Embed Notice

the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness ... is the history of those who got away, and statemaking cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes this an anarchist history.

This account implicitly brings together the histories of all those peoples extruded by coercive state-making and unfree labor systems: Gypsies, Cossacks, polyglot tribes made up of refugees from Spanish reducciones in the New World and the Philippines, fugitive slave communities, the Marsh Arabs, San-Bushmen, and so on.

Pastoralism, foraging, shifting cultivation, and segmentary lineage systems are often a “secondary adaptation,” a kind of “selfbarbarianization” adopted by peoples whose location, subsistence, and social structure are adapted to state evasion.

Chinese and other civilizational discourses about the “barbarian,” the “raw,” the “primitive” ... practically mean ungoverned, not-yet-incorporated. Ethnicity and “tribe” begin exactly where taxes and sovereignty end—in the Roman Empire as in the Chinese.