Against the grain

It is the beginning of the twenty-first century and most humans remain inhabitants of what James C Scott calls the ‘Multispecies Resettlement Camp’ – the aggregation of men, women, children and their domesticated plants and animals that was made possible by the development of agriculture.

His book, 'Against the Grain – A Deep History of the Earliest States', 2017, takes a jaundiced look at sedentism – the staying put that initially gave rise to urban culture and that would, some millennia later, come to define modernity. This progression represents our understanding of the development of Western Civilization which we are accustomed to celebrate – or did, until a couple of months ago when we reaped its corollary of epidemiological terrorism. As city dwellers, and more broadly, as subjects of highly interdependent, globally connected states, we remain prey to the “chronic and acute infectious diseases that devastate the population again and again,” which Scott identifies as a primary characteristic of the very earliest states.

Scott’s ambit spans across the early states that emerged in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and Egypt in around 2500 BCE, and a little later in the drainage basins of the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers in China. But he extends his review of ‘civilized’ humanity to the moment, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when urbanity at last predominated over its antithesis, the world of non-state peoples. For these barbarians, from the very beginnings of emergent states, and entirely beforehand, had always been vastly more populous.

We Americans are heirs to one of the last great ‘victories’ of the civilized world over the barbarian. That victory was won, initially, by our introduction of the myriad zoonoses – those diseases we share with our domestic animals – to which our habitual sedentism in the ‘Multi-Species Resettlement Camp’ have made us hosts. Scott writes, “Once a disease becomes endemic in a sedentary population, it is far less lethal, often circulating largely in a subclinical form for most carriers. At this point, unexposed populations having little or no immunity against this pathogen are likely to be uniquely vulnerable when they come into contact with a population in which it is endemic.”

He notes that Native Americans had been “isolated for more than ten millennia from Old World pathogens” and succumbed in horrifying numbers to the diseases that the earliest colonists brought with them. It should be remembered, however, that Europeans were not themselves immune to novel infectious disease, having lost perhaps one-third to one-half of their population during medieval pandemics.

Despite their partial epidemiological eradication, the more complete destruction of Native Americans populations required, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz notes in, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, 2014, “three hundred years of colonial warfare, followed by continued wars waged by the independent republics of the hemisphere.”

Excerpted from: 'Civilization Ruffled by Another Perfect Epidemiological Storm'.

Counterpunch.org