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1. James Scott shows how legibility and simplification (includingstandardization) are the primary means that states have used in

trying to successfully manageto whatever endssocieties and

environments. Legibility is a, perhaps the, central means ofstatecraft in Scotts view, particularly in relation to state aims of

taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. But he also

considers these projects within a much broader set of state-

mediated endeavors and rationalities: health, production,

symbolism, aesthetics, urban development, as well as social and

environmental organization more broadly.

2. Scotts Nature and Space initially explores how the state handledand developed forest management, later applying those same

principles to how the current state manages agriculture and land

distribution. In great detail, Scott describes how fiscal forestry

transformed from a disorderly endeavor of cultivating domainal

deciduous forests to one of great precision: careful seeding,

planting, and cutting, a forest that was easier for state foresters to

count, manipulate, measure, and assess.

3. This was done because the early European state viewed its forestsprimarily through the fiscal lens i.e the revenue generating

capability of the forests. Any aspect of the forest that fell outside

this purview was termed as wastes or shrubs.

4.Nature was replaced by natural resources

5. These uniform and geometrically inclined deciduous forests werereplaced by equally uniform coniferous forests, further isolating one

variable, converting the forest into a single commodity.

Monoculture and not natural polyculture became the new practice.

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By doing this the state achieved a synoptic view of the forest, it

could precisely estimate its revenues.

6. The coniferous forests had trouble lasting past more than onegrowth cycle. This was because forest needed the diversity to

survive and sustain. Later on, the state tried to inject diversity

artificially by planting pest cultures etc.(1stVideo)

7. the uniformity of forestry paved the way for states control ofnature, imposing order among the new administrators forest.

8. Similar to the disarray of the old-growth forests, non-state formsof measurementwhich were a product of localizationgenerated

a headache for the states quantification of land and yields, and

therefore, taxable entities.

9. Originally, the state relied on local clergy and nobility to decipherthe local standards, but this was eventually replaced by the states

standardization and implementation of the metric system. Like the

uniform forests of the Germany, the state reflected the notion that

A rational unit of measurement would promote a rational citizenry.

This was a major reform during the French Revolution. (2ndvideo)

10. Scott explains that goal of the modern state is to measure,codify, and simplify land tenure. Although he admits that such

high-modernist schemes can be used toward more positive or more

negative ends, he criticizes their attempt to simplify what are

utterly un-simplifiable phenomena (individuals, societies, space, and

nature), thereby excluding or trying to stamp out the particulars of

knowledge, know-how, and complexity-diversity that make such

systems work in all their motley glory.