Abstract
Although many economists recognize the existence of stateless orders, economists such as Cowen, Sutter, and Holcombe question how viable stateless orders are in the long run. Research documenting the historical existence of stateless societies is much more developed than our understanding of whether societies can successfully remain free of states. This article analyzes historical and anthropological evidence from societies in Southeast Asia that have avoided states for thousands of years. The article provides an overview of some of their customary legal practices and then describes the mechanisms that they use to avoid, repel, and prevent would-be states. Such stateless societies have successfully repelled states using location, specific production methods, and cultural resistance to states. A better understanding of these mechanisms provides a potential explanation for how such societies remained free of states for long periods of time.
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Notes
In the exchange between Holcombe (2004, 2005) and Leeson and Stringham (2005), Holcombe (2005, p. 553) writes, “The examples that Leeson and Stringham cite are ultimately unpersuasive because, except for Somalia, the anarchistic societies they cite have all been taken over by governments.” For a discussion of statelessness in modern day Somalia, see Coyne and Leeson (2010) and Powell et al. (2008). For further discussion of why anarchy need not devolve into government see Caplan and Stringham (2003), Stringham (2006), and Stringham and Hummel (2010).
Although Scott does not provide a singular definition of the state, we find the “state” in the anthropological literature cited corresponding to the definition of the term from Henri Claessen's entry in The Encyclopaedia of Cultural Anthropology (Claessen 1996, p. 1255), as follows: “the state is an independent, centralized socio-political organization for the regulation of social relations in a complex, stratified society living in a specific territory, and consisting of two basic strata, the rulers and the ruled, in this whose relations are characterized by political dominance of the former and tax obligations of the latter, legitimized by an at least partly shared ideology…” as well as the broad Weberian (1964, p. 154) definition of the state as a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence in a given territory. However, other anthropologists such as Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1948) have on occasion added to this definition numerical population qualifications or pronounced hierarchy in social status or wealth.
Anthropologist Peter Skalník (1989, p. 8) argues that state power entails the “capacity for carrying out decisions and activities ostensibly on behalf of a whole society by specific state agencies that have monopoly of use or threat of use of organized violence” and that while societies such as those described in this article as stateless may have had authority in familial headmen, elders, or chiefdoms, there did not exist state power as such authority was legitimated without proactive violence and was “voluntarily recognized by all.”
Statecraft is used here in the historical and anthropological terms of state-making and state expansion, not in the sense the word often is used in political science and international relations, where it means diplomacy or good governance.
Zomia, defined as the higher altitude region of continental Southeast Asia, is alternatively referred to as “the Southeast Asian massif.” A comprehensive bibliography of academic work on the region as well as a term-based, summarized history thereof can be found in the Historical Dictionary of the Peoples of the Southeast Asian Massif (Michaud 2006), edited by social anthropologist Jean Michaud. Much anthropological, archaeological, and historical literature also exists on individual groups and countries within the Zomian region. Edmund Leach's influential work (1954/Leach 2004) on the Kachin in Burma is of particular note, as is that of Michaud (2000), McKinnon and Bhruksasri (1983), McKinnon (1997), and Scott (2000, 2009) on the region as a whole.
Scott (2000, p. 3) notes, for example, that “for most of ‘Burmese’ history there was no state in any robust sense of the term. There were, instead, small scale local chiefs, confederations of villages, warlords, bandits, multiple sovereigns contending.” Scott (2009, p. 331) writes, “Virtually all hill societies exhibit a range of state-evading behavior” and describes how some stateless societies display internal hierarchies of social class whereas other, more egalitarian stateless societies work to prevent that as well.
States often leave written records that exaggerate the state's importance and history. Scott (2009, p. 35) argues that state histories have been distorted by modern state accounts in the interest of identifying a protonation to create “an historical fable that projects the nation backward.” This state-centric historiography has resulted in the notion that stateless societies in Southeast Asia and elsewhere were primitive peoples passively left out of states by the civilized lowland states (Scott 2009, p. 9).
For instance, archeological evidence indicates that in northeast Thailand, widespread copper mining on a large and organized scale existed as long as 2,500 years ago (Scott 2009, p. 339). But no evidence suggests that state-like institutions existed during this period. Pigott (1998, p. 222) argues that production was community-based, which in the framework of Costin (1991, p. 8) is: “autonomous individual or household-based production units, aggregated within a single community, producing for unrestricted regional consumption.”
Stevenson (1943, p. 154) contrasted the British legal system's emphasis punishment and imprisonment with the principles of Chin customary law, which involved “redress of the economic consequences of offense.” Stevenson wrote that the British Penal Code “envisages offences as infringements of a codified law,” whereas among the Chin, “the courts of the elders regard them principally as acts resulting in economic loss.”
An offense against a village elder, chief, or headman was treated simply as an offense against the individual.
Stevenson (1943, p. 152) wrote that in all cases among the Chin, “only fines or compensation are inflicted; bodily injury and death are not included in the list of traditional deterrents.”
The arbiters were often councils of elders “selected for their wisdom and social prestige” (Stevenson 1943, p. 90).
To this end, they take into account not only the facts of the offense itself but also the “likelihood of emigration of disaffected persons” (Stevenson 1943, p. 153). Stevenson noted at the time the British “officers argued that allowing elders to participate in sharing the proceeds of their own judicial orders increases litigation because unscrupulous elders stir up trouble in order to raise fines.” However, “many [Chin] argue in precisely the opposite direction, saying that if all the fines were paid as compensation to injured parties there would be a profit in litigation and a much greater incentive to sue.”
Stevenson (1943, pp. 154–155) concluded that the customary law procedure was relatively cheap, as it was executed on the basis of “village autonomy and through the hereditary officials and traditional councils, and last not least, it is successful in attaining the result desired, for there is very much less crime” among the stateless Chin “than in most other areas in Burma.”
Swidden agriculture entails the clearing a plot of land for temporary cultivation by way of cutting or burning the extant vegetation, cultivating and harvesting crops thereon, and then leaving the area fallow to regrow.
Dove (1983, pp. 86–87) explains, “Throughout Southeast Asia, rights to secondary forest are usually held by specific, individual households; these rights being initially acquired by virtue of the opening of the primary forest on that land.”
British archaeologist E. Forchhammer (1884, pp.3-4) also observed the construction of wood fences for individual land plots by the upland Chin in Burma, and anthropologist H.N.C. Stevenson (1943, pp.164-165) noted that in the Chin village, the individual retains property right to “his house, field-plots and garden that carries with it all the benefits of ownership exclusive of the free right of disposal.”
Among Kachin of the gumsa society in Burma, anthropologist Edmund Leach further noted a conception and demarcation of private property by fencing that many outsiders did not appreciate. Leach (2004, pp.111-112) wrote, “The household is the primary unit of economic cooperation… In some areas, every [house] has attached to it a small fenced garden” that is “kept in permanent cultivation.” Leach explains that “In 1939, a well-meaning British administrator pointed out that the garden system involved the construction of a most unnecessary amount of fencing and suggested that households should pool their gardens so as to work a sort of allotment system. [The Kachin villagers’] comments on this suggestion were most unfavorable; it seemed clear the whole point… was that it was immediately adjacent to the house and private to the members of that house.”For an analysis of how government officials misunderstanding local customs leads to problems see Carilli et al. (2008).
Similar principles of homestead-type property rights were found elsewhere, including among many Tibeto-Burman peoples throughout pre-colonial history. Michaud (2009, p. 38) wrote that “for mobile societies such as other Mon-Khmer groups, all Miao-Yao speakers and many within the Tibeto-Burman family, land itself was not strictly speaking subject to ownership. There were instead rights for growers to use the land that they and their family had cleared, while earning the privilege to dispose privately of its produce.”
Stevenson (1943, pp. 91–92) observed that in many villages, there exist what he refers to as “extremely individualistic” norms of absolute land tenure, including sale, rent, and absentee ownership. Stevenson (1943, pp. 82–84) noted elsewhere individual land rights were on occasion subject to provisos such as allowance for a headman or council's decision to reappropriate a measure of land to a needy villager or allowance for another person's travel through said land or for tribute to community religious ceremony. Stevenson noted the land of such villages was often initially founded by a Chief or headman's familial homesteading. He wrote that among the Zahau of the Chin, “clearing virgin jungle establishes a perpetual right of cultivation … this is the sanction for the hereditary cultivation titles” (Stevenson 1943, p. 87). However, in the villages of other Chin such as the Zanniat, “there is no such thing as the Chief's claim to land” (Stevenson 1943, p. 87).
Scott (2009, p. 43) notes that “in one sense, the difficulty of moving grain long distances, compared with the relative ease of pedestrian travel, captures the essential dilemma of Southeast Asian statecraft before the late nineteenth century.”
This situation is not unique to Southeast Asia. In South America, Northern Africa, North American Appalachia, and various other regions of disparate altitudes, “the steepest places” often functioned as “the asylum of liberty” (Fernand Braudel quoted in Scott 2009, p. 20).
Scott (2009, p. 48) notes that a map in which “the unit of measurement is not distance but the time of travel is, in fact, more in accord with the vernacular practices” of the Southeast Asian peasantry. Such a map would account for the relative ease of travel via “navigable rivers, coastlines, and flap plains” and the relative difficulty of travel over “mountains, swamps, marshes, and forests” (Scott 2009, p. 47).
Scott (2009, p. 33) writes physical flight was the “bedrock of popular freedom” and “the principal check on state power.”
In Southeast Asia, the locational mechanism shaped statecraft; the key for states was “to press the kingdom's subjects only so far so as not to provoke their wholesale departure” (Scott 2009, p. 144). Scott writes (2009, p. 71) that the state had limited military ability so sought “to counteract the tendency of the populace to disperse widely so as to take full advantage of the hunting, foraging, and less labor-intensive farming techniques.”
Sedentary economic activity such as wet-rice farming was key to statecraft, as it was often a necessary condition for feasible tax collection and enforcement. Scott (2009, p. 340) notes that encouraging such sedentary economic activity was “at the center of Chinese statecraft for millennia” even “through the Maoist period, when People's Liberation Army soldiers by the thousands were digging terraces to get the ‘wild’ Wa to plant irrigated wet rice.”
Scott (2009, p. 192) notes that some of these irrigated rice terraces were in fact very sophisticated, exemplars being those of the Hani in Vietnam and of the Ifugao in the Philippines.
The use of escape crops is again not unique to Southeast Asia. Maroon communities of escaped African slaves in the Americas also engaged in a similar agricultural practice. These communities ranged in size from Palmares in Brazil with as many as 20,000 inhabitants to smaller communities throughout the Caribbean and South Atlantic USA (Scott 2009, pp. 189–190). Escape crops common in these communities included root crops such as cassava, yams, and sweet potatoes, which were not labor intensive and were difficult for government officials to detect or collect. In the nineteenth century, the Irish also utilized potatoes as their escape crop (Scott 2009, p. 196).
As pillaging is more feasible if goods are concentrated and easily extractable, slave-raiding is generally more profitable if the population of would-be slaves is more densely concentrated.
We use here the definition of culture provided by Guiso et al. (2006, p. 23) as follows: “those customary beliefs and values that ethnic religious, and social groups transmit fairly unchanged from generation to generation.”
Scott (2009, p. 162) argues that “state-resistant space was not a place on the map but a position vis-à-vis power,” and thus, “the same spot could oscillate between being heavily ruled or being relatively independent, depending on the reach of the padi state and the resistance of the would-be subjects.”
In the case of Zomia, Scott (2009, p. 283) notes that the “mere enumeration of hundreds, nay thousands, of rebellions mounted by hill people against encroaching states over the past two millennia defies easy accounting.”
Culas and Michaud (1997, p. 230) write, “[T]he Hmong traditionally are a stateless society and therefore have no formal political organization. Each household head is free to make any decision he considers appropriate.”
These anti-state trends in mythology and culture were often reversed among the populations under state rule, who were frequently “preoccupied with explaining the superiority of their ‘civilization’ vis-à-vis their more ‘primitive’ or ‘ruder’ neighbors” (Scott 2009, p. 217).
Scott (2009, p. 135) notes that their “distinct tradition is culturally encoded in a strong tradition of household autonomy, self-reliance, and an anti-hierarchical impulse.”
Scott (2009, p. 155) writes that the state's “ability to impose its religious writ at a distance was about as extensive as its ability to impose its political writ and taxes.”
Scott (2009, p. 158) describes how religious heterodoxy functioned as a mechanism of statecraft prevention for the mountain Berbers of northern Africa as well, who “often reformulated their religious dissent in implicit contention with nearby rulers.” For instance, when the Romans who controlled the province of Ifriqiya were Christianized, the Berbers also became Christians—but “Donatist and Arian heretics so as to remain distinct from the church of Rome.” Likewise, when the area was Islamized, they became Muslims, but “Kharijite Muslim heretics to aid in dissent from Arab Muslim rule.”
State control at the margin requires enough subjects to view the state as legitimate so as to make the state's revenue minus costs of enforcement positive. If their costs exceed their revenue, this increase renders the state, or new state formation, unprofitable. Of course, factors affecting revenues and costs are not limited to state-legitimating ideologies. Other factors include geography, weather, competing states, and technological disparity between state enforcers and state resisters. But state resisters will always want to sway things to make the state's job more difficult and thus decrease the incentives for statecraft. Thus, many of these factors are also partially dependent on the level of state-legitimating ideology acceptance in the state territorial population.
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Stringham, E.P., Miles, C.J. Repelling states: Evidence from upland Southeast Asia. Rev Austrian Econ 25, 17–33 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-010-0115-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-010-0115-3