alt Hacker NewsIf you are basing your claims on Against the Grain, Scott focuses on early centralized states, which emerged thousands of years after agriculture and towns.
Such states were by definition exceptional. Most of them were in regions, where rainfall alone was insufficient, and agriculture dependend on irrigation. Such a dependence on centralized infrastructure favored state formation, but it also made the communities fragile. Local population collapses were common everywhere, but the fragility made them worse. When the irrigation infrastructure failed, harvests failed, the town failed, and the survivors dispersed.
But agriculture spread long before states. Where the local conditions were favorable, agricultural communities naturally had a surplus of labor. If there was unclaimed land available, landless men and women would occasionally split from the community and start a new one. That was the primary mechanism of the spread of agriculture.
I don’t think there’s a good basis for your claim. The earliest agricultural cultures all practiced flood retreat agriculture in alluvial plains.
If you look at the Americas you also only see intensive agriculture in coercive top down city states or small empires. Outside of that you see opportunistic plantings and forest agronomy mixed with foraging and hunting. Or in coastal regions you see marginal planting supplementing diets focused on fishing.
Settled agriculture was not spreading very frequently by choice. Why would anyone choose subsistence grain agriculture when literally anything else was available. On an individual level it’s strictly worse than foraging and hunting across almost all measures you’d care about.