The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

there were far more interesting things going on than we might ever have guessed by sticking to any conventional definition of ‘the state’.

painting on walls is something people in virtually any cultural setting seem inclined to do.

As the evidence accumulates, year on year, for large settlements and impressive structures in previously unsuspected locations, we’d be wise to resist projecting some image of the modern nation state on to their bare surfaces, and consider what other kinds of social possibilities they might attest to.

by the eighteenth century, the indigenous critique – and the deep questions it posed about money, faith, hereditary power, women’s rights and personal freedoms – was having an enormous influence on leading figures of the French Enlightenment, but also resulted in a backlash among European thinkers which produced an evolutionary framework for human history that remains broadly intact today.

the conventional wisdom we’ve been challenging throughout this book – about hunter-gatherer societies, the consequences of farming, the rise of cities and states –

This European backlash was so effective that generations of philosophers, historians, social scientists, and almost anyone else since who wishes to address the human story on a broad scale, feels secure in their knowledge of how it should properly start and where it is leading. It begins with an imaginary collection of tiny hunter-gatherer bands and ends with the current collection of capitalist nation states

the same portrayers of world history who profess themselves believers in freedom, democracy and women’s rights continue to treat historical epochs of relative freedom, democracy and women’s rights as so many ‘dark ages’. Similarly, as we’ve seen, the concept of ‘civilization’ is still largely reserved for societies whose defining characteristics include high-handed autocrats, imperial conquests and the use of slave labour.

How inevitable, really, were the type of governments we have today, with their particular fusion of territorial sovereignty, intense administration and competitive politics? Was this really the necessary culmination of human history?

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 socialism (then communism). All these approaches were basically unworkable, and eventually had to be thrown away as well.

Throughout this book, we have spent a good deal of time demonstrating how deceptive all this is. The reason why these ways of thinking remain in place, no matter how many times people point out their incoherence, is precisely because we find it so difficult to imagine history that isn’t teleological – that is, to organize history in a way which does not imply that current arrangements were somehow inevitable.

A properly historical event has, perhaps, two qualities: it could not have been predicted beforehand, but it only happens once.

The best we can do, when confronted with unique historical events or configurations such as the Persian or Hellenistic empires, is to engage in a project of comparison. This at least can give us an idea of the sort of things that might happen, and at best a sense of the pattern by which one thing is likely to follow another. The problem is that ever since the Iberian invasion of the Americas, and subsequent European colonial empires, we can’t even really do that, because there’s ultimately been just one political-economic system and it is global.

we have no other planets to compare ourselves to.

prior to the Iberian invasion, the Americas were not in direct or regular communication with Eurasia. They were in no sense part of the same ‘world system’. This is important, because it means we do have one truly independent point of comparison (possibly even two, if we consider North and South America as separate), where it is possible to ask: does history really have to take a certain direction?

In the case of the Americas, we actually can pose questions such as: was the rise of monarchy as the world’s predominant form of government inevitable? Is cereal agriculture really a trap, and can one really say that once the farming of wheat or rice or maize becomes sufficiently widespread, it’s only a matter of time before some enterprising overlord seizes control of the granaries and establishes a regime of bureaucratically administered violence? And once he does, is it inevitable that others will imitate his example? Judging by the history of pre-Columbian North America, at least, the answer to all these questions is a resounding ‘no’.

what we can say with some confidence is that the societies encountered by European invaders from the sixteenth century onwards were the product of centuries of political conflict and self-conscious debate.

though later European authors liked to imagine them as innocent children of nature, the indigenous populations of North America were in fact heirs to their own, long intellectual and political history – one that had taken them in a very different direction to Eurasian philosophers and which, arguably, ended up having a profound influence on conceptions of freedom and equality, not just in Europe but everywhere else as well.

If the indigenous peoples of North America aren’t being imagined as living in a separate time, or as vestiges of some earlier stage of human history, then they’re imagined as living in an entirely separate reality (‘ontology’ is the currently fashionable term), a mythic consciousness fundamentally different from our own. If nothing else, it is assumed that any intellectual tradition similar to that which produced Plotinus, Shankara or Zhuang Zu can only be the product of a literary tradition in which knowledge becomes cumulative. And since North America did not produce a written tradition – or at least not the sort we are used to recognizing as such11

Monumental architecture on the scale of the Hopewell earthworks is generally assumed to imply a significant agricultural surplus, governed by chiefs or a stratum of religious leaders. Yet this isn’t what was going on.

If nothing else, however, this overall situation illustrates the profound irrelevance of a conventional evolutionist terminology, based on a progression from ‘bands’ to ‘tribes’ and ‘chiefdoms’.

despite the existence of a system of offices and clans, there appears to be virtually no relation between the two. It is possible that clans sometimes ‘owned’ certain offices, but there is little evidence for the existence of a hereditary, ranked elite.21

in many ways Hopewell and ‘Ubaid are polar cultural opposites. The unity of the ‘Ubaid interaction sphere lay in the suppression of individual differences between people and households; in contrast, the unity of Hopewell lay in the celebration of difference.

Archaeologists even identify certain figures as war chiefs; and yet, despite all this, there is an almost total lack of evidence for actual warfare. One possibility is that conflict took a different, more theatrical form

Scholars continue to debate the relative importance of ecological and social factors in Cahokia’s collapse, just as they argue about whether or not it should be considered a ‘complex chiefdom’ or a ‘state’.45 In our own terms (as set out in the last chapter), what we appear to have in Cahokia is a second-order regime in which two of our three elementary forms of domination – in this case, control over violence and charismatic politics – came together in a powerful, even explosive cocktail.

Perhaps we are dealing here with attempts to create ‘third-order’ regimes of domination, albeit of a very different kind to modern nation states, in which control over violence and esoteric knowledge became caught up in the spiralling political competition of rival elites. This may also explain why, in both cases – Cahokia and the Maya – the collapse of such totalizing (totalitarian, even) projects, when it happened, was itself sudden, comprehensive and total.

the Osage – a Siouan people who appear originally to have inhabited the region of Fort Ancient in the Middle Ohio River valley before abandoning it for the Great Plains – used the expression ‘moving to a new country’ as a synonym for constitutional change.

What we would now call social movements often took the form of quite literal physical movements.

when those rulers were definitively gone, people would begin descending back into the valleys, but this time in communities organized on very different principles: small towns of a few hundred people, or at most 1,000 or 2,000, with egalitarian clan structures and communal council houses. Today historians seem inclined to see these developments as in large part a reaction to the shock of war, slavery, conquest and disease introduced by European settlers. However, they appear to have been the logical culmination of processes that had been going on for centuries before that.

Much like the arguments Iroquoian speakers presented to Jesuit missionaries, or for that matter their theories about dreams, descriptions of daily life in these post-Mississippian townships often feel strikingly familiar – perhaps disturbingly so for anyone committed to the idea that the Age of Enlightenment was the result of a ‘civilizing process’ originating exclusively in Europe.

as we have seen, indigenous North American ideas – from the advocacy of individual liberties to scepticism of revealed religion – certainly had an impact on the European Enlightenment, even though, like pipe-smoking, such ideas underwent many transformations in the process.

in the case of Native North America the state-making project seems to come first, virtually out of nowhere, and the chiefdoms observed by de Soto and his successors appear to be little more than the rubble left behind by its downfall.

even the Osage, who ascribed key roles to sacred knowledge in their political affairs, in no sense saw their social structure as something given from on high but rather as a series of legal and intellectual discoveries – even breakthroughs. This last point is critical, because – as outlined earlier – we are used to imagining that the very notion of a people self-consciously creating their own institutional arrangements is largely a product of the Enlightenment.

But we are generally taught to think of the French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu as the first to build an explicit and systematic body of theory based on the principle of institutional reform with his book The Spirit of the Laws (1748). By doing so, it’s widely believed, he effectively created modern politics. The Founding Fathers of the United States, all avid readers of Montesquieu, were consciously trying to put his theories into practice when they attempted to create a constitution that would preserve the spirit of individual liberty, and spoke of the results as a ‘government of laws and not of men’. As it turns out, precisely this sort of thinking was commonplace in North America well before European settlers appeared on the scene.

It was traditional at the time to organize a series of public events around such ‘savage’ diplomats and arrange private meetings with prominent European intellectuals. We don’t know whom specifically they met with, but Montesquieu was indeed in Paris at the time, and already working on such subjects. As one historian of the Osage notes, it is hard to imagine Montesquieu would not have attended. At any rate, the chapters in The Spirit of the Laws which speculate on the modes of savage government seem an almost exact reproduction of what Montesquieu would likely have heard from them, albeit framed by an artificial distinction between those who do or don’t cultivate the land.67 The connections may well run deeper than we think.

What we are suggesting is that indigenous doctrines of individual liberty, mutual aid and political equality, which made such an impression on French Enlightenment thinkers, were neither (as many of them supposed) the way all humans can be expected to behave in a State of Nature. Nor were they (as many anthropologists now assume) simply the way the cultural cookie happened to crumble in that particular part of the world.

Still, the societies that European settlers encountered, and the ideals expressed by thinkers like Kandiaronk, only really make sense as the product of a specific political history: a history in which questions of hereditary power, revealed religion, personal freedom and the independence of women were still very much matters of self-conscious debate, and in which the overall direction, for the last three centuries at least, had been explicitly anti-authoritarian.

even within indigenous society, the political question was never definitively settled.

It was precisely this combination of such conflicting ideological possibilities – and, of course, the Iroquoian penchant for prolonged political argument – that lay behind what we have called the indigenous critique of European society.

not only did indigenous North Americans manage almost entirely to sidestep the evolutionary trap that we assume must always lead, eventually, from agriculture to the rise of some all-powerful state or empire; but in doing so they developed political sensibilities that were ultimately to have a deep influence on Enlightenment thinkers and, through them, are still with us today.

Why are we entertaining such ideas? Why does it seem so odd, even counter-intuitive, to imagine people of the remote past as making their own history (even if not under conditions of their own choosing)? Part of the answer no doubt lies in how we have come to define science itself, and social science in particular.

Any account which appears to show human beings collectively shaping their own destiny, or even expressing freedom for its own sake, will likely be written off as illusory, awaiting ‘real’ scientific explanation; or if none is forthcoming (why do people dance?), as outside the scope of social theory entirely. This is one reason why most ‘big histories’ place such a strong focus on technology.

it’s very easy to overstate the importance of new technologies in setting the overall direction of social change. To take an obvious example, the fact that Teotihuacanos or Tlaxcalteca employed stone tools to build and maintain their cities, while the inhabitants of Mohenjo-daro or Knossos used metal, seems to have made surprisingly little difference to those cities’ internal organization or even size. Nor does our evidence support the notion that major innovations always occur in sudden, revolutionary bursts, transforming everything in their wake. (This, as you’ll recall, was one of the main points to emerge from the two chapters we devoted to the origins of farming.)

Instead of some male genius realizing his solitary vision, innovation in Neolithic societies was based on a collective body of knowledge accumulated over centuries, largely by women, in an endless series of apparently humble but in fact enormously significant discoveries. Many of those Neolithic discoveries had the cumulative effect of reshaping everyday life every bit as profoundly as the automatic loom or lightbulb.

Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort. Nor was this pattern of discovery limited to crops. Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children.

Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple doors that appeared to open of their own accord, or similar theatrical illusions. Chinese scientists, equally famously, first employed gunpowder for fireworks.

If we are trying to frame more interesting questions to ask of history, this might be one: is there a positive correlation between what is usually called ‘gender equality’ (which might better be termed, simply, ‘women’s freedom’) and the degree of innovation in a given society?

What is true of technological creativity is, of course, even more true of social creativity. One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book – indeed, one of the patterns that felt most like a genuine breakthrough to us – was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation – even, in some ways, as an encyclopaedia of social possibilities.

the evidence we have from Palaeolithic times onwards suggests that many – perhaps even most – people did not merely imagine or enact different social orders at different times of year, but actually lived in them for extended periods of time. The contrast with our present situation could not be more stark. Nowadays, most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative economic or social order would be like. Our distant ancestors seem, by contrast, to have moved regularly back and forth between them.

Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities, or shift back and forth between different ones.

It’s clear that something about human societies really has changed here, and quite profoundly. The three basic freedoms have gradually receded, to the point where a majority of people living today can barely comprehend what it might be like to live in a social order based on them.