the publication of Darwin’s theories meant that evolutionism became entrenched as the only possible scientific approach to history – or at least the only one likely to be given credence in universities. So the search was on for more workable categories. In his 1877 Ancient Society, Lewis Henry Morgan proposed a series of steps from ‘savagery’ through ‘barbarism’ to ‘civilization’ which was widely adopted in the new field of anthropology. Meanwhile, Marxists concentrated on forms of domination, and the move out of primitive communism towards slavery, feudalism and capitalism, to be followed by
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