Against the Grain

James C. Scott's 2017 revisionist history of early state formation — arguing that the first states emerged not from voluntary settlement but from coercion, that they were fragile and often collapsed, and that the peoples who avoided state incorporation were often doing so deliberately.

Inverts the standard civilizational narrative — states were not the natural culmination of human progress but fragile, disease-ridden, coercive structures that people often fled; the 'barbarians' outside the state were frequently ex-state people, and the collapse of early states was often experienced as liberation.