Outside the city walls, a fortunate savage might be a hunter in the morning and a bard singing tales around the fire in the evening.

So why would anyone come into the city? Scott argues, based on reconstruction of ancient soils and climate, that around 5,000 years ago, droughts in the fertile wetlands of Mesopotamia made wild foods critically scarce, which meant that foragers had to rely more and more on grain to feed themselves. Once a system of labor was in place, fresh bodies could be hustled into it by the new sub–ruling class of soldiers, or swept up en masse in slave raids. Enslavement was nothing new, but the tax-grain-surplus regime enabled the new cities’ rulers to scale it up immensely. Once the exploitation machine called civilization was running, it was self-perpetuating.

Except that it often was not, because cities were acutely vulnerable—both more powerful and fragile than the more diverse and dispersed ways of life that preceded them. Besides epidemics, they tended to produce ecological crises, such as gradual salinization of the soil, sediment buildup in canals, and other environmental choke points that degraded grain production. And although urban ruling classes wielded organized military power, they were often sitting ducks for barbarian raiders. Many stories of civilizational flowering end with raiders riding in from the plains or their black sails appearing in the harbor, bringing looting, fire, and the end of days.

The barbarians beyond the walls are the charismatic figures in Scott’s book. Their hierarchies were flatter and perhaps looser, and, compared to laborers on the grain corvée, they seem free. Part of Scott’s goal in recasting the story of civilization is to open a new space for its “dark twin,” the great majority of human experience that has been lived outside cities and empires. Such lives are easily neglected in hindsight. Precisely because they were stateless, their labor did not produce many stone monuments, and their stories did not enter the annals of the early historians. They burned up their surpluses feasting together, in camps or villages whose materials decayed a few generations after they died. They left no Ozymandias.

But Ozymandias needed them. Barbarians were a threat but also a resource. They traded with city dwellers, supplying them with goods from the wild—such as honey, hides, and amber—as well as slaves and mercenaries. (Think of the Gauls in Rome, who fought as gladiators and labored as slaves.) The great flourishing of pre-modern states, from China west through Rome, brought with it the era of great barbarian nations that preyed on the cities, traded with them, and fed them their own people as slaves. When cities declined or failed, their laborers might slip across the frontier and join the barbarians; such escapes from exploitation were probably a safety valve at all times. What we still tend to call civilization was always intimately and ambiguously linked with what “civilized” people called barbarism. This is easy to miss, Scott argues, because we still imagine history through the self-serving and binary stories that the earliest civilizations have passed on to us.

The built world that sustains us is so vast that, for every pound of an average person’s body, there are 30 tons of infrastructure.

Scott is well aware that much of this story is not entirely new. Big-picture historians such as Jared Diamond have acknowledged that for most people quality of life fell when agriculture replaced hunting and gathering. Yuval Noah Harari’s idiosyncratic, best-selling story-of-everything, Sapiens, describes settled agriculture as “history’s biggest fraud” for the same reasons. Even Adam Smith acknowledged that hunter-gatherers were more egalitarian than settled folk, and saw the state as arising “for the defense of the rich against the poor.” Highlighting the state’s role in ruling-class exploitation is central to the Marxian tradition of writing history, in which ancient slave societies serve as an early example of the extraction of surplus labor.

Part of what makes Scott’s story novel is the central and esteemed place he gives the barbarians. The infrastructure-building, law-codifying, biopolitical states of antiquity are not the starting points of universal history for Scott, as they were for both Marx and liberal historians. They are instead a kind of usurpation of a longer and quite possibly richer human practice of mobility and freedom. Here, too, Scott is echoing strands of a long tradition: The Roman historian Tacitus suggested that German barbarians were more virtuous than settled Romans; Anglo-Americans often traced their democratic identity to the “Anglo-Saxon” liberty of the forest rather than the cities of the Mediterranean; and today both paleo diets and the popularity of the bearded, nomadic wildlings on Game of Thrones suggest a hankering for rude barbarian health and liberty.

Scott ends on an elegiac note, suggesting that the golden age of the barbarians ended about the year 1600—that is, at roughly the same time that early-modern state-building began and legal discourses of sovereignty were developing. The barbarians began to decline partly because they sold out to the state, becoming slavers and mercenaries, until the enhanced state made its borders universal. In North America, for the first time, the “frontier” was not simply where imperial civilization stopped; it formed a presumptively (and actually) advancing vanguard of universal history. A different way of life, a vital and persistent alternative, and its people—the barbarians—receded into the story of the Encyclopaedia.

It isn’t just that the barbarians are gone. The sense in which we are caught in a world we have built is even stronger than that. The built world that sustains us is so vast that, for every pound of an average person’s body, there are 30 tons of infrastructure: roads, houses, sidewalks, utility grids, intensively farmed soil, and so forth. Without all that, global population would fall to ten million or so, where it stood during much of Scott’s story, or perhaps 200 million, as it was at the beginning of the Common Era. We are creatures of the artificial world that began with Scott’s walls and canals. The Earth is so thoroughly the world we have made that our domestic animals outweigh wild terrestrial mammals by a factor of 25 to one.

We are the only things here, and “here” is a planetary version of the infrastructure state. There really is no more outside. All of this leaves us to ask how far we, on the inside, can overcome the inherited logic of our exploitation machine, and how much of the nonhuman world will be left if we do. Any answers will unavoidably come through political projects to remake this world in gentler and more inclusive forms, so that it can house more kinds of lives. The state got us into this. It is only by using the state for new purposes that we can hope to get ourselves someplace else.