A Perfect Recipe for a State: How Rivers and Cages Birthed Civilization

Photo by Zheng Hong Chua on Unsplash

Last time, we learned about some of the forms that government has taken throughout history. Now we’ll look even further back in time, and ask ourselves: where did government come from?

This is not an obvious question. For many of us, the state must seem like a natural and inevitable phenomenon. After all, states have existed for pretty much all of our recorded history, and most of us alive today have never known a world without them. We were born into nations, we have lived under them all our lives, and we receive from them a huge number of what we think of as “necessary” provisions. States construct infrastructure, provide documents like drivers’ licenses and passports, dole out money for the unemployed, serve justice in courts, police our neighborhoods, fund health care, science and education, and draft laws to keep our fellow citizens (or visiting foreigners) from impinging upon our rights. Given the vast integration of the state with our modern, day-to-day lives, it is tempting to create a just-so story that explains its existence as inevitable and necessary. But this is an example of what’s called a “naturalization fallacy” — the idea that because something is “normal”, it was supposed to happen that way.

Michael Mann, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at UCLA, believes exactly the opposite. Mann is the author of one of the most comprehensively-researched historical reviews of power in existence — the four-volume Sources of Social Power. He is matched by few others in the sheer breadth and thoroughness of his investigation. As such, I think his narrative is an excellent place to start our inquiries (later, I’ll discuss some of his sources in detail, along with the work of others).

In contrast with the traditional social evolutionist, Mann believes that the state was not an inevitably-emerging institution; instead, he argues that it arose independently in only about six different cases. Civilization was an anomaly in the course of human history, resulting from a unique set of ecological factors that “caged” people to fixed territories and relationships.

In order to understand this, we must take a moment to truly visualize the vast history of humanity. Sure, from Earth’s perspective — or that of the universe — we’re a mere drop in the bucket. But even in the eyes of our own species, recorded history doesn’t tell the half of it. So how long have we been around? The answer is different depending on who you choose to include in that “human” category. But if you begin with our particular species, Homo sapiens, current evidence seems to point to about 300,000 years ago.¹

For most of those hundreds of thousands of years — today voiceless and shrouded in shadow — Homo sapiens seems to have lived almost entirely as hunter-gatherers. They had little to no “society” in the sense that we understand the concept today; instead, they wandered nomadically in loose kinship groups, dependent neither on specific people nor on particular tracts of land. They were not fixed or bounded, either socially or territorially.²

Then, from about 10,000 BC to 3,000 BC — itself a period of time longer than recorded history — “more extensive, settled, and complex forms of society gradually emerged out of the initial gatherer-hunting base”.³(1) Hunter-gatherers still lived as they had for hundreds of thousands of years before; but now, a wider variety of social forms began to evolve. Intentional agriculture, mining and fishing encouraged more sedentary lifestyles, with increasingly fixed relationships and networks of cooperation.

This concept of fixity is important, according to Mann: “Fixed settlement traps people into living with each other, cooperating, and devising more complex forms of social organization,” he writes. Mann calls this phenomenon “social caging”, and asserts that it is a key ingredient in the ultimate formation of the state.

Three Common Social Caging Factors

Mann identifies three types of investments that could act as caging factors, leading to the development of authority structures. The first is an investment in nature: animal husbandry, irrigation infrastructure, or the planting of crops, for example. All of these things fix people to specific territories. Domesticated animals need specific types of terrain on which to feed, and they make mobility more difficult (although herders can still remain semi-nomadic). Agriculture requires tending to a specific patch of land for a period of months or years, while crops grow. And building infrastructure for irrigation is both a material and labor investment, also bound to a specific place.

Another type of investment is one of social relations — usually for production or exchange. People engaged in cooperative labor, or who have specialized within their community, are dependent on one another and so become fixed to each others’ norms and rhythms. Trade relationships, too, bind people together, although not with the same intensity as in cooperative labor.

A third type of investment that can become a caging factor is an investment in tools or machinery. Hunter-gatherers typically used simple tools that they could remake quickly or carry with them; but as production machinery became larger and more complex, these investments rendered people increasingly immobile.

As people came to rely more on fixed territories, tools and social relationships related to husbandry, agriculture and trade, their settlements became more permanent. In turn, they came to depend more on specific authority figures within their communities. This happened all over the world, wherever humans inhabited land. Thus, Mann believes it was something of a natural progression.

But were these conditions sufficient for the eventual development of civilization? He thinks not. These typical settlement networks simply were not caged enough. “Elites” within their ranks would hoard up power, only to have their authority collapse from under them as people left their sphere of influence or pitted rival elites against them.

“If most societies have been cages,” Mann writes, “the doors have been left unlocked for two main actors. First, the people have possessed freedoms. They have rarely given away powers to elites that they could not recover; and when they have, they have had opportunity, or been pressured, to move away physically from that sphere of power. Second, elites have rarely been unitary: Elders, lineage heads, bigmen, and chiefs have possessed overlapping, competitive authorities, viewed one another suspiciously, and exercised those same two freedoms.”

In Europe, for example, agricultural settlements became more hierarchical and complex from about 3800–3200 BC, when stable chiefdoms began to emerge out of more general “rank” societies. Power became consolidated, infrastructure and megaliths were built under a centralized cooperative impetus, and trade networks manufactured goods in more organized ways. But these chiefdoms fell apart between 3200–2300 BC, and the people moved back into more nomadic and egalitarian ways of living. Between 1900–1200 BC, power slowly consolidated again in the hands of a few chiefs, and social hierarchies re-emerged. But the chiefdoms were not fated to last this time, either. They collapsed again during the transition to the Iron Age, never quite making the leap to a civilized state.

“Hence there have been two cycles. Egalitarian peoples can increase intensity of interaction and population density to form large villages with centralized, permanent authority. But they stay broadly democratic. If the authority figures become overmighty, they are deposed. If they have acquired resources such that they cannot be deposed, the people turn their backs on them, find other authorities, or decentralize into smaller familial settlements. Later, centralization may begin again, with the same outcomes. The second pattern involves more extensive, but less intensive, cooperation in extended lineage structures, typically producing the chiefdom rather than the village. But here, too, allegiance is voluntary, and if the chief abuses this, he is resisted by the people and rival chiefs.”

So what was the difference between Europe — or the vast majority of cyclical, agricultural chiefdoms around the globe — and the few societies that centralized power in the civilized state? Before we try to answer that question, we should define what we mean by “civilization”.

How Do We Define Civilization?

Before we can decide on how many “pristine” cases of civilization arose, we need a working definition of what “civilization” means. What we think of as “civilization” and “the state” today is undoubtedly different from what ancient peoples experienced. Mann stresses that ancient city-states were composed of loose, overlapping power networks, and that early governments did not have the same authority over their people that most nationstates do today. Instead, the first city-states were probably rough democratic-oligarchies, composed primarily of delegates from local kinship groups and unable to enforce coercive power over large areas. The peoples living within their purvey were quite diverse, and probably had little sense of unified national identity. So what differentiated the first civilized states from other urbanized, tribally-governed systems?

British archaeologist and paleolinguist Colin Renfrew defines “civilization” as insulation from nature. He outlines three “most powerful insulators” as helpful criteria for naming a civilization. These include: ceremonial centers (insulation from the unknown), writing (insulation from time) and cities (a container insulating against the outside). Mann uses this definition to start his search for the world’s “pristine” civilizations — that is, civilizations that emerged completely independently, rather than as a result of outside cultural transmission.

“Taking Renfrew’s three characteristics as our proxy indicator, only a few cases of the emergence of civilization were autonomous. So far as we know, there were four literate, urban, and ceremonially centered groups that seem to have arisen independently of each other in Eurasia: the Sumerians of Mesopotamia; the Egyptians of the Nile Valley; the Indus Valley civilization in present-day Pakistan; and the people of several North China river valleys, beginning with the Yellow River. Only the earliest, Sumer, is *certainly* independent, and so there has been periodic interest in diffusion and conquest theories of the other cases. However, the present consensus among specialists is to accord all four probable independent status. To these some add a fifth, the Minoans of Crete, though this is disputed. If we turn to other continents we can, perhaps, add two further cases, the pre-Columbian civilizations of Mesoamerica and Peru, probably not in contact with one another, and independent of Eurasia. This makes a probable total of six independent cases.”

These were the examples that, most likely, defied the norms of the time, centralizing power in the hands of a bureaucratic state. If the scholars are right, all other civilizations that arose after these did not “evolve” the state on their own, but instead copied it in one way or another from these existing systems. But what unique circumstances placed these social systems on a different trajectory from the rest of the world?

Alluvial Irrigation and the Social Cage: A Perfect Recipe For a State

With the exception of the Mayan civilization in Mexico, and the case of Minoan Crete (“if counted”), all of these “pristine” civilizations arose in alluvial river valleys.⁴ Mann argues that these river valleys, when compared to other types of ecologies, produce an especially marked social caging effect. While evolutionary theories of civilization credit the alluvium itself for the invention of the state — tying civilization directly to developments in irrigation techniques — Mann disagrees. Instead, he believes that social caging factors were primarily responsible for creating the centralized authority systems from which the state emerged. “It took almost two millennia to go from irrigation to urbanization,” he writes. “Before the early Uruk period [3900–3400 BC] settlement patterns changed little, and irrigation, though known, was not predominant. And we find traces of ancient irrigation, without social complexity or subsequent local evolution, in various places in the world.”

It was the indirect effects of irrigation, he argues — specifically within the geographic ecology of the alluvial river valley floodplain — that trapped people within emerging power structures, and closed the doors to escape.

How Does Alluvial Ecology Create the Cage?

When a river floods, it washes mineral-rich mud and silt onto the surrounding floodplain — thereby fertilizing the soil. This natural fertilizer produces much higher crop yields than rainwater does. As a result, people who live on these floodplains — or learn to divert the floodwater to a broader area in the surroundings — achieve more surplus. Along with the surplus in food comes an increase in both population and density, pushing people into closer quarters and rapidly occupying the available land.

This is important, because on the floodplain, fixed pieces of land at the core provide the fertile soil necessary to create surplus and support a growing population. Outside the reach of rich silt deposits, yields would follow those of rainwater, and soil depletion would eventually render tracts of land relatively barren. But on the sides of the river, and wherever man-made canals could spread the alluvial bounty, the land would retain its magic.

Since land near the core of the river floodplain would be vastly more desirable than the rainwatered land on the periphery, private property in these areas became extremely important, according to Mann’s analysis. Not only that, but some locations proved more strategic for trade and defense than others. People thus became tied to fixed tracts of land (an “investment in nature”, as we discussed earlier) on a much larger scale than had typically occurred before. With this fixity of private property came increased wealth inequality, aiding in the growth of an oligarchic class.

But that’s not all. People became increasingly trapped in labor relations, as well (the second investment we discussed above). Man-made irrigation infrastructure, sowing and harvest all required intensive cooperation on a large scale.

“To irrigate was to invest in cooperative labor with others, to build artifices fixed for many years. It produced a large surplus, shared among the participants, tied to this particular investment and artifice. The use of large labor forces (of hundreds rather than thousands) was occasional but regular and seasonal. Centralized authority would also be useful to manage such irrigation schemes. Territory, community, and hierarchy were coinciding in irrigation more than they did in either rain-watered agriculture or herding.”

Wealthier landowners began to contract with local laborers, as well as with pastoralists and hunter-gatherers who still roamed in the periphery. This freed up the emerging “oligarchs” for more bureaucratic or priestly duties, and increased everyone’s interdependence, trapping people in fixed, hierarchical relationships.

Mann argues that the geographical “periphery” contributed significantly to the caging ecology of the floodplain. Alluvial river valleys are typically surrounded by geographical contrasts: mountains, harsh deserts, and swamps provide formidable barriers to agricultural escape. One cannot simply give up a Nile-based farm and waltz off into the surrounding desert for a new life. For someone accustomed to a sedentary lifestyle as a cultivator, such geographical extremes would lack promise. But there were networks of people — herders and nomads, as mentioned above, as well as merchants and traders — who forged livelihoods amidst the peripheral landscape. These people engaged in a kaleidoscope of economic relationships with the irrigators at the core. According to Mann, as these core-periphery networks became more economically interdependent, the social cage also became more deeply entrenched.

As social relationships and territory became more fixed (especially in the core) and with them, hierarchy and wealth inequality, centralized power and the state emerged to defend resources, protect the private property rights of the wealthy, and organize infrastructure. Alongside the already-existing city (one of Renfrew’s insulators) writing and bureaucratic temples arose (the other two), thus completing the urban center’s transformation into a fully-fledged “civilization”. Mann believes the priesthood and the temple came before a fully-fledged state military (although this was not far behind, especially in the case of China).⁵ The priestly order probably consisted largely of oligarchs, who contracted out farm labor and so were freed into a rising managerial class. Their chief functions were probably narrative management (unifying people through stories, to preserve regional peace and keep trade flowing) and accounting (in order to defend their claims to property). Indeed, writing itself seems first to have been used for bookkeeping purposes, rather than to record historical events or to document culture.

Mann believes that writing and narrative (i.e. religion and myth) helped to further cement stratification and coercive power relations. He calls this “the first stage of civilization — two-level, segmental, semicaged”. This “first stage” of state evolution lasted from about 3100 (when the state first arose in Mesopotamia) to about 2700 BC. During this transitionary period, the state was still broadly democratic, lacking despotic power:

“The social form that emerged was the city-state, exerting control over only a limited length and lateral flow of the river. It may have embodied a degree of stratification, centralized political authority, and coercive labor control, and these — especially the last — owed something to the necessities of irrigation. But it did not embody a despotic state, not even kingship at first. When larger territorial states with kings and emperors later emerged, control over irrigation was a part of their power […] but we shall see that this was only a subsidiary factor.”

Military kings began to emerge around 2700 BC; Mann charts the “first empire” of history at around 2300, when Sargon of Akkad conquered Sumer. Alluvial city-states increasingly had to defend their concentrated surpluses from poorer neighbors; meanwhile, those neighbors — and mercenaries on the periphery — bolstered their own military power to keep up. With the rise of military power, the state’s coercive ability increased, as well. And fatefully for some city-states, so did the coercive power of would-be conquerors and marcher lords from outside. These marcher lords ended up founding some of the first despotic and coercive monarchies; Sargon of Akkad himself was one of them.

If we take Mann’s word for it, then, it seems that civilization actually wasn’t a “typical” human development after all. The state arose naturally in only a small number of cases, fostered by a unique set of circumstances and ecology. For the rest of humanity, semi-permanent agricultural settlements, pastoralism, and hunting and gathering remained the norm for quite awhile (at least, until civilization ultimately engulfed most of them, too). Most of these networks and settlements were still incredibly egalitarian, as well.

We’re going to return to Mann’s work later, so that we can examine his argument in more detail, look at his sources, and compare his narrative to those of other sociologists and historians. In search of the truth, it’s always important to examine multiple sources and narratives, and to take time to think about why one narrative might be true when compared with another one. I also want to return to this closing concept of the despotic state, and examine Mann’s account surrounding its origins. How did military power emerge out of early democratic-oligarchies, and come to seize permanent authority?

But in the very next article, I want instead to return focus to the earliest and “least caged of human beasts” (as Mann phrases it): the hunter-gatherer. The hunter-gatherer was the human norm for hundreds of thousands of years — and many people still preserve this way of life today. What was life like before the emergence of the state, and for most of human history? What lessons might we learn from peering at the tracks of our ancestors?

Notes

1. The “Homo” genus, however, has been around for at least about a couple million years (Leakey et al., 2009).
2. We’re going to look at the hunter-gatherer and its derivatives in specific detail in the next article, so for now I gloss over them in favor of discussing the state.
3. Mann’s Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1 is the source used for the remainder of this article.
4. You might note that 2/7 discussed cases is a huge statistical deviation in a very small sample size. Unfortunately, there is no way to create a larger sample size for “pristine civilizations”, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to explain their development with models. We use the “case study” method of sociology and simply keep in mind our limitations. Mann goes into some of the deviations from his model — discussing each of the seven cases in their unique contexts — and explains why they might have occurred, in Chapter 4. I say “seven” even though he names “six probable cases”, because he actually includes Minoan Crete in his analysis, despite his skepticism.
5. Contrast this with David Priestland’s narrative in Merchant, Soldier, Sage, which places emphasis on the first states being largely military. We’ll discuss this later; actually, Priestland’s and Mann’s accounts may not differ as much as it seems.

Sources

1. Mann, Michael (2005). The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1: A history of power from the beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge University Press: New York. (Original publication 1986).