James C. Scott — Against the Grain
The founding of the earliest agrarian societies and states in mesopotamia ocurred in the latest five percent of our history as a species on the planet. And by that metric, the fossil fuel era, beginning all the end of the eighteenth century, represents merely the last quarter of a percent of our species history.
Once the basic assumption of the superiority and attraction of fixed-field farming over all previous forms of subsistence is questioned, it becomes clear that this assumption itself rests on a deeper and more embedded assumption that is virtually never questioned. And that assumption is that sedentary life itself is superior to and more attractive than mobile forms of subsitence.
If you were hunter-gatherers or nomads, however numerous, spreading your biodegradable trash thinly across the landscape, you were likely to vanish entirely from the archeological record.
On a generous reading, until the past four houndred years, one-third if the globe was still occupied by hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, pastoralists, and independent horticulturalists, while states, being essentially agrarian, were confined largely to that small portion of the globe suitable for cultivation.
// raw source
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title: James C. Scott — Against the Grain
date: 2026-07-15
tags: [cita, historia, agricultura, Estado]
summary: The founding of the earliest agrarian societies and states in mesopotamia ocurred in the latest five percent of our history as a species on the planet.
---
# James C. Scott — *Against the Grain*
> The founding of the earliest agrarian societies and states in mesopotamia ocurred in the latest five percent of our history as a species on the planet. And by that metric, the fossil fuel era, beginning all the end of the eighteenth century, represents merely the last quarter of a percent of our species history.
> Once the basic assumption of the superiority and attraction of fixed-field farming over all previous forms of subsistence is questioned, it becomes clear that this assumption itself rests on a deeper and more embedded assumption that is virtually never questioned. And that assumption is that sedentary life itself is superior to and more attractive than mobile forms of subsitence.
> If you were hunter-gatherers or nomads, however numerous, spreading your biodegradable trash thinly across the landscape, you were likely to vanish entirely from the archeological record.
> On a generous reading, until the past four houndred years, one-third if the globe was still occupied by hunter-gatherers, shifting cultivators, pastoralists, and independent horticulturalists, while states, being essentially agrarian, were confined largely to that small portion of the globe suitable for cultivation.