A HISTORY OF AGRARIAN EVOLUTION
Despite the Supreme Court’s decision to stay farm laws and appoint a panel to examine them, protests have continued, demanding a repeal of these laws. This week, we recommend Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, written by Yale University professor James C Scott. It overturns the popular notion that agriculture made our human ancestors abandon hunting and gathering for a more sedentary life. On the contrary, Scott argues, the first agrarian states were “accumulations of domestications” that were meant to control reproduction, which reified a patriarchal social order.
Although several thousand years passed between the first domestications and the emergence of states from entrenched social orders, replicating such models of control through forms of slavery and labour, Scott delves deep into what this did to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and what we’ve lost as a result of it.