propose that these are two political formations vying for control of the grain manpower module Over time and that barbarian life represented actually a quite well to do in its stable form Barbarian life with all of the comforts of an artisan class and wealth and so on Without the inconveniences of taxes and corvée and the burdens of being a state I think I missed that. I understood that very well Okay, sorry. I lost my head. It won't happen again I don't want to start in on Stephen Pinker and I reject his argument More or less wholesale and since it coincides actually with an argument made less carefully and more negligently by Jared Diamond in the world until yesterday It seems to me that what it fails to take into account is the fact that the first sedentary communities were at the same time the birthplace for all of the zoonotic infectious diseases And the rates of mortality because of crowding and by crowding I mean not just the crowding of human beings because these are called density dependent diseases or community acute infections in the public health parlance But it was also a crowding of domesticated animals and most of the infectious diseases are zoonotic diseases that move between domesticated animals and human beings And these diseases did not exist at all before the crowding of the late Neolithic So the point is that the early period of the first sedentary communities or an Uruk that had 25,000 perhaps people The rates of mortality were huge and so I think a lot of the collapse of these areas was large The other difference is that I don't want to make a case for peaceful, happy, communal, barbarian life It riven with feuds and internecine warfare but I think it's indisputable that in hunter and gathering societies the kind of wars tend to be brief, episodic The losers move out, move away and it's only when you get large sedentary kingdoms that you get standing armies and you get sort of large scale warfare of a major kind And I think Stephen Pinker misses this and the idea of taking the fact when you find a number of people who've been executed And you then try to do a statistical analysis of pre-Neolithic life, the statistical assumptions that you have to do to get there from the data he has are not right Anyway, he takes my breath away The question of weapons, my impression is that the military advantages of mobile non-state people over sedentary communities has to do with mobility and not with arms That is to say until quite late in the game the technology, other things equal a sedentary state against another sedentary state The sedentary state with the larger number of people almost always wins Because the technology of warfare is pretty much equal and it depends to a great extent on manpower So it's the mobility of barbarians to concentrate the manpower that they have in the weapons that they do have which are no different or superior to the ones of sedentary communities So you can see this happening when the reinforced walls start appearing It's complicated because I began thinking of all these walls as a way of the way... If there's a wall, there's something that people want to protect behind it And it turns out that many of these walls actually were walls against floods and the siltation that the very early sedentary communities created And they weren't all defensive walls to protect stores of grain or valuable silver commodities and so on The... I'm not sure... I answered your question, I don't think I did I'm not sure... Can you see the state and the wall being protected? Oh, actually it's not my job to like the state or not like it It's my job to kind of understand what's going on And, you know, if... I do live in, right, a guerrilla state And so it's quite a part... But my job is to kind of partly to understand a narrative of civilization and history that is so state-centric and so written from the large accumulations of population as sedentary agrarian centers that it seems... So I think it is extremely important to realize that for a huge period of human history the emptying out of these cities and the so-called collapse of ancient civilizations unless it was by disease, that in many cases this resulted in an improvement in human welfare In a redistribution of population, people getting away from corvée and taxes and warfare and conscription and so on So to the idea to think that a decrease in complexity and a movement to the non-state sort of periphery is a return to, you know, living hand to mouth, it's insane I mean, just I think palpably and demonstrably wrong And so that a collapse of one of these centers has to be looked at carefully and empirically I don't want to think I can characterize all of them myself But it's clear to me that they are seen as lamentable declines in civilization And I think if you take... What do we know about the famous Dark Age of Greece from 1100 to 700 BC? Well, it's the period when the Illy in the Odyssey became the great oral epics of Greece Most of the major centers appeared... There appears to have been some warfare and burned cities How many people died? Who knows? Maybe it was just a redistribution of population We don't know, I... It just seems to me that the Dark Age means that we don't have things to put in the British Museum from that period And isn't that a shame? And we ought to sort of look at it with a kind of wider eye There's two down there For much of the talk, you stayed within a kind of equilibrium model as it were And then sort of... In terms of a kind of historical development, it was truncated Around the time when the world capitalist economy or the military revolution or the gunpowder revolution takes off But you also mentioned among various people, someone who's more familiar to most people here than some of the other scholars you mentioned Namely Charles Tilly And I just wonder whether part of what we should take away from your account is an alternative or complementary understanding of what he and others would call state formation In which that unacknowledged dark twin, you know, the uncle no one wants to talk about is there in the story That it's not just that states make states, but it's that barbarians make states And that alongside the equilibrium model, you've suggested in a variety of ways how the tools of statecraft were developed in this kind of dialectic, you know, this relationship, the condominium with the barbarians I would endorse that. I mean, there's something to be said, although I don't say it in the talk Something to be said when the barbarians, let's say the Yuan or the Manchu or Osman, when they actually conquer a large sedentary population and become rulers in their own right They actually often have to invent a kind of form of rule that accommodates cultural differences that they did not have to accommodate, if you like, in their heartland And so I think it's often empires like that, those nomadic empires, who invent forms of indirect rule and cultural toleration But that seems to me to be reasonably important And I think the reason I invoke Tilly is that Tilly has this actually quite famous article laid in his career called, is it government or the state as a protection racket And he made essentially this same relationship So it seems to me that my guide in the way in which this changes, and I'm not sure how you would date it, but Ian Hacking's work on the discovery of probability and the taming of chance His argument that it's like in the late 18th and 19th century where the state sees its job as the improvement of the human population in its care Whether preventing accidents or I mean the sort of beginning of the germ of a kind of welfare state And much of it is to make sure that we have healthy people who can fight, right? Our wars and so on So that kind of moment at which the job of the state moves away from extraction to the idea that it's a major objective of the state crap is to improve the health, well-being, satisfaction and so on Right, what is it called? Social well-being index But that's rather late in the game And we're not talking about the state until at least 18th century I think in terms of the understanding of what state crap is all about And thank you actually the question relates partly to what you were just saying about the difference between early states and states in the last couple of hundred years And the question is really has the work that you've been doing recently made modern states look more weird or less weird In the sense that social science is premised on the idea that modernity is some kind of distinctive rupture and that what we're doing when we're doing social science is some kind of study of the modern So in that sense all of these interesting questions about the relationships between states and populations are opened up But does looking backwards make if you like the high modernism that you've explored in earlier work look very distinctive or actually something that states were always kind of doing That's the job I'd be happy to turn over to someone else to figure out In the sense that it does So I did ask myself how come so homo sapiens has been around for 200,000 years The last 50,000 years out of Africa by and large And the first states just as tiny little dots on the horizon appear maybe 6,000 5,000 6,000 years ago about 4,000 BC you can say okay these might be states right That's really kind of late in the game and so and and by the way towns exist long before states domesticated crops exist long But at least 4,000 years and so the question is the old narrative is that oh my god once we could domesticate plants We couldn't wait to settle down I mean there's the narrative is the purpose of plants finally we were we were tired of wondering the world and finally we had domesticated Now that's also insane in the sense that how many brutal struggles have been fought to force people who were mobile to settle down right at the point of a gun Native Americans among them and reservations and so on so the kind of assumption that the sedentary community is something that homo sapiens always secretly longed for And that certain technical advances like domestication of plants and animals made this possible seems to me to be not correct But it does seem to me I'm I'm wondered a bit but I think part of my question was isn't it strange that we came to live in great heaps of people And crops right and domesticated animals and governed by these strange institutions that we call states And now today the nation state it's like a traveling module and the IMF and the World Bank and the WHO and the UN are busy codifying Standard sets of laws and currency regulations and property rules and land titling and so on in order to create a kind of standardized nation state module And that's weird in the sense that is that the only form of human political community that we can come up with well how that's pathetic Yeah very brief comment and two questions comment is Jim's work always struck me as anarchist in its sensibility I think it's just that more recently he's been more explicit about that than how he's titled his books And two questions one is this extraordinary symbiosis of early agrarian states and barbarians that you've suggested very very richly so But the agrarian states clearly have a class structure and that class structure is based on production and the ability to appropriate surplus labor as you said And are we to infer that the barbarians don't have a class structure if so is that does that play its own part in this symbiosis that's my first question The second question is have there been densely populated grain producing societies in the kind of ecological conditions you outlined without states or that have survived the demise of states The last one the last question that have survived the collapse of states I mean it seems to me well that's suggested to me as well by your incredible historical sweep whether you think that's the case So let me take the last question first of agrarian communities that survived the collapse of the state there are agrarian communities that predate the state as well and there are agrarian communities that survived the collapse of the state The problem is that in the Southeast Asian context the most familiar is that when a state collapses first of all the population is likely to disperse of its own volition to some considerable extent And the people who are left are actually the most exposed to raiding of their crops or of their persons and so it's common after a kingdom falls in Southeast Asia for all kinds of groups to sweep in and vacuum up the remaining population as slaves to be traded to other states and so on That's how people kind of that's what that's how most of these states get to be kind of multi ethnic over a long periods of time in an interesting way What is interesting is that because the ecology of rich alluvial soil that is very productive these are good places to be if you're not subject to raiding and so they are places where another state is likely to grow up over time right So these are if like if you like state formation ecologies and you often get the foundation of a new state a generation later partly because it's such a favorable place in the trade routes of alluvial soils that rich The first agriculture ever practiced no self-respecting hunter-gatherer would ever stoop to a plow which is tremendous drudgery and work So the first agriculture that you get in the ancient world is flood retreat agriculture in which the floods bringing the nutritious soil they kill all the competing weeds They give you this sort of perfectly harrowed field they do the work of fire and swindling if you like and you just after scatter seeds I'm exaggerating a little bit but there's it is the only in terms of return per unit of labor it's the only kind of agriculture that is at all competitive with hunting and gathering in this world With the question barbarian communities are definitely stratified and in in in kind of interesting ways what's interesting however is that these tend not to be property relations that can be inherited as a class system that Overdoors any particular you know hegemony by particular lineage or fraction of a tribe over time so there are differences but they tend to be differences that are not kind of rooted in in in permanent property differences So they're not yeah, they're not passed on as a as a kind of structure and and I think that's actually There's no secret to why if you're a good artisan and you're a scribe and you're the elites of these early agrarian states why this would be a cool thing to be in the agrarian state The only question arises is if you're a cultivator at the bottom of the heap right what the advantages are for you being in this state and that depends you know on a whole series of conditions and over time is likely to fluctuate just I mean a interstate war and the Mesopotamian so Mesopotamia is by the way at the period the uruk period is a The term that they use technically is pure polities rather like Greece a whole bunch of polities about the same size of sharing a kind of culture and competing among themselves their little confederations among them from time to time And and when those they those cities went to war with one another they they were relatively rather small but they had to mobilize all the resources that they could possibly mobilize and that meant Corvée extra grain and people kind of running away And so you know the kind of Athenian coalition after they were beaten by Sparta just sort of fell apart and so the war was created all these pressures on the core population Epidemics might do the same thing and and and by epidemics I'm going on longer than I wanted to but I do want to insist the epidemics we're talking about are not the diseases of crowding are not just homo sapiens diseases of crowding But crops that is to say for the first time you have crops of genetic similarity also crowded in the same way this is also an epidemiologically ideal for crop diseases and the same for domesticated animals So the crowding is a phenomenon that you have to think of the early domus as this huge pilgrimage of plants and animals domesticated animals and human beings creating a completely new landscape Disturbing the soil and not just the things that we domesticate but the things that say hey this is a nice place to hang out So rats and mice and sparrow and all the sort of uninvited commensals that come to the domus because it's a good place and they bring their parasites their fleas their ticks and so on So you have to see this as a huge completely artificial and totally new in-gathering of a totally artificial ecology that actually is very fragile partly because it has to be defended against nature more or less constantly We have to room upstairs only till 8 so maybe we have time for one last question quick one maybe yeah yeah please Thank you very much that was very interesting you're talking about a lot and I found it fascinating the relationship between agrarian states and the surrounding barbarians And the relationship was like raiding and protection rackets what part did migration and immigration of barbarians into the agrarian states play and are there any parallels that you see with what is going on now with mass migration Okay well the last part of that question opens out to a huge question I suppose right So my I don't want to flatter it with the eye calling it a model but the my idea of the relationship between the barbarian periphery and states is that there are people moving in both directions over time And so and I think one way of seeing it in the early period is that people have a whole series of subsistence options a portfolio if you like you can put it in sort of neoliberal terms That they can vary the kind of subsistence that they practice depending on the distance they want to place between themselves and the state And so when you have peaceful trade and commerce a good crops there are barbarians moving in all the time for the trading opportunities who may stay who may culture aid and assimilate And you also have which I don't think anyone has kind of worked out in terms of culturally you know 70% of the population of Athens are slaves What that has to kind of change the cultural and many of these are barbarian women who married Athenians and sort of nannies who are raising children as well Not to mention the chain gangs and the silver mines and so on So all of these states have a huge slave population and in those in the places that I'm familiar with the there are slaves always coming in at the bottom But in the Malay world you could be captured as a slave and in 15 years you might be running your own slave expeditions right by boat So it is it's a slave society and it remains a slave society is because slaves are being brought in always at the bottom But it's also a rapid upper mobility society as well in which people become assimilated quite quickly within certainly within two generations No particular problem and because these are manpower starved Same is true for Native Americans actually they captured people from other tribes and also Europeans when they could and so on And would integrate them very quickly into the community so that it seems to me that the importance of slaves and assimilation of people from without That would have me look at these societies as being more interesting and less coherent cultural cultural sites than I think I used to think of them I mean if 9,000 of the 45,000 people in Uruk who are weaving are 9,000 of the total population of 45,000 in Uruk are weavers who are mostly all slaves and who are integrated into the society 20-30% of the population What does this do for what Uruk culture looks like over time and these are barbarians from the hills the word for slave in Mesopotamia is the combination of the word of the hieroglyph for mountain and woman This is this kind of standard term for slave and so now my impression is that we have vastly, vastly understated the degree to which people have been moved around voluntarily and by force and by wars and incursions and deep in history and I would like to see someone figure that out right I don't know there's a polemical book that many people hate but it's interesting in which all groups are kind of constructed over time historically There's a book called the invention of the Jewish people in which it's an effort to take apart the idea that if you think contemporary Jews are direct genealogical and genetic descendants of the people when the second temple was destroyed you are crazy And so Jewish identity has to be based on something else right then this kind of mythical construction because I mean if any people have been moved around right and the Khazars and anyway there's a that happens to be a kind of striking example in which someone tried to trace the way in which you do I'll stop in a second if you I promise the people who study the Roma in Holland did genetic studies of the DNA of the Roma population and it's indistinguishable from the Dutch population And I mean you tell a Hungarian that that's the case and they'll kill you On that note Thank you very much for coming please join us at the reception upstairs