Moving Peoples in the Early Roman Empire

The opening pages of James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed offer a global account of the political economy and ecology of early states. The first states, for Scott, were miniscule authoritarian regimes nestled on arable plains and plateaux and surrounded by vast ungoverned peripheries of mountain, marshland, swamp, steppe and desert. Around them peripheral populations were both natural trading partners – because the ecologies of their respective homes were so different – and a constant threat. Peripheral populations posed a double threat in fact since they not only periodically raided the plains, but also represented an alternative, freer way of life, an object lesson in “the art of not being governed”.