Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1715223

Repelling states: Evidence from upland Southeast Asia EDWARD PETER STRINGHAM Hackley Endowed Chair for Capitalism and Free Enterprise Studies Fayetteville State University, North Carolina, U.S.A. and CALEB J. MILES Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.A.

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. JEL Codes: N45, N95, P16

Keywords: Self-governance, stateless order, ordered anarchy, analytical anarchism

1 Introduction

Are societies free of states possible? Historical evidence strongly indicates

the answer is yes. From ancient Iceland to the American West, numerous orderly

societies not governed by states have existed.1 Are societies free of states

sustainable? That is a more difficult question. Economists such as Cowen and

1 For an overview of the literature on self-governance and private law enforcement, see Stringham (2007) and Powell and Stringham (2009).

Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1715223

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Sutter (2005) or Holcombe (2004, 2005) recognize the existence of stateless orders,

but they question whether they are viable in the long term.2 To Holcombe (2004,

p.334): “People may not need or want government, but inevitably they will find

themselves under government’s jurisdiction.” Even many anarchist economists

such as Bruce Benson, Bryan Caplan, and Robert Higgs are fairly pessimistic

about whether the state can ultimately be eradicated and repelled. Although

authors such as Rothbard (1973) and Friedman (1973) provided many very good

theoretical reasons why society would be better off without a state, they have

spent less time showing how stateless societies could avoid takeover by a state in

the long run. Without understanding the mechanisms or having evidence of the

long-term viability of statelessness, does it make sense for anarchists to be

pessimistic ones who only support the idea in the abstract?

In this article we review evidence from stateless areas of Southeast Asia

documented by various researchers and best highlighted by Yale professor of

political science and anthropology James C. Scott. In a very important new work

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, Scott

documents how people in upland Southeast Asia have successfully lived free

from states3 for thousands of years. Scott (2009, p.ix) writes that at present “Zomia

2 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, Ford, and Nowrasteh (2008). 3 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

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is the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not been fully

incorporated into nation-states.” According to Scott (2009, p.14), “Rough

calculations would put Zomian minority populations alone at around eighty

million to one hundred million.” Many of people of Zomia have been taken over

by states, but to this day many continue to live outside the state’s control.

Examining successful stateless societies provides evidential details

regarding the different mechanisms that can help prevent emergence of,

reemergence of, and conquest by states. In this article, we examine three broad

categories of mechanisms that stateless4 societies in Southeast Asia employed

against statecraft.5 In particular, the peoples of the vast Southeast Asian region of

Zomia were successful in providing incentives against statecraft—that is, they

successfully prevented their own appropriation by external states and

successfully prevented local state formation—for most of their long history. Scott

(2009, p.178) notes that Zomian populations disincentivized statecraft via

entry in The Encyclopaedia of Cultural Anthropology (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. 4 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.” 5 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.

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“pattern[s] of settlement, agriculture, and social structure.” We describe these

interrelated mechanisms—settlement, agriculture, and social structure—more

broadly as (1) locational, (2) productional, and (3) cultural mechanisms to repel

states. Although certain mechanisms appear to be more effective in certain

historical circumstances, we believe that many of them can be used as models of

potential mechanisms for repelling states in the future.

This article is organized as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the

customary law and property norms in select Zomian societies. Section 3

describes some of the key mechanisms that stateless societies in Zomia and

elsewhere in Southeast Asia used to prevent, avoid, and repel states. Section 4

concludes.

2. The internal governance of stateless societies in Southeast Asia: customary law and property rights

Zomia is a neologism coined by historian Willem van Schendel in reference

to an upland region the size of Europe stretching from northeast India to

southwest China to the southern point of peninsular Thailand (van Schendel,

2005). Geographically, it often is defined as regions of continental Southeast Asia

at relatively high altitudes.6 Though diverse in ethnicity and language, Scott

6 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 (2006), edited by social anthropologist Jean Michaud. Much anthropological, archaeological, and historical literature also exists on individual

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(2009, p.19) argues the “distinguishing trait of Zomia” is its “relative

statelessness.” Even though most of the timeline of Southeast Asian civilization

was free of states,7 most of the earlier written histories of the region have been

histories of states.8 Scott maintains that such historiographical state-centricity and

geographic overstatement is largely the consequence of certain circumstantial

facts regarding the centralized state model. Ideology of the researchers aside,

centralized states leave more concentrated archaeological remains relative to

much less centralized stateless societies, which spread debris more sparsely--

despite at times being populous, sophisticated, and economically developed.9

Although states were able to arrogate power in certain parts of Asia, the

Zomian peoples avoided and continue to avoid states, to significant but varying

degrees, by living upland and acting against people among them who would

form states. As with other stateless societies (Benson, 1988), internal governance groups and countries within the Zomian region. Edmund Leach’s influential work (1954/2004) on the Kachin in Burma is of particular note, as is that of Michaud (2000), McKinnon (1983, 1997), and Scott (2000, 2009) on the region as a whole. 7 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. 8 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). 9 For instance, archeological evidence indicates that in northeast Thailand widespread copper mining on a large and organized scale existed as long ago 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.”

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through customary law that respected various forms of property rights appears

quite common. Various researchers have documented aspects of the customary

law property rights systems of such peoples as the Dao in upland Vietnam, the

Mien of northern Laos, the Kachin of northeast Burma, and the Chin of highland

central Burma.

Providing a detailed description of all legal customs throughout stateless

Southeast Asia would require many volumes of books, but let us briefly describe

some aspects from various groups to show generally how their legal systems and

systems of property rights function. Researchers usually document the traditions

of the people when the researcher writes, so we will refer to their descriptions

using the past tense even though many of these descriptions apply today.

Obviously all arrangements can change over time, but the observed legal systems

in stateless Southeast Asia have many parallels with other non-state legal

systems and to modern arbitration and mediation in which private individuals

rather than state judges help adjudicate disputes. The anthropologist Kandre

(1967, p.615) described how among the Mien people in Northern Laos mediation

was provided by hamlet elders such as the “high-level headmen [who] started as

wealthy and respected village headmen and gradually secured their reputations

by skillful mediation of conflicts.” Similarly, among the Dao people in upland

Vietnam, hamlet elders or councils adjudicated disputes (Xuan, 2002, p.4).

Anthropologist and British colonel Henry N. Cochrane Stevenson

documented in detail the customary law system of the stateless Chin peoples in

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upland central Burma. Stateless here needs clarification. British archaeologist E.

Forchhammer observed (1884, p.3) that the upland Chin may have had

“temporary leaders” during feuds or “against a common enemy; but they appear

not to be subjected to the authority of a chief, either separately or collectively.”

The British chief commissioner at the time further observed that the Chin lacked

any centralized government (Scott, 2009, p.212), though Leach noted that within

the Chin there were varying social status structures ranging from hierarchical to

egalitarian (Leach, 2004, p.197).

Stevenson (1943, p.119) noted that each household unit, while

autonomous, was “at the point of intersection” with four social obligation circles:

“the village community [council] circle, the kinship circle, the membership circle

of a Feaster’s Club and the membership circle of the Hunter’s Club.” A village

council may have collected regular contributions from villagers in the form of

beer or meat. It is not exactly clear but doubtful that such tribute was ever

enforced coercively. Stevenson (1943, pp.119-131) noted that such social

obligations were enforced through reciprocity and reputation mechanisms, and

further observed that the non-payment of these contributions resulted in

expulsion from communal activities such as certain feasts key to social prestige.

This voluntary, reciprocal enforcement was similar to that described by

Stevenson for the other three circles of social obligation, including the Feaster’s

Club, which organizes the socially important Feasts of Merit.

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As in many non-state legal systems elsewhere, emphasis on economic

incentives (Stringham, 2003) and restitution (Benson, 1990) rather than

retribution is common.10 Stevenson (1943, p.154) wrote that “customary law is

enforced almost entirely through the medium of economic exchange.”

Customary law of the Chin divided offenses into three categories: offenses

against person, offenses against property, and offenses against spiritual values.

The Chin did not recognize anything equivalent to offenses against the state

(Stevenson, 1943, p.150).11 Offenses against person include culpable or accidental

homicide, physical injury, wrongful confinement, and rape. The consequences

for such offenses ranged from loss of reputation to banishment. Offenses against

property and property rights included theft, damage, non-payment of

reciprocities, etc. Offenses against spiritual values included such crimes as

defilement of altars. In the Chin justice system, capital punishment was absent,12

and the most serious punishment ever inflicted was ram (which was very rarely

inflicted) and entailed “banishment and the confiscation of all property”

(Stevenson, 1943, p.152).

When a person was fined the proceeds would go to the complainant as

compensation. In some communities the arbiters were satisfied with a donation 10 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.” 11 An offense against a village elder, chief, or headman was treated simply as an offense against the individual. 12 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.”

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of thu dil nak beer provided by both parties; in others, the arbiter would retain a

small portion of the fines (Stevenson, 1943, pp.152-3).13 In awarding punishment

for an offense, the elders rarely inflict the maximum applicable because their

main objective was “the granting of just sufficient economic balm to assuage the

wounded without permanently antagonizing the wounder.”14 Payment of fines

following judgment was encouraged with a reputational mechanism as well as

the lamkhlan pal man (road below go price), which entailed a multiplication by

five of any fine that went unpaid and potentially had to be collected by force.15

Zomian legal systems such as these clearly had respect for people’s

private property rights in their person, but did they have private property in

physical goods or land? The existence of swidden16 agriculture, in which people

change what plots of land they cultivate, has led many observers to conclude that

property rights were absent. Yale anthropologist Michael Dove (1983, p.86)

points out that “some observers (especially from governmental bodies) have

maintained that swidden cultivators possess either communal land tenure or else

13 The arbiters were often councils of elders “selected for their wisdom and social prestige” (Stevenson, 1943, p.90). 14 To this end they take into account not only the facts of the offense itself, but 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.” 15 Stevenson (1943, pp.154-5) 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.” 16 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.

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no land tenure at all.” Dove (1983, p.86), however, maintains that this is a false

conclusion, one typically based on a confusion between village and household

rights and a misunderstanding of how land is fallowed in swidden agriculture.

Rather than communal land rights, in Southeast Asia, swidden farmers typically

have individual household property rights not only to residential land but to

secondary forest as well. Property rights are acquired by the initial clearer of the

plot and persist through the following cycles of cultivating, harvesting, and

leaving secondary forest land fallow (Dove, 1983, p.86-87). Although a village or

hamlet may have a customary territory, land use rights accrue to individual

households. Furthermore, Dove (1983, p.88-89) notes the error of those observers

who may mistake paid reciprocal labor and household consumption for

communalism.

In groups including the gumsa Kachin, upland Dao of northern Vietnam,

and Tibeto-Burman peoples in general, property rights were generally held by

individual households or individuals and accrue based on use or first use.17 The

Dao people, for example, traditionally had customary law regarding land

utilization and management that was in many ways similar to the homestead

principle. The boundaries of a Dao village or hamlet territory were demarcated

by natural landmarks such as springs, mountain ridges, and top lines (Xuan,

2002, p.4). Surrounding people mutually recognized these natural landmarks

17 Dove (1983, pp.86-7) 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.”

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(Xuan, 2002, p.4). Individual households owned residential and farming lands,

whereas unused forestland was considered open access until claimed by a

household. Individuals were free to choose land in the forest to farm or

otherwise to use, which they demarcated with sticks or light fencing.18 That

individual was then considered the owner of that land, and others were required

to ask his permission before they were legally permitted to work on that plot.19

This traditional household-based property rights system of the Dao was similar

to that of the Hmong in upland northern Vietnam, for whom “all wet-rice fields,

swidden fields, residential land, and some forest land was privately owned”

(Tinh and Hjemdahl, 2001, p.14). These conceptions of property rights may have

18 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, Coyne, and Leeson (2008). 19 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.”

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differed from many modern American conceptions of property rights,20 but

clearly property rights and law were present in Zomia without the state.

3. Mechanisms for repelling states

The peoples of Zomia avoided, prevented, and repelled states for

millennia. But how? Scott’s work provides much insight into the mechanisms

that the Zomian peoples have employed so let us focus on the evidence that he

highlights. The Zomia have chosen to live and conduct economic activity in

places that have been difficult for states to control or tax. Zomian peoples have

organized their agriculture so that their crops cannot easily be confiscated or

measured. They have also adopted religions and ideologies that make them

resistant to control by external or internally grown states. We classify these as

locational, productional, and cultural mechanisms for repelling states. Let us

describe them in turn.

3.1 Locational mechanisms for repelling states

20 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).

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Higher altitudes, hilly terrain, and the comparatively denser vegetation of

Zomia created a friction of distance (Scott, 2009, p.58) and terrain that increased

the cost of statecraft relative to the flatter lowlands. Most simplistically, the

terrain made appropriation in Zomia more costly per unit increase of territory

than in the lower altitude regions. States require tax collection and taxes must be

returned eventually to state centers. Furthermore, states often require

conscription. Accordingly, conditions favorable to state-making include an

accessible, concentrated population producing easily appropriable goods that

can feasibly be returned to the state centers. If the cost of physically traveling to

the taxable population and returning collected taxes to the state center is

significantly higher than what it costs the taxable population to move out of the

way, the state is cost prohibitive.21 For this reason, states in Southeast Asia were

primarily rice-growing valley states (padi states), situated in flatter lowlands

where the cost of traveling from the state center to the taxable populations,

collecting taxes, and returning the taxes to state centers was lower. States were

thus territorially limited by the cost and time of travel.22

Scott (2009, p.47) argues that standard maps based on the constant as the

crow flies mile-to-inch type scale can be misleading with regard to the cost of

travel and thus statecraft over different areas. Instead of looking at areas or

21 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.” 22 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).

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distances on a map, instead we should look at how easy or difficult travel is to a

region.23 Zomia tended to have significantly higher cost and time of travel per

mile and state-makers who attempted to expand into the region, from the

emperor of the Tang Dynasty in 860 to British colonial officials in 1892, described

this problem (Scott, 2009, p.43-44). A British military official gave an account of

this difficulty in appropriating Zomian terrain in the Gazetteer of Upper Burma and

the Shan States (J.G. Scott, 1893) as follows:

Here pursuit was impossible. The tracts are narrow and tortuous and admirably suited for ambuscades. Except by the regular paths there were hardly any means of approach … The villages are small and far between; they are generally compact and surrounded by dense, impenetrable jungle. The paths were either just broad enough for a cart, or very narrow, and where they led though the jungle were overhung with brambles and thorny creepers. (reprinted in Scott, 2009, p.2)

The societies of Zomia were not merely passive remnants of primitive pre-state

peoples left out of the way of states due to geographical happenstance. They

actively avoided and had often escaped from the borders of states to seek

autonomy in Zomia.24 The decision on the part of many Southeast Asians to

relocate out of states to more distant or difficult terrain such as that of Zomia

(and to remain there) functioned as a proactive locational mechanism for

disincentivizing statecraft.

23 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). 24 Scott (2009, p.33) writes physical flight was the “bedrock of popular freedom” and “the principal check on state power.”

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The Dutch historian Leo Alting von Geusau (2000) emphasizes the role of

human agency in the locational mechanism as follows: “tribal groups such as the

Hani and Akha also selected and constructed their habitats—in terms of altitude

and surrounding forestation—in such a way that they would not easily be

accessible to soldiers, bandits, and tax collectors” (reprinted in Scott, 2009,

p.150).25 Scott notes that this mechanism operated as a kind of “homeostatic

device” on state power.

3.2 Productional mechanisms for repelling states

In addition to locating in areas that were difficult for the state to access the

Zomian people chose to produce specific crops with specific production methods

that made it easier to avoid appropriation by states. We classify these efforts as

productional mechanisms for repelling states. In Southeast Asia, the economic

activity of state subjects was historically wet-rice agriculture, which required

flatter terrain, was labor-intensive, and had a product (rice) that was easily

measured and appropriated by state tax collectors. Wet-rice was thus an optimal

crop for states because its cost of tax collection was minimal.26

25 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.” 26 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.”

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Contrariwise, the most common agricultural practice in the stateless

regions of Southeast Asia historically was shifting cultivation through swidden

agriculture. The swidden farmer would cultivate a botanically diverse selection

of crops, sometimes more than sixty different cultivars, and that swidden

farmers also acquired meat through hunting and fishing (Scott, 2009, p.195).

Furthermore, highland peoples were not limited to swidden agriculture and

often tended irrigated rice simultaneously by way of terracing and exploiting

available water sources such as streams.27 Utilizing diversification and what

Scott calls escape crops (crops that help people escape the state) in swidden

practice as productional mechanisms of statecraft prevention therefore did not

rule out diversification into rice as well. Measuring and appropriating such a

diverse selection of produce presented a costly task to the would-be tax collector.

Thus, it was recorded in the Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States (1893)

that the upland swidden farmer was “of no account whatever in the state” as it

would be a “sheer waste of energy in the eyes of an official” to attempt to

appropriate tax therefrom (J.G. Scott reprinted in J.C. Scott, 2009, p.195).

In addition to cultivar diversification and swidden practice, upland

farmers often utilized specific plants–“escape crops”–that had characteristics that

made them more costly to appropriate and measure. These included adaptability

to the environmental niches of upland Southeast Asia, staggered maturity, high

27 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 Ifuago in the Philippines.

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growth rates, crop concealability, low labor intensiveness, heavy weight relative

to value, and, importantly, the ability to grow beneath the ground (Scott, 2009,

p.199). Certain cultivars that spoiled quickly such as fresh fruits and vegetables

also served this function. The selection of escape crops such as these further

decreased incentives for state-making and expansion in the relevant areas.

Medieval globalization significantly increased the economic profitability

of swidden practice and escape crop cultivation with the appearance of new

world crops such as corn which was imported into Southeast Asia in the fifteenth

century (Scott, 2009, p.201-205). Swidden farmers rapidly adopted corn due to its

low labor-intensiveness, low land-intensiveness, reliable output, high caloric

value, and survivability in diverse weather conditions. The cassava root was

similarly popular because of its high caloric value with little effort to grow (Scott,

2009, p. 206). The introduction of more efficient swidden and escape crops

increased the economic incentives for rice-farming subjects to relocate out of the

state and into the hills of Zomia.28

Importantly, the economic activity of stateless societies was not limited to

subsistence agriculture; most also engaged in significant trade with neighboring

valley states. Highly traded goods included cash crops such as coffee, tea,

28 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 United States (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).

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tobacco, cotton, and opium (Scott, 2009, p.200). Furthermore, stateless societies

such as those of Zomia had engaged in significant international trade as early as

the eighth century in which they supplied high-value goods such as pepper,

resins, medicinal herbs, bird feathers, and aromatic woods (Scott, 2009, p.197).

Economic self-interest thus played a role in the Zomian motivation for

utilizing these productional mechanisms against statecraft. Not only did the

societies of Zomia largely avoid taxation by states while often gaining

advantages in trade and comparative economic well-being, they also offered

what was frequently better protection from slave-raiders,29 pillagers, thieves, and

war. Thus, stateless societies were not just state-repelling but more secure in

general (Scott, 2009, p.179). Furthermore, the richer food diversity, higher

elevations, less concentrated population, and mobile and active lifestyle of

swiddening agriculture meant better nutrition, health, and often more leisure

time for inhabitants of Zomia relative to state subjects.

State officials frequently designated the economic activity and lifestyle

typical of upland Zomians as backward and primitive (Scott, 2009, p.190), and

such designation continues today. Scott argues this is often the result of some

people’s arbitrary measure of efficiency that looks at output per unit of land

rather than output per unit of labor (Scott, 2009, p.192). But comparing whether

swidden versus other forms of agriculture is more productive depends on the

29 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.

19

relative scarcity of each respective factor of production—land vs. labor. In

Southeast Asia, the scarcer factor of production was generally labor, whereas

land was abundant. It follows that swidden farming was quite often a better

choice than sedentary wet-rice farming. In many cases states needed to enslave

people if they wanted to get them to leave swidden farming and work as wet-rice

farmers (Scott, 2009, p.193). Scott (2009, p.110) argues that the Great Wall of

China were “calculated as much to keep the tax-shy Chinese peasantry” such as

the Miao (Hmong) from relocating outside the state as they were to protect from

outsiders.

3.3 Cultural mechanisms for repelling states

The choice to physically relocate outside state borders, to engage in state-

thwarting agricultural and commercial practices, or to resist the state directly is

affected, like all human behavior, by culture.30 Economists such as Boettke (1996)

and Greif (1994) have pointed out that culture affects human choice and is thus

important to economic analyses of human society. Furthermore, culture is not

static. It is dynamic and affected itself by human agency. Therefore, it is useful to

note that embedded in the cultural beliefs and practices of many stateless

societies, such as those of Zomia, were anti-state and state-resistant elements.31

30 We use here the definition of culture provided by Guiso, Sapienzia, and Zingales (2006, p.23) as follows: “those customary beliefs and values that ethnic religious, and social groups transmit fairly unchanged from generation to generation.” 31 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

20

The most obvious type of resistance to states is physical rebellion, which

was quite common in Zomia.32 However, direct physical rebellion is only a

marginal form of resistance. Scott (2009, p.208) maintains that people can

influence social structures in their society by states by moving “toward simpler,

smaller, and more dispersed social units.” This makes statecraft economically

much less viable because states depend on centralized structures to rule and

leverage taxes. If such a focal point is unavailable, the marginal costs of tax

collection and enforcement are likely to be much higher. Historian Malcolm

Yapp (1980) termed a population that lacks this focal point of leverage in its

social structure a “jellyfish tribe” (quoted in Scott, 2009, p.210).

Examples of populations with this kind of decentralized social structure

abound in Zomia. The Kachin peoples of upper Burma are one such example.

The Gazetteer of Upper Burma (1893) records that a British official “warned

observers … not to take the apparent subordination of the petty Kachin chiefs

seriously” as “beyond this nominal subordination, each village claims to be

independent and only acknowledges its own chief” (J.G. Scott reprinted in J.C.

Scott, 2009, p.212). This British official further wrote that self-determination in

Kachin society went deeper down the scale of social units, extending “down to

even the household and each house owner. If a house owner disagreed with the

relatively independent, depending on the reach of the padi state and the resistance of the would-be subjects.” 32 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.”

21

chief, he would leave the village and set up his own house elsewhere” (J.G. Scott,

reprinted in J.C. Scott, 2009, p.212).

Anthropologist Edmund Leach in the staple Political Systems of Highland

Burma proposes an oscillating model of social structure among the Kachin, a

structure that is rarely in stable equilibrium but rather is in flux between two

polar systems. The first system is the gumlao model, which Scott notes

“repudiates all hereditary authority and class difference – though not individual

differences in status” (Scott, 2009, p.214). The second polar system is that of the

Shan, in which there are more defined ranks of social status, hereditary chiefs,

and regular tribute. Kachin societies generally fluctuated between the gumlao and

Shan systems. The dynamic in-between is the gumsa model, which incorporates

elements of both gumlao and Shan, elements of both hierarchical social status and

anarchic ideals. Scott (2009, p.215) describes gumlao areas as being “anathema to

the state.” Leach noted a British account (reprinted in Scott, 2009, p.215) of a

gumlao village in which the social structure was described as “practically a small

republic” with a headman, “however well-meaning he may be, quite unable to

control the actions of any badly-disposed villager.” The gumlao ideology quite

drastically provided incentives against statecraft. It went as far as the killing of

“would-be chiefs with hereditary or feudal pretensions,” and consequently the

gumlao Kachin had a history of doing just that (Scott, 2009, pp.215-216).

Accordingly, the British found them difficult to govern.

22

Many peoples of Zomia had similar ideologies of resistance to states

integrated in their culture via mythology, language, and religious practices. One

anthropologist states that the Lisu, for instance, “loathe assertive and autocratic

headmen” and that the “stories Lisu tell of murdering headmen are legion”(Paul

Durrenber quoted in Scott, 2009, p.276). The Lahu and Akha had similar stories

embedded in their culture, as did the Miao (Hmong), who integrated anti-state

ideologies into their culture consistently. The Miao (Hmong) were a traditionally

stateless33 people whose stories differentiated them from state-dwellers with

such contrasts as “they pay taxes to overlords and we pay none” and “they are

servile where we are free” (quoted in Scott, 2009, p.217). A further example is the

Wa peoples of southwestern China/northern Burma. For instance, a chief of the

Mongmon of the Wa people in northern Burma was asked upon Burmese

independence from Britain what kind of administration he would support, and

he replied, “We have not thought about that because we are wild people”

(quoted in Martin Smith, reprinted in Scott, 2009, p.216). Scott (2009, p.216) notes

that the chief understood the point of being Wa “was precisely not to be

administered at all.”34

Similar to the aforementioned stateless societies of continental Southeast

Asia, the peoples of the Tengger highlands of the Indonesian island of East Java

33 Culas et al. (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.” 34 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).

23

have maintained a stateless Hindu-Shaivite society for half a millennium. There

they successfully prevented statecraft from religious state expansion in the early

sixteenth century to Dutch state imperialism to current-day resistance.35

Particularly, the language of the mountain Javanese itself functioned as a

statecraft-preventing mechanism. According to the work of anthropologist

Robert Hefner, the members of this society, from children to the village leaders,

all spoke a distinct version of the Javanese language ngoko that eliminated rank-

coded terms of status like those used in the equivalent languages of the valley

states (Scott, 2009, p.367).36

Religious diversification can also function as a social mechanism for

repelling states. Scott (2009, p.155) maintains that “political dissent and religious

heresy or apostasy” were, up until recent history, “difficult to distinguish from

one another.” This follows intuitively, as religion is often invoked as the

legitimating ideology of the state itself. In Zomia-bordering countries such as

Siam and Burma, the Hindu-Buddhist cosmology presented state rulers as god-

kings, legitimating their power and making statecraft economically feasible.37

The Chin people of upland central Burma frustrated 19th century British

officials, as their jellyfish tribe-like lack of centralized social structure made

35 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.” 36 Hefner (1990) further observed that “no one bent down and bowed before others,” and that the “overriding goal” of the Tengger highlanders was to “avoid being ordered about” (reprinted in Scott, 2009, p.135). 37 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.”

24

negotiating a point of leverage for governance unworkable. A British chief

commissioner noted that the Chin’s “only system of government was that of

headmen of villages or at the most a small group of villages, and, consequently,

negotiation with the Chin as a people was impossible” (quoted in Scott, 2009,

p.212). The British, in fact, attempted to create a centralized chiefdom for the

Chin in order to have a reference point for taxation and negotiation. Kirsch

explains how this was partially thwarted by a cultural mechanism, and

specifically one of religious entrepreneurship:

The British colonial regime established a “chief” in the “democratic” Chin area and enforced his authority. The “democratic” Chin were oriented to status achievement but achievement was artificially limited by the position of the imposed chief. One interesting result of this was the development of a “nativistic” movement, a syncretic cult [the Pau Chin Hau] that repudiated community feasts (which enhance the status of the "chiefs") while retaining private feasts (which raise individual status). Stevenson reports that this Pau Chin Hau cult had been adopted by “almost the entire Zanniat (democratic) tribe” and about 27% of the Chin population. Thus the democratic Chin were able to retain their orientation to personal feasting achievement and ritual status mobility in the face on an arbitrary restriction on status. (1973, p.32)

The fact that so many Chin converted to the Pau Chin Hau is a demonstration of

resistance to control being embedded in culture.38 If people are committed to

their own religion and not to the government’s religion, those people will be

harder to control, especially if the former contains anti-state elements.

38 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.”

25

Although the state is manifested as a territorial monopoly on proactive,

physical coercion, it requires some level of an ideology of legitimation. With zero

state-legitimating ideology present, state subjects would not voluntarily submit

to taxation, and the cost of carrying through on the threat of coercion backing up

the state would drastically increase.39 As Rothbard and others point out, states

cannot physically apply coercion against one hundred percent of the population,

so they need to convince subjects of the necessity of the state. Many stateless

societies thus had embedded in their culture ideological elements counter to state

–legitimation, which aid in effectively repelling the ideology of the state as well

as in preventing the local formation of new state ideologies, and thus aid in

sustaining statelessness over time.

4. Lessons from Zomia

In this article we analyzed some of the mechanisms Zomian people

successfully used against statecraft. Their history demonstrates that societies can

repel states over very long periods of time. Historically, Zomians successfully

employed locational, economic, and cultural mechanisms for repelling states.

These mechanisms, though changed in particulars, are similar in form today, and

39 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.

26

many have likely been in use throughout history by many peoples. It is easy to

look at the modern world and conclude that states must be ubiquitous. Yet, for

much of human history (and until quite recent history in many regions), the

option of relocating one’s self outside of a state’s borders, or outside of states

altogether, was a real and active one. As Scott points out:

Until shortly before the common era, the very last 1 percent of human history, the social landscape consisted of elementary, self-governing, kinship units that might, occasionally, cooperate in hunting, feasting, skirmishing, trading, and peacemaking. It did not contain anything that one could call a state. (2009, p.3)

Statelessness is far more common than most people believe. It did not take place

in only a few select instances in medieval Iceland or modern Somalia. If humans

have lived without states for the vast majority of human history, how much

sense does it make to say that states are something that cannot be avoided?

The world has obviously changed significantly in the past couple

thousand years, and even the Zomian peoples find themselves increasingly

losing out to statecraft. But the mechanisms they have successfully used to repel

states may help inform how states can be repelled in the long run. What lessons

can people learn from the Zomian mechanisms for repelling the state? In regard

to locational mechanisms, historically, freedom-loving people have often sought

to find new frontiers such as the New World (Rothbard and Liggio, 1975) or the

American West (Anderson and Hill, 1979). Only in the last century have states

eliminated the existence of stateless lands outside their borders so that few, if

any, frontiers of that kind exist anymore. Ultimately, Scott (p.xii, p.324) is

27

pessimistic about the future of stateless Zomia because improvements in

government transportation and technology have made avoiding the state

geographically less viable. Whether any frontiers remain is an open question that

certain libertarians, such as Patri Friedman and David Friedman, are thinking

about.

But regardless of whether one thinks that liberty can be found in new

frontiers such as the seas (Friedman and Gramlich, 2009) or cyberspace

(Friedman, 2008), other Zomia-like mechanisms for repelling the state can be

employed that do not require moving to the hills or engaging in small-scale

agricultural production. The Zomian peoples engaged in swidden agriculture to

employ locational and productional mechanisms lest the state expropriate their

property; multinational corporations engage in what can in many ways be called

swidden business. The manufacturer that shifts production from one region to

the next as tax rates or chances of expropriation change is engaging in swidden

manufacturing. The investment bank that only invests when taxes on capital or

profits are lower is engaging in swidden banking. Consider the capital flight that

occurs when states attempt to raise taxes on profits or capital gains. These

modern entities are practicing the age-old Zomian practice of evading states on a

corporate scale. The more that they can evade states, the better off investors and

consumers will be. The multinational corporations are providing powerful

checks on government and may be one reason why many nations have been

adopting policies more consistent with economic freedom.

28

Finally, we also might learn from the Zomian cultural mechanisms for

repelling the state. Economists such as Mises and Bastiat argued that a society in

which everyone inclines to statism is unlikely to have liberty (Caplan and

Stringham, 2005). Freedom is more likely to flourish when people recognize the

beneficence of markets and reject the snake oil sold by the state. If a people

becomes resistant to state control, then states will have a much more difficult

time taking over. As eighteenth century orator John Philpot Curran said, “The

condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance,” and

anarchist economic historians such as Rothbard and Liggio (1975) have argued

that a free society requires that people do not automatically give into demands

from the state or would-be states. The actions of the Zomian people illustrate this

lesson perfectly. By embedding ideologies in their culture that opposed external

control, the Zomian peoples were much less likely to be taken over and more

likely to live as free, self-governing people.

Scott (2009, p.x) writes, “Virtually everything about these people’s

livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their

largely oral cultures, can be read as a strategic positioning to keep the state at

arm’s length.” To use the phraseology of historians such as William H. McNeill

and Jeffrey Rogers Hummel (2001, p.524), just as people take active steps to

prevent micro-parasites, the Zomian people took active steps to prevent macro-

parasites, states. Their history helps show that society need not always be ridden

with states. In the future, as more and more people come to recognize that state

29

control is neither necessary nor inevitable, then we will be able to more

effectively repel states.

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