The Golden Age of the Barbarians
James Scott
(from the book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States)
The history of the peasants is written by the townsmen
The history of the nomads is written by the settled
The history of the hunter-gatherers is written by the farmers
The history of the nonstate peoples is written by the court scribes
All may be found in the archives catalogued under “Barbarian Histories”
Looked at from outer space in 2,500 BCE, the very earliest states in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Indus Valley (for example, Harrapan) would have been scarcely visible. In, say, 1,500 BCE there would have been a few more centers (Maya and the Yellow River), but their overall geographical presence may actually have shrunk. Even at the height of the Roman and early Han “superstates,” the area of their effective control would have been stunningly modest. With respect to population, the vast majority throughout this period (and arguably up until at least 1600 CE) were still nonstate peoples: hunters and gatherers, marine collectors, horticulturalists, swiddeners, pastoralists, and a good many farmers who were not effectively governed or taxed by any state.[1] The frontier, even in the Old World, was still sufficiently capacious to beckon those who wished to keep the state at arm’s length.[2]
States, being largely agrarian phenomena, would, with the exception of some intermontane valleys, have looked like small alluvial archipelagoes, located on the floodplains of a handful of major rivers. Powerful as they might become, their sway was ecologically confined to the well-watered, rich soils that could support the concentration of labor and grain that was the basis of their power. Outside this ecological “sweet spot,” in arid lands, in swamps and marshes, in the mountains, they could not rule. They might mount punitive expeditions and win an engagement or two, but rule was another thing. Most early states of any duration probably consisted of a directly ruled core region, a penumbra of peoples whose incorporation depended on the varying power and wealth of the state, and a zone quite outside its reach. For the most part, states did not seek to rule fiscally sterile areas beyond the core that would not normally repay the cost of governing them. Instead, states sought military allies and proxies in the hinterland and traded to obtain the scarce raw materials they needed.
The hinterland was not simply an ungoverned—or better put, a not-yet-governed—zone, but rather a zone governed, from the perspective of the state center, by “barbarians” and “savages.” Though hardly precise Linnaean categories, “barbarians” often denoted a hostile pastoral people who posed a military threat to the states but who might, under certain circumstances, be incorporated; “savages,” on the other hand, were seen as foraging and hunting bands not suitable as raw material for civilization, who might be ignored, killed, or enslaved. When Aristotle wrote of slaves as tools, one imagines that he had in mind “savages” and not all barbarians (for example, Persians).
The lens of “domestication” in general is useful for making sense of “barbarians” from the perspective of state centers. The grain growers and bondspeople at the state core are domesticated subjects, while foragers, hunters, and nomads are wild, savage, undomesticated peoples: barbarians. Barbarians are to domesticated subjects as wildlife, vermin, and varmints are to domesticated livestock. They are uncaptured at the very least and, at worst, represent a nuisance and threat that must be exterminated. In turn, weeds in the cultivated field are to domesticated crops as barbarians are to civilized life. They are a nuisance, and they and the birds, mice, and rats who appear uninvited at the harvest supper in the fields are a danger to the state and civilization. Weeds, varmints, vermin, and barbarians—the “undomesticated”—threaten civilization in the grain state. They must either be mastered and domesticated or, failing that, exterminated or rigorously excluded from the domus.
I should make it crystal clear, once again, that I am using the term “barbarian” in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek sense. “Barbarian” and its many cousins—“savage,” “wild,” “raw,” “for- est people,” “hill people”—are terms invented in state centers to describe and stigmatize those who had not yet become state subjects. In the Ming Dynasty the term “cooked,” referring to assimilating barbarians, meant, in practice, those who had settled, had been registered on the tax rolls, and who were in principle governed by Han magistrates—in short, those who were said to have “entered the map.” A group that was identical in language and culture would often be divided into “raw” and “cooked” fractions entirely on the basis of whether they were outside or inside state administration. For the Chinese as for the Roman, the barbarians and tribes began precisely where taxes and sovereignty stopped. Let’s understand, then, that henceforth, when I use the term “barbarian,” it is merely an ironic shorthand for “nonstate peoples.”
CIVILIZATIONS AND THEIR BARBARIAN PENUMBRA
We have seen in great detail how the early state was radically unstable for internal structural, epidemiological, and political reasons. It was also vulnerable to predation from other states. But I wish to argue here that the threat posed by barbarians was perhaps the single most important factor limiting the growth of states for a period measured more in millennia than in centuries. From the Amorite incursions into Mesopotamia, through the Greek “dark age,” the fragmentation of the Roman Empire, and the Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty in China, and perhaps beyond, the barbarian presence was the greatest danger to the state’s existence and, at the very least, the crucial constraint on its growth.[3] I am speaking less of the barbarian “stars”—the Mongols, the Manchu, the Huns, the Mughals, Osman—than of the countless bands of nonstate peoples who gnawed relentlessly with raids on sedentary, grain-farming communities. Many of the nonstate, raiding peoples were themselves at least semisedentary: for example, Pathans, Kurds, Berbers.
The way we can best conceptualize this activity, I believe, is to see it as an advanced and lucrative form of hunting and foraging. Sedentary communities represented, for mobile foragers, an irresistible site for concentrated gathering. Some idea of the pickings they offered can be gained by this inventory of the loot from a large (ultimately unsuccessful!) hill raid on a lowland settlement in western India in late colonial times: 72 bullocks, 106 cows, 55 calves, 11 female buffaloes, 54 brass and copper pots, 50 pieces of clothing, 9 blankets, 19 iron ploughs, 65 axes, ornaments, and grain.[4]
The period between the first appearance of states and their hegemony over nonstate peoples represented, I believe, something of a “golden age of barbarians.” What I mean is that it was in many ways “better” to be a barbarian because there were states—so long as those states were not too strong. States were juicy sites for plunder and tribute. Just as the state required a sedentary grain-growing population for its predations, so did this concentration of settled people, with their grain, livestock, manpower, and goods, serve as a site of extraction for more mobile predators. When the predator’s mobility was enhanced by camels, horses, stirrups, or swift boats of shallow draft, the range and effectiveness of their raids was greatly extended. The returns to barbarian life would have been far less attractive in the absence of these concentrated foraging sites. If we think of the carrying capacity of barbarian ecology, my argument is that it was enhanced by the existence of petty states in much the same way that it would have been enhanced by a propitious stand of wild cereals or a migration of game. It would be hard to tell whether the microparasites of sedentary communities or the outbreaks of macroparasitic raiders contributed more to the limits on the growth of states and their populations.
Setting precise dates to the “golden age of barbarians” is surely a fool’s errand. The history and geography of any particular area is likely to yield a very different configuration of state-barbarian relations, and one that is likely to shift over time. The Amorite “incursions” into Mesopotamia around 2,100 BCE may have represented a notable peak of barbarian “troubles,” but it was surely not the only occasion on which the Mesopotamian city-states faced trouble from their hinterlands. And here we should recall that virtually all of our knowledge of barbarian “threats” comes from state sources—sources that might well have self-interested reasons to downplay or, more likely, to overdramatize the threat and to define the term “barbarian” narrowly or widely.
Conscious of the complexities, Barry Cunliffe bravely ventures to propose that, in the Mediterranean at least, the barbarian disruption of the ancient state world lasted for more than a millennium until 200 BCE. Within this period he identifies particularly the century between 1,250 and 1,150 BCE as the time when “the whole edifice of centralized, bureaucratic, palace-based exchange fell apart.”[5] The virtual abandonment of many state centers at this time is often attributed to the so-called sea people invaders, perhaps of Mycenaean and Philistine origin, about whom little is known.[6] They raided Egypt in 1,224 BCE and again in 1,186 BCE, along with nomads from the desert to the west of the Nile. At about the same time, fortifications and towers proliferate in the northern Mediterranean, presumably to defend against raiders moving by land and by sea. Over the course of this long millennium a large proportion of the Mediterranean population had been displaced not once but several times. By the second century BCE, Cunliffe judges, “an all-pervading ethos of raiding had largely subsided,” but not before the Celts had raided as far as Delphi.[7]
At the end of this period, on the other side of the Eurasian continent, the Qin and Han Dynasties were having their own troubles with the Xiongnu tribal confederacy over control of the lands within the large “Ordos loop” of the Yellow River. In the middle of the continent, Bennett Bronson claims that the relative absence of any strong states in the Indian subcontinent was due largely to the many powerful nomadic raiding groups that prevented states from consolidating. From the fourth century BCE until 1600 CE, “the entire northern two-thirds of the subcontinent produced exactly two moderately durable, region-spanning states: the [Chandra] Gupta and the Mughal,” Bronson writes. “Neither of these nor any of the smaller northern states lasted longer than two centuries and anarchical interregna were everywhere prolonged and severe.”[8]
Owen Lattimore, the pioneer of border studies in the context of China’s relationship with its powerful, militarized, nomadic fringe to the north, sees a more general, continental pattern. He points to state walls and fortification against nonstate peoples springing up from western Europe through central Asia into China, and lasting until the Mongol invasions of Europe in the thirteenth century. It seems a rather extravagant claim, but, coming as it does from Lattimore, it merits pondering. “There was a linked chain of fortified northern frontiers of the ancient civilized world from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The earliest frontier walls appear to have been in the Iranian sector. The walled frontiers of the western Roman Empire in Britain and on the Rhine and Danube faced forest, upland, and meadow tribes, now pastoral nomads.”[9]
The greatest boon that the appearance of states provided to barbarians, however, was less as sites for predation than as trading posts. Because states represented such narrow agro-ecologies, they relied on a host of products from outside the alluvium to survive. State and nonstate peoples were natural trading partners. As a state grew in population and wealth, so too did its commercial exchange with nearby barbarians. In the first millennium BCE there was a veritable explosion in seaborne commerce in the Mediterranean that exponentially increased the volume and value of trade. The greater part of the “barbarian economy” in this context was devoted to supplying lowland markets with raw materials and goods they required, much of which was in turn destined for reexport to other ports. A good part of what barbarians supplied was livestock in the most expansive sense of the term: cattle, sheep, and above all slaves. In return they received textiles, grain, iron- and copperware, pottery, and artisan luxury items, much of it too from “international” trade. Barbarian groups that controlled one or more of the major trading routes (usually a navigable river) to a major lowland center could reap large rewards and became, in turn, conspicuous sites of luxury, talent, and, if you will, “civilization.”
Plunder of and trade with the state, then, made economic life on the state’s margins more viable and lucrative than it could otherwise have been. But plunder and trade were not simply alternative modes of appropriation; as we shall see, they were very effectively combined in ways that mimicked certain forms of statecraft.
BARBARIAN GEOGRAPHY, BARBARIAN ECOLOGY
“Barbarians” are certainly not a culture or a lack thereof. Neither are they a “stage” of historical or evolutionary progress in which the highest stage is life in the state as taxpayer, in line with the historical discourse of incorporation shared by the Romans and Chinese. For Caesar incorporation meant moving from tribal (friendly or hostile) to “provincial” and perhaps eventually to Roman. For the Han it meant progressing from “raw” (hostile) to “cooked” (friendly) and perhaps eventually to Han. The intermediate steps “provincial” and “cooked” were specific categories of administrative and political incorporation to be followed, in ideal circumstances, by cultural assimilation. Put clinically and structurally, “barbarian” is best understood as a position vis-à-vis a state or empire. Barbarians are a people adjacent to a state but not in it. As Bronson puts it, they are simply “on the outside looking in.”[10] Barbarians did not pay taxes; if they had a fiscal relationship with the state at all, they were expected to offer tribute as a collectivity.
Describing state geography and ecology in the ancient world is relatively easy on account of the agrarian and demographic requirements of state making. States were likely to arise only in rich, well-watered, bottomland soils. Until the last half of the first millennium BCE, when larger, sail-driven ships could transport larger cargoes longer distances, states had to hug the grain core quite tightly. Barbarian geography and ecology is, on the other hand, much harder to describe concisely because it constitutes a large and residual category; basically they comprise all those geographies that are unsuitable for state making. The barbarian zones most often referred to are the mountains and steppes. In fact, almost any area that was difficult to access, illegible and trackless, and unsuitable for intensive farming might qualify as a barbarian zone. Thus uncleared dense forest, swamps, marshes, river deltas, fens, moors, deserts, heath, arid wastes, and even the sea itself have been cast into this category by state discourse. A great many apparently ethnic names turn out to be, when translated literally, a description of a people’s geography, applied to them by state discourse: “hill people,” “swamp dwellers,” “forest people,” “people of the steppes.” The only reason pastoral nomads of the steppe, mountain people, and sea people figure so prominently in state discourse about barbarians is that such peoples were not only out of reach but were also the most likely to pose a military threat to the state itself.
The figurative and often literal limit of a state’s reach was often demarcated by a state-erected physical boundary between “civilized” and “barbarian” zones. The first great wall of this kind was the 250-kilometer-long “wall of the land” built around 2,000 BCE between the Tigris and Euphrates by command of Sumerian king Sulgi. Though it is typically described as a wall to keep the barbarian Amorites out (a task at which it failed), Anne Porter and others believe it had the additional purpose of keeping the southern Mesopotamian taxpaying cultivators in.[11] For the early Roman Empire, the barbarians “began” on the east bank of the Rhine, beyond which the Roman legions never ventured after their catastrophic defeat in the battle of Teutoburg Forest (9 CE). The Balkans, “a land of mountains and valleys cut by countless streams and with few large areas of flat land,” were similarly marked by a boundary (limes) of fortifications.[12]
Barbarian geography corresponded with what is distinctive about barbarian ecology and demography. As a residual category it describes modes of subsistence and settlement that are not those of the state grain core. In a Sumerian myth, the goddess Adnigkidu is admonished not to wed a nomad god, Martu, as follows: “He who dwells in the mountains . . . having carried on much strife . . . he knows not submission, he eats uncooked food, he has no house where he lives, he is not interred when he dies . . .” One can scarcely imagine a more telling mirror image of life as a grain-producing, domus-based state subject.[13] The Record of Rites (Liji) of the Zhou Dynasty contrasts the barbarian tribes who ate meat (raw or cooked) instead of the “grain food” of the civilized. Among the Romans, the contrast between their diet of grain and the Gallic diet of meat and dairy products was a key marker of their claim to civilized status. Barbarians were dispersed and highly mobile, and lived in small settlements. They might be shifting cultivators, pastoralists, fisher folk, hunter-gatherers, foragers, or small-scale collector-traders. They might even plant some grain and eat it, but grain was unlikely to be their dominant staple as it was for state subjects. They were, by virtue of their mobility, their diverse livelihoods, and their dispersal, unsuitable raw material for appropriation and state building, and it was for precisely these reasons that they were called barbarians. Such distinctions admitted of differences in degree, and this, in turn, served to demarcate, for the state, those barbarians who were plausible candidates for civilization from those who were beyond the pale. To Roman eyes, the Celts, who cleared land, raised some grain, and built trading towns (oppida), were “high-end” barbarians, while acephalous, mobile hunting bands were irredeemable. Barbarian societies can, like the oppida Celts, be quite hierarchical, but their hierarchy is generally not based on inherited property and is typically flatter than the hierarchy found in agrarian kingdoms.
The vagaries of geography often meant that the central grain-core territory was fragmented by, say, hills and swamps, in which case the state’s core might include several “unincorporated” barbarian areas. A state often bypassed or hopped over recalcitrant zones in the process of knitting together nearby arable areas. The Chinese, for example, distinguished between “inner barbarians,” who were in such quarantined areas, and “outer barbarians,” at the frontiers of the state. The civilizational narratives of the early states imply, if they don’t state directly, that some primitives, through luck or cleverness, domesticated crops and animals, founded sedentary communities, and went on to found towns and states. They left primitivism behind for state and civilization. The barbarians, according to this account, are the ones who did not make the transition, those who remained outside. After this great divergence there were two spheres: the civilized sphere of settlement, towns, and states on the one hand and the primitive sphere of mobile, dispersed hunters, foragers, and pastoralists on the other. The membrane between the two spheres was permeable, but only in one direction. Primitives could enter the sphere of civilization—this was, after all, the grand narrative—but it was inconceivable that the “civilized” could ever revert to primitivism.
We now know this view to be, on the historical evidence, fundamentally wrong. It is mistaken for at least three reasons. First, it ignores the millennia of flux and movement back and forth between sedentary and nonsedentary modes of subsistence and the many mixed options in between. Fixed settlement and plough agriculture were necessary to state making, but they were just part of a large array of livelihood options to be taken up or abandoned as conditions changed. Second, the very act of establishing a state and its subsequent enlargement was itself typically an act of displacement. Some of the preexisting population may have been absorbed, but others, perhaps a majority, may have moved out of range. Many of a state’s adjacent barbarian populations may well have been, in effect, refugees from the state-making process itself. Third, once states were created, as we have seen, there were frequently as many reasons for fleeing them as for entering them. If, as the standard narrative suggests, people are attracted to the state for the opportunities and security that it offers, it is also true that high rates of mortality coupled with flight from the state sphere were sufficiently offsetting that slaving, wars for capture, and forced resettlement seemed integral to the manpower needs of the early state.
The key point for our purposes is that, once established, the state was disgorging subjects as well as incorporating them. Causes for flight varied enormously—epidemics, crop failures, floods, salinization, taxes, war, and conscription—provoking both a steady leakage and occasionally a mass exodus. Some of the runaways went to neighboring states, but a good many of them—perhaps especially captives and slaves—left for the periphery and other modes of subsistence. They became, in effect, barbarians by design. Over time an increasingly large proportion of nonstate peoples were not “pristine primitives” who stubbornly refused the domus, but ex–state subjects who had chosen, albeit often in desperate circumstances, to keep the state at arm’s length. This process, detailed by many anthropologists, among whom Pierre Clastres is perhaps the most famous, has been called “secondary primitivism.”[14] The longer states existed, the more refugees they disgorged to the periphery. Places of refuge where they accumulated over time became “shatter zones,” as their linguistic and cultural complexity reflected that they were peopled by various pulses of refugees over an extended period.
The process of secondary primitivism, or what might be called “going over to the barbarians,” is far more common than any of the standard civilizational narratives allow for. It is particularly pronounced at times of state breakdown or interregna marked by war, epidemics, and environmental deterioration. In such circumstances, far from being seen as regrettable backsliding and privation, it may well have been experienced as a marked improvement in safety, nutrition, and social order. Becoming a barbarian was often a bid to improve one’s lot.
Nomads, Christopher Beckwith has noted,
were in general much better fed and led easier, longer lives than the inhabitants of the large agricultural states. There was a constant drain of peoples escaping from China to the realms of the eastern steppe, where they did not hesitate to proclaim the superiority of the nomad lifestyle. Similarly, many Greeks and Romans joined the Huns and other Central Eurasian peoples, where they lived better and were treated better than they had been back home.[15]
Such voluntary self-nomadization was neither rare nor isolated. For China’s Mongol frontier, Owen Lattimore, as noted earlier, has made the case most forcefully that the purpose of the Great Wall(s) was as much to keep the Chinese taxpayers inside as to block barbarian incursions and that, nonetheless, a great many taxpaying Han cultivators had “distanced themselves” from state space—especially during times of political and economic disorder—and “attached themselves quite readily to barbarian rulers.”[16] Lattimore, as a student of frontiers in general, quotes a scholar of the late Western Roman Empire who noted the same pattern there too, as “the pitiless collection of taxes and the helplessness of citizens before wealthy law-breakers” drove Roman citizens to seek the protection of Attila’s Huns.[17] “In other words,” Lattimore adds, “there were times when the law and order of the barbarians was superior to those of civilization.”[18]
Precisely because this practice of going over to the barbarians flies directly in the face of civilization’s “just so” story, it is not a story one will find in the court chronicles and official histories. It is subversive in the most profound sense. The attraction of the Goths in the sixth century CE was at least as great as that of the Huns had been earlier. Totila (king of the Ostrogoths, 541–552 CE) not only accepted slaves and coloni into the Gothic army, but even turned them against their senatorial masters by promising them freedom and ownership of land. “In so doing he permitted and provided an excuse for something the Roman lower classes had been willing to do since the 3rd century”: “to become Goths out of despair over their economic situation.”[19]
A great many barbarians, then, were not primitives who had stayed or been left behind but rather political and economic refugees who had fled to the periphery to escape state-induced poverty, taxes, bondage, and war. As states proliferated and grew over time, they ground out ever greater numbers who voted with their feet. The existence of a large frontier—rather like migration to the New World for poor Europeans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—provided a less dangerous avenue of relief than rebellion.[20] Without romanticizing life on the barbarian fringe, Beckwith, Lattimore, and others make it clear that leaving state space for the periphery was experienced less as a consignment to outer darkness than as an easing of conditions, if not an emancipation. As the state was weakened and under threat, the temptation was to press harder on the core to make good the losses which then risked further defections in a vicious cycle. A scenario of this kind, it appears, was partly to blame for the collapse of the Cretan and Mycenaean centralized palatial state (circa 1,100 BCE). “Under bureaucratic pressure to increase yield, the peasantry would despair and move away to fend for themselves, leaving the palace-dominated territory depopulated, much as the archaeological evidence suggests,” Cunliffe writes. “Collapse would follow quickly.”[21]
We return briefly to the imperative of manpower. The early state was successful to the extent that it could amass an appropriation zone consisting of grain growers packed together on productive soil. Holding that population in place or, failing that, replenishing losses was the key to statecraft. Confinement could help. “The only way to avoid losing population, power and wealth to central Eurasia was to build walls, limit trading at the frontier cities, and attack steppe peoples as often as necessary to destroy them or keep them away.”[22]
Tribes are, in the first instance, an administrative fiction of the state; tribes begin where states end. The antonym for “tribe” is “peasant”: that is, a state subject. That tribality is above all a relationship to the state is captured nicely by the Roman practice of reverting to the use of former tribal names to describe provincial populations that had broken away and rebelled against Rome. The fact that barbarians who menaced states and empires and therefore made it into the history books bear distinct names—Amorites, Scythians, Xiongnu, Mongols, Alamanni, Huns, Goths, Junghars—conveys an impression of cohesion and cultural identity that is usually wildly at odds with the facts. These groups were all loose confederacies of disparate peoples brought together briefly for military purposes and then characterized by the threatened state as a “people.” Pastoralists in particular have remarkably flexible kinship structures, allowing them to incorporate and shed group members depending on such things as available pasture, number of livestock, and the tasks at hand—including military tasks. Like states, they too are typically manpower hungry and therefore quickly work refugees or captives into the lineage kinship structure.
For the Romans and the Tang Dynasty, tribes were territorial units of administration, having little or nothing to do with the characteristics of the people so designated. A great many of the so-called tribal names were simply place names: a particular valley, a range of hills, a stretch of river, a forest. In some cases the term might designate the character of the presumed group—for example, a group the Romans called Cimbri, which means “robbers” or “brigands.” The aim of both the Romans and Chinese was to find or, failing that, simply to designate a leader or chief who would subsequently be responsible for the good behavior of his people. Under the Chinese system (tusi) of “using barbarians to rule barbarians” a tributary chief was appointed, given titles and privileges, and held accountable by Han officials for “his people.” Over time, of course, such an administrative fiction might take on an autonomous existence of its own. Once in place the fictions were institutionalized by courts, tribute payments, lower native officials, land records, and public works, structuring that part of native life that involved contact with the state. A “people” originally conjured out of whole cloth by administrative fiat might come to adopt that fiction as a conscious, even defiant, identity. In Caesar’s evolutionary scheme, described earlier, tribes preceded states. Given what we now know, it would be more accurate to say that states preceded tribes and, in fact, largely invented them as an instrument of rule.
RAIDING
After a raid by people from beyond the alluvium, a well-to-do resident of Ur wrote the following lament:
He who came from the highland has carried my possessions to the highlands . . . The swamp has swallowed my possessions . . . Men ignorant of silver have filled their hands with my silver. Men ignorant of gems have fastened my gems around their necks.[23]
While the density of grain, population, and livestock in a concentrated space is the source of a state’s power, it is also the source of its potentially fatal vulnerability to mobile raiders.[24] To be sure, the state is often no richer than its periphery, but as we have seen, the decisive difference is that the wealth of the state, or any sedentary community, is all conveniently stacked up in a confined space, while the wealth of the periphery is widely dispersed. Mobile raiders, especially if they are mounted, have the military initiative. They can arrive at a time and place of their choosing and in sufficient numbers to overwhelm the weakest point of a settled community or to intercept a trading caravan. If they are numerous enough, they can take a fortified community. Their advantage lies in lightning raids; they are unlikely, for example, to lay siege to a fortified city, as the longer they stay put the longer a state has to mobilize against them, thus nullifying their tactical advantage. Under premodern conditions and perhaps even until the era of cannons, mobile armies of pastoralists have generally been superior to the aristocratic and peasant armies of states.[25] Even in regions without pastoralists and horses, the general pattern seems to be that more mobile peoples—hunter-gatherers, swiddeners, and boat people—tend to dominate and extract tribute from sedentary horticulturalists and farmers.[26]
The well-known Berber saying “Raiding is our agriculture,” cited in my introduction, is significant. It gestures, I think, in the direction of an important truth about the parasitic quality of raiding. The granaries of a sedentary community may represent two or more years of agrarian toil that raiders can appropriate in a flash. Penned or corralled livestock are, in the same sense, living granaries that can be confiscated. And since the booty of a raid also typically included slaves to ransom, keep, or sell, they too represented a concentrated store of value and productivity—reared at considerable expense—that could be taken away in a day. From an even broader perspective, however, one might say that one parasite was displacing another, inasmuch as the raiders were confiscating and dispersing the accumulated assets of what had been, until then, a concentrated site of appropriation reserved exclusively for the state.[27]
Barbarian raiders were, for their part, relatively safe from retaliation by the state. Being mobile and dispersed, they could usually simply melt away, often into the hills, swamps, and trackless grasslands, where state armies followed at their peril. State armies might be effective against fixed objectives and sedentary communities but were largely helpless campaigning against acephalous bands with no central authority with whom to negotiate or to defeat in battle.
Another way of expressing the relative immunity of, say, Mongol raiders from Chinese counterattack is to note the absence, as Lattimore does, of nerve centers in the grasslands.[28] If we are to believe the words that Herodotus puts in the mouth of a Scythian interlocutor, nomad raiders were quite conscious of the military advantages of having no fixed property. “For we Scythians have no towns or planted lands, that we might meet you the sooner in battle, [otherwise] fearing that the one [town] be taken or the other [crops] be wasted.”[29]
In the Mediterranean in the late second millennium BCE, the danger to states came less from grasslands and deserts than from the sea. Like the steppe or desert, the navigable sea offers unique opportunities for seaborne raiders to surprise coastal communities and sack them or, in some cases, to take them over as rulers. Sea nomads preyed on the huge growth in Mediterranean trade by piracy as well, the equivalent of the pastoralists preying on overland caravans. The king of Ugarit, near present-day Latakia in Syria, describes an attack on his kingdom when his own chariots and ships were absent: “Behold the enemy’s ships came here; my cities were burned and they did evil things in my country”; “The seven ships of the enemy that came here inflicted much damage upon us.”[30] In addition to their well-known attacks on Egypt and the Levant, naval raiders were probably responsible for the destruction of palatial Crete and the imperial Hittite heartland.[31] They were the precursors to other famed seaborne raiders such as the Vikings and the “sea gypsies” (orang laut) of Southeast Asia. Contemporary piracy in the Arabian Sea suggests that even today, speed, mobility, and surprise can, for a time at least, tactically prevail over “quasi-sedentary” container ships.
Little is known about the “sea pirates.” They may well have often operated out of Cyprus and have been responsible for several waves of attacks over more than a century. Like pastoralist raiders, they were an extremely heterogeneous lot in terms of their cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In state documents and chronicles they appear as a source of terror and dread. Modern research, however, has rehabilitated them as not just raiders but city builders in many of the realms they captured.
There is a deep and fundamental contradiction to raiding that, once grasped, suggests why it is a radically unstable mode of subsistence, one that is likely under most circumstances to evolve into something quite different. Carried to its logical conclusion, raiding is self-liquidating. If, say, raiders attack a sedentary community, carrying off its livestock, grain, people, and valuables, the settlement is destroyed. Knowing its fate, others will be reluctant to settle there. If raiders were to make a practice of such attacks, they would, if successful, have killed all the “game” in the vicinity or, better put, “killed the goose that lays the golden egg.” Much the same is true for raiders or pirates who attack caravans or shipping lanes. If they take everything, either the trade is extinguished or, more likely, it finds another, safer route.
Knowing this, raiders are most likely to adjust their strategy to something that looks more like a “protection racket.” In return for a portion of the trade goods, harvest, livestock, and other valuables, the raiders “protect” the traders and communities against other raiders and, of course, against themselves. The relationship is analogous to endemism in diseases in which the pathogen makes a steady living from the host rather than killing it off. As there are likely to be a plurality of raiding groups, each group is likely to have particular communities it “taxes” and guards. Raiding, often quite devastating, still occurs, but it is most likely to be an attack by raiders on a community protected by another raiding community. Such attacks represented a form of indirect warfare between rival raiding groups. Protection rackets that are routine and that persist are a longer-run strategy than one-time sacking and therefore depend on a reasonably stable political and military environment. In extracting a sustainable surplus from sedentary communities and fending off external attacks to protect its base, a stable protection racket like this is hard to distinguish from the archaic state itself.[32]
Ancient states as a whole, in addition to building walls and raising armies of their own, often resorted to paying off powerful barbarians not to raid. The payments might take many forms. They might, to save face, be described as “gifts” in exchange for formal submission and tribute. They might consist in awarding a raiding group a monopoly over the control of trade in a particular location or over a particular commodity. They might be disguised as payment to a militia that would ensure peace at the border. In return for the payment, the raiders would agree to plunder only enemies of their allied state, and the state, for its part, would often recognize the raider’s independence in a particular territory. Over time, if the arrangement lasted, the raider’s protected zone might come to resemble a provincial, quasi-autonomous government.[33]
Relations between the (Eastern) Han Dynasty around 200 CE and its nomadic raiding neighbors, the Xiongnu, is an illuminating example of political accommodation. The Xiongnu would make lightning raids and retreat back to the steppes before state forces could retaliate. Soon afterward, the Xiongnu would dispatch envoys to the court promising peace in return for favorable terms for border trade or direct subsidies. The arrangement would be sealed by a treaty in which the nomads appear as tributaries and make the appropriate performance of allegiance in return for large subsidies. The “reverse” tribute was enormous: one-third of the annual government payroll went to buying off the nomads. Seven centuries later, under the Tang, officials were delivering half a million bolts of silk to the Uighurs annually on similar terms. On paper it may have looked as if the nomads were tributary inferiors to the Tang emperor, but the actual flow of revenue and goods suggests the opposite in practice. The nomads were, in effect, collecting bribes from the Tang in exchange for not attacking.[34]
One imagines that such protection rackets were more common than the documents allow, inasmuch as they were likely to be secrets of state which, if fully revealed, would risk contradicting the public facade of an all-powerful state. Herodotus notes that the Persian kings paid annual tribute to the Cissians (residents of Susa in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains at the edge of the Mesopotamian alluvium) lest they raid the Persian heartland and endanger its overland caravan trade. The Romans, after several defeats in the fourth century BCE, paid the Celts one thousand pounds of gold to prevent raiding, a practice they would repeat with the Huns and Goths.
If we step back and widen the lens, barbarian-state relations can be seen as a contest between the two parties for the right to appropriate the surplus from the sedentary grain-and-manpower module. It is this module that both is the basis for state formation and is equally essential for barbarian accumulation. It is the prize. One-time plunder raiding is likely to kill the host altogether, while a stable protection racket mimics the process of state appropriation and is compatible with the long-run productivity of the grain core.
TRADE ROUTES AND TAXABLE GRAIN CORES
The earliest substantial communities were already dependent on trade and exchange with other ecological zones. The consolidation of larger states only increased this dependence. Given the early constraints on transportation, the juxtaposition in Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent of high plateau, intermontane valleys, piedmont steppe, and alluvium, along with navigable water, made possible a “vertical economy” of beneficial exchange.[35] Ur and Uruk were possible only by virtue of products from higher altitudes: stone, ores, oils, timber, limestone, soapstone, silver, lead, copper, grindstones, gems, gold, and, not least, slaves and captives. Most of these products were floated down watercourses. The longer and more navigable the river, the larger the potential polity. Smaller Mediterranean polities were miniature replications of this pattern. They were typically located on the alluvium of a river near the coast and on adjacent uplands and could thereby command trade and exchange for the whole watershed. “This combination was favored over time, thanks to its unrivalled ability to harness and integrate the food-mobilizing and wealth acquiring openings of both land and sea.”[36]
The barbarian “stars” best known to history were no different in kind from earlier and smaller nonstate peoples—hunters and gatherers, swiddeners, coastal foragers, herdsmen—who raided small states and traded with them. What was unique was the unprecedented magnification of scale: of the confederations of mounted warriors, of the wealth of the lowland states, and of the volume and reach of trade. The emphasis on raiding in most histories is understandable in view of the terror it evoked among elites of the threatened states who, after all, provide us with the written sources. This perspective overlooks the centrality of trade and the degree to which raiding was often a means rather than an end in itself. Christopher Beckwith’s emphasis on trade routes is illuminating:
Chinese, Greek and Arab historical sources agree that the steppe peoples were above all interested in trade. The careful manner in which Central Eurasians generally undertook their conquests is revealing. They attempted to avoid conflict and tried to get cities to submit peacefully. Only when they resisted, or rebelled, was retribution necessary . . . The Central Eurasians’ conquests were designed to acquire trade routes or trading cities. But the reason for the acquisition was to secure occupied territory that could be taxed in order to pay for the rulers’ socio-political infrastructure. If all this sounds exactly like what sedentary peripheral states were doing, that is because it was indeed the same thing.[37]
The early agrarian states and the barbarian polities had broadly similar aims; both sought to dominate the grain-and-manpower core with its surplus. The Mongols, among other raiding nomads, compared the agrarian population to ra’aya, “herds.”[38] Both sought to dominate the trade that was within reach. Both were slaving and raiding states in which the major booty of war and the major commodity in trade were human beings. In this respect they were competing protection rackets.
The linkage between raiding and trading is reflected in the Celtic fringe of the Roman Empire, particularly in Gaul. In Republican Rome, the Celts, as noted, were often paid off in gold for not raiding. Over time the Celtic towns (oppida) became, in effect, multiethnic trading posts along river routes to the Empire, dominating trade in that sector. In return for grain, oil, wine, fine cloth, and prestige goods, they might send raw materials, woolens, leather, salt pork, trained dogs, and cheeses to the Romans.[39]
The potential rewards for dominating land- and waterborne trade expanded exponentially as the trade itself expanded in the same fashion. That expansion had in part to do with technical factors such as improvement in boatbuilding, sail rigging, and navigation out of sight of the coast. Above all, of course, it depended on the substantial growth of both population and polities around the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the major rivers leading to them. Dating the expansion of trade is relatively arbitrary, but Barry Cunliffe notes that by around 1,500 BCE, major centers of population in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia were major consumers of products from distant markets, and Crete had become a major naval power in the Mediterranean on the basis of that trade.[40] Three hundred years later the notorious “sea people” appeared to dominate the urban coastal centers of Cyprus and to have eclipsed the older agrarian states in the control of trade. Originally, trade in such treasured commodities such as gold, silver, copper, tin, precious stones, fine textiles, cedar wood, and ivory had been monopolized, as far as possible, by the elites of the agrarian states. But by 1,500 BCE that monopoly had been broken, and, in any event, the volume and variety of goods had swollen beyond recognition.
Trade over long distances was hardly new. Even before the Neolithic, valued commodities, so long as they were small and light, were exchanged over great distances: obsidian, precious and semiprecious stones, gold, carnelian beads. What was new was not so much the range of the trade but the fact that it had come increasingly to include bulk commodities moved long distances across the entire Mediterranean. Egypt became the “breadbasket” of the eastern Mediterranean, shipping grain to Greece and later to Rome. What is crucial as well is that the market for goods that were raised, grown, collected, and foraged outside the agrarian core had an exponentially larger potential market. Goods from the mountains, high plateaus, marine fringes, and marshes that might previously have circulated locally were now traded “worldwide.” Beeswax and bitumen, used to caulk ships, were in great demand. Aromatic woods such as camphorwood and sandalwood, as well as aromatic resins such as frankincense and myrrh, were much prized. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of this transformation. Suddenly the periphery and semiperiphery of the early states were the sites of valuable commodities for which there was now an appreciable market. Foraging, hunting, and marine collecting became lucrative commercial activities.
A few brief analogies can help clarify what this shift meant. In the ninth century CE, with the growth of trade links between China and Southeast Asia, hunting and foraging in the forests of Borneo exploded. Some claim that the island, hitherto virtually unpopulated, was peopled by forest collectors hoping to take advantage of the trading opportunities in camphorwood, gold, hornbill ivory, rhinoceros horn, beeswax, rare spices, feathers, edible birds’ nests, tortoise shells, and so on. A second analogy, much later, might be the worldwide demand for ivory—in the North Atlantic mainly for piano keys and billiard balls—that set off a myriad of intertribal wars for control of the trade and, not incidentally, destroyed much of the elephant population. The trade in beaver pelts in North America is another case. Today, the demand in the Chinese and Japanese market for ginseng root, caterpillar fungus, and matsutake mushrooms has made foraging a commercial activity that occasionally resembles the Klondike gold rush.[41] On a smaller but no less revolutionary scale for their epoch, the various peripheries of the agrarian states became valuable commercial landscapes—in some ways more valuable than the alluvium itself—thoroughly enmeshed in Mediterranean-wide trade networks. The possibilities for hunters, foragers, and marine collectors had never been more promising.
Central Eurasia had a wealth of products to trade for goods from the agrarian states, especially once shipping opened distant markets. Beckwith provides an extensive list of such products recorded by early travelers. The list is enormous, but an abbreviated version will illustrate its variety: copper, iron, horses, mules, furs, hides, wax, amber, swords, armor, fabrics, cotton, wool, carpets, blanket cloth, felt, tents, stirrups, bows, fine woods, linseed, nuts, and, never absent from the list, slaves.[42] Raiding by nomadic groups, which resembled warfare by agrarian states, is best understood as a means of acquiring tributary communities and of dominating the trade that circulated through them. It was not a result of nomadic poverty, still less a desire for shiny objects. All nomadic societies were complex in the sense that they practiced some agriculture as well as herding and had a substantial artisan class, so that they were not normally in need of staple cereals or technical expertise from the agrarian states.
The barbarians, broadly understood, were perhaps uniquely positioned to take advantage—and in many cases direct charge—of the explosion in trade. They were, after all, by virtue of their mobility and dispersion across several ecological zones, the connective tissue between the various sedentary cereal-intensive states. As trade grew, mobile nonstate peoples were able to dominate the arteries and capillaries of that trade and exact tribute for doing so. Mobility was, if anything, even more critical with respect to seaborne trade across the Mediterranean. These nomads of the sea were, one archaeologist explains, in all probability seamen who originally hired out their services to the established agrarian kingdoms in “official trade.” As the scale of trade and its opportunities grew, they became an increasingly independent force capable of imposing themselves as coastal polities, raiding, trading, and exacting tribute on the model of their landward counterparts.[43]
DARK TWINS
State and nonstate peoples, agriculturalists and foragers, “barbarians” and “civilized” are twins, both in reality and semiotically. Each member of the pair conjures up its partner. And despite abundant historical evidence to the contrary, the peoples who have historically identified themselves as belonging to the ostensibly more “evolved” member of each pair—state people, agriculturalists, the “civilized”—have taken their identity as essential, permanent, and superior. The most tendentious of these pairs, the civilized-barbarian pair, are born together as twins. Lattimore has articulated this “dark twin” thesis most clearly:
Not only the frontier between civilization and barbarism, but barbarian societies themselves, were in large measure created by the growth and geographical spread of the great ancient civilizations. It is proper to speak of the barbarians as “primitive” only in that remote time when no civilization yet existed and when the forbearers of the civilized peoples were also primitive. From the moment civilization began to evolve . . . it recruited into civilization some of the people who had land and displaced others and the effect on those who were displaced [was] that . . . they modified their own economic practices and experimented with new kinds of specialization and they also evolved new forms of social cohesion and political organization, and new ways of fighting. Civilization itself created its own barbarian plague.[44]
Although Lattimore ignores the millions of nonstate foragers, shifting cultivators, and marine collectors who were not pastoralists, he does capture the parallel evolution of nomadism and states. These nomads, most especially those on horseback who “plagued” state centers, are best seen simply as the strongest competitors of the state for control of the agrarian surplus.[45] Hunters and gatherers or swiddeners might nibble at the state, but politically mobilized large confederations of mounted pastoralists were designed to extract wealth from sedentary states; they were a “state in waiting” or, as Barfield puts it, a “shadow empire.”[46] In the most robust cases, such as the itinerate state founded by Genghis Khan, the largest contiguous land empire in world history, and the “Comanche Empire” in the New World, we would be better advised to think of them as “horseback states.”[47]
The relationship between a nomadic periphery and an adjacent state could take any number of forms and was, in any case, highly volatile. At the predatory end it might simply consist of occasional raids punctuated by retaliatory expeditions by state armies. Caesar’s brutal campaigns in Gaul might be considered a rare example of a successful expedition that, despite many subsequent uprisings, extended Roman rule. In other cases, such as the Xiongnu, Uighurs, and Huns, the relationship might involve bribes, subsidies, and a kind of reverse tribute. Such arrangements, under which the barbarians received part of the proceeds of the sedentary grain complex in return for not raiding, might be thought of as a de facto joint sovereignty by state and barbarians. Under relatively stable conditions, such an equilibrium might approximate the frontier protection-racket model described earlier. Conditions, however, were rarely so stable with respect either to statecraft or to the often fragmented, fractious nomadic polity.
Two other “solutions” were possible, each of which, in effect, dissolved the dichotomy itself. The first was for the nomadic barbarians to conquer the state or empire and become a new ruling class. Such was the case at least twice in China’s history—the Yuan and Manchu/Qing Dynasties—and with Osman, founder of the Ottoman Empire. The barbarians became the new elite of the sedentary state, living at the capital and operating the state apparatus. As the Chinese proverb has it, “You can conquer a kingdom on horseback, but to rule it, you have to dismount.” The second alternative is far more common but less remarked upon, and that is for the nomads to become the cavalry/mercenaries of the state, patrolling the marches and keeping the other barbarians in check. In fact, it is the rare state or empire that has not recruited units from among the barbarians, often in return for trade privileges and local autonomy. Caesar’s pacification of Gaul was accomplished largely with Gallic troops. In this case, rather than conquering the state, the barbarians became part of the military arm of an existing state along the lines of, say, the Cossacks or the Gurkhas. This pattern, in the colonial setting, has been called “indigenous sub-imperialism.”[48] On a large scale the use of mercenaries poses its own risks for a sedentary state, as the Tang discovered when they, in effect, hired the Turkic Uighurs to suppress the huge An Lushan Rebellion.
The consensus among most “barbarian specialists” seems to be that nomadic pastoralists require sedentary communities as depots of manpower and revenue as well as trading outlets. Nomadic pastoralists have been known to forcibly resettle agricultural populations to create such depots. Furthermore, according to this view, barbarian confederations operate as “shadow empires” adjacent to and parasitic on large sedentary polities. Their quasi-derivative status is emphasized by the fact that they tend to disappear when their host collapses. As Nikolay Kradin puts it, “The degree of centralization among nomads is in direct proportion to the extent of the neighboring agricultural civilization . . .”
The imperial and quasi-imperial organization of the nomads in Eurasia first developed after the ending of the “axial age” from the middle of the first millennium BCE at the time of the mighty agricultural empires (Qin in China, Maur in India, the Hellenistic states of Asia Minor, the Roman Empire in Europe) and in those regions . . . where the nomads were forced into contact with highly organized, agricultural, urban societies.[49]
Kradin and others include among the pairs that arise and fall together the Xiongnu and the Han, the Turkish Khaghanat and the Tang, the Huns and the Romans, the “sea people” and the Egyptians, and perhaps the Amorites and the Mesopotamian city-states. Presumably the Yuan and Manchu Dynasties do not count in this series, as they swallow the sedentary kingdom rather than disappearing.
It is all too characteristic, though no less deplorable, that so much ink is devoted to the barbarian states and the empires they bedeviled. Like a capital city that dominates the news, they dominate the historical coverage. A more evenhanded history would chronicle the relationship of hundreds of smaller states with thousands of nearby nonstate peoples, not to mention the relation of predation and alliance between those nonstate peoples. In his account of Athens in the Peloponnesian Wars, for example, Thucydides discusses dozens of different hill and valley peoples: those with kings and without kings, those with whom Athens has relations of alliance, tribute, or enmity. Each of those pairs, were their histories known, would add immeasurably to our understanding of the relations between states and their nonstate neighbors.
A GOLDEN AGE?
There is, I believe, a long period, measured not in centuries but in millennia—between the earliest appearance of states and lasting until perhaps only four centuries ago—that might be called a “golden age for barbarians” and for nonstate peoples in general. For much of this long epoch, the political enclosure movement represented by the modern nation-state did not yet exist. Physical movement, flux, an open frontier, and mixed subsistence strategies were the hallmark of this entire period. Even the exceptional and often short-lived empires of this long epoch (the Roman, Han, Ming, and in the New World the Mayan peer polities and the Inka) could not impede large-scale population movements in and out of their political orbit. Hundreds and hundreds of petty states formed, thrived briefly, and decomposed into their elementary social units of villages, lineages, or bands. Populations were adept at modifying their subsistence strategies when circumstances dictated—abandoning the plough for the forest, the forest for swiddening, and swiddening for pastoralism. While the increase in population would have, by itself, encouraged more intensive subsistence strategies, the fragility of the state, its exposure to epidemics, and a large nonstate periphery would not have allowed us to discern anything like state hegemony until, say, 1600 CE at the earliest. Until then a large share of the world’s population had never seen a (routine) tax collector or, if they had seen one, still had the option of making themselves fiscally invisible.
There is no particular need to insist on the quasi-arbitrary date of 1600 CE. It roughly marks the end of the great Eurasian barbarian waves: the seaborne Vikings from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, Tamerlane’s great kingdom of the late fourteenth century, and the conquests of Osman and his immediate successors. Between them they destroyed, plundered, and conquered hundreds of polities large and small and displaced millions of people. They were also great slaving expeditions; among the major prizes of such campaigns were precious metals and human beings for sale. It is not so much that such raiding mixed with trade disappeared after 1600 CE as that it became more fragmented. Edward Gibbon, a comparatively rare voice with something to say on behalf of pagans, wondered whether there were any “barbarians” left in Europe in the late eighteenth century. (He might have considered the Barbary pirates, Macedonia, or the highland Scots, or have noticed that the Europeans had joined the Arabs in scouring the slaving ports of the African continent for slaves.) Outside Europe and the Mediterranean the pattern of raiding, trading, and slaving remained a major activity in the Malay world and in upland Southeast Asia among hill peoples. As states and durable gunpowder empires grew, the ability of nonstate peoples to raid and dominate small states shrank at a pace that depended greatly on the region and its geography.
The earliest states, because of the opportunities they opened for trade, supplemented by raiding and protection rackets, represented a qualitatively new environment for nonstate peoples. Now a good deal of the world around them was valuable; they could participate fully in the new opportunities for trade without becoming a subject of the state. There would have been periods when leaving behind the plough of a state subject to take up foraging, pastoralism, and marine collecting would have represented a rational economic calculation as well as a bolt for freedom. In such moments, it is likely that the proportion of barbarians vis-à-vis state subjects would have grown because life at the periphery had become more, not less, attractive.
The life of “late barbarians” would, on balance, have been rather good. Their subsistence was still spread across several food webs; being dispersed, they would have been less vulnerable to the failure of a single food source. They were more likely to be healthier and live longer—especially if they were female. More advantageous trade made for more leisure, thus further widening the leisure-drudgery ratio between foragers and farmers. Finally, and by no means trivial, barbarians were not subordinated or domesticated to the hierarchical social order of sedentary agriculture and the state. They were in almost every respect freer than the celebrated yeoman farmer. This is not a bad balance sheet for a class of barbarians over whom the waves of history were supposed to have rolled a long time ago.
There are, however, two deeply melancholy aspects of the golden age of barbarians. Each has directly to do with the ecologically given political fragmentation of barbarian life. Many of the trade goods brought to the trading states were, of course, other nonstate peoples who could be sold into bondage at the state core. So pervasive was this practice in mainland Southeast Asia that one can identify something like a chain of predation in which more strategically located and powerful groups raided their weaker and more dispersed neighbors. In so doing they reinforced the state core at the expense of their fellow barbarians.
The second melancholy aspect of the new livelihoods at the periphery afforded by states was, as previously noted, the sale of their martial skills to states as mercenaries. One would be hard put to find an early state that did not enlist nonstate peoples—sometimes wholesale—in their armies, to catch runaway slaves, and to repress revolts among their own restive populations. Barbarian levies had as much to do with building states as with plundering them. By systematically replenishing the state’s manpower base by slaving and by protecting and expanding the state with its military services, the barbarians willingly dug their own grave.
____________
[1] By “taxation” I mean any more or less regular charge on the production, labor, or revenue of subjects. In early states, “taxes” are likely to take the form of levies in kind (for example, from the harvest of cultivators) or the form of labor (corvée).
[2] My colleague Peter Perdue, an expert on the China borderland and nonstate people generally, would put the terminal date later, at the end of the eighteenth century, when, he observes, “nearly all the frontiers of the globe had been occupied by settlers and merchants, and global commodity traders were extracting resources from all the major continents”; personal communication.
[3] J. N. Postgate distinguishes, in the Mesopotamian case, “mountain” raids as compared with “pastoralist” raids, terming the latter as more likely to destroy the state; Early Mesopotamia, 9.
[4] Skaria, Hybrid Histories, 132.
[5] Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 229.
[6] For a useful summary of what we know about the “sea people” and what is in dispute, see Gitin, Mazar, and Stern, Mediterranean Peoples in Transition.
[7] Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 331.
[8] Bronson, “The Role of Barbarians in the Fall of States,” 208.
[9] Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” 486.
[10] Bronson, “The Role of Barbarians in the Fall of States,” 200.
[11] Porter, Mobile Pastoralism, 324. As Porter has also shown, the Amorites were more a branch of Mesopotamian society than “barbarians.” They were, to be sure, challengers and usurpers but they were not “outsiders” (61).
[12] Burns, Rome and the Barbarians, 150.
[13] Quoted in volume 1 of Coatsworth et al., Global Connections, 76.
[14] Clastres, La Société contre l’État.
[15] Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 76.
[16] Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” 476–481.
[17] Ibid., quoting E. A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 185–186.
[18] Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” 481.
[19] Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. Thomas J. Dunlap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 8, quoted in Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 333.
[20] Spartacus and his rebels, it should be noted, were seeking to leave Italy but were stopped by treachery and, finally, by Sulla’s army. For a history of state-fleeing practices in upland Southeast Asia, see my The Art of Not Being Governed.
[21] Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 238.
[22] Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 333–334.
[23] Wengrow, What Makes Civilization, 99.
[24] One could argue, analogously, that large herd animals, by virtue of being relatively “sedentary” and assembling in large numbers at certain times of the year, were uniquely vulnerable to “raiding,” aka “hunting,” by Homo sapiens with dogs, spears, and bows and hence likely to be among the among the first species to be threatened with extinction as soon as the population of such hunters became numerous.
[25] Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 321.
[26] Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies.
[27] Perdue reminds me that the relationship between mobile raiders and sedentary creatures may also be found in the animal and insect kingdoms. They are different and, to some degree, competitive subsistence strategies.
[28] Owen Lattimore, “On the Wickedness of Being Nomads.”
[29] Quoted in Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 69.
[30] Paul Astrom, “Continuity and Discontinuity: Indigenous and Foreign Elements in Cyprus Around 1200 BC,” in Gitin, Mazar, and Stern, Mediterranean Peoples in Transition, 80–86, quotation on 83.
[31] Susan Sherratt, “‘Sea Peoples’ and the Economic Structure of the Late Second Millennium in the Eastern Mediterranean,” in Gitin, Mazar, and Stern, Mediterranean Peoples in Transition, 292–313, quotation on 305.
[32] This logic is worked out nicely by Charles Tilly in “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime.”
[33] William Irons, “Cultural Capital, Livestock Raiding.”
[34] Barfield, “Tribe and State Relations,” 169–170.
[35] Flannery, “Origins and Ecological Effect of Early Domestication.”
[36] Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea, 358. See also the elegant schematic application of this logic to the traditional riverine statelets in the Malay world in Bronson, “Exchange at the Upstream and Downstream Ends.”
[37] Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 328–329. See also Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies.
[38] Fletcher, “The Mongols,” 42.
[39] Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans, 378.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World.
[42] Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road, 327–328.
[43] Artzy, “Routes, Trade, Boats and ‘Nomads of the Sea,’” 439–448.
[44] Lattimore, “The Frontier in History,” 504.
[45] Fletcher distinguishes between, on the one hand, “steppe” no- mads, who interact far less with settled peoples and agrarian states and for whom raiding is as important as trading, and, on the other, “desert” nomads, who are more likely to have routine trading relations with sedentary communities and urban society; Fletcher, “The Mongols,” 41.
[46] Barfield, “The Shadow Empires.”
[47] See, in this connection, Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan, and Hämäläinen, Comanche Empire.
[48] Ferguson and Whitehead, “The Violent Edge of Empire,” 23.
[49] Kradin, “Nomadic Empires in Evolutionary Perspective,” 504. See also Barfield, “Tribe and State Relations,” for a similar view.
parfois 