[1] Instead, he argues, people had to be forced to live in the early states, which were hierarchical, beset by malnutrition and disease, and often based on slavery.
[2] A review in Science concludes that the book's thesis "is fascinating and represents an alternative, nuanced, if somewhat speculative, scenario on how civilized society came into being.
He begins by recounting the impact of mankind's use of fire, calling it "a species monopoly and a trump card" and detailing its desirability for its capacity to reduce the radius of a meal by concentrating foodstuffs in a smaller area around human encampments.
Scott's point in this chapter is that humans domesticated the planet more extensively than simply taming cattle and planting crops, and that this had deep consequences.
He examines the changes that mankind has brought to its environment by employing artificial selection to develop plant types that are now unrecognizable from their progenitors and are also unable to survive without human care.
From the altered bone-structures of women who were forced into agricultural labor to general size-difference and proof of nutrition-deficits in post-agriculture mankind, Scott argues that humans have bred their own irreversible change.
Scott concurs with other scholars in the field that "'[n]o hunter-gatherers occupying a productive locality with a range of wild foods able to provide for all seasons are likely to have started cultivating their caloric staples willingly.
'"[5] Finally, Scott also points out that early states were beset by zoonoses, i.e. diseases spread from animals to humans, that result in high morbidity rates.
He also notes that since early states were full of disease, population tended to fall unless people could be replaced by new slaves.
In early states this population control often took the form of forcefully settling peoples on fertile land, and then preventing them from fleeing in order to avoid bondage and labour-obligations.
Scott cites the earliest legal codes as one piece of evidence, characterising them as "filled with such injunctions" intended to "discourage and punish flight".
Self-inflicted causes of this vulnerability included "climate change, resource depletion, disease, warfare, and migration to areas of greater abundance.
Scott thus theorizes that up until 400 or so years ago humanity was in the "Golden Age of the Barbarians" - an era when the majority of the world's population had never seen a tax collector.
Part of this was due to the existence of "Barbarian Zones", i.e. great tracts of land where states found it either impossible or prohibitively difficult to extend their rule.
Places like "mountains and steppes", as well as "uncleared dense forest, swamps, marshes, river deltas, fens, moors, deserts, heath, arid wastes, and even the sea itself.
"[14] Steven Mithen writes that Scott's "account of the deep past doesn't purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we're used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on a narrative of human progress and on the ideal of the city/nation-state.
Moyn thinks that we owe the ideals Scott uses to harshly judge the early state—ideals like equality and liberty—to the stability and prosperity that states make possible.
"[17] Writing in the journal Public Choice, Ennio Piano asserts that Against the Grain will reinforce Scott's reputation as a leading scholar of stateless societies.