“…I think, that state formation becomes possible only when there are few alternatives to a diet dominated by domesticated grains. So long as subsistence is spread across several food webs, as it is for hunter-gatherers, swidden cultivators, marine foragers, and so on, a state is unlikely to arise, inasmuch as there is no readily assessable and accessible staple to serve as a basis for appropriation” (Scott 2017, p. 22).
The characteristics of such a staple food are (1) the possibility of being taken away from the producer; for example, wheat, which must be harvested in time, and not tubers, which remain in the ground for years and are edible; and (2) a specific harvest time; here, too, it is wheat, and not, for example, legumes (Scott 2017, p. 22). The measurability and divisibility of the harvest, the possibility of calculating yields and taxes, is a key prerequisite for the emergence of the state. Wheat, barley, rice, millet and corn were the “premier political crops” (Scott 2017, p. 131):
“One might be tempted to say that states arise, when they do, in ecologically rich areas. This would be a misunderstanding. What is required is wealth in the form of an appropriable, measurable, dominant grain crop and a population growing it that can he easily administered and mobilized” (Scott 2017, p. 24). “…The embryonic state arises by harnessing the late Neolithic grain and manpower module as a basis of control and appropriation” (ibid., p. 116).
The technologies necessary for the emergence of political organization are not limited to the use of purely natural effects such as grain cultivation. Social and abstract technologies based on cultural effects (e.g., writing) were crucial both for centralized recording and calculation and for the formalization of political norms:
“The entire exercise in early state formation is one of standardization and abstraction required to deal with units of labor, grain, land, and rations. Essential to that standardization is the very invention of a standard nomenclature, through writing, of all the essential categories—receipts, work orders, labor dues, and so on” (Scott 2017, p. 144). “Claude Levi-Strauss wrote thus: Writing appears to be necessary for the centralized, stratified state to reproduce itself … Writing is a strange thing … The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system, that is to say, of a considerable number of individuals … into a hierarchy of castes and classes … It seems to favor rather the exploitation than the enlightenment of mankind” (ibid., p. vi).