A recent paper, "The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?" (Mayshar et al., 2022), highlights how seemingly small changes in subsistence can have vast and far-reaching implications for human well-being. In this paper, the researchers suggest that throughout history, the development of tax-fueled states and empires required grain agriculture, not necessarily high production agriculture. The traditional academic idea is that agriculture created more excess production that could fuel all kinds of other cultures and development. The picture that emerges from this work is that it was not more production that enabled kings and empires to form. Empires formed because grain is portable and nonperishable, and farmers store the whole year's production in a silo. Therefore a high production agricultural area that grew root crops was less likely to experience political consolidation than a low production area that grew grain. This is because strongmen easily steal grain and can become a gangster/warlords. This theft is then called 'taxation,' and it is what fuels the wars and vanity projects of the warlord, who becomes a king.

We can see grain's dramatic impact on the Ukrainian conflict (The Economist, 2022) inside those two countries and worldwide. It goes much deeper than that. In this research, without grain, there is no Ukraine to invade. Without grain, there is no Russia to invade it. This is the ultimate protection against war. The kingdoms and empires (and the modern nation-states that inherited their territory) exist to protect grainfields and grain silos. People are incidental. 

The "cultural developments" that people hold up as the product of these empires are no such thing. These empires made gold baubles and pyramids to nowhere, for the king, by slaves fed grain grown by serfs. In these empires, serfs don't add that extra flourish to the spoon they were carving; they are just happy to have something to eat. Besides, they don't have the heart for it anymore. They don't come up with a better way to build their own house or barn; that's the sort of thing free people do.

Ok, so maybe I am 'extrapolating' a little on these researchers' data. But I believe that this is another example of my core thesis; if you know something about someone's landscape, you know something about their heart because our hearts expect a certain landscape.

I will get back to that idea next time. Because if war, tyranny, and taxes required a minor shift in the sort of crops farmers grew, imagine the changes that resulted when people started growing crops and raising livestock in the first place.