A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our
most fundamental assumptions about social evolution--from the
development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state,
democracy, and inequality--and revealing new possibilities for human
emancipation.
For generations, our
remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike--either
free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we
are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original
freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David
Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the
eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques
of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals.
Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make
sense of human history today, including the origins of farming,
property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.
Drawing on
pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors
show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn
to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really
there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past
in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that
time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into
hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic
organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and
suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone,
and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to
assume.
The Dawn of
Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the
human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom,
new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of
formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision,
and a faith in the power of direct action.
Includes
Black-and-White Illustrations