1.

James Scott shows how legibility and simplification (including standardization) are the primary means that states have used in trying to successfully manageto whatever endssocieties and environments. Legibility is a, perhaps the, central means of statecraft 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 statemediated 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 handled and 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 forests primarily 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 were replaced 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.

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 one growth 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. (1st Video) 7. the uniformity of forestry paved the way for states control of nature, imposing order among the new administrators forest. 8. Similar to the disarray of the old-growth forests, non-state forms of 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 decipher the 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. (2nd video) 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.