THE emergence of state authority was a logical consequence of the move to settled agriculture, or so we thought. Until recently, we also assumed that ancient peoples welcomed the advantages of this way of life as well as the growth of state leadership, since it was key to the development of culture, crafts and civil order.

Over the past 50 years, though, more and more cracks have appeared in this picture. We now know settled agriculture existed for several thousand years before the emergence of the city states of the Near East and Asia. In the past few years, archaeologists have been stunned to find 11,000-year-old structures such as those at Göbekli Tepe, in what is now southern Turkey. These were built by peoples who foraged, and who also developed specialised skills, both artistic and artisanal.

This is a surprise, and leaves researchers busily trying to get the story straight – something that really matters for a number of reasons. Traditional definitions of the state and its authority hinged on the right to raise taxes, and on its legal monopoly on coercing its people, from punishing and imprisoning them to waging formal war.

But as James Scott points out, roughly between 8000 BC and 4000 BC we find settled agricultural communities with developing craft skills – yet no evidence of anything much by way of state authority.

This also poses a key question, one which resonates in the 21st century, about whether there is a necessary link between state power and community life.

Scott is a political science researcher at Yale University who has stepped out of his academic comfort zone to grapple with the new archaeological reality. Against the Grain delivers not only a darker story, but also a broad understanding of the forces that shaped the formation of states and why they collapsed – right up to the industrial age.

Interestingly, his conclusions find grim contemporary echoes in a new book about the San Bushmen of the Kalahari by anthropologist James Suzman, who spent 25 years with them. In Affluence without Abundance, Suzman, an African studies fellow at the University of Cambridge, documents what happened when pastoralists, encouraged by governments, enclosed the San’s lands and took away their hunter-gatherer way of life.

The San’s recent past is like a speeded-up version of Scott’s tale. He teases out the elements of how states formed, especially in Mesopotamia – specifically what is now modern southern Iraq. It was here that the first small city states appeared, on the northern shore of the Gulf and on plains created and watered by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

There is some evidence for settlements among foragers in the Near East, often near wetlands, around 12,000 BC, and field agriculture from about 10,000 BC. But the earliest evidence of states dates from 4000 BC, with permanently settled towns. This is where Scott derives that figure of at least 4000 years between settlement-plus-agriculture (the two assumed prerequisites of state formation) and the first appearance of the state.

Around 12,000 BC, the world’s population stood at between two and four million; by 2000 BC, it was around 25 million. But the vast majority of people had no contact with states as late as the end of the 15th century – Europe’s middle ages. These people survived on a mix of agriculture and foraging, much like the inhabitants of those early settlements on the plains of Mesopotamia before 4000 BC.

Scott describes the creation, from around 4000 BC, of what he calls “late-Neolithic multispecies resettlement camps”. Faced with a shortage of wild resources, these made use of domesticated animals and plants. Life in these settlements was much tougher than foraging, and the daily drudgery, chronic illness and epidemics brought on by increased reliance on domesticated species are apparent in skeletal remains and sudden collapses in population.

As the Danish agricultural economist Ester Boserup and some anthropologists have noted, there is little reason to imagine foragers would have adopted this way of life unless they were hungry, afraid or coerced.

A combination of factors seems to have caused people to cluster in those Mesopotamian plains, including rising populations in areas where wild food was more abundant, a cold spell in the climate, and possibly a rise in sea level. The populations in Scott’s camps developed even better craft skills and social cohesion.

Early state development around the world has another defining feature, a staple diet of cereals. By contrast, agricultures based on tubers or pulses have no fixed harvest period and create no stockpiles. As Scott remarks, there are no early states founded on manioc, yam or sweet potato.

But the annual grain harvest creates two problems: storage, which requires protection; and vulnerability to thieving supervisors or outside raiders. It also ties producers to their store in time and space – no wandering off with a bow and arrow.

It seems likely, says Scott, that at first there was a voluntary approach to collective labour in fields, and to grain being pooled for safekeeping and even redistribution to the needy. But this created all the technical and organisational know-how for an increasingly coercive state. Constrained to a relatively small area, people were dependent on central grain stores, and grew used to supervision of both food distribution and their labour – things that feature almost obsessively in early writing.

By 3000 BC, we have the first definitive evidence of city states, with kings, bureaucracies, compulsory labour, taxation and punishment for non-compliance. These early states were also very fragile, prone to epidemics, soil degradation and political collapse.

Predictably, then, those early city states in Mesopotamia soon entered a long period of rivalry and shifting alliances. A key element was the struggle to dominate trade with hinterland peoples who had access to stone, timber and other resources not found on the alluvial plains.

This became a common theme among the emerging cereal states and was mirrored much later elsewhere, for example, in China’s “warring states” period, starting in the 5th century BC. Victors subjected conquered neighbours to tribute, bondage and forced resettlement, particularly to do unskilled work in erecting city walls and irrigation. Thousands of identical, crude, bevelled pottery bowls found around Mesopotamia suggest measured rations for gang labour.

“For at least 4000 years, there were settled communities but no evidence of state power”

Slavery and severe punishment for escapees remained at the heart of subsequent regional kingdoms and empires. Each civilisation retained trade links with those in surrounding areas, the so-called barbarians. These were typically pastoralists who often kept some foraging component to their diets, and tended to be healthier and to have more personal freedoms.

This set up a dynamic that repeated into the last millennium, with people in the non-state periphery trading goods and slaves, and periodically raiding cereal-based cities. Tied together in this tense relationship, roaming pastoralists and urban states (Scott’s “dark twins” of history) slowly captured or wiped out foragers and their way of life.

The same dark twins are in evidence in Suzman’s affectionate and thoughtful book. Many of the San were compelled to work on cattle ranches in miserable and often violent conditions, while their foraging territories were fenced off by surrounding pastoralists or ranchers. Some still remember the “old times”, but knowledge of the wild food sources they once relied on is dwindling. Groups are resettled in remote camps with a few shops, useless to them without money.

Under these new conditions, the forager mindset, its distaste for authority, expectation of natural providence, and code of sharing and honour, is often utterly broken. Some turn to drink or give in to the inevitable by taking up low-paid menial work.

In this fashion, through neglect, abuse and misunderstanding, an ancient way of life is being finally extinguished by the imperatives of local agriculture and its state support, reducing biodiversity to dusty waste. Yet, Suzman argues, even now the Bushmen have much to teach us about a social order that, in many ways, offered a freer, fairer existence and a non-invasive adaptation to ecology.

Suzman and Scott have both written excellent books, which could serve on reading lists for geography, history and politics, as well as in their natural homes of archaeology and anthropology.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Unearthing power”

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“Scheidel believes in four horsemen of equalisation: war, disease, revolution and state collapse”

“For hunter-gatherers, failure to share is taboo, countered by pestering, gossip, ridicule, ostracism”

Aristotle wrote in his Politics that if machines could be made to obey or anticipate the will of humans and then function untended, “chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves”. The ancient Greeks were pretty handy with labour-saving devices, and although Aristotle was not predicting the imminent end of slavery in the 4th century BC, his logic remains impeccable.

Yet history has revealed barriers to the adoption of automation: if human labour is cheap, why invest in machines? And when technology is adopted, what happens to the servants or slaves? Throughout the medieval period, the only investments that interested squabbling feudal landowners were related to war. It took the profit motive of 18th-century capital investors to sponsor innovators and weigh the fine financial balance between machines and humans in producing everyday goods.

But as we know, the gains made by ordinary workers in the industrial period came only through bitter struggle and upheaval. Now in 2017, we are struggling again with newer disruptions and inequalities brought on by imbalances between humans and machines.

Past a threshold

Enter Dutch thinker Rutger Bregman, whose debut book Utopia for Realists has become an unexpected bestseller. Bregman accepts that many new jobs have emerged since early automation in the 1800s, but suggests that the pace of technological advance has now passed a threshold – and the rate of creation is now falling. He cites Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who coined the term “” to describe this most recent phase, in which wages no longer even partially keep step with technical productivity.

How is it that real incomes have barely risen since the 1970s, despite the most rapid technical advances in human history? Instead, inequality has grown to levels similar to those of the Roman Empire. The answer, suggests Bregman, is twofold: the output of modern automation is not met by adequate purchasing power, and labour has been drawn increasingly into administrative and transactional work that delivers no direct improvement in living standards.

To resolve these problems, first, if machines increasingly make more of the things that meet our needs, then a universal basic income (UBI) is no longer a pipe dream, but essential Ìęto permit us to buy those machine-made goods. It’s an old idea, toyed with by such unlikely fellow proponents as the 18th-century author of Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, and US president Richard Nixon. Now, argues Bregman, its time has finally come.

Second, the advantages of technology would be enhanced still further if futile admin could be reduced, and labour mainly refocused on activities that directly meet human needs. Bregman makes the argument vigorously, if perhaps a little unsympathetically, to those who, in search of a job, have found themselves in the financial sector.

In the banks, he says, clever minds concoct myriad, complex financial products that “don’t create wealth, but destroy it. These products are, essentially, like a tax on the rest of the population. Who do you think is paying for all those custom-tailored suits, sprawling mansions, and luxury yachts?”

‘QE for the people’

”ț°ù±đČ”łŸČčČÔ’s Utopia is light on discussion about how the UBI is to be funded, though. Money creation by central banks is already practised through “quantitative easing” (QE), but it goes to the commercial banks, in a largely futile effort to stimulate the economy with yet more debt. As a result, the idea of “QE for the people” is already appearing in political manifestos, in line with ”ț°ù±đČ”łŸČčČÔ’s argument, as a source of UBI.

If all this happens, we will need to watch for inflation. When the new UBI is spent, what will people buy? Will the industries that produce these goods or services have adequate investment to gear up? And can progressive governments ensure an orderly reorientation of labour, especially in the corporate sector?

As with previous historic efforts at imagining UBI, the changes that Bregman proposes will meet political resistance from vested interests and risk popular alarm if not carefully planned. Global corporations and their owners, the pension and insurance funds, will need to be persuaded by the economic restructuring implied – the shrinking of bank profit and transactional activity, and the need for capital assets, training and recruitment to be redirected to productive sectors.

The questions that Bregman poses must be addressed, and urgently: thought-through projections will be essential soon. It is possible that a modest UBI alone might jump-start a move in the right direction. Too large an amount, and an unprepared productive sector will not have enough capacity to meet the new demand, resulting in inflation and disappointment.

Complex issues

A more detailed treatment of the history, theory and political prospects for UBI is offered by Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, who also believe its time has come. They begin to address the complex social issues it raises in their book, Basic Income – who receives UBI, at what age, and can we avoid triggering unwanted cross-border migration?

Their work will be essential for the ongoing debate, but by their own admission, leaves much to tackle with regard to macroeconomic and corporate governance issues.

So, to guarantee that UBI doesn’t become a flash in the pan and ensure the smoothest possible transition away from dysfunctional modern economics, writers and thinkers will need to engage the public and professional imagination.

These authors make a brilliant start though — after all, how on Earth are we to pay for goods made by robots, and wouldn’t a world composed entirely of “wealth-creating” bankers starve to death?

[book_info title=”Utopia for Realists: And how we can get there” author=”Rutger Bregman” publisher=”Bloomsbury Publishing” title_link=”http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/utopia-for-realists-9781408890264/”]

[book_info title=”Basic Income: A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy” author=”Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght” publisher=”Harvard University Press” title_link=”http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674052284″]