In Praise of Floods

"One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades."--John Gray, New York Times Book Review "A powerful, and in many [ways] insightful, explanation as to why grandiose programs of social reform, not to mention revolution, so often end in tragedy. . . . An important critique of visionary state planning."--Robert Heilbroner, Lingua Franca Hailed as "a magisterial critique of top-down social planning" by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail--sometimes catastrophically--in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. "Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit."--New Yorker "A tour de force."--Charles Tilly, Columbia University The Institution for Social and Policy Studies

An account of all the new and surprising evidence now available that contradicts the standard narrative for the beginnings of the earliest civilizations <BR>  <BR>An Economist Best History Book 2017<BR>  <BR>“Scott is one of those rare academics whose writing is a thing of beauty.”—Rana Dasgupta, The Week<BR>  <BR>“Scott hits the nail squarely on the head by exposing the staggering price our ancestors paid for civilization and political order.”—Walter Scheidel, Financial Times<BR>  <BR> 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.<BR>  <BR> 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.

Wie selbstverständlich gehen wir davon aus, dass die neolithische Revolution, in deren Verlauf Nomaden zu Ackerbauern und Viehzüchtern wurden, ein bedeutender zivilisatorischer Fortschritt war. James C. Scott entwickelt in seinem provokanten Buch eine ganz andere These: Die ersten Staaten entstanden aus der Kontrolle über die Reproduktion und errichteten ein hartes Regime der Domestizierung und Unterwerfung, das Epidemien, Ungleichheiten und Kriege mit sich brachte. Einzig die 'Barbaren' - die heimlichen Helden dieses Buches - haben sich der Sesshaftigkeit sowie den neuen Besteuerungssystemen verweigert und sich damit gegen die Mühlen der Zivilisation gestemmt.

James C. Scott reframes rivers as alive and dynamic, revealing the consequences of treating them as resources for our profit<BR> <BR>A New Yorker Best Book of the Year<BR> <BR>"Informative, enjoyable, and provocative. . . . Scott's [prose] is dry, clear, and scalding with moral purpose."-Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post<BR> <BR>Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they can teem (usually) with life; they may die a quasi-natural death; they are frequently maimed and even murdered.<BR> <BR>It is the annual flood pulse-the brief time when the river occupies the floodplain-that gives a river its vitality, but it is human engineering that kills it, suppressing the flood pulse with dams, irrigation, siltation, dikes, and levees. In demonstrating these threats to the riverine world, award-winning author James C. Scott examines the life history of a particular river, the Ayeyarwady (Irrawaddy) of Burma, the heartland and superhighway of Burman culture.<BR> <BR>Scott opens our understanding of rivers to encompass their entirety-tributaries, wetlands, floodplains, backwaters, eddies, periodic marshlands, and the assemblage of life forms dependent on rivers for their existence and well-being. For anyone interested in the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration, rivers offer a striking example of the consequences of human intervention in trying to control and domesticate a natural process, the complexity and variability of which we barely understand.