The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Geographers and historians used to believe that plants and animals were first domesticated in just a few ‘nuclear’ zones: the same areas in which large-scale, politically centralized societies later appeared.

Such neat geographical alignments between early centres of crop domestication and the rise of centralized states invited speculation that the former led to the latter: that food production was responsible for the emergence of cities, writing, and centralized political organization, providing a surplus of calories to support large populations and elite classes of administrators, warriors and politicians.

Quite likely, European expansion in the Americas played a role. With perhaps 90 per cent of the indigenous population eliminated by the effects of conquest and infectious disease, forests reclaimed regions in which terraced agriculture and irrigation had been practised for centuries. In Mesoamerica, Amazonia and the Andes, some 50 million hectares of cultivated land may have reverted to wilderness. Carbon uptake from vegetation increased on a scale sufficient to change the Earth System and bring about a human-driven phase of global cooling.12

Extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization.

In other words, such ‘simple’ economies are rarely all that simple. They often involve logistical challenges of striking complexity, resolved on a basis of intricate systems of mutual aid, all without any need of centralized control or administration.

corvée.

This refers to obligatory labour on civic projects exacted from free citizens on a seasonal basis, and it has always been assumed to be a form of tax extracted by powerful rulers: taxes paid not in goods, but in services.

The flood-myth Atrahasis – the prototype for the Old Testament story of Noah – tells how the gods first created people to perform corvée on their behalf.

What would history look like if – instead of assuming that there must be some deep internal resemblance between the governments of, say, ancient Egypt and modern Britain, and our task is therefore to figure out precisely what it is – we were to look at the whole problem with new eyes.

As we’ve seen, this obsession with property rights as the basis of society, and as a foundation of social power, is a peculiarly Western phenomenon – indeed, if ‘the West’ has any real meaning, it would probably refer to that legal and intellectual tradition which conceives society in those terms.

In other words, ‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence.

Revolutions are rarely won in open combat. When revolutionaries win, it’s usually because the bulk of those sent to crush them refuse to shoot, or just go home.

We would like to suggest that these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power.2 The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral.

As we can now begin to see, modern states are, in fact, an amalgam of elements that happen to have come together at a certain point in human history – and, arguably, are now in the process of coming apart again (consider, for instance, how we currently have planetary bureaucracies, such as the WTO or IMF, with no corresponding principle of global sovereignty).

we are at least trying to see what happens when we drop the teleological habit of thought, which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states.