Zomia is the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states. Its days are numbered. hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.

Virtually everything about these people ... can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length ... to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent states from springing up among them.

the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness ... is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be understood apart from it. This is also what makes this an anarchist history.

This account implicitly brings together the histories of all those peoples extruded by coercive state-making and unfree labor systems: Gypsies, Cossacks, polyglot tribes made up of refugees from Spanish reducciones in the New World and the Philippines, fugitive slave communities, the Marsh Arabs, San-Bushmen, and so on.

Pastoralism, foraging, shifting cultivation, and segmentary lineage systems are often a “secondary adaptation,” a kind of “self-barbarianization” adopted by peoples whose location, subsistence, and social structure are adapted to state evasion.

Chinese and other civilizational discourses about the “barbarian,” the “raw,” the “primitive” ... practically, mean ungoverned, not-yet-incorporated.

Since 1945, and in some cases before then, the power of the state to deploy distance-demolishing technologies—railroads, all-weather roads, telephone, telegraph, airpower, helicopters, and now information technology—so changed the strategic balance of power between self-governing peoples and nation-states, so diminished the friction of terrain, that ... the sovereign nation-state is now busy projecting its power to its outermost territorial borders and mopping up zones of weak or no sovereignty.

“dead white men” ... . were the pioneers of the trail along which I plod here; I wouldn’t even have found it without them. Pierre Clastres’ ... daring interpretation of state-evading and state-preventing native peoples in post-Conquest South America in La société contre l’état.... Ernest Gellner’s analysis of Berber-Arab relations helped me grasp that where sovereignty and taxes stopped, there precisely, “ethnicity” and “tribes” began, and that barbarian was another word states used to describe any self-governing, nonsubject people.

The numerous orang laut (sea nomads, sea gypsies) in insular Southeast Asia are clearly a seagoing, archipelago-hopping variant of swiddeners dwelling in mountain fastnesses. Like many hill people they also have a martial tradition and have moved easily between piracy (seaborne raiding), slave-raiding, and serving as the naval guard and strike force of several Malay kingdoms. Poised strategically at the edge of major shipping lanes, able to strike and disappear quickly, they conjure up a whole watery Zomia.... As Ben Anderson noted while urging me in this direction, “The sea is bigger, emptier than the mountains and the forest. Look at all those pirates still easily fending off the G-7, Singapore, etc., with aplomb.” to pursue [this theme]: ... Eric Tagliacozzo.

edited by Pamela Crossley, Helen Siu, and Donald Sutton, Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), is packed with original history, theory, and ethnography.

— The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott (Yale Agrarian Studies)