#stateformation — Public Fediverse posts

New research suggests early states grew not from surplus alone but from the tax potential of cereal grains. Writing followed as a tool for keeping track. A fresh phylogenetic view on why grain shaped political evolution. #Anthropology #Archaeology #HumanEvolution #StateFormation https://www.anthropology.net/p/fields-that-built-nations-how-the

New excavations in Shandong reveal that early Zhou ritual platforms shaped China’s first shared identities long before the First Emperor. Political unity began not with conquest, but with communion. #Archaeology #Anthropology #China #StateFormation @antiquity.ac.uk https://www.anthropology.net/p/the-politics-of-sacred-earth-how

"What is required [for state formation] is wealth in the form of an appropriable, measurable, dominant grain crop and a population growing it that can be easily administered and mobilized. Areas of great but diverse abundance such as wetlands, which offer dozens of subsistence options to a mobile population, because of their very illegibility and fugitive diversity, are not zones of successful state making. The logic of assessable and accessible crops and people applies as well to smaller-scale efforts at control and legibility one finds in the Spanish redduciones in the New World, many missionary settlements, and that paragon of legibility, the monocrop plantation with the workforce in the barracks."

-- James C. Scott, Against the Grain

#Anarchism #Anarchy #States #StateFormation #Plantation

https://archive.org/details/nkrumahs-ghana

The Military and Politics in Nkrumah's Ghana by Simon Baynham

Topics
#Ghana, #military, #coups, #militarycoups, #britishcolonialism, #britishimperialism, #Africanization, #stateformation, #whitesupremacy, #antiblackness, #neocolonialism, #WestAfrica, #coupdetat, #golpedelestado

“The book is based on documents from the Ministry of Defence and other departments in Ghana and on interviews with 96 Ghanaian and British army officers, civil servants, and politicians.”