The Dawn of Everything
A New History of Humanity A truly crucial book, David Graeber and David Wengrow’s engrossing and revelatory re-examination of the human past challenges us to reject outdated ideas and consider new directions for our future
“It gives a genuinely global picture”
Seeing a cask of Lindeman’s (Australian) wine in a hard currency shop in Pyongyang back in 1998 led me to quote Milan Kundera: “Unity of mankind means: No escape for anyone anywhere.” In the two decades since, the world has only become more uniform and uni ed. Astonishingly, despite the record number of humans on this planet, there’s less diversity of life and organisation than for at least tens of millennia.
ere’s one economic system – late neoliberal capitalism – that rules pre y well everywhere and one pervasive – terribly dull – global culture found everywhere.
at makes e Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by the late great anthropologist David Graeber and leading archaeologist David Wengrow a truly crucial book. It demonstrates the wonderful, sometimes weird, amazingly creative history of our species, giving proper weight to the great length and – we increasingly understand – variety of how beings every bit as smart and innovative as humans today lived for 200,000 years-plus.
Most of this human thinking and exploration has inevitably been lost – short of the invention of a time machine – but Graeber and Wengrow nd a real treasure in Kandiaronk, the 17th-century Wendat (American First Nation) philosopher-statesman who, they argue, greatly in uenced debate about liberty and society in Europe. And overlooked hints can be found in the texts of the early European destroyers, such as Cortes
nding in Tlaxcala, population around 150,000, “the order of government so far observed among the people resembles very much the republics of Venice, Genoa and Pisa for there is no supreme overlord”.
In the archaeological evidence from the Palaeolithic onwards, there are wonderful clues. at some of the richest burials are of people we would now call disabled is hugely suggestive of a social structure unlike any of today. e cities of Ukraine and Moldova such as Taljanky, Maidanetske and Nebelivka in the fourth century BC were huge, sophisticated and – according to these authors – show no sign of centralised government, administration, or a ruling class. e city of Teotihuacan, which might have followed a classic Meso-American pa ern of warrior aristocracy, around 300AD decided a er a period of upheaval instead to build what looks like a mass social housing programme, supplying high quality, quite uniform apartments for almost all the city’s population.
e Dawn of Everything also puts paid to any idea of plodding, inevitable advance through hunting and gathering, to se led farming, on to cities, to globalisation, with accompanying rise in hierarchy and inequality and a shi from bartering to nance.
And it gives – as few such books do – genuinely a global picture, not prioritising those parts of the world, the west, so heavily recorded and theorised, when we know li le of other whole continents. ere will be, undoubtedly, quibbles with the details. Interpretations of archaeological evidence is prone – more even than other areas of academia – to revision a er revision. But that’s not really the point. It is instead to throw out deeply embedded, outdated thinking that’s had a deadening hold on our ideas of the past but – more importantly – about our potential directions of the future.
We’ve clearly headed down a narrow dead end of an economic system accepting massive inequality and smashing through the limits of this fragile planet. But we can imagine, and create, something very di erent and be er. Over hundreds of thousands of years that’s what our species has done, again and again.
All this and a wonderfully entertaining read, easy to disappear into for hours.