The birth pains of the first states in all their brutishness and oppression

Review of Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

Scott sets out to demolish the myths that surround the founding of the state, i.e. that it represented progress and longed-for stability, was a natural outgrowth of agriculture, and improved the living standards of its subjects as in a contract with power. Though I am not surprised that the establishment of the first states was a rough process, Scott pr…