Distinguished International Visiting FellowProfessor James Scott

Department of GeographySeminar

Thursday 9 May 2019, 4.15pm Large Lecture Theatre

Department of Geography

James Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. His research concerns political economy, comparative agrarian studies, theories of hegemony and resistance, peasant politics, revolution and anarchism, mostly in the context of Southeast Asia.

He is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Science, Science, Technology and Society Program at M.I.T., and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Places of Refuge: high and dry, low and wetCertain landscapes are well-suited to early state-making: e.g. flood plains, river junctions, protected coastal zones. Certain other landscapes are resistant to state-making and therefore attractive to peoples wishing to evade or escape state control (taxes, conscription, corvée, enslavement). Such landscapes include rugged mountains, deserts, mangrove coasts, swamps, marshes, and fens—such as those nearby you! I will aim to give a brief description of such “non-state spaces” as well as the history of efforts to reinforce them and efforts by states to eliminate them (e.g. drainage).