In both public and professional accounts of the grand sweep of human history, a few questions recurrently beg for attention. How did technology—broadly understood to encompass everything from control of fire to domestication of food sources, to craft manufacture, to communication and transportation—transform human life? How did social complexity come into being: e.g. classes, formal institutions and the state? Why did some ancient societies invest so much effort in corporate constructions such as pyramids, temples and other monumental architecture? What were the effects of warfare and disease on the human condition? And why did the early societies of so many regions cycle between eras of concentrated power and its apparent dissolution?

In Against the Grain, James Scott has produced an admirably broad and sweeping account of state origins. He takes humans’ first use of fire as his starting point and works his way toward states by way of the transition to settled agricultural life in the Neolithic. The intended audience would seem to be primarily the general public, for whom Scott's goals are ‘condensing the best knowledge we have … and then suggesting what it implies’ (p. xii). It is clearly, however, an audience more professionally concerned with state origins that he has in mind when he says ‘…these implications … are meant to be provocations … intended to stimulate further reflection and research’ (p. xiii), and his book provides plenty of fuel for such stimulation.

Cultivars domesticated and organized people. Cereal grain-growing agriculturists—at least those lucky enough to live in floodplains—exploited others in order to sustain themselves. From such preconditions, states were born, the organizational fragilities of which routinely led to their dissolution, and to other sorts of social forms in peripheral locations. This is James Scott's Against the Grain in a nutshell.

In his most recent book, James Scott presents us with a ‘deep history’ of the alluvial lowlands of Mesopotamia, from early domestications in the Neolithic to the emergence and consolidation of early states. Although the focus lies on Mesopotamia in these periods, Scott delves into the beginnings of the human use of fire in the Palaeolithic and draws on comparative developments in Southeast Asia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and elsewhere. He poses large questions: Why did people move into densely packed villages—‘Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps’—accompanied by the plants and animals they domesticated, but also by an exponentially increased disease load and a substantial portion of drudgery? Why did states emerge when they did, despite the fact that the main ecological and demographic conditions were present millennia earlier? What accounts for the fragility of these early states, and why do our standard histories obscure that fact? Guiding themes are ecological and demographic, but also draw explicit attention to the unintended consequences of human actions. Indeed, reflections on the Anthropocene underpin the book's arguments, and, like many others who write on this topic, Scott is motivated by deep-seated concerns about the sorry ecological state of our contemporary world and connections to long-term effects of human activity.

It seems almost preordained that James Scott, a scholar who moves with profound agility between the worlds of anthropology and political science, should eventually work his way onto the intellectual terrain of the barbarian. Barbarians play a foundational role in the formation of both disciplines, populating both anthropology's ‘savage slot’ (Trouillot 2003) and political science's prelapsarian ‘state of nature’ (Palmeri 2016). In Scott's most recent book, Against the Grain, the barbarians who helped to shape the world's earliest states play a variety of consequential roles. They are at once the forces of resistance to centralizing power, the refugees seeking respite from sovereignty's infringements and the brigands of the borderlands who provide the slave labour and mercenaries that prop up the fragile state.

Southeast Asia is a paradox to Western scholars. Few are familiar with its history, yet Southeast Asia has been a veritable intellectual resource extraction zone for twentieth- and twenty-first-century social thought: imagined communities, galactic polities, agricultural involution and the moral economy of peasants all emanate from work done in Southeast Asia. The region's archaeological record is equally paradoxical: late Pleistocene ‘Hobbit’ hominins disrupt models of human origins, the world's largest Buddhist monument of Borobudur now sits in a wholly Muslim land mass in central Java, and the world's largest premodern city of Angkor is located in Cambodia, a country that remains resolutely rural. So we should not be surprised that Scott's Against the Grain: A deep history of the earliest states draws from a career in Southeast Asian studies to study human history (the entire Anthropocene). This essay concentrates on how Scott believes early Mesopotamian states became legible.