The 11,000-year-old Göbekli Tepe was an amazingly complex find Vincent J Musi/National Geographic Creative

THE emergence of state authority was a logical consequence of the move to settled agriculture, or so we thought. Until recently, we also assumed that ancient peoples welcomed the advantages of this way of life as well as the growth of state leadership, since it was key to the development of culture, crafts and civil order.

Over the past 50 years, though, more and more cracks have appeared in this picture. We now know settled agriculture existed for several thousand years before the emergence of the city states of the Near East and Asia. In the past few years, archaeologists have been stunned to find 11,000-year-old structures such as those at Göbekli Tepe, in what is now southern Turkey. These were built by peoples who foraged, and who also developed specialised skills, both artistic and artisanal.

This is a surprise, and leaves researchers busily trying to get the story straight – something that really matters for a number of reasons. Traditional definitions of the state and its authority hinged on the right to raise taxes, and on its legal monopoly on coercing its people, from punishing and imprisoning them to waging formal war.

But as James Scott points out, roughly between 8000 BC and 4000 BC we find settled agricultural communities with developing craft skills – yet no evidence of anything much by way of state authority.

This also poses a key question, one which resonates in the 21st century, about whether there is a necessary link between state power and community life.

Scott is a political science researcher at Yale University who has stepped out of his academic comfort zone to grapple with the new archaeological reality. Against the Grain delivers not only a darker story, but also a broad understanding of the forces that shaped the formation of states and why they collapsed – right up to the industrial age.

Interestingly, his conclusions find grim contemporary echoes in a new book about the San Bushmen of the Kalahari by anthropologist James Suzman, who spent 25 years with them. In Affluence without Abundance, Suzman, an African studies fellow at the University of Cambridge, documents what happened when pastoralists, encouraged by governments, enclosed the San’s lands and took away their hunter-gatherer way of life.

The San’s recent past is like a speeded-up version of Scott’s tale. He teases out the elements of how states formed, especially in Mesopotamia – specifically what is now modern southern Iraq. It was here that the first small city states appeared, on the northern shore of the Gulf and on plains created and watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

San Bushmen are trying to cling on to their traditional way of life Jason Edwards/National Geographic Creative

There is some evidence for settlements among foragers in the Near East, often near wetlands, around 12,000 BC, and field agriculture from about 10,000 BC. But the earliest evidence of states dates from 4000 BC, with permanently settled towns. This is where Scott derives that figure of at least 4000 years between settlement-plus-agriculture (the two assumed prerequisites of state formation) and the first appearance of the state.

Around 12,000 BC, the world’s population stood at between two and four million; by 2000 BC, it was around 25 million. But the vast majority of people had no contact with states as late as the end of the 15th century – Europe’s middle ages. These people survived on a mix of agriculture and foraging, much like the inhabitants of those early settlements on the plains of Mesopotamia before 4000 BC.

As the Danish agricultural economist Ester Boserup and some anthropologists have noted, there is little reason to imagine foragers would have adopted this way of life unless they were hungry, afraid or coerced.

A combination of factors seems to have caused people to cluster in those Mesopotamian plains, including rising populations in areas where wild food was more abundant, a cold spell in the climate, and possibly a rise in sea level. The populations in Scott’s camps developed even better craft skills and social cohesion.

Early state development around the world has another defining feature, a staple diet of cereals. By contrast, agricultures based on tubers or pulses have no fixed harvest period and create no stockpiles. As Scott remarks, there are no early states founded on manioc, yam or sweet potato.

But the annual grain harvest creates two problems: storage, which requires protection; and vulnerability to thieving supervisors or outside raiders. It also ties producers to their store in time and space – no wandering off with a bow and arrow.

It seems likely, says Scott, that at first there was a voluntary approach to collective labour in fields, and to grain being pooled for safekeeping and even redistribution to the needy. But this created all the technical and organisational know-how for an increasingly coercive state. Constrained to a relatively small area, people were dependent on central grain stores, and grew used to supervision of both food distribution and their labour – things that feature almost obsessively in early writing.

By 3000 BC, we have the first definitive evidence of city states, with kings, bureaucracies, compulsory labour, taxation and punishment for non-compliance. These early states were also very fragile, prone to epidemics, soil degradation and political collapse.

Predictably, then, those early city states in Mesopotamia soon entered a long period of rivalry and shifting alliances. A key element was the struggle to dominate trade with hinterland peoples who had access to stone, timber and other resources not found on the alluvial plains.

This became a common theme among the emerging cereal states and was mirrored much later elsewhere, for example, in China’s “warring states” period, starting in the 5th century BC. Victors subjected conquered neighbours to tribute, bondage and forced resettlement, particularly to do unskilled work in erecting city walls and irrigation. Thousands of identical, crude, bevelled pottery bowls found around Mesopotamia suggest measured rations for gang labour.

“For at least 4000 years, there were settled communities but no evidence of state power”

Slavery and severe punishment for escapees remained at the heart of subsequent regional kingdoms and empires. Each civilisation retained trade links with those in surrounding areas, the so-called barbarians. These were typically pastoralists who often kept some foraging component to their diets, and tended to be healthier and to have more personal freedoms.

This set up a dynamic that repeated into the last millennium, with people in the non-state periphery trading goods and slaves, and periodically raiding cereal-based cities. Tied together in this tense relationship, roaming pastoralists and urban states (Scott’s “dark twins” of history) slowly captured or wiped out foragers and their way of life.

The same dark twins are in evidence in Suzman’s affectionate and thoughtful book. Many of the San were compelled to work on cattle ranches in miserable and often violent conditions, while their foraging territories were fenced off by surrounding pastoralists or ranchers. Some still remember the “old times”, but knowledge of the wild food sources they once relied on is dwindling. Groups are resettled in remote camps with a few shops, useless to them without money.

Under these new conditions, the forager mindset, its distaste for authority, expectation of natural providence, and code of sharing and honour, is often utterly broken. Some turn to drink or give in to the inevitable by taking up low-paid menial work.

In this fashion, through neglect, abuse and misunderstanding, an ancient way of life is being finally extinguished by the imperatives of local agriculture and its state support, reducing biodiversity to dusty waste. Yet, Suzman argues, even now the Bushmen have much to teach us about a social order that, in many ways, offered a freer, fairer existence and a non-invasive adaptation to ecology.

Suzman and Scott have both written excellent books, which could serve on reading lists for geography, history and politics, as well as in their natural homes of archaeology and anthropology.

Against the Grain: A deep history of the earliest states James C. Scott Yale University Press

Affluence without Abundance: The disappearing world of the Bushmen James Suzman Bloomsbury

This article appeared in print under the headline “Unearthing power”