The First States: A Radical Disruption
- didiermoretti
- Jan 16
- 8 min read
Updated: Feb 22
Not since the domestication of fire had human society witnessed such a dramatic transformation. Some 6,000 years ago, in the fertile valleys between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, mankind embarked on its first experiment with a brand-new invention: the state.
It took several millennia from the time humans began planting wheat and herding sheep to begin to experiment with these early precursors to the modern state. Why did it take so long? (1)
Reluctant Subjects
The path from farming to statehood was neither inevitable nor straightforward. Imagine pitching the concept of a state to our ancestors: "Give us a portion of your harvest, submit to our authority, and in return, we'll provide protection services you didn't know you needed! Oh, and by the way, we'll also take credit for the good weather." Not surprisingly, early humans weren't immediately sold on this value proposition.
Coming from relatively egalitarian tribes, people must have been keen to maintain their autonomy. As we saw in a previous article, many societies flourished without ever developing a state. After all, why would a peasant who has enough to meet their basic needs agree to produce a surplus that would be appropriated by a ruler? It's rather like being asked to work overtime without pay—except the boss claims divine authority.
The First States: Small and Fragile
The first states emerged with great fanfare, if only to impress their reluctant population, but they proved remarkably brittle. At their core, these states were essentially protection rackets with better architecture: a territory with a ruler, specialized officials (history's first bureaucrats, complete with clay tablet spreadsheets), and armed men to "convince" people about the benefits of taxation.
Consider humanity's first known city-states, in Mesopotamia. At its height around 3200 BC, the city of Uruk was the largest urban area in the world, with a population exceeding 50,000 people, city walls stretching 6 miles, monumental temples, and a sophisticated bureaucracy recording transactions on clay tablets.
Yet within a few centuries, such urban centers would be abandoned, their populations scattered to the winds. Early states faced a precarious existence, constantly battling against a host of threats: disease, warfare, desertion, and overreach.
Disease: The Original Network Virus
Disease was particularly pernicious, as we saw in the previous article. Imagine trying to quarantine a city with no concept of hygiene or the germ theory of disease. Good luck with that!
The Military Challenge
Warfare posed another threat - early states relied heavily on corvee labor to defend their territories. A single failed harvest could leave city walls poorly manned. The archeological record shows layers of destruction and rebuilding in many Mesopotamian early cities, testament to frequent military routs.
The Great Escape
Perhaps the most intriguing threat, and a constant thorn in the side of early rulers, was the ever-present risk of desertion. For those who could, the lure of the 'barbarian' frontier was strong. When tax collectors or circumstances became too demanding, people simply voted with their feet. Ancient city states were small islands in vast ungoverned spaces - disgruntled citizens could readily revert to farming or pastoral lifestyles beyond state control.
The Overreach Trap
Finally, and not surprisingly, many early states fell victim to their own success. As rulers accumulated power and resources, they often launched ambitious building projects or military campaigns that stretched their capabilities to breaking point. The remains of unfinished monuments and abandoned public works projects scatter Mesopotamia, as memorials to overreach.
A Lasting Innovation
Despite their fragility (or because of it, similar to startups - fail early and often!) these early states proved remarkably influential. Their very instability drove rapid innovation in administrative techniques, legal codes, and military organization. The solutions they devised, from writing to standardized weights and measures, form the backbone of governance to this day.
The world's first writing system was essentially invented to track grain deliveries and tax payments—proving that bureaucracy, not poetry, drove human innovation. The world's first writing system wasn't born from a desire to express profound thoughts or immortalize epic tales. No, it was born from the state's need to keep track of who owed it how much grain.
Paradoxically, this pattern of collapse and renewal helped spread institutions across the ancient world. When states failed, their educated elites became the world's first management consultants, spreading their expertise to other regions. This process helped propagate state structures from Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley, Egypt and beyond - ancient civilization's first franchise model.
States turned out to be a momentous invention and a remarkably successful evolutionary adaptation. Given enough time, the small reproductive advantage of settled farmers would compound and prove to be overwhelming, and lead to the eventual dominance of agricultural societies.
Coercion and Human Bondage
Early states had to resort to one form or another of coercion to get its population to create
a surplus which it could appropriate. Coercion was the engine that powered the early state. It took many forms, from the seemingly benign (corvee labor for public works) to the brutal (serfdom, slavery, and outright enslavement of conquered peoples).
Each state deployed its own approach to coercion, as it required a delicate balance between maximizing the state surplus and the risk of mass flight, especially where there was an open frontier. Great walls were built as much to keep subjects in as to keep barbarians out! Only much later, when most of the world was occupied by agricultural states, did it become feasible to relax coercive mechanisms, and rely on ownership of the land instead.
The need for coercion to generate surplus explains why the first states relied on the cultivation of grains, as highlighted by James Scott. Grain was the perfect taxable resource: visible, divisible, and hard to hide. Communities that were able to rely on other food sources such as fishing, hunting, or roots and vegetables, could relatively easily hide their bounties from tax assessors.
As indicated earlier, early states were faced with constant leakage of their population due to desertions, war, and disease. They sought to replace their losses through various means, including wars to capture slaves, purchases of slaves, and forced resettlement of communities to the state's grain core area. As such warfare in early states was not about the conquest of territory, but rather were wars of capture, where success was measured by the number and quality of human captives, including women and children.
States didn't invent slavery, but they certainly scaled it up with ruthless efficiency. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of coerced labor in states through much of history - as late of the early 1800s, roughly three quarters of the world population was said to be living in bondage. (3) In Ancient Greece, slaves represented a clear majority, perhaps as much as two-thirds, of Athenian society and were taken for granted. (4) In Imperial Rome, slaves represented between one quarter and one third of the population. By one estimate, Ceasar's Gallic campaigns resulted in a million slaves. Roman military campaigns were shadowed by slave traders and the Mediterranean was turned into a massive slave emporium.
The state's reliance on coercion created an interesting paradox. The more states perfected their systems of control and extraction, the more attractive the barbarian alternative became. Every tax collector's demand and every corvee labor summons made the ungoverned spaces beyond the walls look more appealing. And so, while states were busy building ever more sophisticated systems of coercion within their borders, they were inadvertently creating perfect conditions for alternative societies to flourish beyond them.
A Golden Age for "Barbarians"
For the Sumerian, Chinese, or Roman state, "barbarians" weren't defined by their table manners (though that probably didn't help). The distinction was far simpler: taxation. Your civilization ended precisely where your tax collectors feared to tread. Inside the state lived the "domesticated" subjects—history's first registered users, their lives meticulously recorded and their labor carefully extracted, much like livestock on a well-managed farm. Outside roamed the "wild" barbarians—foragers, hunters, and nomads who had the audacity to opt out of the state's subscription model, preferring the freedom of the untaxed wilderness to the supposed comforts of civilization.
Why the abundant distaste for barbarians? We saw earlier that early states were quite
fragile. Barbarians played no small part in that fragility - sedentary communities were irresistible targets for rich and concentrated "foraging and hunting", e.g. loot and tribute. Countless bands of nomads and other non-state people mounted raids on sedentary, grain-farming communities. The barbarian threat proved remarkably persistent. From the mysterious "Sea Peoples" who caused a system-wide crash of Mediterranean civilizations in the 12th century BC, to the Xiongnu tribes who gave Chinese dynasties their first serious scaling challenges, to the Vikings who conducted history's longest-running penetration testing of European defenses (8th to 12th centuries)—barbarians remained a force to be reckoned with until surprisingly recently.
Unintended Consequences
Ironically, the very existence of these opulent, tax-burdened states created a golden age for the 'barbarians' who lived beyond their borders. Life as a "barbarian" often proved far more attractive than being a tax-paying subject of an agrarian kingdom. Think of them as history's first digital nomads—mobile, independent, and surprisingly sophisticated in exploiting the new economic landscape.
In addition to raiding, barbarians benefited from a significant expansion in trade. Agrarian states had a narrow ecology and had to secure a host of goods from the outside to survive. Barbarians were all too happy to act as trading partners, with those barbarian groups that controlled a major trading route or river to an agrarian center reaping large rewards. Barbarians became quite accomplished in their own "statecraft", combining legitimate trade with the occasional protection racket. In many instances they gradually weakened the state and caused its eventual collapse, a scenario that was repeated all too often in history.
The First Tax Havens
The 'barbarian' frontier served as history's first tax havens, offering a refuge for those who sought to escape the increasingly burdensome demands of the state. "Going over to the barbarians" was a far more common occurrence than recorded in history, as the latter was typically written by states. To some extent the barbarian frontier served as a release valve, much like the "New World" would later offer Europeans a fresh start. Many fled to escape crushing taxes, bondage, or military service—proving that the practice of "voting with your feet" predates democracy by several millennia.
States responded with history's first retention walls. The Sumerian king who built the first great wall between the Tigris and Euphrates in 2000 BC claimed it was to keep barbarians out. In reality, it was probably history's largest employee retention program—designed as much to keep tax-paying subjects in as raiders out. The Great Wall of China would perfect this model: part border control, part psychological barrier, part architectural reminder of state power.
Built to Last
To a large extent then, the states contributed to the rise and prosperity of barbarian tribes, and the development of significant "barbarian" civilizations.
While state chroniclers were busy portraying barbarians as uncouth savages, these nominal "primitives" were developing complex trading networks, sophisticated diplomatic systems, and remarkably effective methods of military organization. They became the ancient world's most successful disruptors, repeatedly forcing states to innovate or collapse.
(1) Much of this article is based on the book "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States" by James C. Scott.
(2) Early writing tablet recording the allocation of beer, 3100–3000 B.C.E, Late Prehistoric period, clay, probably from southern Iraq. (© Trustees of the British Museum) The symbol for beer, an upright jar with pointed base, appears three times on the tablet. Beer was the most popular drink in Mesopotamia and was issued as rations to workers. Alongside the pictographs are five different shaped impressions, representing numerical symbols. Over time these signs became more abstract and wedge-like, or “cuneiform.” The signs are grouped into boxes and, at this early date, are usually read from top to bottom and right to left. One sign, in the bottom row on the left, shows a bowl tipped towards a schematic human head. This is the sign for “to eat.”
(3) See Adam Hochschild, "Bury the Chains. Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves", 2005.
(4) Moses Finley, "Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology", 2017
