Against the Grain by James C Scott
A Deep History of the Earliest States
My view, by contrast, is that the state originated as a protection racket in which one band of robbers prevailed.
Page 113
The short answer, I believe, is sedentism itself. Despite general ill health and high infant and maternal mortality vis-a-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.
Page 181
A combination of property in land, the patriarchal family, the division of labor within the domus, and the state’s overriding interest in maximizing its population has the effect of domesticating women’s reproduction in general.
Note 23 P267
While Mayshar et al. correctly associate cereal grains with state and hierarchy and root crops with nonstate, egalitarian societies, they wrongly take subsistence strategies as a primordial given and not the product of political institutions and political choice. Wherever there is adequate water and decent soil, many choices are possible. The authors further assert—apparently on the basis solely of institutional economics’ theory of the provision of public goods—that state creation is a benign, elite-initiated invention to defend the community’s stored grain against “robbers.” My view, by contrast, is that the state originated as a protection racket in which one band of robbers prevailed. While I am delighted to know that others have detected the important relationship between cultivar and state, I must, at the risk of seeming small-spirited, insist on my claim of paternity of this argument, inasmuch as the authors seem unaware of its articulation six years earlier.