Ep. 0087: Grain and the State
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Join CJ as he discusses:
- How people lived in the Paleolithic Era, which actually encompasses the vast majority of human existence
- The Neolithic Revolution and the coming of agriculture
- The domestication of grains and their rise to dominate global food production
- The rise of “civilization,” including its downsides
- The characteristics of grains which make them the preferred food crops of states
- Alternatives to sedentary, fixed-field, grain-dominated agriculture, which states tend to discourage
- A few thoughts and observations about grains and states in the modern world
External Links
- A lecture by James C. Scott entitled, “How Grains Domesticated Us”, which is the one from which I played an excerpt and to which I referred several times in the show
- Another great James C. Scott lecture, “The Art of Not Being Governed” which discusses a lot of similar and related topics (I also highly recommend Scott’s book The Art of Not Being Governed — see below)
- The Dangerous History Podcast is covered by a BipCot No Gov license; learn more at BipCot.org
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Wheat photo attribution: By User:Bluemoose (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC BY-SA 2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5-2.0-1.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
