Most people will be familiar with the Social Contract (Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke) idea of state formation. There is an alternative theory that hypothesises that the first states were not formed to protect private property but to extract it from the population. In The Origins of Political Order (2011) Francis Fukuyama writes:
In an influential article, the economist Mancur Olson posited a simple model of political development. The world was initially ruled by “roving bandits,” like the various warlords of early twentieth-century China, or the ones operating in Afghanistan and Somalia at the beginning of the twenty-first century. These bandits were purely predatory and sought to extract as many resources from the population as possible, often with very short time horizons so they could quickly move on to other victims. At a certain point one bandit would emerge stronger than all the others and come to dominate the society: “These violent entrepreneurs naturally do not call themselves bandits but, on the contrary, give themselves and their descendants exalted titles. They sometimes even claim to rule by divine right.” In other words, the king, who claimed a legitimate title to rule, was simply a “stationary bandit” with motives no different from those of the roving bandits he displaced. The stationary bandit realizes, however, that he can become even richer if, instead of going for short-term plunder, he provides stability, order, and other public goods to his society, thereby making it richer and liable to higher taxes in the long run. From the standpoint of the ruled, this represents an advance on the roving bandits. But “exactly the same rational self-interest that makes a roving bandit settle down and provide government for his subjects also makes him extract the maximum possible amount from the society for himself. He will use his monopoly of coercive power to obtain the maximum take in taxes and other exactions.”
Fukuyama himself does not believe the theory to be true as there are plenty of examples of governments that under-taxed rather than over-taxed their subjects and thus not providing enough means for defence, for example. However, taxation was already an established system by the time the bandits took over a settlement. Taxation itself arose in agrarian societies as a redistributive system. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued that chiefly redistribution is not different in principle and nothing but a highly organised form of kinship-rank reciprocity. We can assume that this system of redistribution was somewhat fairer than the one established by the bandits. So, who were those bandits that took over much larger farming populations? The first city-states did not appear until long after the advent of farming 10.000 BCE during the Bronze Age 3300 BCE to 1200 BCE. If we assume that most farmers by then were rather sedentary, kin-oriented and unlikely to become roving bandits this leaves two possibilities for roving bandits: nomadic foragers, who were still quite common by the Bronze Age (but not anymore afterwards) or nomadic pastoralists. Here is my model of temperament types based on these subsistence strategies:
Foragers may occasionally have stolen some of the harvest, however, foragers were unlikely bandits as they do not seek possessions. What’s more, the few possessions they are are usually communally shared. This leaves us with pastoralists. Some of the countries where nomadic pastoralism is still practised include Kenya, Iran, India, Somalia, Algeria, Nepal, Russia, and Afghanistan. It’s no coincidence that Somalia and Afghanistan are mentioned in Fukuyama’s passage above. Pastoralists are usually organised in segmentary lineages. Marshall Sahlins described the segmentary lineage as “an organisation of predatory expansion.”
One Bronze Age pastoralist culture was the Yamnaya. The Yamnaya spread Indo-European languages all over Europe and Western Asia. How did a small population of pastoralists achieve this feat? Mancur Olson’s theory of roving bandits becoming stationary bandits has basically almost all that it takes to explain the spread of Indo-European languages: small tribes of Yamaya taking over local farming populations. The Yamnaya had horses and superior bronze weapons and were thus able to subject populations much larger than themselves.
Their language would have mixed somewhat with the local language and then be spread if that local population went on to become a successful state (e.g. Greece or Hittite). The same was probably true of Afro-Asiatic languages (Semitic, Berber, Cushitic, etc.), many of which are still associated with pastoralism nowadays, like Cushitic in Somalia. The Nostratic language hypothesis proposes that Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and Afro-Asiatic are all related. All of these language families have close ties to pastoralism and it is possible that the proto-Nostratic language was spoken by the very first cattle herders in Africa around 8.000 BCE. The earliest African food producers were nomadic herders, not sedentary farmers.
The distribution of Nostratic languages and the “pastoralist corridor” between Africa and Asia
Check out my book on how these three tribes, foragers, farmers and pastoralists have shaped history:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08ZR3KPVH
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