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

“The state…requires a subsistence environment that is far simpler than the wetland ecologies”

These regions’ biotic diversity also facilitated escaping from state control by offering alternative networks of sustenance than state-driven/taxed agricultural production.

Wetlands, as the “edge environments of several ecologies,” offered abundant harvests for hunter gatherers, much more so than agrarian populations. This explains the “wetlands origins of population settlement,” rather than the traditional agricultural origins of sedentism story.

Much of chapter one covers the same material as chapters three and six of In Praise of Floods, particularly the focus on humans as a riverine species. Sedentism preceded agriculture because of the diversity of wetland regions, which is why the first large settlements emerge in river valleys (not agriculture). Humans stayed put, the flood pulse changed the environment around them, as ultra biotically diverse.

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

Anthropogenic “human fire as landscape architect” as absolutely transformative - although obscured by its pre-Homo sapiens and ancient use of hundreds of millennia by - and the spur for the “thin Anthropocene.”

“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”.