Why did people abandon hunting and gathering for a settled life in societies that were based on crops and livestock and ruled by the predecessors of modern states? Most of us are sure that the domestication of plants and animals allowed people to finally settle down and found villages, cities and states based on agriculture, and the latter, in turn, created civilization, law, public order and, apparently, provided us with a safe life. However, archaeological and historical evidence calls this traditional narrative into question. James Scott believes that the first agrarian states were the product of a set of domestications: first fire, then plants, animals, state subjects, captives, and finally women in the patriarchal family - all these stages of domestication can be seen as a way of gaining control over reproduction. Scott seeks answers to the questions of why we avoided sedentism and plow farming for so long, what were the advantages of mobile economic systems, why crowding of plants, animals and grains had such unforeseen epidemiological consequences, and why all the first states were based on millet, other grains and unfree labor. Scott also considers “barbarians,” who have long eluded state control, and “barbarism” as a tool for understanding the tensions between states and disobedient peoples.