etirabys:

One thing I didn’t realize before reading Against the Grain was how dependent early states were on slavery and coercion. I would have guessed that they had lots of it, sure, but I wouldn’t have guessed that they would totally fall apart if they didn’t have slavery and coercion. Almost no one who wasn’t at the top wanted to be in an early state, keeping the state’s population where they were creating surplus for the elites was the project of statecraft. They won’t just naturally make surplus either, you have to force them to do it.

An early state’s population tends to run away and die fast (early city dwellers have worse nutrition and higher disease rate than hunter-gatherers), so the state had to frequently go get more population by waging war and bringing back the captives.

If the purpose of war was largely the acquisition of captives, then it makes more sense to see such military expeditions more in the light of slave raids than as conventional warfare.

You also acquire material loot, horses, cattle, etc in the raid. And burn the defeated villages, so the captives have nothing to go back to.

The most obvious advantage is that the conquerors take for the most part captives of working age, raised at the expense of another society, and get to exploit their most productive years. In a good many cases the conquerors went out of their way to seize captives with particular skills that might be useful—boat builders, weavers, metal workers, armorers, gold- and silversmiths, not to mention artists, dancers, and musicians.

James C Scott lists three reasons shy slavery was crucial in early Mesopotamian states:

• To be the property/reward of the elites
  
• To get labor for textiles, which were Mesopotamian states’ main export to non-state peoples who paid with resources which early states couldn’t do without, and also couldn’t produce on their own, like metals.
• Uruk basically had a textile gulag at one point that engaged as many as 9000 women (at a time when Uruk’s population was ~45,000)
• To get labor for onerous work like canal digging and wall building, which normal non-slave subjects won’t do without high rebellion risk
• There isn’t much information about how male war captives were used in Mesopotamia, but Greco-Roman states would use them for the most brutal work: stone quarrying, timber felling, pulling oars in galleys. This was work that needed doing for state projects, but was hard to force its normal population to do. “The numbers involved were enormous, but because [the male war captives] worked at the sites of the resources, they were a far less visible presence—and far less a threat to public order—than if they had been near the court center. It would be no exaggeration at all to think of such work as an early gulag, featuring gang labor and high rates of mortality.”

Also, one really interesting point the book brings up that I’d never considered:

Only much later, when the world was, as it were, fully occupied and the means of production privately owned or controlled by state elites, could the control of the means of production (land) alone suffice, without institutions of bondage, to call forth a surplus. So long as there are other subsistence options, as Ester Boserup noted in her classic work, “it is impossible to prevent the members of the lower class from finding other means of subsistence unless they are made personally unfree. When population becomes so dense that land can be controlled it becomes unnecessary to keep the lower classes in bondage; it is sufficient to deprive the working class of the right to be independent cultivators”—foragers, hunter-gatherers, swiddeners, pastoralists.

Huh, yes. There was a world before this, where the parameters of human-created value were different.