Source : https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1prZyp6Oi8zID3BAC7OaNIuF_pntJJngi Recommandé par : [[Science Po]] MOC : [[DROIT]] [[HISTOIRE]] Tags : #alire #livre #résumé AUTEUR : [[James C. Scott]] Date : 2009 DATE : 2024-02-22 Note : /5 *** The encounter between expansionary states and self-governing peoples is hardly confined to Southeast Asia. It is echoed in the cultural and administrative process of “*internal colonialism*” that characterizes the formation of most modern Western nation-states; in the imperial projects of the Romans, the Hapsburgs, the Ottomans, the Han, and the British; in the subjugation of indigenous peoples in “white-settler” colonies such as the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and Algeria; in the dialectic between sedentary, *town-dwelling* (citadins) Arabs and nomadic pastoralists that have characterized much of Middle Eastern history. The precise shape of the encounters is, to be sure, unique to each case. Nevertheless, the *ubiquity* (l'omniprésence) of the encounter between self-governing and state-governed peoples—variously styled as the *raw* (brut) and the cooked, the wild and the tamed, the hill/forest people and the valley/cleared-land people, *upstream* (l'amont) and *downstream* (l'aval), the barbarian and the civilized, the backward and the modern, the free and the *bound* (enchaîné), the people without history and the people with history—provides us with many possibilities for *comparative triangulation* (méthode de comparaison réunissant plusieurs points de vu pour avoir une meilleure perspective). We shall take advantage of these opportunities where we can. ##### A World of Peripheries In the *written record* (dossier écrit) —that is to say, from the beginning of grain-based, *agrarian civilizations* (civilisations agricoles) — the encounter we are examining can fairly be said to preoccupy rulers. But if we *stand back* (prendre du recul) and *widen* (élargir) the historical *lens* (perspective) *still further* (encore +), seeing the encounter in human rather than state-civilization terms, it is *astonishing* (surprenant) how recent and rapid the encounter has been. Homo sapiens sapiens has been around for something like two hundred thousand years, and only about sixty thousand, at the outside, in Southeast Asia. There the region’s first small concentrations of sedentary populations appear not earlier than the first millennium before the common era (CE) and represent a *mere smudge* (simple tache) in the historical landscape— localized, *tenuous* (ténue), and evanescent. *Until shortly before the common era* (jusqu'à peu avant l'ère commune) , the very last 1 percent of human history, the social landscape consisted of *elementary* (primaires) , self-governing, *kinship units* (groupes de parentés) that might, occasionally, cooperate in hunting, *feasting* (festins), *skirmishing trading* (lorsqu'il y avait des escarmouches), and *peacemaking* (rétablissement de la paix). It did not contain anything one could call a state. In other words, living in the absence of state structures has been the standard human condition. The founding of agrarian states, then, was the *contingent* (contingent = déterminant) event that created a distinction, *hence* (donc / par conséquent) a *dialectic* (divergence), between a settled, state-governed population and a *frontier penumbra* (région frontalière) of less governed or *virtually* (pratiquement) autonomous peoples. Until at least the early nineteenth century, the difficulties of transportation, the state of military technology, and, above all, demographic realities placed *sharp limits* (des limites strictes) on the *reach* (portée) of even the most ambitious states. Operating in a population density of only 5.5 persons per square kilometer in 1600 (compared with roughly 35 for India and China), *a ruler’s subjects* (les sujets d'un dirigeant) in Southeast Asia had relatively easy access to a vast, *land-rich* (riche en terres) frontier. That frontier operated as a *rough* (rudimentaire) and ready *homeostatic device* (dispositif homéostatique, Caractéristique d'un écosystème qui résiste aux changements et conserve un état d'équilibre) ; the more a state *pressed* (opprimait) its subjects, the fewer subjects it had. The frontier *underwrote* (garantissait) popular freedom. Richard O’Connor captures this dialectic nicely: “Once states appeared, *adaptive conditions changed yet again* (les conditions d'adaptations ont encore changé) — at least for farmers. At that moment, mobility allowed farmers to escape the *impositions* (les impôts) of states and their wars. I call this *tertiary dispersion* (dispersion terrestre). The other two revolutions — agriculture and complex society — were *secure* (assurées) but the state’s domination of its peasantry was not, and so *we* (les chercheurs) find a strategy of ‘collecting people . . . and establishing villages.’” ##### The Last *Enclosure* (enfermement) Only the modern state, in both its colonial and its independent *guises* (forme), has had the resources to realize a project of *rule* (domination) that was a mere *glint* (lueur) in the eye of its precolonial ancestor : *namely* (à savoir) to bring nonstate spaces and people to *heel* (mettre au pas). This project in its *broadest* (plus large) sense represents the last great *enclosure* (enfermement) movement in Southeast Asia. It has been pursued — *albeit clumsily* (bien que maladroitement) and with *setbacks* (revers) — *consistently* (de façon constante) for at least the past century. Governments, whether colonial or independent, communist or neoliberal, populist or authoritarian, have *embraced* (adopté) it fully. The *headlong* (effrénée) pursuit of this end by regimes *otherwise* (par ailleurs) *starkly* (radicalement) different suggests that such projects of administrative, economic, and cultural standardization are *hard-wired* (solidement ancrés) into the architecture of the modern state itself. Seen from the state center, this enclosure movement is, in part, an effort to integrate and monetize the people, lands, and resources of the periphery so that they become, to use the French term, rentable—*auditable contributors* (des contributeurs contrôlables) to the *gross national product* (PNB) and to *foreign exchange* (opérations de change). In truth, peripheral peoples had always been *firmly* (fermement) linked economically to the *lowlands* (les terres en dessous de 300 mètres de dénivelés d'Asie du Sud-Est) and to world trade. In some cases, they appear to have provided most of the products valued in international commerce. Nevertheless, the attempt to fully incorporate them has been culturally *styled* (qualifié) as development, economic progress, *literacy* (alphabétisation), and social integration. In practice, it has meant something else. The objective has been less to make them productive than to ensure that their economic activity was *legible* (identifiable), taxable, *assessable* (évaluable), and confiscatable or, failing that, to replace it with forms of production that were. *-> Le but c'était pas de les rendre productifs, c'était plutôt de leur faire adopter un système de production compréhensible et contrôlable par l'État* Everywhere they could, states have obliged mobile, *swidden cultivators* (cultivateurs de terres arables = pouvant être cultivées ou labourées)to settle in permanent villages. They have tried to replace *open common-property* (les communs libres) *land* *tenure* (régime foncier = relatif à la terre) with *closed common property* (les communs fermés): collective farms or, more especially, *the individual freehold property* (propriété individuelle) of liberal economies. They have seized *timber* (bois) and mineral resources for the national patrimony. They have encouraged, whenever possible, cash, *monocropping* (monoculture), plantation-style agriculture in place of the more biodiverse forms of cultivation that prevailed earlier. The term enclosure seems entirely appropriate for this process, *mimicking* (imitant) as it does the English enclosures that, in the century after 1761, swallowed half of England’s common arable land in favor of large-scale, private, commercial production. The novel and revolutionary aspect of this great enclosure movement is apparent if we open our historical lens to its *widest aperture* (au maximum). The very earliest states in China and Egypt—and later, Chandra-Gupta India, classical Greece, and republican [[Rome]]—were, in demographic terms, insignificant. *-> les premiers États d'Asie du Sud-Est sont énormes si on compare leurs démographies aux tous premiers États.* They occupied a minuscule portion of the world’s landscape, and their subjects were no more than a *rounding error* (erreur arrondie) in the *world’s population figures*. (chiffres de la population mondiale) In *mainland* (continentale) Southeast Asia, where the first states appear only around the middle of the first millennium of the common era (1000 après JC), their mark on the landscape and its peoples is relatively *trivial* (insignifiante) when compared with their oversized place in the history books. Small, *moated*, and *walled* centers (petits centres entourés de douves et de murs) together with their tributary villages (villages tributaires), these little nodes (noeux) of hierarchy and power were both unstable and geographically confined. To an eye not yet hypnotized by archeological remains and state-centric histories, the landscape would have seemed *virtually* (pratiquement)all periphery and no centers. Nearly all the population and territory were outside their *ambit*. (périmètre) *Diminutive though* (Aussi modeste que soit) these *state centers* (centres étatiques) were, they possessed a singular strategic and military advantage in their capacity to concentrate *manpower* (main-d'oeuvre) and *foodstuffs* (denrées alimentaires) in one place. Irrigated rice agriculture on permanent fields was the key. As a new political form, the padi state was an *ingathering* (rassemblement) of previously stateless peoples. Some subjects were no doubt attracted to the possibilities for trade, wealth, and status available at the court centers, while others, almost certainly the majority, were captives and slaves *seized* (saisis) in *warfare* (guerre) or purchased from *slave-raiders* (pilleurs d'esclaves). The vast “barbarian” periphery of these small states was a vital resource in at least *two respects*. (deux regards) First, it was the source of hundreds of important trade goods and forest products necessary to the prosperity of the padi state. And second, it was the source of the most important trade good in circulation: the human captives who formed the working capital of any successful state. What we know of the classical states such as Égypte, Grèce, and Rome, as well as the early Khmer, Thai, and Burmese states, suggests that most of their subjects were formally unfree: slaves, captives, and their descendants. *-> sans la périphérie, l'État Padi n'aurait pas pu se développer* The enormous ungoverned periphery surrounding these *minute* (minuscules) states also represented a challenge and a threat. It was home to fugitive, mobile populations whose modes of subsistence—*foraging* (la recherche de nourriture), hunting, *shifting cultivation* (la culture itinérante), fishing, and pastoralism—were fundamentally *intractable* (intolérables) to state appropriation. The very diversity, fluidity, and mobility of their *livelihoods* (moyens de subsistances) meant that for an agrarian state adapted to sedentary agriculture, this ungoverned landscape and its people were fiscally sterile. Unless they wished to trade, their production was inaccessible for *yet another reason*. (une autre raison encore) Whereas the *early states* (premiers états) were nearly everywhere the creature of arable plains and plateaus, much of the more numerous ungoverned population lived, from a state perspective, in geographically difficult terrain: mountains, *marshland* (marais), *swamps* (marécages), arid steppes, and deserts. Even if, as was rarely the case, their products were in principle appropriable, they were effectively out of range *owing to* (en raison de) dispersal and the difficulties of transportation. The two zones were ecologically complementary and therefore natural trading partners, but such trade could rarely be *coerced* (contraint); it took the form of voluntary exchange. For early state elites, the periphery—seen frequently as the *realm* (royaume) of “barbarian tribes”—was also a potential threat. Rarely—but memorably, in the case of the Mongols and the Huns and Osman and his conquering band—a militarized pastoral people might *overrun* (envahir) the state and destroy it or rule in its place. More commonly, nonstate peoples found it convenient to *raid* (piller) the *settlements* (établissements) of sedentary farming communities subject to the state, sometimes *exacting* (imposant) systematic tribute from them in the manner of states. Just as states encouraged sedentary agriculture for its “*easy pickings* (récolte facile),” so, too, did raiders find it attractive as a site of appropriation. The main, long-run threat of the ungoverned periphery, however, was that it represented a constant *temptation* (tentation), a constant alternative to life within the state. Founders of a new state often *seized* (s'emparaient) arable land from its previous occupants, who might then either be incorporated or choose to move away. Those who fled became, one might say, the first refugees from state power, joining others outside the state’s reach. When and if the state’s reach expanded, still others faced the same dilemma. At a time when the state seems pervasive and inescapable, it is easy to forget that for much of history, living within or outside the state—or in an intermediate zone—was a choice, one that might be revised as the circumstances warranted. A wealthy and peaceful state center might attract a growing population that found its advantages rewarding. This, of course, fits the standard civilizational narrative of rude barbarians mesmerized by the prosperity made possible by the king’s peace and justice—a narrative shared by most of the world’s salvational religions, not to mention Thomas Hobbes. This narrative ignores two capital facts. First, as we have noted, it appears that much, if not most, of the population of the early states was unfree; they were subjects under duress. The second fact, most inconvenient for the standard narrative of civilization, is that it was very common for state subjects to run away. Living within the state meant, virtually by definition, taxes, conscription, corvée labor, and, for most, a condition of servitude; these conditions were at the core of the state’s strategic and military advantages. **When** these burdens became overwhelming, subjects moved with alacrity to the periphery or to another state. Under premodern conditions, the crowding of population, domesticated animals, and the heavy reliance on a single grain had consequences for both human and crop health that made famines and epidemics more likely. And finally, the early states were warmaking machines as well, producing hemorrhages of subjects fleeing conscription, invasion, and plunder. Thus the early state extruded populations as readily as it absorbed them, and when, as was often the case, it collapsed altogether as the result of war, drought, epidemic, or civil strife over succession, its populations were disgorged. States were, by no means, a once-and-for-all creation. Innumerable archeological finds of state centers that briefly flourished and were then eclipsed by warfare, epidemics, famine, or ecological collapse de- pict a long history of state formation and collapse rather than permanence. For long periods people moved in and out of states, and “stateness” was, itself, often cyclical and reversible.10 This pattern of state-making and state-unmaking produced, over time, a periphery that was composed as much of refugees as of peoples who had never been state subjects. Much of the periphery of states became a zone of refuge or “shatter zone,” where the human shards of state formation and rivalry accumulated willy nilly, creating regions of bewildering ethnic and linguistic complexity. State expansion and collapse often had a ratchet effect as well, with fleeing subjects driving other peoples ahead of them seeking safety and new territory. Much of the Southeast Asian massif is, in effect, a shatter zone. The reputation of the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan as a “museum of human races” reflects this history of migration. Shatter zones are found wherever the expansion of states, empires, slave-trading, and wars, as well as natural disasters, have driven large numbers of people to seek refuge in out-of-the-way places: in Amazonia, in highland Latin America (with the notable exception of the Andes, with their arable highland plateaus and states), in that corridor of highland Africa safe from slave-raiding, in the Balkans and the Caucasus. The diagnostic characteristics of shatter zones are their relative geographical inaccessibility and the enormous diversity of tongues and cultures. Note that this account of the periphery is sharply at odds with the official story most civilizations tell about themselves. According to that tale, a backward, naïve, and perhaps barbaric people are gradually incorporated into an advanced, superior, and more prosperous society and culture. If, instead, many of these ungoverned barbarians had, at one time or another, elected, as a political choice, to take their distance from the state, a new element of political agency enters the picture. Many, perhaps most, inhabitants of the ungoverned margins are not remnants of an earlier social formation, left behind, or, as some lowland folk accounts in Southeast Asia have it, “our living ancestors.” The situation of populations that have deliberately placed themselves at the state’s periphery has occasionally been termed, infelicitously, secondary primitivism. Their subsistence routines, their social organization, their physical dispersal, and many elements of their culture, far from being the archaic traits of a people left behind, are purposefully crafted both to thwart incorporation into nearby states and to minimize the likelihood that statelike concentrations of power will arise among them. State evasion and state prevention permeate their practices and, often, their ideology as well. They are, in other words, a “state effect.” They are “barbarians by design.” They continue to conduct a brisk and mutually advantageous trade with lowland centers while steering clear of being politically captured. Once we entertain the possibility that the “barbarians” are not just “there” as a residue but may well have chosen their location, their subsistence practices, and their social structure to maintain their autonomy, the standard civilizational story of social evolution collapses utterly. The temporal, civilizational series—from foraging to swiddening (or to pastoralism), to sedentary grain cultivation, to irrigated wet-rice farming—and its near-twin, the series from roving forest bands to small clearings, to hamlets, to villages, to towns, to court centers: these are the underpinning of the valley state’s sense of superiority. What if the presumptive “stages” of these series were, in fact, an array of social options, each of which represented a distinctive positioning vis- à-vis the state? And what if, over considerable periods of time, many groups have moved strategically among these options toward more presumptively “primitive” forms in order to keep the state at arm’s length? On this view, the civilizational discourse of the valley states—and not a few earlier theorists of social evolution—is not much more than a self-inflating way of confounding the status of state-subject with civilization and that of self-governing peoples with primitivism. The logic of the argument made throughout this book would essentially reverse this logic. Most, if not all, the characteristics that appear to stigmatize hill peoples—their location at the margins, their physical mobility, their swidden agriculture, their flexible social structure, their religious heterodoxy, their egalitarianism, and even the nonliterate, oral cultures—far from being the mark of primitives left behind by civilization, are better seen on a long view as adaptations designed to evade both state capture and state formation. They are, in other words, political adaptations of nonstate peoples to a world of states that are, at once, attractive and threatening. ##### Creating Subjects Avoiding the state was, until the past few centuries, a real option. A thousand years ago most people lived outside state structures, under loose-knit empires or in situations of fragmented sovereignty.11 Today it is an option that is fast vanishing. To appreciate how the room for maneuver has been drastically curtailed in the past millennium, a radically schematic and simplified fast forward history of the balance of power between stateless peoples and states may be helpful. The permanent association of the state and sedentary agriculture is at the center of this story.12 Fixed-field grain agriculture has been promoted by the state and has been, historically, the foundation of its power. In turn, sedentary agriculture leads to property rights in land, the patriarchal family enterprise, and an emphasis, also encouraged by the state, on large families. Grain farming is, in this respect, inherently expansionary, generating, when not checked by disease or famine, a surplus population, which is obliged to move and colonize new lands. By any long-run perspective, then, it is grain agriculture that is “nomadic” and aggressive, constantly reproducing copies of itself, while, as Hugh Brody aptly notes, foragers and hunters, relying on a single area and demographically far more stable, seem by comparison “profoundly settled.” The massive expansion of European power, via colonialism and whitesettler colonies, represented a vast expansion of sedentary agriculture. In the “neo-Europes” such as North America, Australia, Argentina, and New Zealand, Europeans reproduced, as far as possible, the agriculture with which they were familiar. In colonies with preexisting states based on sedentary agriculture, the Europeans replaced the indigenous overlords as sovereigns, collecting taxes and encouraging agriculture as had their predecessors, but more effectively. All other subsistence patterns, except when they provided valuable trade goods (for example, furs), were, fiscally speaking, considered sterile. Thus foragers, hunters, shifting-cultivators, and pastoralists were bypassed and ignored or driven from potentially arable farmland into territories considered wastelands. Nevertheless, as late as the end of the eighteenth century, though they were no longer a majority of the world’s population, nonstate peoples still occupied the greater part of the world’s land mass— forest lands, rugged mountains, steppes, deserts, polar regions, marshes, and inaccessibly remote zones. Such regions were still a potential refuge for those who had reason to flee the state. These stateless peoples were not, by and large, easily drawn into the fiscally legible economy of wage labor and sedentary agriculture. On this definition, “civilization” held little attraction for them when they could have all the advantages of trade without the drudgery, subordination, and immobility of state subjects. The widespread resistance of stateless peoples led directly to what might be called the golden age of slavery along the littoral of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and in Southeast Asia.14 From the perspective adopted here, populations were forcibly removed en masse from settings where their production and labor were illegible and inappropriable and were relocated in colonies and plantations where they could be made to grow cash crops (tea, cotton, sugar, indigo, coffee) which might contribute to the profits of landowners and the fiscal power of the state.15 This first step of enclosure required forms of capture and bondage designed to relocate them from nonstate spaces where they were generally more autonomous (and healthy!) to places where their labor could be appropriated. The final two stages of this massive enclosure movement belong, in the case of Europe, to the nineteenth century and, in the case of Southeast Asia, largely to the late twentieth century. They mark such a radical shift in the relationship between states and their peripheries that they fall largely outside the story I tell here. In this last period, “enclosure” has meant not so much shifting people from stateless zones to areas of state control but rather colonizing the periphery itself and transforming it into a fully governed, fiscally fertile zone. Its immanent logic, unlikely ever to be fully realized, is the complete elimination of nonstate spaces. This truly imperial project, made possible only by distance-demolishing technologies (all-weather roads, bridges, railroads, airplanes, modern weapons, telegraph, telephone, and now modern information technologies including global positioning systems), is so novel and its dynamics so different that my analysis here makes no further sense in Southeast Asia for the period after, say, 1950. Modern conceptions of national sovereignty and the resource needs of mature capitalism have brought that final enclosure into view. The hegemony, in this past century, of the nation-state as the standard and nearly exclusive unit of sovereignty has proven profoundly inimical to nonstate peoples. State power, in this conception, is the state’s monopoly of coercive force that must, in principle, be fully projected to the very edge of its territory, where it meets, again in principle, another sovereign power projecting its command to its own adjacent frontier. Gone, in principle, are the large areas of no sovereignty or mutually canceling weak sovereignties. Gone too, of course, are peoples under no particular sovereignty. As a practical matter, most nation-states have tried, insofar as they had the means, to give substance to this vision, establishing armed border posts, moving loyal populations to the frontier and relocating or driving away “disloyal” populations, clearing frontier lands for sedentary agriculture, building roads to the borders, and registering hitherto fugitive peoples. On the heels of this notion of sovereignty came the realization that these neglected and seemingly useless territories to which stateless peoples had been relegated were suddenly of great value to the economies of mature capitalism.16 They contained valuable resources—oil, iron ore, copper, lead, timber, uranium, bauxite, the rare metals essential to the aerospace and electronics industries, hydroelectric sites, bioprospecting and conservation areas—that might in many cases be the linchpin of state revenue. Places that long ago might have been desirable for their deposits of silver, gold, and gems, not to mention slaves, became the object of a new gold rush. All the more reason to project state power to the nethermost reaches of these ungoverned regions and bring their inhabitants under firm control. Occupying and controlling the margins of the state implied a cultural policy as well. Much of the periphery along national borders of mainland Southeast Asia is inhabited by peoples linguistically and culturally distinct from the populations that dominate the state cores. Alarmingly, they spill promiscuously across national frontiers, generating multiple identities and possible foci of irredentism or secession. Weak valley states have permitted, or rather tolerated, a certain degree of autonomy when they had little choice. Where they could, however, all states in the region have tried to bring such peoples under their routine administration, to encourage and, more rarely, to insist upon linguistic, cultural, and religious alignment with the majority population at the state core. This meant, in Thailand, encouraging, say, the Lahu to become Thai-speaking, literate, Buddhist subjects of the monarchy. In Burma it meant encouraging, say, the Karen to become Burmese-speaking Buddhists loyal to the military junta.17 Parallel to policies of economic, administrative, and cultural absorption has been the policy, driven by both demographic pressure and self-conscious design, of engulfment. Huge numbers of land-hungry majorities from the plains have moved, or been moved, to the hills. There, they replicate valley settlement patterns and sedentary agriculture, and, over time, they demographically dominate the dispersed, less numerous hill peoples. The combination of forced settlement and engulfment is nicely illustrated by a series of Vietnamese mobilization campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s: “Campaign to Sedentarize the Nomads,” “Campaign for Fixed Cultivation and Fixed Residence,” “Storm the Hills Campaign,” and “Clear the Hills by Torchlight Campaign.”18 Culturally, this reduction and standardization of relatively autonomous, self-governing communities is a process of long historical lineage. It is an integral theme of the historical consciousness of each of the large mainland Southeast Asian states. In the Vietnamese official national narrative, the “march to the south”—to the Mekong and the trans-Bassac Deltas—inaccurate though it is as a description of the historical process, vies with the wars of **national** liberation for pride of place.19 Burmese and Thai history are no less marked by the movement of population from their more northern historical cores of Mandalay, Ayutthaya, and what is now Hanoi into the Irrawaddy, Chao Praya, and Mekong river deltas, respectively. The great cosmopolitan, maritime cities of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Rangoon, and Bangkok that grew to serve this onetime frontier, delta, hinterland have come, demographically, to dominate the earlier inland capitals. Internal colonialism, broadly understood, aptly describes this process. It involved the absorption, displacement, and/or extermination of the previous inhabitants. It involved a botanical colonization in which the landscape was transformed—by deforestation, drainage, irrigation, and levees—to accommodate crops, settlement patterns, and systems of administration familiar to the state and to the colonists. One way of appreciating the effect of this colonization is to view it as a massive reduction of vernaculars of all kinds: of vernacular languages, minority peoples, vernacular cultivation techniques, vernacular land tenure systems, vernacular hunting, gathering, and forestry techniques, vernacular religion, and so on. The attempt to bring the periphery into line is read by representatives of the sponsoring state as providing civilization and progress—where progress is, in turn, read as the intrusive propagation of the linguistic, agricultural, and religious practices of the dominant ethnic group: the Han, the Kinh, the Burman, the Thai.20 The remaining self-governing peoples and spaces of mainland Southeast Asia are much diminished. We shall, for the most part, concentrate on the so-called hill peoples (often mistakenly called tribes) of mainland Southeast Asia, particularly Burma. While I will clarify what I mean by the awkward term nonstate spaces, it is not simply a synonym for hills or for higher altitudes. States, being associated with concentrated grain production, typically arise where there is a substantial expanse of arable land. In mainland Southeast Asia, this agro-ecology is generally at low elevations, allowing us to speak of “valley states” and “hill peoples.” Where, as in the Andes, most easily cultivable land under traditional conditions is located at high elevations, it is the other way around. The states were in the hills and nonstate spaces were downhill in the humid lowlands. Thus the key variable is not so much elevation per se as the possibility for concentrated grain production. Nonstate space, by contrast, points to locations where, owing largely to geographical obstacles, the state has particular difficulty in establishing and maintaining its authority. A Ming emperor had something like this in mind when he described the southwest provinces of his kingdom: “The roads are long and dangerous, the mountains and rivers present great obstacles, and the customs and practices differ.”21 But swamps, marshes, mangrove coasts, deserts, volcanic margins, and even the open sea, like the ever growing and changing deltas of Southeast Asia’s great rivers, all function in much the same way. Thus it is difficult or inaccessible terrain, regardless of elevation, that presents great obstacles to state control. As we shall see at great length, such places have often served as havens of refuge for peoples resisting or flee- ing the state. ##### The Great Mountain Kingdom; or, “Zomia”; or, The Marches of Mainland Southeast Asia One of the largest remaining nonstate spaces in the world, if not the largest, is the vast expanse of uplands, variously termed the Southeast Asian massif and, more recently, Zomia.22 This great mountain realm on the marches