Scott describes how many indigenous and nomadic peoples in North America responded to colonization and state expansion. Some groups were forcibly confined to reservations after military defeat.
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- Oct 2025
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Scott challenges the assumption that Human Beings naturally progressed toward agriculture, cities, and states. He argues for the opposite, for most of human history, people chose not to live in concentrated and hierarchical societies.
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Now, it is surely true that in any period of human history, there will always be those who feel most comfortable in ranks and orders. As Étienne de La Boétie had already pointed out in the 16th century, the source of ‘voluntary servitude’ is arguably the most important political question of them all.
Archaeology shows that many societies that experimented with freedom, fluid leadership, and non-coercive systems. People were not forced into hierarchy by a law of progress, but they rather made choices.
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In Babylonia, such groups – when not given tribal or ethnic labels – might be variously described as ‘scattered people’, ‘head-bangers’ or simply ‘enemies’. In the early centuries BCE, emissaries of the Han Empire wrote in similar ways about the rebellious marsh-dwellers of the tropical coastlands to their south.
Wengrow is describing here how imperial or centralized societies like Babylonia or Han China described groups that lived outside their direct control, people in surrounding regions who didn't conform to imperial systems of government or settlement.
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