James C. Scott’s “In Praise of Floods,” Reviewed

“In Praise of Floods” (Yale), a study of rivers by the late political scientist James C. Scott, arrives after a year of catastrophic floods. Last spring, heavy rainfall lifted parts of the San Jacinto and Trinity Rivers, in East Texas, at least a dozen feet above the flood stage, forcing thousands to evacuate their homes. In September, during Hurricane Helene, the French Broad River surged into commercial corridors in Asheville, North Carolina, wiping out restaurants, breweries, stores, and dwellings. In October, in Spain, the Magro, Júcar, and Turia Rivers overflowed their banks in the region around the city of Valencia, leading to the deaths of two hundred and thirty-two people.

Scott wants us to look past disasters such as these. Focussing on the human costs of flooding, he argues, is too anthropocentric. A flood may be, “for humans,” the “most damaging of ‘natural’ disasters worldwide,” but, from “a long-run hydrological perspective, it is just the river breathing deeply, as it must.” A seasonal inundation, known as a “flood pulse,” delivers crucial nutrients to organisms that depend on rivers. “Without the annual occupation of the floodplain, the channel—that line on the map—is comparatively dead biotically,” he argues. Or, as he puts it more succinctly elsewhere in the book, “No flood, no river.”

It is as difficult to imagine a flood survivor reading these sentences without objection as it would be to picture a displaced resident of Pacific Palisades reading a book called “In Praise of Fires.” But Scott doesn’t ignore how damaging a river’s overflowing can be to those living along its banks. In celebrating periodic flooding, he is also warning about the costs of human intervention. Dams and levees lead to less frequent flooding, but erosion and deforestation mean more catastrophic floods when these barriers are breached. The more civilized you are, the less resilient you are.

“In Praise of Floods” offers a posthumous conclusion to a scholarly career of upending conventional wisdom. Scott spent forty-five years in the political-science department at Yale, where he taught until a few years before his death, last July, at eighty-seven. But his interests were broader than those of most political scientists. He started out as a specialist in contemporary Southeast Asia; just as he was beginning to gain recognition for his work, he risked his career to move to Malaysia and embark upon an ethnography of village life. He founded the agrarian-studies program at Yale, researching and teaching about rural communities from around the world. By the end of his career, he had left detailed field work behind and was writing sweeping treatments of the distant past, which nonetheless managed to broach some of the most vexing political questions of our time.

Though Scott came from the political left, his most famous book, “Seeing Like a State,” a vigorous critique of big government projects intended to improve human welfare, was warmly received by the libertarian right. When asked to define himself, he hedged and qualified: he sometimes called himself “a crude Marxist, with the emphasis on ‘crude.’ ” He was an anthropologist “by courtesy,” in acknowledgment of the fact that he had no formal training in the discipline. Late in life, he drifted toward anarchism, but even this belief system exerted a tenuous hold, and he could offer only “two cheers” for it. He strove to cultivate a similar openness in his students. For several years at Yale, he led what he called an “incubator” workshop, in which he encouraged graduate students to bring in half-formulated ideas as a way to develop risk-taking instincts. Another risk he encouraged was student organizing: he was a strong and consistent supporter of the decades-long project to form a graduate-student union at Yale. In his private life, he tried his hand at farming (his biography on the political-science department’s website listed him as “a mediocre farmer”), and he brought eggs to his classes.

The lives of people working in agriculture were at the center of Scott’s work. Small farmers and peasants the world over endured dramatic transformations in the twentieth century and were subject to grand and ill-begotten experiments by capitalist and communist states alike. In colonial and post-colonial regimes, they were forced to plant cash crops and were heavily taxed. Under Stalin and Mao, experiments in collective farming led to famine. Scott wanted to study how rural populations responded to these upheavals.

Peasants have often been seen as docile and passive. Scott thought otherwise. He looked out for tacit “local knowledge” that states ignored in their giant programs of social remodelling, and discerned in small acts of disobedience a pattern of resistance that sometimes erupted into full-scale revolt. In his later work, he cheerfully depicted the “barbarians” who hovered on the edges of states, eluding conscripted labor and leading daring raids on grain hoards. Scott himself was a bit like one of these barbarians, constantly attacking and unsettling a seemingly stable consensus on the value of state power, and of civilization itself.

Scott first visited Southeast Asia in his early twenties. Born in southern New Jersey, in 1936, he attended a Quaker school before going to Williams College. At Williams, a professor encouraged him to study Burma, now Myanmar. After graduating, Scott went there on a Rotary Fellowship, in 1959. Riding a 1940 Triumph motorcycle, he travelled throughout the country, ending up at Mandalay University, where he studied Burmese for five months. The sojourn launched his interest in Southeast Asia, the peasantry, and the formation of states.

While overseas, Scott wrote reports on Burmese student politics for the C.I.A., and was involved in the U.S. National Student Association, then a hotbed of global student activism. As detailed by the political scientist Karen Paget, Scott’s involvement with the C.I.A. was brief, but his time with the U.S.N.S.A. seems to have whetted his interest in radical politics. This was the era of Third Worldism, when countries that had ejected colonial powers began to band together, many of them under the banner of non-aligned socialism. With the U.S.N.S.A., Scott travelled to Singapore, where he met representatives of the Socialist student union, and to Indonesia, where he was introduced to the heads of the Communist student union, many of whose members were later killed in the country’s anti-Communist purges of 1965.

In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the Vietnam War was a matter of urgent concern in politics and scholarship alike. The leading role played in the war by the Vietnamese rural poor prompted Scott to wonder what motivated peasants to revolt. This question led to his first major book, “The Moral Economy of the Peasant,” from 1976, which borrowed the idea of a “moral economy” from the left-wing British historian E. P. Thompson. Scott described a universe of mutual assistance that peasants—his subject was Southeast Asia, but his conclusions were general—created for themselves to insure that they didn’t go hungry. The peasantry relied on what Scott called a “subsistence ethic,” a safety-first principle that dictated that access to food and other means of sustaining life took precedence over maximizing profit. If this fragile web of economic relationships was disturbed, it could lead to starvation and a breakdown of social trust.

Just such a breakdown had occurred in Vietnam and Burma in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when colonial authorities began to intrude into peasant life, privatizing village lands, forests, and fisheries and introducing a multitude of punishing taxes. These moves disrupted the tenuous balance that had allowed peasants to survive. When the Great Depression reached these countries, in 1930, putting further strain on the livelihoods of small farmers, they erupted in resistance. Crowds, sometimes swelling to the thousands, began an assault on the colonial state. In a series of rebellious actions in central Vietnam, Scott writes, “administrative offices and their tax rolls were destroyed, post offices and railroad stations and schools were burned, alcohol warehouses plundered, collaborating officials assassinated, forest guard posts destroyed, rice stores seized, and at least one salt convoy attacked.”

“The Moral Economy of the Peasant” came out as political events were laying waste to the hopes that many had placed in Third World revolution. Post-colonial and socialist states founded in opposition to colonial oppression exhibited their own brutality and oppressiveness. One country after another employed fantastic schemes to improve general welfare, such as Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa campaign to resettle rural populations in Tanzania in planned villages. These efforts often required coerced labor and diminished democratic participation, and sometimes led to famine. When peasant rebellions appeared, they were crushed even in superficially democratic countries such as India, whose government violently suppressed the Naxalite uprisings in West Bengal. Later in life, Scott would confess to having become “disillusioned by the way in which revolutions produced a stronger state that was more oppressive than the one it replaced.”

Scott’s fourth book, the extraordinary “Weapons of the Weak,” from 1985, registers a growing disenchantment with revolutionary politics. In 1978, hoping to observe peasant struggle up close, he had moved with his wife, Louise, and their three children from Connecticut to a remote village in the state of Kedah, the rice bowl of Malaysia. In that country, as elsewhere in Southeast Asia, revolutionary idealism was giving way to forms of state power that were sometimes as intrusive as the colonial regimes they had replaced. As part of the so-called Green Revolution, the Malaysian government had introduced new machinery and cash crops intended to boost agricultural productivity, restructuring the farming economy in ways that were greatly resented by the rural poor.