Fuel of the First Kingdoms: The Grain and Manpower Module

Photo by Nathalie SPEHNER on Unsplash

Every dynamic system requires energy to function. This is a fact of physics: you cannot have movement without a power input. This maxim applies to mechanical systems, biological systems, and also to human societies. Energy is another word for food; so we might ask:

On what does the state feed?

Leading up to this article, we have discussed how the state emerged and cemented its institutional power. Once the state becomes an entity, an “emergent property” of a pre-existing network of social systems, it requires fuel to keep it going.

Today, we’re going to examine how the early state fueled itself — what James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale, calls the “grain and manpower module”.

The Grain and Manpower Module

We can think of the grain and manpower module as representing the two ends of the energy system: consumption and production. The fuel is grain, and the output (production) is labor in the state’s service. Though the grain is the “food” for the laborers — just as gasoline is the fuel for the pistons in a car engine — the state, in a sense, “feeds” on manpower as well; that is, manpower is not only a mechanism of production but also a source of energy for accomplishing its goals.

Grain

All of the so-called “pristine” civilizations¹ were founded on grain crops: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River, the Mayans and the Inca. Grain acted as a food source both for individual laborers and their families, as well as for collective society; it was taxed and stored by the state so that it could be redistributed in times of famine, and the surplus farmed by agriculturalists could help feed priests, craftsmen, officials, and other non-agricultural workers. These crops were: wheat, barley, millet, rice and maize.

Why did the state system depend on grain so extensively for fuel? Scott has a theory: that grains are the most readily taxable type of crop.

“The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable.’ Other crops — legumes, tubers, and starch plants — have some of these desirable state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages. To appreciate the unique advantages of the cereal grains, it helps to place yourself in the sandals of an ancient tax-collection official interested, above all, in the ease and efficiency of appropriation.” (1)

Let’s take a closer look at those six points.

Visibility: Grain crops ripen simultaneously, and above ground. That makes it easy for the tax man to assess how much his dues should be, and in turn to collect them. When it comes time to harvest, it can be cut and carted away(by force, if necessary); no digging required. And since the harvest happens at one point — not continuously — the tax collector only needs to show up once. There is no hiding what you reap.

Divisibility: Cereal grains can be almost infinitely divided, which means they can be weighed in precise increments for accounting purposes. This also allows them to serve as standards of measurement by which other goods can be valued — which is exactly what early civilizations did.

Assessability: A tax collector can measure a field planted with grain crops and, because of their visibility and predictable growing patterns, calculate the expected harvest. “A tax assessor typically classifies fields in terms of soil quality and, knowing the average yield of a particular grain from such soil, is able to estimate a tax,” Scott writes in Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.

Storability: Tubers can be stored for awhile, but will eventually spoil. By contrast, grains can be stored unhusked for long periods of time, until they’re needed.

Transportability: Grains have a low weight for their caloric content, meaning they can be transported less expensively and across longer distances than other foodstuffs. If they were shipped across water, this allowed a kingdom to collect taxes from a considerable area, thereby expanding control over their empire.

Rationability: Because they can be stored for long periods of time, grains make great ration-crops. Scott writes: “It was ideal for distributing to laborers and slaves, for requiring as tribute, for provisioning soldiers and garrisons, for relieving a food shortage or famine, or for feeding a city while resisting a siege.”

Without grain, Scott argues, power maintenance would have been impossible for the early state. Its institutions would not have been able to track, control, and coerce their citizens, who might have been more mobile, practicing shifting cultivation or full-scale nomadism; they would have had no reliable funding source or store for times of famine; they would not have been able to feed laborers or keep a surplus for non-agricultural officials.

Dr. Craig Morris describes a powerful example of this grain-dependency mechanic in the form of Incan chicha, a fermented corn beverage (what he calls “corn beer”). Chicha, he argues, did not simply facilitate state power; it was essential. Without it, Inca rulers could not maintain authority and motivate labor. He writes:

“It is not just that millions of gallons of chicha were brewed and consumed annually, it is that the way in which they were distributed made them basic to giving the leaders their authority. The state’s ability to increase beer production was essential to its political and economic expansion […] [Incan laborers] built more than 5000 miles of roads; they constructed the great fortress of Sacayhuaman above Cuzco, cutting and fitting blocks of stone weighing several tons; they built warehouses throughout the empire and stocked them with food and other goods….” (2)

In other words, the Incan rulers distributed chicha to their armies and workers, and it was this that kept them happy enough to work. It’s important to note that part of this wizardry is mythological; chicha was not just a casual alcoholic indulgence. It was a ritual beverage with powerful significance. Corn and its byproducts were food for the emperor, food to keep his officials loyal, and food to sustain the second fuel source for the state: manpower. They were a sacred part of the social order. The Spanish saw firsthand chicha’s power to legitimate authority: after they tried to outlaw it, they could not coerce anyone to work.

According to Bonavia:

“From all of the documents it follows that part of the prestige of a coastal lord lay in giving his subjects drink, and in having a large number of hammock bearers […] The caciques [local leaders] protested when Cuenca drastically banned this custom […] Cristóbal Payco, from Jequetepeque, clearly explained that the Indians obeyed their caciques because they gave them drink, and that they would not work their land if they did not receive it. Chicha provided the lords with ‘…the complicated web of reciprocities that could not be suppressed without it raising serious problems.’” (3)

Grain also served as rations for elite, non-agricultural workers. Oppenheim writes about Mesopotamia:

“Both [the temple and the palace] supported by means of food rations, oil, clothing allowances, and a number of other benefits the managerial personnel who directed, administered, and controlled the work, the deliveries, and the payments.”

Because of its importance, it was sacred to the early state, and therefore figured prominently in most civilized creation myths and dynastic legends. In the Mayans’ creation myth, found in the Popol Vuh, humans were created by the gods out of maize. According to Inca legend, the wife of Inca ruler Manco Capac taught the people to plant it. In China, the legendary ancestor of the Chou Dynasty played a similar role with millet:

“The high ancestor of the Chou house was Hou Chi 后稷, literally ‘Ruler Millet.’ Quite evidently he was, like some other reputed founders of prominent Chinese families, a spirit. He was conceived, the Poetry tells us, when his mother stepped in a footprint of the deity Ti. Many marvels are related of him and of his prowess in agriculture. He is celebrated as the giver of grain to the people, the founder of agricultural sacrifices, and himself the object of sacrifices for harvests. He was at the same time a culture hero, an agricultural deity, and the legendary ancestor of the Chou house.” (4)

Rituals and ceremonies frequently accompanied the planting of grains. The Sumerian Farmer’s Almanac, for example, was compiled by “pedagogues”² and provides instructions to farmers on how to sow barley. Several prayers are part of the process: one before, and one after, cleaning the grains. The Almanac concludes by invoking the agricultural deity Ninurta, the “trustworthy farmer” of Enlil. On the other side of the world, Bonavia describes the elaborate planting rituals of the Inca:

“In Inca times the priests had many maize-related duties. Every year they had to ask the gods whether or not they could plant. They had to follow the movements of the shadows in the Intihuatana in order to regulate the periods when the land would lie fallow, when it was to be irrigated, and when it was harvested. They kept a quipu system with which to check the sequence of dry and rainy years. They fasted from planting season until the sprouts were the size of a finger. They organized processions with war drums, in which the participants shouted to scare away the drought and the frosts. They sacrificed llamas in gratitude and to request a good harvest. The Intiwasi, the famed Temple of the Sun, was decorated with symbolic gold plants to stimulate the harvest (Murra, 1975: 54–55).”

Manpower

Michael Mann doubts the importance of slavery and corvée labor in the initial formation and consolidation of the state; however, its role becomes undeniable with the rise of despotism and the god-king. The free citizenry worked fields and paid taxes on their labor; but the state exploited a whole spectrum of unfree labor to their benefit, too. Free citizens could be drafted for corvée labor; forced resettlement, combined with city-building or agriculture, was a common way to expand an empire; debtors and landless immigrants could go to work on someone else’s land to earn their keep; war captives could be turned into slaves; occasionally, barbarians might capture neighboring nomads and sell them into slavery in the city as well.

The first serious walled fortifications start appearing around 2700 BC; they quickly became standard features of the urban environment.³ As Owen Lattimore famously suggests for the case of China, these walls were built as much to keep taxpayers and laborers in as they were to keep barbarians out. According to Michael Mann, increased fortification was associated with an increase in military organization. This, in turn, was associated with a rise in social stratification. As Robert McCormick Adams writes:

“The increasing concentration of political authority in dynastic institutions at the expense of older communal and religious bodies obviously took place in a setting in which both the perils and rewards of militaristic contention were fully and deeply understood. Successful conquest brought political prestige in its wake, not uniformly enriching the community but, instead, increasing the stratification within it and permitting the consolidation of an independent power base by forces whose initial role had merely been that of leading elements in a common enterprise.”

Mann awards the title of “First Empire of Domination” to Sargon of Akkad, before whom “5,400 soldiers ate daily”. (5) Those soldiers go out to conquer other lands, bringing back war captives, or turning over entire cities’ worth of productive labor to government oversight. Either way, the energy stored in these new territories, in the form of a workforce, was captured and transferred to the state’s dominion. It’s a self-reinforcing cycle; as the dominion grows, the army grows with it. The new workforce needs to eat, and the soldiers need to eat, as well. The state could fund army rations out of the tribute it collected from newly-conquered territories, thus expanding and in turn conquering more land. What did those rations consist of? If Sumerian accounting is any indication, probably largely grain.

The emerging institutions of the state were dependent on manpower, and manpower, in turn, was dependent on grain-based agriculture. Scott writes about the inseparable nature of the two in his book on barbarian-state relations in Southeast Asia, The Art of Not Being Governed:

“In its crudest version, the formula goes something like this: Political and military supremacy requires superior access to concentrated manpower close at hand. Concentrated manpower, in turn, is feasible only in a setting of compact, sedentary agriculture, and such agro-ecological concentrations are possible, before the twentieth century in Southeast Asia, only with irrigated rice.” (6)

Not only does grain feed the labor population, and lock people down to stable plots of land — where they can be tracked, taxed, and conscripted; it also concentrates people densely in physical space. Scott continues:

“Shifting cultivation requires far more land than irrigated rice and therefore disperses population; where it prevails, it appears to ‘impose an upper limit of population density of about 20–30 per square kilometer.’ Once again, concentration is the key. It matters little how wealthy a kingdom is if its potential surplus of manpower and grain is dispersed across a landscape that makes its collection difficult and costly.”

Forced relocation was one way that the state could concentrate manpower, while also suppressing insurrection. This was a common tactic in early empires. The Chou, having squashed a Shang rebellion, forcefully relocated many of the Shang people to places where they could integrate with Chou cultural practices. The Inca did the same thing when they conquered a new region. This forced integration helped erase tribal differences, homogenizing culture and creating a loyal citizenry. Forced relocation also provided a ready workforce for official projects, or for the military.

Creel describes how the Chou mobilized a Shang workforce to build a new capital city:

“The Documents seems to suggest that all of the labor of constructing the new city was supplied by Yin [Shang] people. Although the circumstances are not clear, it seems possible that large numbers of them were marched to the site for the work, and that only a portion of those who performed the labor remained to occupy the city.”

In Mesopotamia, powerful kings feared the scattered peoples of the hinterlands, who, when left to their own devices, threatened their reigning stability. Oppenheimer relates how they relocated and conscripted such people in service of the state:

“The most effective remedy against these potentially dangerous elements were projects of internal and frontier colonization which only a powerful king could set afoot. The inscriptions of such kings speak triumphantly of the ingathering (puḫḫuru) of the scattered, the resettling (ŝūŝubu) of the shiftless on new land, where the king forced them to dig or re-dig canals, build or resettle cities, and till the soil, pay taxes, do corvée work to maintain the irrigation system, and — last but not least — perform military service.”

Corvée labor⁴ such as this was a common way for the state to mobilize a workforce, not just among rebels or captives, but among their own otherwise “free” citizens. We discussed chicha earlier as a mechanism for motivating labor in the Inca empire; in fact, chicha was a “hospitality” reward for the corvée labor system imposed on men between 25–50. It was a way that rulers could “socially obligate” their workers to participate in public projects, when really they had no choice in the matter. It was a mild disguise for coercive conscription.

In Egypt, where wealth inequality rose quite steeply and early on, it seems that workers labored in gangs for landowning noblemen. They were paid in rations of bread, fish, grain, vegetables and beer; according to I.V. Vinogradov they were subject to the lash, like slaves. Despite this, they appear to have been entitled to some of the surplus they reaped from their toils, as they also traded goods in local markets. (7)

Robert McCormick Adams tells us the signs for “slave” begin to appear in the Protoliterate period (3700–2900 BC) in Mesopotamia. “War captive” follows soon after; however, it’s not until the Early Dynastic Period (2900–2400 BC) that we start to see terms like “full, free citizen” and “commoner of subordinate status”, and to see evidence of a more crystallized class status system. The early word for “slave” derived from a term for “foreign country”, “perhaps suggesting that the institution originated either in the taking of war captives or in the impressment of seminomadic groups who drifted into the settlements after their herds fell below an acceptable minimum for subsistence”. (8)

The majority of these slaves, at least in the beginning, were women. They worked in estates and temples, or manufactured textiles in centralized, factory-like industrial areas. Some also worked as millers, brewers, or cooks. In the Aztec kingdom, slaves seem to have played a different role. Adams tells us there is little evidence they were involved in manufacturing; it seems instead they probably cultivated private lands, served in the houses of nobility, and helped to transport goods in the absence of draft animals. However, as in Mesopotamia, corvée labor played a much larger role in early Aztec society than did slavery.⁵ Adams writes:

“Recruitment is said to have depended mainly on impressment of criminals, on defaulting debtors, on self-sale during times of famine, and, in some cases, on their requisition as tribute. It differed from the classical Western concept of slavery as an unlimited condition of depersonalization and servitude…”

In Mesopotamia slaves had some legal rights, according to Samuel Kramer. They could engage in business, borrow money, and ultimately buy their freedom. (9) Under some conditions they could work for their own living, provided they made monthly payments to their masters. But Adams and others suggest they were sometimes blinded to prevent escape, and in the Neo-Babylonian period the backs of their hands were often branded with their owners’ names. (10)

You can see, from this sampling, that the ancient state and its elites had a veritable menu of ways to extract labor from their citizenry and captive foreigners. There was a spectrum between “slave” and “free person”, and the boundaries marking different social categories weren’t always clearly delineated. One thing is certain: manpower was a crucial resource.

In the Akkadian creation story Atrahasis (18th century BC), the earth gods, or Igigi, create irrigation canals and till the soil. Weary of their charge, they petition the Anunnaki, the judges or “great gods” of the sky, to relieve them from their toil. Thus, man is created.

“When the gods instead of man
Did the work, bore the loads,
The gods’ load was too great,
The work too hard, the trouble too much,
The great Anunnaki made the Igigi
Carry the workload sevenfold.
[…]
The gods had to dig out canals,
Had to clear channels, the lifelines of the land,
The Igigi had to dig out canals,
Had to clear channels, the lifelines of the land.” (11)

These are the very first verses of the creation myth, indicating the prime importance of irrigation labor. Before humans were created, “the gods” had to do it; mankind was “invented” precisely for the purpose of relieving them from their toil. The gods of the earth go on strike, rioting at the door of the sky gods’ representative, until he takes their cause to the assembly.

Was this perhaps an early piece of propaganda — a way to explain to peasants why it was their duty to labor at the state’s service? We’ll never know for sure, but it’s not a ludicrous suggestion. Perhaps a story like this could even have explained why the city-state’s elite got exemption from the fields; if they were connected to divinity, then by extension they might be beyond agricultural duties just like the gods.

Beyond the Walls

“The state, in order to exert control over the boundaries that define it, cannot tolerate groups it perceives as transgressing those boundaries, for those groups threaten to destabilize it by demonstrating their ability to escape the means of control exercised within, and limited to, those boundaries.” — Anne Porter (12)

As we’ve already discussed, nomads and semi-nomadic agriculturalists didn’t necessarily rush to join the newly-minted city-state. In fact, there was a good amount of defection among the citizenry, as power closed in around them and state institutions began to exploit their subsistence. What happened to these people, and what was their relationship with the state? What happened to the people who dared to thwart coercive control?

The relationship was complex, and as we shall see — despite the fortifications — the boundaries were not sharply defined. Hunter-gatherers were forever changed by the arrival of civilization, even if they did not settle within its walls. And the state, though it hated and feared the living history it had left behind, also benefited from the services of “barbarians” on its periphery. These complex barbarian-state relationships will be the subject of our next article.

Notes

1. We discussed “pristine” civilization in a prior essay. In this series we use Michael Mann’s list of six: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, the Yellow River, the Mayans in Mexico, and the Inca in Peru. Mann admits we can possibly include Minoan Crete, and does discuss it to some extent, but I choose to include only the main six. James C. Scott appears to corroborate.
2. This comes from Kramer. (9)
3. This date, and everything else in this paragraph, comes from Mann. (5)
4. Corvée labor is a form of compulsory labor, usually mandated by a feudal lord, king, or empire.
5. I am not going to discuss slavery’s prevalence, or lack thereof, in early civilization. Creel also downplays the role of slavery in Chou-run China, claiming — like Adams with regards to the Aztecs — that ancient Chinese slaves did not fit our modern Western conceptualizations. It makes sense for this to be the case: if the first empires could just draft their free citizens to work on public projects or till fields, using corvée labor, the need for slaves would not be so urgent. Nobles might still want personal or domestic servants, but it took awhile for a truly stratified class system to become widespread and removed from the context of kinship clans. Slaves absolutely existed, and their use increased alongside increased militarization. But scholars far more well-researched than I argue the prevalence issue with convincing arguments. Adams suggests this divide classically runs along Cold War lines, with Soviet historians in the “prevalent” camp and Western historians downplaying slavery’s importance. Perhaps this debate tells us more about modern agendas than it does about history; the bottom line is, we do not have enough information to make claims with certainty.

Sources

1. Scott, James C. (2017). Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Yale University Press: New Haven and London.
2. Morris, Craig (1979). Maize beer in the economics, politics, and religion of the Inca Empire. In Gastineau, Clifford F., Darby, William J. and Turner, Thomas B. (Ed.), Fermented Food Beverages in Nutrition. Academic Press: New York.
3. Bonavia, Duccio (2008). Maize: Origin, Domestication, and its Role in the Development of Culture. Trans. Javier Flores Espinoza.
4. Creel, Herrlee G. (1970). The Origins of Statecraft in China: Vol. 1. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London.
5. 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).
6. Scott, James C. (2009). The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale University Press: New Haven and London.
7. Vinogradov, I.V. (1991). The Predynastic Period and the Early and the Old Kingdoms in Egypt. In Diakonoff, I.M. (Ed.), Early Antiquity.
8. Adams, Robert McC. (1973). The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico. Aldine Publishing Company: Chicago. (Original publication 1966).
9. Kramer, Samuel Noah (1963). The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London.
10. Oppenheim, A. Leo (1977). Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London. (Original publication 1964).
11. Dalley, Stephanie (2000). Myths From Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Oxford University Press: Oxford. (Original publication 1989).
12. Porter, Anne (2012). Mobile Pastoralism and the Formation of Near Eastern Civilizations. Cambridge University Press: New York.