Everybody knows the story: People figure out farming, settle down, build cities, and civilization takes it from there. Scott, an anthropologist and political scientist at Yale who spent his life studying how regular people dodge governments, points out the timeline doesn’t work. Four thousand years pass between the first domesticated grain and the first real cities. People knew how to farm and mostly didn’t bother, because hunting and foraging fed them better and were less work. When states finally do show up, they run on grain, and Scott thinks that’s the tell. Grain ripens on a schedule and grows up where anyone can see it, so a tax collector can swoop in, count it, and take a cut. Roots and tubers hide underground on nobody’s calendar.
He goes further, suggesting the walls around the first cities might have been there as much to keep the workers in as to keep raiders out, and the record backs him up. People in those early settlements were shorter, sicker, and worked harder than the foragers outside. Which is his final point: The “barbarians” beyond the walls weren’t the losers of this story. Much of the time, they were eating better and living their best lives. In yo face, Tax Man.