It was argued in the previous dispatch that the international cross-section of productivity and hence per capita income is explained by the distribution of heat on the surface of the planet. More precisely, productivity is a function of the intensity and tempo of work performed in a factory. And the intensity and tempo of factory work is a function of the thermal environment. That the human thermal balance is a binding constraint on work intensity in countries across the globe is clear from known facts about global temperatures (countries face wildly different thermal regimes) together with known facts about the human physiological response to heat (the human thermal balance equation).

Figure 1. Work performance and heat. Source: Wyndham (1969).

Figure 1 shows the fall-off in work performance in a South African mine where precise control of wind velocity and wet bulb temperature allowed Wyndham to carry out scientific controlled experiments. As a physiologist in Apartheid South Africa, Wyndham was able to test racial differences under controlled conditions. What he found was that the fall-off in productivity as a result of heat was more or less uniform across the races. The most important factor in work intensity was acclimatization. Between acclimatized Bantu and South African White men, the differences in heat tolerance and productivity were minor compared to the importance of wind velocity, which is already a second-order correction to the contribution of humidity-adjusted temperature (“wet bulb temperature”).

The Heliocentric model has a specific implication for the regional polarization of countries straddling isotherms. Namely, cooler regions should be richer than warmer regions. We can test this hypothesis by visual inspection of per capita income and temperatures. We begin with Italy.

Figure 2. Isotherms and per capita income distribution in Italy.

Figure 2 displays the mean temperatures and per capita incomes in Italy. This is the  pattern we expect to find if the Heliocentric Hypothesis is true. The cool, northern extremity had a mean per capita income above 30,000 euros in 2010; the hot, southern half of the Italian peninsula had a mean per capita income less than 18,000 euros. The former is close in per capita income to the countries of northwestern Europe; the latter to the Mediterranean region.

If the Heliocentric model is correct, mean temperatures should be “priced in” the cross-section of per capita income across regions. By that we mean that the gradient in a simple linear regression of per capita income onto mean temperatures should be economically and statistically significant. This is easy enough to check by hand.

Figure 3. The Italian cross-section.

Figure 3  displays the mean urban temperatures and per capita incomes of the Italian administrative regions. We obtain a statistically significant gradient of 1,683 euros per degree Celsius. That is, a six degree difference, such as that which exists between Sicily and Lombardy, translates into a difference of nearly 11,000 euros in per capita income. The scatter plot in fact suggests that there are two quite different clusters with their own gradients: Rich Italy, Poor Italy. Sardinia has the highest income of the latter but is still shy of 20,000 euros. Liguria has the lowest income of Rich Italy, 27,200 euros. There is a “gap” of 7000 euros where we have no observation.

Figure 4 displays Rich Italy and Poor Italy data two side-by-side. The gradient of mean temperature for rich Italy is a statistically significant 927 euros per degree Celsius; that of the poor Italy is not statistically significant but it has the right sign. The thermal variable explains 30 percent of the variation in the full sample, and 47 percent of the variation once we restrict the sample to the rich regions. That’s very high.

Figure 4. Rich Italy, Poor Italy.

Table 1 displays the mean temperature and per capita incomes of the 15 administrative regions of Italy.

We move on to the United States. Figure 3 displays the cross-section of per capita income for US states. When we project per capita income onto mean temperatures we obtain a gradient of $740 per degree Celsius (statistically significant at 5 percent). That is, if the mean temperature of a state is just 5 degrees Celsius higher, we expect its per capita income to be $3,700 lower. To be sure, the temperature gradient only explains 12 percent of the interstate variation in per capita income, so this is obviously an inadequate theory of regional polarization in the United States. But the gradient is priced in. And that is really remarkable. The United States is the most powerful and capable state in the world. If even the US cannot counter the polarization induced by the heat, we ignore the thermal variable at our own peril.

Figure 3. Regional polarization in the United States.

A very interesting case is that of Chile. It extends more than 4000 kilometers on a roughly north-south axis but is nowhere more than 200 kilometers wide. It hugs the Andes for almost the entire length with the result that elevation plays a very significant role in governing the isotherms (lines of equal temperature). The northern bit is the Atacama desert; sparsely populated and with significant mining wealth. The southern bit is again sparsely populated forest merging into tundra as one goes further south. The central zone is the bread-basket where two-thirds of the population lives. We have to keep these observations in mind when we examine Chile’s regional polarization.

Figure 4. Chile, population density and per capita GDP.

Figure 5. Chile, rainfall, temperature, and per capita GDP.

Half the Chilean population lives in Santiago and Valparaíso where the per capita GDP is in the range $20,000-$25,000. The Köppen climate classification of these two regions is Cfc meaning that they have a temperate climate with a dry, cold summer. This is very attractive territory and the concentration of population here is no coincidence. By contrast, Maule, Bío Bío and Araucanía, where a quarter of the Chilean population lives, are classified as Csb, meaning that they have a temperate climate with a dry, warm summer. Their per capita income is in the range $11,000-$16,000. So the difference between a temperate climate with dry, cold summer and a temperate climate with dry, warm summer translates into a $9,000 advantage. That’s roughly the difference is per capita income between Wisconsin and Kentucky.

Though it has a low population density, O’Higgins is exceptional. Despite hot summers, the million odd people of O’Higgins have an average income of $21,500. (Geography is not destiny.) The high per capita incomes in some of the sparsely populated northern and southern regions is a function of mining activity that is quite pronounced particularly in the Atacama desert.

We turn now to Asia where the real action is. At least if the following “high-pass” population density map is interpreted strategically. Germany, the Gangetic plain and the region between the Yangtze and the Yellow Sea emerge as the core regions of the globe.

Figure 6. A “high-pass” world map of population density.

Figure 7. A “high-pass” map of population density in eastern Eurasia.

The “high pass” density map in Figure 7 shows a finer resolution of the core regions of eastern Eurasia. This is the key figure to keep in mind. On the subcontinent, population densities are very high along a vast belt stretching from Punjab to Bengal. This is good alluvial soil constantly replenished by the floodwaters of the Ganges. The same riverine detail is behind the Chinese distribution. (Note the shape of the high density zone in China.) Indeed, Asian population density maps onto the river systems originating in the Tibetan plateau. See Figure 8.

Figure 8. The Tibetan origins of the river systems of eastern Eurasia.

We have to keep these in mind as we look at India and China. The two have been dealt very unequal hands by the dealer. Recall the thermal map of the globe (Figure 9 below) that displays the number of days of the year with temperatures above 20 degrees Celsius. We see that India is hot, while China is cool. However, southern China is hotter than northern China. Might this explain the density map of China in Figure 7?

Figure 9. Number of days above 20 degrees Celsius.

Let’s take a closer look at China’s geography. Figure 10 displays density by administrative region. We see that the core region is a triangle with vertices in Beijing, Henan, and Zhejiang. The center of mass is Jiangsu, and of course, Shanghai. Call it “the Han triangle.” In southeastern China, only Guandong exceeds 400 persons per square kilometer.

Figure 10. Population densities in China.

Keeping that Han triangle in mind, observe the location of the high income provinces in Figure 11. The northern coastal provinces, Beijing, Tianjin, Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Zhejiang, are not only more populous but richer than the southern coastal Guangdong and Fujian. Even Shandong is more populous and as rich as Guangdong. Only Henan is more populous but poorer; but it is inland. Beyond river basins and coastlines, Can isotherms explain this over-weighting of wealth and population in Jiangsu and Shanghai?

Figure 11. China’s regional polarization.

Figure 12 suggests that isotherms may be a factor. The cool provinces lying across the Yellow Sea (Beijing, Tianjin, Jiangsu and Shanghai) are favored over the warm provinces lying across the East China Sea (Zhejiang), which are in turn favored over the still warmer provinces facing the Taiwan Strait (Fujian), and all of them are trailed by the hot provinces facing the South China Sea (Guangdong and Hainan). Before the Yangtze bends upwards towards Shanghai, the temperature gradient does not turn favorable until well beyond the northern shores of the Yangtze. Riches and people are overweight Jiangsu relative to Guangdong, despite the latter being the center of gravity of maritime trade, because the former is cooler. More generally, the northern bias of the coastal core of China has the definite imprint of the macroclimate.

Figure 12. Chinese isotherms.

We turn last to India before gathering our results. As we saw in Figure 7, the Indian population is packed into the Gangetic plain stretching from Punjab to Bengal. There is an independent high density zone in the extreme south.

Figure 13. Indian population density by state.

Figure 14 shows that mean average temperatures on the vast bulk of the subcontinent, including the Gangetic belt, range over 20-30 degrees Celsius. By comparison, the region with the highest mean annual temperature among Italian administrative regions is Sicily at 18 degrees Celsius. Lombardy and Veneto have a mean of 12 degrees. If the Heliocentric model is right, India is twice as disfavored as Sicily compared to Lombardy. Unfortunately, because it is so hot everywhere in India except the northern and northeastern extremities, we should not expect the thermal variable to be priced in the cross-section of state-level per capita income. The Heliocentric model’s main implication for the subcontinent would be higher expected incomes in the regions that are cooler—J&K, Himachal, Uttarakhand, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Meghalaya and Arunachal.

Figure 14. Indian isotherms.

The evidence from Figure 15 is not altogether unfavorable. Sikkim and Uttarakhand do have high incomes; Himachal and Arunachal also have modestly higher incomes than average. But Meghalaya and J&K do not; although that comes as no surprise since both are sites of violent insurgency and counter-insurgency. The odds of observing this configuration by chance are not terribly low, so we should take this evidence with a pinch of salt.

Figure 15. Per capita GDP, Indian states.

Time then to gather our results. We documented that the thermal variable is priced into the cross-section of per capita income across US states and Italian administrative regions. We documented evidence of climate-related polarization of the core regions of Chile and China. We also documented some evidence of an income advantage in exceptional Indian states with cooler climates. The weight of the qualitative and quantitative evidence marshaled so far is consistent with the hypothesis that the distribution of heat on the surface of the earth is an important cause of regional polarization. It would be ideal to test the Heliocentric model at a finer resolution, say county level, and for as many nations and macroregions straddling isotherms as possible. It would also be useful to flesh out the geoeconomic, geopolitical and grand-strategic implications of the Heliocentric model. We’ll leave these two tasks to future work.

Why are some nations rich and others poor? Why are some powerful and other weak? What explains the roster of great powers? What explains the global distribution of wealth and power? What explains the cross-section of per capita income? Who put the responsibility of the world on the shoulders of the White Man? Who put the Anglo-Saxon in the cockpit of history? Why have all modern great powers hailed from the northern temperate zone? All of these questions can be folded into the question posed in the title of this essay.

There is a sort of consensus among economic historians that the international cross-section of per capita income is roughly a question of the spread of the Industrial Revolution. Countries that industrialized are rich, those that did not are poor. And as countries industrialize they become richer. More precisely, the variation in per capita income is explained by the variation in labor productivity. Countries close the income gap with the rich, industrialized nations when their output per worker catches up with that of the latter; otherwise, they don’t. What needs to be explained then is the cross-section of output per worker. We will return to this question presently.

Figure 1. Source: ILO, author’s computations. We restrict our sample to big countries with populations over 30 million that together account for 4.8 billion of the world’s 7.6 billion people. This excludes all sub-Saharan African countries except Sudan and South Africa.

In the preindustrial world, some places were richer than others but the globe was an order of magnitude less polarized. Living standards were comparable across the core regions of Europe, India, China, and Japan as late as the eighteenth century. Modern standards of living are the result of the Second Industrial Revolution, concentrated in 1890-1940 but extending over 1870-1970, that witnessed the advent and dissemination of key technologies—penicillin, indoor plumbing, electricity, industrial chemistry, and above all, powered machinery. To be sure coal-powered versions of the last were at the center of the cotton textile, steamship and railroad revolutions in Britain in the early-19th century. But mass production with powered machinery did not become generalized well into the 20th century. In either case, the sustained escape from Malthus was the result of a thermodynamic revolution: powered machinery allowed the energy stored in the muscles of man and beast to be supplemented by the energy stored in hydrocarbons. The scale of work that could be performed on the farm and on the factory floor was no longer bounded by the muscle energy of working mammals. And that is what made modern living standards possible; that’s what is responsible for the hockey stick.

The mechanical foundation of modern prosperity raised hopes that that nations that are now poor can industrialize and thereby escape their poverty. Surely there are no insurmountable social or natural obstacles in the acquisition of competence in working with powered machinery? Barriers to cross-border flows of machinery, knowhow, and best-practices are also not insurmountable. Nor certainly is funding; not with the mobilization of modern nation-states. Moreover, low real wages in the poor nations seemingly promise an extraordinary reward to global firms willing to relocate production. Why then has the spread of global industrial production been largely confined to Northeast Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania? Why have the nations of South America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Indochina, and Southeast Asia, failed to industrialize before and after independence, and before and after liberalization?

In order to answer this question we have to go to the source of the power. We have to take a closer look at powered machinery. The controlling variable is the (quality-adjusted) rate of production that is achieved by the factory. The secret sauce of powered machinery is the performance of precisely repeated mechanical tasks with great frequency. The repetition is mathematically a harmonic oscillation—the underlying principle of the pendulum. The harmonic oscillator can be thought of as the source of the stability of mechanical movement even at great rapidity. The main difference between the pendulum clock and powered machinery lies in the fact that the rate of the latter is variable and read against the former, even as the former marks the relentless march of time. The game of high productivity is to do this really fast and at scale. It requires clever engineering and factory discipline. More precisely, it requires worker submission to a definite tempo of factory work.

Are the cross-country differentials explained by variation in machinery? or are they explained by the variation in work intensity? In order to disentangle the two we have to look at the cross-country variation in the rate of production with the same powered machinery. That isolates the variation accounted for by factory discipline. What we find in such controlled comparisons is that there is great variation in work intensity—enough to account for the bulk of the gap in output per worker between nations. The breaks are frequent; the machines are left idle for much longer; absenteeism is rife. Even when the worker is at the machine, the pace of work is slower and the work load much lower. Bombay textile workers would mind two spindles in 1920s, where on the same machinery, American workers would mind six. Then as now, in India and across the South, it takes too many workers to do the same amount of work on the exact same machine. Why is that?

We argue that work intensity and factory discipline are functions of the macroclimate of the workers. The globe is polarized the way it is because of the polarization of man’s lifeworld by a merciless sun. Specifically, a harsh sun beats down between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Work intensity is affected directly by the thermal environment of the factory, as well as indirectly through the epidemiological consequences of the sun’s hostility and the crippling trauma thereby visited upon the inhabitants of the torrid zone. Figure 2 displays two thermal maps of the globe. Left: Number of days of the year the temperature exceeds 20 degrees Celsius. Right: Number of days of the year the temperature exceeds 32 degrees.

Figure 2. Source: Jendritzky and Tinz (2009). Left: days above 20; right: days above 32.

The thermal environment of the factory means frequent breaks are required to cool down. Put simply, work intensity cannot be sustained at the rate of the temperate world with temperatures well beyond the limits imposed by the human thermal balance. Figure 2 shows the maximum temperatures by work intensity recommended by the ISO. Intense work should not be undertaken when the temperature is above 25 degrees Celsius; light work 30 degrees. Above 33 one is at risk of overheating, even if one is at complete rest. In Southeast Asia, Indochina, South Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America, mean temperatures range over 20-40 degrees Celsius. The thermal environment of the factory thus places a sharp and binding limit on the rate and intensity of work performed in a factory.

Figure 3. Source: Kjellstrom et al. (2009).

Not only does the merciless sun make sustained, disciplined factory work incompatible with the human thermal balance, it encourages the proliferation of pathogens, parasites and vectors that sap the strength of the populace of the torrid zone. The mosquito vector, for instance, is endemic to the zone between the January and July 10 degree isotherms displayed in Figure 4. According to the WHO, more than 3.9 billion people in over 128 countries are at risk of contracting dengue, with 96 million cases estimated per year; and malaria causes more than 400,000 deaths every year globally, most of them children under 5 years of age. Other vectors include sandflies, triatomine bugs, blackflies, ticks, tsetse flies, mites, snails and lice.

Figure 4. Source: WHO.

But leading off vectors is misdirected. The issue is not actually vectors but microbial pathology. Germs proliferate luxuriantly in the torrid zone causing a long list of infectious diseases that sap the strength of people already weakened by the scorching sun. Food, culture, behavioral norms, worker behavior are all shaped by the overwhelming need to counter the unrelenting hostility of the heat and the fever. Spicy food, frequent hydration, staying out of the sun, frequent rest, and indeed, minimal physical exertion in the heat—these are adaptations of the people of the torrid zone.

There are limits to human adaptation to the thermal environment. The heat still takes its toll. Childhood infections stunt and cripple the populace. Even people who survive to be healthy adults are periodically put out of action by the deadly germs. But is it reasonable to think that the direct burden of the disease would dominate work intensity on the factory floor? Then how do we make sense of the fact that the strongest correlate of output per worker is the WHO’s measure of per capita years lost to infectious disease?

Figure 5. Source: WHO, author’s computations.

Figure 4 documents the cross-sectional evidence. We have rescaled the observations by per capita income only for visualization; the fit is unweighted. We restrict our sample to 24 countries with more than 30 million people. Together they account for 4.8 billion of the world’s 7.6 billion people. We find that a 1 standard deviation higher infectious disease burden reduces expected output per worker by 0.93 standard deviations with the result that 86 percent of the cross-sectional variation in productivity is explained by the infectious disease burden.

What explains the empirical evidence is the wrath of Ra. The harsh toll of the fever in the torrid zone and efficiency-reducing thermal environment of the factory are both functions of the heat induced by solar radiation. The key to understanding this is to realize that nations are situated animals. They have a specific location on the globe. The zone on which the sun beats mercilessly down on the surface of the earth is a function of latitude that is symmetric across the equator. The distribution of land mass on the surface of the planet is overweight the northern hemisphere; so it comes to us as the ‘north-south’ axis of polarization. But southern Australia, southern New Zealand, the southern trip of Africa are equally pleasant because they too lie in the temperate zone. The gradient of latitude is very significant. But the variable that explains output per worker is the thermal environment. Ra doesn’t need mediators to beat the worker into submission; his wrath is personal; he heats up the worker’s lifeworld himself.

What we have then is a Heliocentric model of global polarization. Given the human thermal balance, the direct effect of solar radiation as mediated by the factory’s thermal environment is sufficient to explain the international cross-section of productivity. Because they are all functions of solar radiation, work intensity, latitude, humidity-adjusted temperature, and disease burden are correlated and priced together into the cross-section of productivity. The controlling variable here therefore is the wrath of Ra.

Ram Rati (1997) has shown that the gradient of latitude explains half the variation in the cross-section of a number of socio-economic variables. Lind (1960) isolated the key problem in his paper titled “The effect of heat on the industrial worker.” See also Axelson (1974) “Influence of heat exposure on productivity.” There is a large physiological literature on heat stress. See Lundgren et al. (2014) for an illuminating case study and in lieu of a literature review.

What is clear is that global polarization is explained by the Heliocentric model. It is telling that the Copernican revolution happened in physiology and not political economy. In the latter discipline, the traditions associated with Malthus, Smith, Marx, and Galton remained trapped in the Latourian rigidity. Who knew that a physiological constraint, the human thermal balance, could bind?

Bandyopadhyaya argued forcefully in Climate and World Order that the macroclimate explained global polarization. He went too far. His remedy called for an intervention to modify the global climate. We have maintained a much more narrow focus in the present study. One clear finding is that air conditioning factories can potentially increase productivity. This should be more carefully investigated via randomized control trials. If they prove as effective as the Heliocentric model suggests, relatively modest investments in air conditioning would have dramatic effects on labor productivity.

James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States is a spirited and sophisticated attack on settled society, agriculturalism, and state formations. Scott’s wager is that all three developments were welfare reducing for the bulk of the populace. Sedentism, the concentration of hitherto dispersed people, animals, plants, insects, and microbes between 10,000 and 5,000 BCE, into what he calls “Late-Neolithic multi-species resettlement camps” was an epidemiological disaster (for the higher species). The domesticated beasts and no less domesticated men of these camps had higher mortality rates and were of lower stature (perhaps even had smaller brains) than their wandering and dispersed counterparts who continued to occupy most of the landmass of the Earth. Fixed-field farming, which arose some two thousand years after sedentism, was back-breaking work that generalist hunter-gatherers could not be persuaded to undertake without so to speak “a pistol at their temple.”[1] And grain states that emerged much later—the earliest emerged around 3,500 BCE in Babylonia (southern Mesopotamia)—were rapacious parasites; concerned above all with extracting as much surplus as possible from their hosts through taxation and forced labor.

The paleo-anarchist premises remain implicit throughout as Scott marshals evidence and argument against his three chosen targets. But in a blatant slight of hand, all of it is put on the state’s balance sheet. The problem is not superficial but deep-seated. He actually conflates the three.

A foundational question underlying state formation is how we (Homo sapiens sapiens) came to live amid the unprecedented concentrations of domesticated plants, animals, and people that characterize states.[2]

What Scott has written is a decentered counter-history—against civilization, against the state, against settled society, against cities, against villages, against farmers; and for the barbarian who lives in the shadow of settled society (on the outside; looking in) and the noble savage who lives without, untouched by civilization. Given the hegemony of the state discourse, one can understand the partisanship and one-sided marshaling of evidence of this counter-narrative—the debit side of the balance sheet of settled society remains empty. But he takes it really too far when he cherry picks the evidence that he marshals.

The world’s population in 10,000 BCE, according to one careful estimate, was roughly 4 million. A full five thousand years later, in 5,000 BCE, it had risen only to 5 million. This hardly represents a population explosion, despite the civilizational achievements of the Neolithic revolution: sedentism and agriculture. Over the subsequent five thousand years, by contrast, world population would grow twentyfold, to more than 100 million.[3]

Why did population stagnate between 10,000 and 5,000 BCE? Scott points to the epidemiological consequences of the late-Neolithic multi-species resettlement camps, making this “the most lethal period in human history.”[4] But that leaves the puzzle of the population explosion in the subsequent period, 5,000 BCE and 1 CE, that witnessed the rise primacy of complex societies all based on “the Neolithic grain complex.”[5]

The short answer, I believe, is sedentism itself. Despite general ill health and high infant and maternal mortality vis-à-vis hunters and gatherers, it turns out that sedentary agriculturalists also had unprecedentedly high rates of reproduction—enough to more than compensate for the also unprecedentedly high rates of mortality.[6]

But that makes no sense whatsoever. Sedentism cannot be marshaled to explain both the stagnation of the population in the first five thousand years after the Ice Age and its explosion in the next five thousand years. The answer is staring him in the face but he doesn’t want to see it.

Population exploded precisely because the carrying capacity of the planet increased considerably as a result of the adoption at scale of fixed-field cereal monoculture and the grain state that survived on taxing it. Grains could feed many more mouths than other strategies of subsistence. Populations could expand until all nearby arable land was brought under cultivation; and even after if yields could be raised further; subject only to ecological constraints—resource depletion, salinization, soil erosion and so on. Population growth was no doubt also enhanced by state formations that admitted dramatically greater security, order and capacity for social action; as well as interregional trade that yielded gains from economic specialization that pushed the economic possibility frontier further out. As we shall see, this took a concrete form in the very first civilization.

Not only is high civilization conspicuous by its absence in Against the Grain, so is the state itself. For a book that aims to take the state down a notch, it pays precious little attention to research on state formation. Scott recognizes that what needs to be explained is the emergence of pristine states.

My focus is almost entirely on Mesopotamia, and in particular the “southern alluvium” south of contemporary Basra. The reason for this focus is that this area between the Tigris and Euphrates (Sumer) was the heartland of the first “pristine” states in the world.…By far most of the evidence I bring to bear concerns the period from 4,000 until 2,000 BCE, as it is both the key period of state formation and the focus of the bulk of the existing scholarship.[7]

Despite Scott’s implicit claim to have mastered the existing scholarship, his latest references on the theory of primary state formation date from 1970. Since then there has been great progress in our understanding of primary state formation. In what follows we shall trace the achievements of the settlers all the way from the origins of settled society to the rise of the first grain state.

The Deep History of Permanent Settlement

Until the end of the Ice Age, around 10,000 BCE, all mankind lived in small mobile bands of hunter-gatherers. Sustenance was secured by hunting, fishing, and gathering plants and fruit. People lived in temporary camps, relocating frequently in pursuit of great herds of animals on the move, migrating flocks of birds and schools of fish, ripening fruit and wild cereals. The first extended periods of residence appear soon after the end of the Ice Age. They are located almost exclusively near sites of strongly differentiated terrain that admitted access to multiple sources of sustenance.

The difference between ecological units is, as a rule, shown in differences between land formations, the types of wild animals inhabiting an area, and the types of plants that grow there, with their varying times of ripening. A camp that sprang up on the borderline between such ecological units would have made it possible to use all the resources the different areas had to offer, either simultaneously or consecutively.…It is surely no accident that traces of early permanent or temporary human settlements in the Near East are found almost exclusively in areas with differentiated structures in the landscape, and there at sites from which there is the easiest possible access to as many different ecological units as possible.[8]

The early Neolithic semi-permanent and permanent settlements were necessarily isolated from each other because the hinterland necessary to subsist by food gathering was very large. The tyranny of distance forbid frequent direct contact between the settlements. We shall see how settlement geography played a decisive role in the emergence of complex society.

Around favored sites where food supply was especially abundant, diverse and secure, settlements finally acquired a degree of permanence. It is here that the excruciatingly slow process of plant and animal domestication could advance steadily. Grains that had hitherto been picked in the wild began to be planted and we finally begin to see evidence of food production with the remains of grain and food processing. Herding of animals also began to practiced early on as evident from the definite concentration of sex and age of the slaughtered animals of a particular type. These processes of domestication took thousands of years to master. Food production and animal husbandry provided a fragile and insecure food supply. Meanwhile, hunting and foraging continued to supply the bulk of the settlers sustenance.

For a very long period of time, therefore, it was essential to have multiple means of ensuring subsistence, and this brought in its train a mixed economy in which the shares of food production—whether by cultivation or animal husbandry—and of the procurement of food through hunting and gathering could shift according to the external circumstances prevailing. If worse came to worse, they could always go back to hunting, fishing, or gathering.[9]

What is clear is that by 6,000 BCE, all major cereals and legumes are being planted at a modest scale, and goats, sheep, pigs and cattle were domesticated. The full “Neolithic package” was coming into place at the favored sites of permanent settlements.

Settlement Geography and the Natural History of Social Complexity

The basic idea of settlement geography is straightforward. The size distribution and spatial pattern of settlements is the archaeological indicator of social complexity par excellence. These settlement patterns encode information about the state of technology, the division of labor, social organization and econopolitical interaction in the settlement system. The basic typology is (1) isolated settlements; (2) simple settlement systems; (3) three-tier systems; and (4) four-tier systems. When settlements are isolated from each other there is little everyday contact between the settlements—they do not constitute a system. Their isolation is the result of food production providing only a small fraction of the sustenance and the consequent need for a large hinterland. Division of labor in isolated settlements is extremely limited since specialist occupations require a large market. This is the pattern we find in the Near East circa 6,000 BCE.

With increasing mastery of the art of cultivation the area necessary to feed the settlement becomes smaller, the dependence of privileged sites is lessened, and with increasing security and more intensive land use, settlements can move closer and closer together. This is the basic prerequisite for the creation of structured relationships between settlements, ie the formation of settlement systems. In a simple settlement system, a number of settlements are subordinated to one big settlement. The communities living in the surrounding area are dependent on the “central functions” of the center—temples, warehouses, specialist craftsmen, chiefly administration, and so on—even as the center depends on its retinue of settlements to achieve specialization in urban functions. Three-tier systems are more complex settlement systems in which “towns” mediate between the “villages” on the one hand and the “city” on the other. Four-tier systems are yet more complex—it is here that pressures build up for state formation.

Typology of settlement systems. Source: Hans J Nissen.

Political authority for two-tier, three-tier, and four-tier systems take the form of simple, complex, and paramount chiefdoms respectively. Chiefdoms are polities in which all political authority is vested in the person of the chief—there is no functional differentiation of political authority. In a state on the other hand, authority is functionally differentiated—defense, policing, tax collection, civil administration et cetera, are performed by different public officials. In other words, in a state we have a differentiated bureaucracy exercising independent but partial authority. This matters greatly because chiefdoms cannot be scaled up while states can and often did. Beyond territorial expansion, the capacity for social action increases dramatically with state formation. The fundamental question of state formation then becomes: Why, and under what conditions, did some chiefdoms make the transition to statehood? The modern theory of primary state formation, that Scott studiously ignores, suggests that it was the struggle for survival with rival chiefdoms that compelled some chiefs and not others to split the atom of chiefly power.

In the Near East, the simple settlement systems of 6,000 BCE slowly evolved towards more complex forms over the next two thousand years. All along the Euphrates, as well as in Syria and Iran, settlements became packed together as food production was further mastered. Complex settlement systems allowed increasing division of labor. Development at this time was still regionally undifferentiated, with a curious exception. Babylonia lagged behind the plains of the northern Euphrates, western Iran and Syria in settlement complexity. Yet, as we shall see, it was here that the decisive breakthrough to state formation and high civilization would be achieved.

The Breakthrough to High Civilization and the Uruk World-System

In the middle of the fourth millennium BCE, a sudden climate shift made conditions cooler and dryer. There was a gradual drop in sea level and precipitation. From the moment that the sea began to recede (it would drop five meters over the next six thousand years), southern Mesopotamia was opened to much more extensive habitation. A prolonged period of an archipelago of isolated settlements was suddenly followed by a period in which the land was cleared so densely that nothing like it had ever been seen before.

[In] the period of early high civilization communal energies were evidently released to such an extent that speedy and comprehensive changes took place in all fields of life. This energy was so great that the rate of change increased rather than decreased in the following two to three hundred years during which a development took place in Babylonia that influenced the course of history more than enduring than many other.[10]

Instead of three-tiered systems that has hitherto been seen at the most advanced sites in the Near East, we finally see unambiguous evidence of a four-tiered settlement, with Uruk at the center. With an enclosed area of 5.5 square kilometers, Uruk was more than twice as large as Athens at is peak in the classical age. Even Rome at the very peak of the great second century boom was only twice its size. And this was thirty centuries before Rome.

Source: Hans J Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C.

In the “Late Uruk” period, for the first time in history, we find unambiguous archaeological evidence of writing, cylinder seals, large-scale works of art, monumental architecture, and increasingly, big canals and irrigation. The record suggests a highly differentiated public administration and a dramatically enhanced capacity for social action. But Uruk was not just a strong state. There is considerable evidence of an increasingly sophisticated division of labor, unprecedented technical innovation, and long-distance trade covering the entire Near East with the attendant international division of labor. Uruk, the latecomer, would not only out-innovate the regional incumbents, it would set the standards that everyone else would try to replicate or risk getting stuck in a state of dependency on the leader.

The Uruk World-System

Susiana in southwestern Iran was considerably more developed when the Babylonian breakthrough began. But it was soon left in the dust.

Unlike the development in Babylonia, where a slow change took place from the painted pottery of the late Ubaid period to the unpainted pottery—made on the potter’s wheel—of the Uruk period, with some repetition and parallel developments in the intermediate phase, in Susiana, the richly painted pottery of the Late Susiana phase was followed directly—with no noticeable transition—by unpainted pottery thrown on the wheel, of the sort we know from the Uruk period in Babylonia. This observation suggests that this clearly recognizable pottery was developed in Babylonia and taken over by Susiana. This statement can be expanded. In Susiana, it was not only the special way of producing pottery that was taken over, but also almost all the other developments we have learned of in Babylonia.…From the sort of rapid changes that took place in Babylonia the conclusion can quite unambiguously be drawn that the aim was to make writing more readily usable, so that the range of uses for writing obviously became larger. However in Susiana the form of writing remains remarkably static.…It is almost superfluous to point out that changes in building techniques because of the introduction of the plano-convex brick…also did not occur.…In Babylonia a culture was constantly expanding both internally and in relation to the outside world. [Initially] the civilization of the Late Uruk period could be taken over almost in its entirety by Susiana….[But] with the sharp pace of change in Babylonia, the time soon had to come when new organizational structures created there no longer had any meaning for the management of living conditions in Susiana, because of differences in scale.[11]

Upstream from the Euphrates, in northern Mesopotamia and Syria, the relationship became more unequal still.

In a completely independent local development, individual settlements were founded that are absolutely identical with what we know from Babylonia and Susiana, down to the last pottery shred in the inventory. Communication, which must have taken place in some way, can only be detected to a limited extent in the inventory of objects found in the Syrian settlements. There does not seem to have been any traffic in the opposite direction. If, in addition, we consider that these alien types of settlements were all either directly on the Euphrates or on its tributaries, there seems to be a relatively simple explanation for the whole situation. We are most probably dealing here with settlements established by people who came there directly from the southern lowland plains. Without doubt, the securing of trade interests had a part to play here—the Euphrates and its tributaries had always been the preferred trade routes—and no other motivation has been revealed to us.[12]

Put bluntly, the Babylonian settlements in Syria were colonies. Although they lasted for only a few decades, they were built to last. Nor was the Babylonian colonial presence restricted to Syria. 

The expansion of Babylonian civilization along the Euphrates to the north, which led to the establishment of the settlements on Syrian territory, did not come to a halt at the borders of the great plain. It then spread along the course of the river into the mountain regions, where the type of understanding arrived at with the local civilization was clearly different from that in the area of the Syrian plain.…As in the Zagros area, we encounter relationships between finds here that are clearly not local and unambiguously show influences from the sphere of the Late Uruk period civilization.

Was this expansion a simple case of imperial predation? Or was there in fact mutual gains from exchange and interaction? Surely, both must have been in play.

Whether we talk of “expansion” or “attraction,” however, we shall obviously not get any closer to an explanation if we see only either trade or imperialist expansion behind this influence, or even if we assume that it was a quasi-inadvertent expansion. It is possible that two factors went hand in hand in this development. One the one hand, there was the fascination on the part of the “underdeveloped” areas when faced with the complex way of life and the knowledge of Babylonia; on the other, Babylonia needed to organize the import of raw materials, and perhaps also the export of manufactured goods, to satisfy a rapidly expanding internal economy.…The fact that from the east across the whole northern area and into the west, all the neighboring regions were in one way or another incorporated by Babylonia either directly or indirectly into a network of relationships stronger than there had ever been before shows that this extension of influence was not aimed directly at one region, but spread out in all directions.[13]

We don’t know if the Babylonians relied on a superior economy of weapons to maintain their presence and whether there was armed resistance by the “colonized,” or whether the magnetism of Babylonian culture was enough to seduce the natives. What we do know is that the inhabitants of Babylonia regarded everyone else as barbarians.

Barbarians and Civilization

Babylonia remained in the core of the central civilization long after Uruk’s fall from primacy. The city itself remained in continuous occupation for forty centuries. The Epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s first epic, was composed at Uruk. Other Babylonian city-states—Ur, Lagash, Kish, Nippur—became strong and they competed for leadership. Babylonia itself was briefly unified by Sargon of Akkad in what was the first territorial state in the Near East. (Egypt had already been unified into a territorial state at the time of Uruk’s flowering.) But it too shrank back to a city-state within three generations. Great territorial states arose outside Babylonia that would come to dominate the Near East in the Bronze Age. But the flame of civilization never went out. Following in the footsteps of the central civilization even more vibrant high civilizations arose all along the Eurasian rim—Rome, Greece, Egypt, Persia, India, China, and beyond. But well into modern times, perhaps even until the late-19th century, most of the Earth’s landmass lay outside the zone of civilization.

On the edges of settled societies, and in mountain redoubts and suchlike within them, were frontier-zones or counter-zones. These ungoverned spaces within and without offered shelter from the tax collector and provided refuge to those who rejected or were rejected by the dominant culture. The nonstate peoples in the frontier-zones were not savages; they were barbarians. They preyed on settled society; traded with it; resisted it’s diktat; and, if they became unified and strong, mounted invasions in a bid to capture the state. The agrarian states traded with them, tried to suppress them, and if punitive expeditions failed, bribed them to keep the peace. All civilized societies had to deal with ‘inner barbarians’—nomads, gypsies, mountain peoples, and so on—and ‘outer barbarians’ who lived in the frontier-zones proper.

Barbarians must be thought of as counter-people. They exist only in symbiosis with or as parasites on settled society. Forest dwellers far removed from state societies are not barbarians. Barbarians begin when taxes stop. They come into history as counter-people in the state discourse; as security threats. Studying the frontier-zones is quite interesting and most definitely worthwhile. We should certainly pay more attention to it and Scott is right to bring our attention to it. But then he says:

The longer states existed, the more refugees they disgorged to the periphery.…The process of secondary primitivism, or what might be called “going over to the barbarians,” is far more common than any of the standard civilizational narratives allow for.…A great many barbarians, then, were not primitives who had stayed or been left behind but rather political and economic refugees who had fled to the periphery to escape state-induced poverty, taxes, bondage, and war. As states proliferated and grew over time, they ground out ever greater numbers who voted with their feet.[14]

Here again he is working strenuously against the grain of the evidence. The case he marshals shows instead that it was precisely instability in state society, and especially the breakdown of state power, that generated exodus. But how can the devastation unleashed by the breakdown of state power be blamed instead on state power?

Causes for flight varied enormously—epidemics, crop failures, floods, salinization, taxes, war, and conscription—provoking both a steady leakage and occasionally a mass exodus.…It is particularly pronounced at times of state breakdown or interregna marked by war, epidemics, and environmental deterioration.[15]

Yes, even in times of stability, people did leave state society to go join the barbarians in the frontier-zones. But this was a mere trickle of outlaws, social rejects, pariahs, and rebels. When state societies provided law and order, net migration was almost certainly inward as people left the periphery for the core, to make their mark in the city. People at the edge of the Roman world could not wait to eat that awful fish sauce, don the toga, and take baths in public. Make no mistake: When state societies flourished their magnetism was considerable. This was as true of Babylonia fifty centuries ago as of the present-day United States.

Epilogue

What we have in Scott is what superficially looks like an impressive case against state society but is in reality a form of one-sided counter-history masquerading as a scholarly work by a Harvard Professor who could not exist for a moment without state society. Yes, the path to civilization was brutal. All the more reason then to celebrate the pioneers of the Neolithic and the earliest state societies starting with Babylonia.

Notes

[1] Moore, Hillman, and Legge, Village on the Euphrates, p. 393. Quoted in Against the Grain.

[2] Against the Grain, p. 33.

[3] Ibid, p. 159.

[4] Ibid, p. 160.

[5] Ibid, p. 181.

[6] Ibid, p. 183.

[7] Ibid, p. 17.

[8] Hans J. Nissen, The Early History of the Ancient Near East, 9000-2000 B.C.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Against the Grain, p. 343-345.

[15] Ibid, p. 342.