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Grains – wheat, barley, millet, rice, and corn – are the dominant food in all of the earliest states because they are the easiest to collect taxes on, not because they are the best for the people who farmed them.
Grains – wheat, barley, millet, rice, and corn – are the dominant food in all of the earliest states because they are the easiest to collect taxes on, not because they are the best for the people who farmed them.
Abulafia has undertaken an extremely ambitious project: to write a summary of the entire history of the Mediterranean, from the first people to cross its waters all the way to today. He mostly succeeds, which makes this a very impressive book.