Marvin Harris (Our Kind): On The Threshold of States

The first states evolved from chiefdoms but not all chiefdoms could evolve into states. For the transition to take place, two conditions were necessary. The population not only had to be large (about 10,000 to 30,000 people), but it had to be "circumscribed," thee is, it had to be confronted with a lack of unused lands to which people who were unwilling to be taxed, conscripted, and ordered about could flee. Circumscription was more than a question of how much land was available; it was also a matter of the quality of soils and natural resources and whether groups of refugees could support themselves at a standard of living, that was not substantially lower than what they could expect under their oppressive chiefs. If the only places a dissident faction could flee to were high mountains, deserts, tropical forests, or other undesirable habitats, there was little incentive for them to hive off.

The second condition had to do with the nature of the food contributed to the central store for redistribution. When the chief's storehouse was filled with perishable root crops like yams and sweet potatoes, the potential for coercion was much less than when it was filled with rice, wheat, maize, or other domesticated grains that could be stored safely from one harvest to the next. Chiefdoms that were not circumscribed or that lacked storageable crops often reached the threshold of kingdoms only to break apart as a result of the mass exodus or rebellion of disaffected commoners.

Hawaii in the days before Europeans appeared is an example of a society that rose to, but never quite got across, the threshold of becoming a kingdom. All the islands of the Hawaiian archipelago were uninhabited until Polynesian voyagers in ocean-going canoes came ashore sometime early in the first millennium A.D. The homeland of these first settlers probably was the Marquesas Islands, some 2,000 miles to the southeast. If so, they were probably already familiar with big-manship or simple egalitarian chiefdoms. A thousand years later, when observed by the first Europeans to contact them, the Hawaiians were living in highly stratified societies that possessed all of the characteristics of states except for the fact that rebellion and usurpation occurred as frequently as war against external enemies. The population of these states or protostates varied from 10,000 to 100,000 persons. Each was divided into several districts and each district in turn was composed of several village communities. At the apex of the political hierarchy was a king or a would-be king called ali'i nui. Paramount chiefs called ali'i ruled over districts, and their agents, lesser chiefs called konobiki, were in charge of the local communities. The greatest percentage of the population–the people who did the fishing, farming, and craft produces–were commoners.

Sometime before the first Europeans arrived, the Hawaiian redistributive system had crossed the Rubicon that divides unequal gift giving from outright taxation. Food and craft produces were siphoned off from the commoners to the district chiefs and on to the ali'i nui. The konohiki were in charge of seeing to it that each village produced enough to satisfy the district chief who, in turn, had to satisfy the ali'i nui. The ali'i nui and the district chiefs used the food and crafts flowing through the redistributive network to feed and support retinues of priests and warriors. Very little trickled back down to the commoners except during times of drought and famine when the most industrious and loyal villages could expect to be favored with emergency rations furnished by the ali'i nui and the district chiefs. As David Malo, a nineteenth-century Hawaiian chief, noted, the storehouses of the ali'i nui were designed as a means of keeping people contented, so that they would remain loyal to him: "As the rat will not desert the pantry, so the people will not desert the king while they think there is food in his storehouse."

How had this system developed? Archaeological evidence shows that as the population grew, settlements slowly spread from one island to another. For almost a thousand years the principal populated areas remained close to the coast, where marine resources could supplement yams, sweet potatoes, and taro, planted in the most fertile patches of soil. Finally, in the fifteenth century, settlements began to spread inland into the higher ecozones, where poor soils and inadequate rainfall prevailed. As the population increased further, the interior forests were cut or burned down and large areas were lost to erosion or turned into grasslands. With the ocean on one side and barren slopes on the other, the population now had no place to go to escape from chiefs who wanted to be kings. Circumscription had set in. Oral tradition and legends tell the rest of the story. After 1600, various districts waged incessant warfare with each other, resulting in temporary control by certain chiefs over whole islands. While these ali'i nui held great power over commoners, their relationship with the paramount chiefs, priests, and warriors, as I indicated, was extremely unstable. Dissident factions fomented rebellions or waged wars, destroying the fragile political unity until a new coalition of would-be kings set up another configuration of equally unstable alliances. That was more or less the situation when Captain James Cook sailed into the harbor of Waimea in 1778, opening the way for the sale of firearms to the Hawaiian chiefs. The ali'i nui, Kamehameha I, obtained a monopoly over the purchase of these new weapons and promptly turned them against his spear-wielding rivals. After defeating them once and for all, he set himself up in 1810 as the first king of the entire Hawaiian archipelago.

We are left to wonder whether the Hawaiians would have gone on to develop a stable state-level society if they had remained isolated. I doubt it. They had intensive agriculture, large harvest surpluses, elaborate hierarchical redistributive networks, taxation, work quotas, dense circumscribed populations, and external warfare. But there was one thing that was missing: a food crop that could be stored from one year to the next. Yams, sweet potatoes, and taro are calorie-rich but perishable foods. They could be stored for only a few months. So the Hawaiian chiefs' storehouses could not be counted on to feed large numbers of followers during shortages brought on by drought or by the ravages of sustained wars. In David Malo's terms, the pantry was empty too often for chiefs to be kings.

And now it is time to tell what happened elsewhere when the pantry was full.