"In one form or another the term [barbarian] was reinvented by all early states to distinguish themselves from those outside the state. ... I will continue to use the term 'barbarian' with tongue planted firmly in cheek -- in part because I want to argue that the era of the earliest and fragile states was a time when it was good to be a barbarian. The length of this period varied from place to place depending on state strength and military technology; while it lasted it might be called the golden age of the barbarians." (Scott, 32-33)
"For the Romans and the Tang Dynasty, tribes were territorial units of administsration, having little or nothing to do with the characteristics of the people so designated. ... A 'people' originally conjured out of whole cloth by administrative fiat might come to adopt that fiction as a conscious, even defiant, identity. In Caesar's evolutionary scheme, ...tribes preceded states. Given what we now know, it would be more accurate to say that states preceded tribes and, in fact, largely invented them as an instrument of rule." (Scott, 236)
"...the connection between nomads and sedentaries was a two-way street, with individuals and groups moving back and forth along this continuum as a response to environmental and social pressure." (Adams, 334; quoted in Scott, 212)
"Most of the world's population in the epoch of the early states comprised nonstate hunters and gatherers. William McNeill conjectures that they would have been demographically devestated when they came into contact with the novel diseases generated by concentrations in the grain core -- diseases that for urban populations were becoming more endemic and hence less lethal. If so, much of this nonstate population may have perished well outside of any documentation and notice...as was the case for the epidemiological devestation of New World populations as they succumbed to diseases that raced inland often well ahead of any European eyes." (Scott, 217)
"States, being largely agrarian phenomena, would, with the exception of some intermontane valleys, have looked like small alluvial achipelagoes, located on the floodplains of a handful of major rivers. ... Outside this ecological 'sweet spot,' in arid lands, in swamps and marshes, in the mountains, they could not rule. They might mount punitive expeditions and win an engagement or two, but rule was another thing. ... For the most part, states did not seek to rule fiscally sterile areas beyond the core that would not normally repay the cost of governing them. Instead, states sought military allies and proxies in the hinterlands and traded to obtain the scarce raw materials they needed." (Scott, 220)
"[T]he threat posed by barbarians was perhaps the single most important factor limiting the growth of states for a period measured more in millennia than in centuries." (Scott, 222)
"[T]This concentration of settled people...serve[d] as a site of extraction for more mobile predators. When the predator's mobility was enhanced by camels, horses, stirrups, or swift boats of shallow draft, the range and effectiveness of their raids was greatly extended. The returns of barbarian life would have been far less attractive in the absence of these concentrated [so-called] foraging sites." (Scott, 223)
"Under premodern conditions and perhaps even until the era of cannons, mobile armies of pastoralists have generally been superior to the aristocratic and peasant armies of states. Even in regions without pastoralists and horses, the general pattern seems to be that more mobile peoples -- hunter-gatherers, swiddeners, and boat people -- tend to dominate and extract tribute from sedentary horticulturalists and farmers." (Scott, 237)
"Barbarian raiders were, for the most part, relatively safe from retaliation by the state. ... State armies might be effective against fixed objectives and sedentary communities but were largely helpless campaigning against acephalous bands with no central authority with whom to negotiate or defeat in battle." (Scott, 238)
"[P]lunder and trade...were very effectively combined in ways that mimicked certain forms of statecraft." (Scott, 227)
"[R]aiding...is a radically unstable mode of subsistence.... Knowing this, raiders are most likely to adjust their strategy to something that looks more like a 'protection racket.' ... In extracting a sustainable surplus from sedentary communities and fending off external attacks to protect its base, a stable protection racket like this is hard to distinguish from the archaic state itself." (Scott, 241)
"Barbarian-state relations can be seen as a contest between two parties for the right to apprpriate the surplus from the sedentary grain-and-manpower module." (Scott, 242)
"Hunters and gatherers or swiddeners might nibble at the state, but politidcally mobilized large confederations of mounted pastoralists were designed to extract wealth from sedentary states; they were a 'state in waiting' or, as Barfield puts it, a 'shadow empire.'" (Scott, 249).
"While raiding's spectacular quality tends to dominate accounts of the early state's relationships with barbarians, it was surely far less important than trade. The early states, located for the most part in rich, alluvial bottomlands, were natural trading partners with nearby barbarians. Ranging widely in a far more diverse environment, only the barbarians could supply the necessities without which the early state could not long survive: metal ores, timber, hides, obsidian, honey, medicinals, and aromatics. The lowland kingdom was more valuable as a trade depot, in the long run, than as a site of plunder." (Scott, 34)
"Raiding by nomadic groups...is best understood as a means of acquiring tributary communities and of dominating the trade that circulated through them. It was not a result of nomadic poverty, still less a desire for shiny objects." (Scott, 248)
"[E]xchange and trade flowed vigorously between [state and nonstate peoples]. The exchange, however, was uncoerced and depended on bartering and trading desirable goods from one ecological zone to another to mutual advantage." (Scott, 136)
"The greatest boon that the appearance of states provided to barbarians...was...trading posts. Because states represented such narrow agro-ecologies, they relied on a host of products from outside the alluvium to survive. State and nonstate peoples were natural trading partners. As a state grew in population and wealth, so too did its commercial exchange with nearby barbarians. In the first millennium BCE there was a veritable explosion in seaborne commerce in the Mediterranean that exponentially increased the volume and value of trade. The greater part of the 'barbarian economy' in this context was devoted to supplying lowland markets with raw materials and goods they required.... A good part of what barbarians supplied was livestock in the most expansive sense of the term: cattle, sheep, and above all slaves. In return they received textiles, grain, iron- and copperware, pottery, and artisan luxury items.... Barbarian groups that controlled one or more of the major trading routes (usually a navigable river) to a major lowland center could reap large rewards and become, in turn conspicous sites of luxury, talent, and, if you will, 'civiliziation.'" (Scott, 226)
"Both foraging and hunting became, with the expansion of trade, more a trading and entrepreneurial venture than a pure subsistence activity." (Scott, 34-35)
"[T]he various peripheries of the agrarian states became valuable commercial landscapes -- in some ways more valuable than the alluvium itself -- thoroughly enmeshed in Mediterranean-wide trade networkds. The possibilities for hunters, foragers, and marine collectors had never been more promising." (Scott, 247)
"[N]omadic pastoralists require sedentary communities as depots of manpower and revenue as well as trading outlets. Nomadic pastoralists have been known to forcibly resettle agricultural populations to great such depots." (Scott, 251)
Some "nomadic barbarians...conquer[ed] the state or empire and became a new ruling class. ... The second alternative is far more common but less remarked upon, and that is for the nomads to become the cavalry/mercenaries of the state, patrolling the marches and keeping the other barbarians in check. ... In this case, rather than conquering the state, the barbarisns become part of the military arm of an existing state." (Scott, 250-251)
"[T]he political enclosure movement represented by the modern nation-state did not yet exist. Physical movement, flux, an open froneier, and mixed subsistence strategies were the hallmark of this entire period. Even the exceptional and often short-lived empires of this long epoch could not impede large-scale population movements in and out of their political orbit." (Scott, 253)
"As states and durable gunpowder empires grew, the ability of nonstate peoples to raid and dominate small states shrank at a pace that depended greatly on the region and its geography." (Scott, 254)
"Selling both their fellow barbarians and their martial service to the early states, the barbarians contributed mightily to the decline of their brief golden age." (Scott, 35)
"Barbarian levies had as much to do with building states as with plunderng them. By systematically replenishing the state's manpower base by slaving and by protecting and expanding the state with its military services, the barbarians willingly dug their own grave." (Scott, 256)
). In Civ6, with the Barbarian Clans feature introduced in 2021, barbarians can develop into city states, with interactions with settled civilizations influencing the rate at which they progress towards that goal. Even without that feature, the Civ6 barbarians produce better units over time; one of the few things I like more about Civ6 than Civ3 is that you actually have to think about the barbarians in the expansion phase, and consistently throughout that phase. One unit to escort a Settler is not necessarily going to cut it, and I saw a barbarian Settler that they had presumably swiped from an AI civilization.
) through today - how many of "us" forget that the introduction of spoke-wheeled chariots into the Indo-European world came from the Eurasian steppes ca. 2000 BCE, via the Scythians.
