Raspberries are a petit-bourgeois crop, while wheat is a proletarian crop — or so says political scientist James C Scott in his remarkable 1998 book Seeing Like a State. That makes it sound as though Scott is musing on matters of taste. In fact, he’s highlighting the link between what we produce, and the political and economic structures that production makes possible.
Wheat is a proletarian crop, says Scott, because it works well on industrial farms. Harvesting can be mechanised. Not so easy with raspberries, which are best cared for on a small farm. They are difficult to grow and pick on an industrial scale.
Such distinctions once mattered a great deal. We associate the invention of agriculture with the rise of ancient states but, as Scott points out in a forthcoming book, Against the Grain, much depends on the crop. Wheat is well-suited to supporting state armies and tax inspectors: it is harvested at a predictable time and can be stored — or confiscated. Cassava works differently. It can be left in the ground and dug up when needed. If some distant king wanted to tax the cassava crop, his armies would have had to find them and dig them up one by one. Agriculture made strong states possible, but it was always agriculture based on grain. “History records no cassava states,” he writes.