## Metadata - Author: [[James C. Scott]] - Full Title: Against the Grain - Category: #books ## Highlights - Mesopotamia (Greek for “between the rivers”), ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0747RTP2W&location=269)) - There are, even today, large stands of wild wheat in Anatolia from which, as Jack Harlan famously showed, one could gather enough grain with a flint sickle in three weeks to feed a family for a year. ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0747RTP2W&location=277)) - We owe our relatively large brain and relatively small gut (compared with other mammals, including primates), it is claimed, to the external predigestive help that cooking provides. ([Location 359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0747RTP2W&location=359)) - One might imagine that ancient domesticated legumes, say—peas, soybeans, peanuts, or lentils, all of which are nutritious and can be dried for storage—might serve as a tax crop. The obstacle in this case is that most legumes are indeterminate crops that can be picked as long as they grow; they do not have a determinate harvest, something the tax man requires. ([Location 421](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0747RTP2W&location=421)) - One might be tempted to say that states arise, when they do, in ecologically rich areas. This would be a misunderstanding. What is required is wealth in the form of an appropriable, measurable, dominant grain crop and a population growing it that can be easily administered and mobilized. Areas of great but diverse abundance such as wetlands, which offer dozens of subsistence options to a mobile population, because of their very illegibility and fugitive diversity, are not zones of successful state making. ([Location 448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0747RTP2W&location=448))