How long does it take to read Against the Grain?
A Deep History of the Earliest States
Against the Grain by James C. Scott takes about 5 hours 43 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 43 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2017. 312 pages, about 85,800 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 32 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 43 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 35 minutes |
The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
An account of all the new and surprising evidence now available for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations that contradict the standard narrative. Why did humans abandon hunting and gathering for sedentary communities dependent on livestock and cereal grains, and governed by precursors of today's states? Most people believe that plant and animal domestication allowed humans, finally, to settle down and form agricultural villages, towns, and states, which made possible civilization, law, public order, and a presumably secure way of living. But archaeological and historical evidence challenges this narrative. The first agrarian states, says James C. Scott, were born of accumulations of domestications: first fire, then plants, livestock, subjects of the state, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family--all of which can be viewed as a way of gaining control over reproduction. Scott explores why we avoided sedentism and plow agriculture, the advantages of mobile subsistence, the unforeseeable disease epidemics arising from crowding plants, animals, and grain, and why all early states are based on millets and cereal grains and unfree labor. He also discusses the "barbarians" who long evaded state control, as a way of understanding continuing tension between states and nonsubject peoples.
Subjects: Origin, Agriculture and state, Agriculture, History, State, the, Agriculture -- Origin
