Recent reading
Oct. 7th, 2018 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaAgainst the Grain: a deep history of the earliest states by James C. Scott (2017)
James C. Scott is deeply suspicious of early states and considers them basically extortion schemes. Interestingly, it seems that both agriculture and sedentism existed for thousands of years without turning into states. Scott presents archaeological research saying that the earliest sedentary people likely lived in wetlands by river deltas, simply because there were so many resources that you didn't need to move around even if you were a hunter-gatherer. Plant and animal domestication happened gradually, and people moved fluidly between different modes of food production without having to settle for one. This was also influenced by climatic fluctuations.
The preconditions for the earliest states were: 1) people being constrained to one place so they can't escape taxes, for example by a more arid climate tying people to a riverside, and 2) grain cultivation, because it is easy to store and and measure and is harvested all at once, thus making it ideal for taxation. People in early states died a lot from new diseases jumping over from domesticated animals, and also escaped a lot, so that the state capturing more people (often as slaves) was imperative. Early states were also fragile and disassembled into decentralized pieces a lot. Finally, he looks at how early states and "barbarians" interacted, for example by barbarians raiding states, states hiring them as mercenaries, people escaping the state to join the barbarians, etc.
The Evolution of Plants by Kathy Willis and Jennifer McElwain (2014)
Plants are so cool. This is a textbook-style book which is just on the right level for me, but which is probably too advanced if you want easily digested popular science. It goes through major changes and innovations in plant evolution: photosynthesis, eukaryotes, going from water to land, vascular plants, trees, seed plants, angiosperms, grasses, C4 and CAM photosynthesis. It also looks at the interactions back and forth between plants and their environment throughout geological time. Interestingly, plants don't have mass extinctions the way animals do--there's a lot of ecological turnover at those times, but whole families don't disappear the way animal families do. This is probably because plants are more resilient--they can hybridize more easily, individuals can persist for longer, seeds can lie dormant, they can reproduce asexually, and they can become polyploid.
James C. Scott is deeply suspicious of early states and considers them basically extortion schemes. Interestingly, it seems that both agriculture and sedentism existed for thousands of years without turning into states. Scott presents archaeological research saying that the earliest sedentary people likely lived in wetlands by river deltas, simply because there were so many resources that you didn't need to move around even if you were a hunter-gatherer. Plant and animal domestication happened gradually, and people moved fluidly between different modes of food production without having to settle for one. This was also influenced by climatic fluctuations.
The preconditions for the earliest states were: 1) people being constrained to one place so they can't escape taxes, for example by a more arid climate tying people to a riverside, and 2) grain cultivation, because it is easy to store and and measure and is harvested all at once, thus making it ideal for taxation. People in early states died a lot from new diseases jumping over from domesticated animals, and also escaped a lot, so that the state capturing more people (often as slaves) was imperative. Early states were also fragile and disassembled into decentralized pieces a lot. Finally, he looks at how early states and "barbarians" interacted, for example by barbarians raiding states, states hiring them as mercenaries, people escaping the state to join the barbarians, etc.
The Evolution of Plants by Kathy Willis and Jennifer McElwain (2014)
Plants are so cool. This is a textbook-style book which is just on the right level for me, but which is probably too advanced if you want easily digested popular science. It goes through major changes and innovations in plant evolution: photosynthesis, eukaryotes, going from water to land, vascular plants, trees, seed plants, angiosperms, grasses, C4 and CAM photosynthesis. It also looks at the interactions back and forth between plants and their environment throughout geological time. Interestingly, plants don't have mass extinctions the way animals do--there's a lot of ecological turnover at those times, but whole families don't disappear the way animal families do. This is probably because plants are more resilient--they can hybridize more easily, individuals can persist for longer, seeds can lie dormant, they can reproduce asexually, and they can become polyploid.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-07 01:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-10-07 03:45 pm (UTC)