The Dawn of Everything A New History of Humanity

Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles. Who does not remember Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years or Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind? But equally often, these books rapidly show their age and are criticized for oversimplifying matters. And so I found myself with The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a 692-page brick with an equally grandiose title. In what follows, I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.

First, rather than one author's pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow. More importantly, rather than yet another history book telling you how humanity got here, they take their respective disciplines to task for dealing in myths. The authors want historians to ask different and better questions, and they critically examine the many assumptions that underlie popular narratives of human history. In this, they succeed spectacularly, and this thought-provoking book is armed to the teeth with fascinating ideas and interpretations that go against mainstream thinking.

The authors start by tracing the origins of our ideas about human history to the indigenous critique of European civilization. Sorry, the what? European colonisation exposed us to new, shocking ideas, with traders, missionaries, and intellectuals debating with, and being criticized by indigenous people. The authors focus on the French coming into contact with Native Americans in Canada. Historians have downplayed how much these encounters shaped Enlightenment ideas. More importantly, it led to an explicitly racist backlash that saw indigenous people as the lowest rung on the ladder of progress. Its legacy, shaped via several iterations, is the modern textbook narrative: hunter-gathering was replaced by pastoralism and then farming; the agricultural revolution resulted in larger populations producing material surpluses; these allowed for specialist occupations but also needed bureaucracies to share and administer them to everyone; and this top-down control led to today's nation states. Ta-daa! Except, the authors point out, this simplistic tale of progress ignores and downplays that there was nothing linear or inevitable about where we have ended up.

Take agriculture. Rather than humans enthusiastically entering into what Harari called a Faustian bargain with crops, there were many pathways and responses. Demographic boom-bust cycles of farmers in Neolithic Central Europe, barely recognized jungle gardens in the Amazon, or the labour-light variant of seasonal flood-retreat agriculture in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia. Experiments show that plant domestication could have been achieved in as little as 20–30 years, but cereal domestication here took some 3,000 years questions the notion of an agricultural "revolution". And then there are many areas where agriculture was purposefully rejected.

The idea that agriculture led to large states similarly needs revision. Early archaeology focused on places where plant and animal domestication was followed by large, centralized societies. But correlation is not causation, and some 15–20 additional centres of domestication have since been identified that followed different paths. And cities did not automatically imply social stratification. The Dawn of Everything fascinates with its numerous examples of large settlements without ruling classes that relied on collective decision-making through assemblies or councils, which questions some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology about scale: that larger human groups require complex (i.e. hierarchical) systems to organize them.

One of the most important messages of this book that unifies these and other topics is that scholars seem to wilfully ignore what is staring them in the face: humans have always been very capable of consciously experimenting with different social arrangements. And—this is rarely acknowledged—they did so on a seasonal basis. The archaeological record is understandably biased to stuff that is easily preserved, but more careful excavation methodology and new technology reveal a past that is far more varied than we have allowed for. There is more to history than the rise and fall of empires. Throughout, Graeber & Wengrow convincingly argue that the only thing we can say about our ancestors is that "there is no single pattern [...] If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements [...] maybe the real question should be 'how did we get stuck?'" (p. 115).

Next to criticism, the authors put out some interesting ideas of their own, of which I want to quickly highlight two. The first is that some of the observed variations in social arrangements resulted from schismogenesis. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined this term in the 1930s to describe how people define themselves against or in opposition to others, adopting behaviours and attitudes that are different. Graeber & Wengrow here extend this from individuals to whole societies, giving numerous examples. The second idea is that states can be described in terms of three elementary forms of domination: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma, which today express themselves as sovereignty, administration, and competitive politics. But looking at history, there is no reason why this should be and the authors provide examples of societies that showed only one or two such forms of control. Asking which past society most resembles today's is the wrong question to ask. It risks slipping into an exercise in retrofitting, "which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states" (p. 382).

The Dawn of Everything is a huge and sprawling bombshell of a book and I have left unmentioned several other topics: the overlooked role of women, the legacy of Rousseau's and Hobbes's ideas, the origins of inequality and the flawed assumptions hiding behind that question... the book is admittedly a tad long in places and yet the writing is clear and accessible. There are so many historical details and delights hiding between these covers that I was thoroughly enthralled. It is tragic that Graeber passed away before the book was published. As Wengrow writes in his foreword, they had plans for three sequels, covering parts of the world they decided to omit here. If you have any interest in big history, archaeology, or anthropology, this book is indispensable. I am confident that the questions and critiques raised here will remain relevant for a long time to come.