Chapter 2: The Surplus Problem

Consider a basket of grain.

It sits in the corner of a mudbrick house in what will eventually be called the Fertile Crescent, sometime around 9000 BCE. It was planted, tended, harvested, and carried here by a woman whose name no one recorded. What is not lost is the problem the basket creates.

Nobody in a hunter-gatherer band accumulates grain. You eat what you find, share what you kill, and move on. But this woman — and thousands like her, across a wide arc from the Jordan Valley to the Zagros Mountains — has done something different. She has stored food. Not for tonight. For later. For winter. For the months when the wild stands thin and the rivers drop.

It is an act of extraordinary foresight. It is also the beginning of every governance problem that will consume the next ten thousand years.

Because the basket raises a question the circle never had to answer: who controls the stored grain?

The story of agriculture is usually told as progress. Humans wandered, then they settled. They hunted, then they farmed. They were primitive, then they were civilized. Each step is an improvement, each transition a triumph of ingenuity over nature.

James C. Scott had a different story. A political scientist at Yale, Scott had spent his career studying how states see their subjects.

In his 2017 book Against the Grain, Scott assembled evidence that dismantled the progress narrative piece by piece. The transition to agriculture was not sudden — sedentism preceded plant domestication by thousands of years, and both were in place for at least four millennia before anything resembling a village appeared. The "Neolithic Revolution" was less a revolution than a slow, messy entanglement between humans and a handful of grass species.

And it was not, by most measures, an improvement.

Early farmers were shorter than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Their bones show more nutritional stress, more evidence of disease, more damage from the repetitive labor of grinding grain. Their teeth were worse — cavities, a rarity among hunter-gatherers, became epidemic. Their diets narrowed catastrophically: where a forager might eat dozens of plant species and a wide range of game and fish, a farmer ate wheat, or barley, or millet, with occasional supplements. Life expectancy in early agricultural settlements often dropped.

So why did people do it?

Scott's answer is sharp, and it has everything to do with governance. They didn't choose it — or rather, by the time choice was relevant, retreat was impossible. Agriculture creates a trap. Once you've cleared the land, built the granary, planted the field, you can't walk away without losing everything you've invested. The forager's greatest governance tool — the ability to vote with your feet, to simply leave — is the first casualty of sedentism.

And once you can't leave, everything changes.

To understand what changed, visit Catalhoyuk.

In the flat, sun-baked plain of central Anatolia, between roughly 7500 and 5700 BCE, a settlement grew to between three thousand and eight thousand people. By the standards of the time, it was enormous — one of the largest human concentrations on Earth. And it was, stubbornly, strange.

No palaces. No temples. No buildings that could be identified as administrative centers. The houses were almost identical in size, crowded together so tightly that residents entered through holes in the roof. When Ian Hodder's excavation teams dug through decades of occupation layers, they found no evidence of a ruling class: no houses with outsized hearths, no graves with dramatically richer goods, no structures that announced power lives here.

For archaeologists accustomed to reading hierarchy from architecture — the palace that dominates the city, the temple that towers above — Catalhoyuk was baffling. Here was a community that had adopted agriculture, abandoned nomadism, and grown to a scale that should, by every theoretical model, have required governance structures. And yet the structures weren't there.

Or were they?

The absence of public buildings doesn't mean the absence of governance. It may mean governance happened in private — in the domestic spaces where food was stored, processed, and shared. A 2014 study by Amy Bogaard and colleagues found that while cooking tools and basic implements were evenly distributed across households, quern-stones and storage units were not. Some households processed more grain than others. Some stored more.

Here, perhaps, is the seed of everything that follows. Not yet hierarchy, but asymmetry. Not yet a ruling class, but households with more capacity, more reserves, more leverage. The difference between having enough grain to survive a bad season and having enough to share with a neighbor who doesn't is the difference between equality and obligation. And obligation, once established, has a way of compounding.

Catalhoyuk held this tension for nearly two thousand years. But the later occupation levels tell a story the earlier ones don't: richer burials appear, adorned with jewelry and finely crafted obsidian. Some graves contain polished obsidian mirrors — objects of such labor-intensity that they could only have been produced by people who didn't need to spend every hour on subsistence. Inequality appears to have been emerging — though whether gradually or in fits and starts, the archaeology cannot yet say.

The circle was stretching. And when circles stretch, they become something else.

Here is the paradox: surplus creates governance problems that surplus alone cannot solve.

When food is immediate — killed, gathered, eaten — governance is simple. Everyone participates in the decision because everyone is affected by the outcome. The feedback loop is instantaneous. A bad hunting plan means you go hungry tonight, and you are the one who made the plan. Correction is automatic.

But surplus introduces delay. The grain in the basket is not for tonight; it is for next month, next season, next year. This means someone must decide: How much do we store? How much do we eat now? What happens when the harvest fails — who eats first? And crucially: who makes these decisions?

In a band of thirty, the answer is still "everyone." But Catalhoyuk had thousands of residents. And across the Fertile Crescent, the Yangtze, the Indus Valley, the same pattern was unfolding. Agriculture concentrated people. Concentration required coordination. Coordination required authority.

The evidence from early agricultural settlements traces a sequence that would repeat, with variations, on every continent where farming took hold:

First, surplus demanded management. Grain must be stored, protected from vermin, rationed through lean seasons. Someone — a household head, an elder, a particularly competent organizer — takes responsibility. This is not yet governance; it is logistics.

Then management demanded specialization. The person managing the grain cannot also be in the field all day. Some take on defense — stored grain, unlike foraged food, can be raided. Others handle tool-making, or wall-building, or the increasingly complex rituals that early agricultural communities developed. Each specialization is sensible in isolation. Together, they create a class of people whose relationship to the grain is different from the people who grow it.

Then specialization demanded hierarchy. The manager, the warrior, the ritual specialist — they need to coordinate with each other. Someone must arbitrate disputes between them. Someone must decide, when the harvest is poor, whether the warriors eat before the builders. That someone begins to acquire a kind of authority that the circle never produced: authority over people they don't eat with, sleep near, or depend on directly.

And then hierarchy demanded legitimation. Because here is the problem with authority: it only works if people accept it. In the circle, acceptance was organic — you followed the experienced hunter because you'd seen her track game successfully for twenty years. But in a community of thousands, most people haven't seen the leader do anything at all. They need a reason to obey that doesn't depend on personal knowledge.

This is where governance, in the sense that the rest of this chronicle will explore, truly begins. Not with the first decision, but with the first justification for decisions made by people who won't personally suffer the consequences.

There is a popular theory about how this happened in irrigated societies. Karl Wittfogel called it the "hydraulic hypothesis." A German scholar who had fled the Nazis, Wittfogel argued in Oriental Despotism (1957) that large-scale irrigation required centralized coordination of mass labor. You cannot build a canal network by consensus. Someone must plan, command, and enforce. Therefore, wherever irrigation appeared — Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Peru — despotism followed.

The theory is elegant. It is also mostly wrong.

Archaeological evidence now shows that in at least three of Wittfogel's cited regions, full-fledged states existed well before large-scale irrigation. The temporal sequence runs backward: power first, then the big canals, not the other way around. And many small-scale irrigation systems were managed perfectly well by local communities without anything resembling centralized authority. The Balinese subak system, for instance, coordinated rice paddy irrigation across an entire island through networks of water temples — no despot required.

Wittfogel's real contribution, stripped of its overreach, was to notice that infrastructure creates governance pressure. Canals need maintenance. Maintenance needs organization. Organization needs someone in charge. But the same is true of grain storage, wall-building, road-making, and a hundred other things that sedentary life demands. There was no single cause of hierarchy. There was a convergence of pressures, all pointing in the same direction: someone must decide.

And then there is the question of who suffered most.

The transition to agriculture didn't just create hierarchy between households. Multiple research lines suggest it transformed relationships between men and women. The evidence is not simple — Catalhoyuk's early levels show striking gender equality, with men and women receiving equivalent nutrition and similar burial goods. But the trend, across millennia and across regions, is unmistakable.

Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn published a landmark study tracing this pattern. Societies with long histories of plough agriculture, they found, have significantly less gender equality today. The "Neolithic inheritance" persists to the present day: where the plough was adopted early, women's labor force participation remains lower, and attitudes toward gender roles remain more traditional. The mechanism appears to be straightforward: plough agriculture rewards upper-body strength, which men tend to have more of. As food production became more physically demanding and less compatible with childcare, the labor division deepened — and deepened authority along with it.

Around 4000 BCE, the domestication of draft animals accelerated this shift. Herding required mobility and exposure to danger, both culturally coded as male. The woman who had been an equal participant in gathering, processing, and sharing food increasingly found her domain narrowing to the household — which, not coincidentally, was also narrowing in its governance authority.

But Jane Peterson, writing in Signs, warns against universal narratives here. "Universal descriptions of the outcomes of early agricultural developments," she argues, "inevitably falter in the light of local data sets and detailed analyses." The shift was real but not uniform. Some communities resisted it for centuries. Others accelerated it. The pattern was not a law of nature; it was a tendency, amplified by specific technologies and specific ecological pressures.

What we can say — carefully, based on the evidence — is that the surplus problem was also a gender problem. When governance moved from the circle to the granary, from shared decisions to administered ones, the question of "who decides" narrowed. And it narrowed, in most places, along the axis of gender.

Step back, now, and see the full arc of what happened.

For two hundred thousand years, humans governed themselves in circles. Small groups, face-to-face, everyone a participant, feedback immediate. It was not paradise, but it was coherent — decisions and consequences lived in the same bodies.

Then, over a span of roughly five thousand years — a blink in evolutionary time, an eternity in lived experience — everything changed. Agriculture rooted people to land. Land accumulated surplus. Surplus demanded management. Management created hierarchy. Hierarchy severed the feedback loop that had kept governance honest.

The person deciding how the grain was distributed no longer went hungry when the distribution was unfair. The warrior protecting the granary ate whether the harvest was good or not. The ritual specialist who blessed the planting had a full belly regardless of what the gods actually provided. For the first time in human history, there were people who made decisions and people who lived with the consequences of those decisions — and they were not the same people.

This is the original sin of governance, if governance has a sin. Not ambition, not greed, not the will to power — those existed in the circle too, and the circle had tools to manage them. The sin was distance. The lengthening of the loop. The growing gap between the hand that decides and the body that bears the weight.

Everything in this chronicle — every empire, every revolution, every constitution, every reform — is an attempt to close that gap. Or, failing that, to manage the consequences of its existence.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The surplus problem has been posed. Now it needs an answer.

And the answer, when it comes, will arrive on a small clay tablet, pressed with the wedge-shaped end of a reed, in a language no one alive can speak anymore. The answer is writing. The answer is bureaucracy. The answer is the state.