Reseña:

"[Scott's work] has focussed on a skeptical, peasant's-eye view of state formation. . . . His best-known book, Seeing Like a State, has become a touchstone for political scientists, and amounts to a blistering critique of central planning and 'high modernism.' . . . Scott's new book extends these ideas into the deep past, and draws on existing research to argue that ours is not a story of linear progress, that the time line is much more complicated, and that the causal sequences of the standard version are wrong."-John Lanchester, New Yorker "Against the Grain delivers not only a darker story but also a broad understanding of the forces that shaped the formation of states and why they collapsed - right up to the industrial age