Alex Levine’s Reviews > Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States > Status Update

Fire, not domestication, was the “key to humankind’s growing sway over the natural world.”

“In a good part of the world, the state - even when it was robust - was a seasonal institution…until very recently.”

Fascinating! We can “locate the era of definitive state hegemony” only as late as around 1600, at which point much of the global population still never saw the “hallmark of the state” (tax collectors), and many if not most relatively easily “moved in and out of state space”.