Scott’s Against the Grain, published in 2017, depicts them as disease-ridden, subjugated, and desperate to escape the city’s bounds. Scott, an anthropologist and political scientist, has never wielded a trowel, but his research is extraordinarily meticulous and detailed, and the lives of his imagined first citizens are unlike anything existing today. His analysis implies that the history of the metropolis has been marked by one long struggle by ordinary citizens to free themselves from oppression... [+]