Scott is a political science and anthropology professor at Yale, specializing in agrarian studies. This book focuses on Zomia, a land-space in Southeast Asia as big as Europe, spanning seven countries and over a hundred million peoples of various ethnic and linguistic groupings. It is a world in the periphery and anathema to all government. The people within it have defied all attempts to make it legible, accessible, assessable, and taxable.
The modern state has strived for administrative, economic, and cultural standardization. To that end, it has particularly sought legibility in forms of production. In Southeast Asia that has meant irrigated rice agriculture on permanent fields. “Living within the state meant, virtually by definition, taxes, conscription, corvee labor, and, for most, a condition of servitude; these conditions were at the core of the state’s strategic and military advantages.” Agriculture was determined to benefit the state machine. “Wet rice is, to be sure, more productive per unit of land than shifting cultivation. It is, however, typically less productive per unit of labor.” In an area where arable land was bountiful, but labor was scarce, this only made sense from a legibility standpoint. “Shifting cultivation was a fiscally sterile form a agriculture: diverse, dispersed, hard to monitor, hard to tax or confiscate. Swiddeners were themselves dispersed, hard to monitor, hard to collect for corvee labor or conscription.”
Throughout Southeast Asian history the most important trade goods were slaves, “the human capital who formed the working capital of any successful state.” Where arable land was plentiful what was needed was manpower to cultivate it. As Richard O’Conner put it, “effective strength often came down to a polity’s core, not the realm’s total size or wealth.” Wars in Southeast Asia were therefore, not about killing the enemy, but were slave raids on massive scale to steal manpower and take it back to your own state core to cultivate your lands. Wet rice cultivation maximizes the food supply within easy reach of that state core. “Grain, after all, grows aboveground, and it typically and predictably ripens at roughly the same time. The tax collector can survey the crop in the field as it ripens and calculate in advance the probable yield. Most important of all, if the army and/or the tax collector arrive on the scene when the crop is ripe, they can confiscate as much of the crop as they wish. Grain then, compared with root crops, is both legible to the state and relatively appropriable. Compared to other foodstuffs, grain is also relatively easy to transport, has a fairly high value per unit of weight and volume, and stores for relatively long periods with less spoilage…. Uniformity in the field, in turn, produced a social and cultural uniformity expressed in family structure, the value of child labor and fertility, diet, building styles, agricultural ritual, and market exchange. A society shaped powerfully by monoculture was easier to monitor, assess, and tax than one shaped by agricultural diversity.”
States had a huge incentive to incorporate disparate peoples into their core. That meant taking people of different ethnic, cultural, and religious persuasions and subsuming them into the monolithic state. Easy assimilation, intermarriage, and social mobility were the norm. Identity was a matter more of performance and adaptability to the state regime more so than genealogy. The Hinduization of the monarch instituted an ideology that provided a ritual umbrella to the claims that the strongman had divine authority, rather than just being temporally powerful. “Sanskritic forms staked a claim to participation in a transethnic, transregional, and indeed, transhistorical civilization." It gave institutionalism and permanence to rule that had previously been based on a cult of personality and personal skill at warfare and leadership.
On the periphery to state control there was always ungoverned land. This land was “home to fugitive, mobile populations whose modes of subsistence- foraging, hunting, shifting cultivation, fishing, pastoralism- were fundamentally intractable to state appropriation." These shatter zones, on the edges, were geographically inaccessible and had a vast diversity of ethnicities and languages within them. These areas were “locations of very high friction- swamps, marshes, ravines, rugged mountains, heaths, deserts- even though they may be quite close to the state core as the crow flies, [they] are likely to remain relatively inaccessible, and thus zones of political and cultural difference.” In Southeast Asia that often meant climbing higher and higher vertically to areas that were both easier to defend and were inhospitable to wet rice cultivation. Foraging at subsistence levels was an extreme measure. Small, scattered, unobtrusive plots of banana or root vegetables was preferred. Crops were chosen based on their quickness to maturity, the little care needed, and their relative indestructibility. Human groupings tended to be small enough to escape the arm of the state, but large enough to defend against slave raiding parties and to protect plots from wild animals and birds. “Cultivars that cannot be stored long without spoiling such as fresh fruits and vegetables, or that have low value per unit weight and volume, such as most gourds, rootcrops, and tubers, will not repay the efforts of the tax gatherer. In general, roots and tubers such as yams, sweet potatoes, potatoes, and cassava/manioc/yucca are nearly appropriation proof. After they ripen, they can be safely left in the ground for up to two years and dup up piecemeal as needed. There is thus no granary to plunder.” Stateless societies were, therefore, widely dispersed and physically mobile, able to fission into new and smaller units as needed, able to forage, hunt and gather when required, were highly egalitarian in social units, and were located in terrain that made them far from the state core in friction, if not in distance.
The peoples of the hills were not left behind by civilization. Most made a conscious decision to escape the reach of the state, joining a small indigenous population already there. As the state expanded further and further, those who wished to escape, in turn, pushed themselves further into the hills, away from the orbit of state control. “Their subsistence routines, their social organization, their physical dispersal, and many elements of their culture, far from being the archaic traits of a people left behind, are purposefully crafted both to thwart incorporation into nearby states and to minimize the likelihood that statelike concentrations of power will arise among them.” Joining the peoples in the hills were often those who had led failed rebellions against the state, those who were members of a religious schism or prophetic cult, those who were escaping diseased areas ravaged by epidemics, those who were slaves, outlaws, and criminals escaping punishment, and those who simply wanted more autonomy or were too poor to pay taxes. “Whenever a society or part of a society elects to evade incorporation or appropriation, it moves to simpler, smaller, and more dispersed social units…. The most appropriation-resistant social structures- though they also impede collective action of any kind- are acephalous (“headless”) small aggregates of households.” These hill peoples, far from being too primitive to write, often chose to discard their written language traditions. Literacy in the valleys was the providence of an elite- the royalty, the state bureaucracy, the clergy, and, most importantly, the tax man. It was also fixed history, where as the oral traditions of the hills allowed for flexibility and adaptability as situations and alliances changed on the ground. New foundation myths and oral traditions could transform and help legitimize evolving social structures. To that end, ethnicity was an amphibious term, with tribes and individuals shifting their cultures depending on the time and place they found themselves trapped in. Instead of the individual having an ethnicity, Richard O’Conner suggested that in Zomia, “where people change ethnicity and locality rather frequently, we might better say that an ethnicity has a people.” There were no distinct cultural borders, but an amorphous continuum, which shifted as situations dictated. “The interflow of genes, ideas, and languages has been so intensive and multidirectional as to render futile any attempt to delineate the various ‘peoples’ in terms of completely distinct bundles of geographical, linguistic, biological, or cultural-historical features.” Tribes did not exist so much on the ground as they were human constructs to make the people seem more legible from the outside. The stateless zones were defined by heterarchy- social and economic complexity, without a formal unified hierarchy. Scott, in closing, maintains that “hill peoples are not pre- anything. In fact, they are better understood as post-irrigated rice, postsedentary, postsubject, and perhaps even postliterate.”
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