[1] While he retained a lifelong interest in Southeast Asia and peasantries, his later works ranged across many topics: quiet forms of political resistance, the failures of state-led social transformation, techniques used by non-state societies to avoid state control, commonplace uses of anarchist principles, and the rise of early agricultural states.

[3] Scott received his bachelor's degree from Williams College and his MA and PhD in political science from Yale.

[10] Scott received his bachelor's degree from Williams College in 1958, and his PhD in political science from Yale University in 1967.

[8] Upon graduation, Scott received a Rotary International Fellowship to study in Burma, where he was recruited by an American student activist who had become an anti-communist organizer for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

[2] His dissertation on political ideology in Malaysia, which was supervised by Robert E. Lane, analysed interviews with Malaysian civil servants.

They started with a small farm, then purchased a larger one nearby in the early 1980s, where they sheared sheep and pastured Highland cattle.

[13][14] Though Scott's early and late books were based on interviews and archival investigations, his use of ethnographic and interpretative methods has been influential.

[16] When he had finished a draft, he returned for two months to solicit villagers' impressions of his depiction, and significantly revised the book based on their criticisms and insight.

2) Making it clear that he regarded Scott, an influential and highly respected scholar, as the most conspicuous spokesman for the "moral economists."

In order to study the systems of domination, careful attention is paid to what lies beneath the surface of evident, public behavior.

On the event of a publicization of this "hidden transcript," oppressed classes openly assume their speech and become conscious of its common status.

Scott's book Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) saw his first major foray into political science.

In it, he showed how central governments attempt to force legibility on their subjects, and fail to see complex, valuable forms of local social order and knowledge.

He highlights collective farms in the Soviet Union, the building of Brasília, and Prussian forestry techniques as examples of failed schemes.

[26] In The Art of Not Being Governed, Scott addresses the question of how certain groups in the mountainous jungles of Southeast Asia managed to avoid a package of exploitation centered around the state, taxation, and grain cultivation.

Scott's main argument is that these people are "barbaric by design": their social organization, geographical location, subsistence practices and culture have been carved to discourage states to annex them to their territories.