The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Why would we – who live without servitude, and never acknowledged a king – spill our blood, only to make ourselves into slaves?

Such accounts have not fared well in the hands of modern historians. Few would go so far as to suggest that what de Salazar described never really happened, or was simply his own imagination of a scene from some ancient Greek agora or Roman senate, placed into the mouths of ‘Indians’. Yet on those rare occasions when the Crónica is considered by scholars today, it is mostly as a contribution to the literary genre of early Catholic humanism rather than as a source of historical information about indigenous forms of government – in much the same way that commentators on the writings of Lahontan never really concern themselves with what Kandiaronk might actually have argued, but dwell on the possibility that some passages might be inspired by Greek satirists like Lucian.57 There is a subtle snobbery at play here. It’s not so much that anyone denies outright that accounts of deliberative politics reflect historical reality; it’s just that no one seems to find this fact particularly interesting.

Why such historians imagine that a collection of sixteenth-century Spanish friars, petty aristocrats and soldiers were likely to know anything about democratic procedure (much less, be impressed by it) is unclear, because educated opinion in Europe was almost uniformly anti-democratic at the time. If anyone was learning something new from the encounter, it was surely the Spaniards.

But a strong case can be made that the deliberations recorded in Spanish sources are exactly what they seem to be – a glimpse into the mechanics of collective indigenous government – and if these deliberations bear any superficial resemblance to debates recorded in Thucydides or Xenophon, this is because, well, there are really only so many ways to conduct a political debate.

Those who aspired to a role on the council of Tlaxcala, far from being expected to demonstrate personal charisma or the ability to outdo rivals, did so in a spirit of self-deprecation – even shame.

Clearly, taking up office in this indigenous democracy required personality traits very different to those we take for granted in modern electoral politics.

Like other Nahuatl speakers, including the Aztecs, Tlaxcalteca liked to claim they were descended from Chichimec. These were considered the original hunter-gatherers who lived ascetic lives in deserts and forests, dwelling in primitive huts, ignorant of village or city life, rejecting corn and cooked food, bereft of clothing or organized religion, and living on wild things alone.64 The ordeals endured by aspiring councillors in Tlaxcala were reminders of the need to cultivate Chichimec qualities

Perhaps some of the seeds of our own evolutionary story about how it all began with simple, egalitarian hunter-gatherers were sown right there, in the imaginations of city-dwelling Amerindians. But we digress.

If all we had to go on were written sources, there would always be room for doubt; but archaeologists confirm that by the fourteenth century AD the city of Tlaxcala was, in fact, already organized on an entirely different basis to Tenochtitlan. There is no sign of a palace or central temple, and no major ball-court (an important setting, recall, for royal ritual in other Mesoamerican cities). Instead, archaeological survey reveals a cityscape given over almost entirely to the well-appointed residences of its citizens,

What we have learned in this chapter is that the political traditions of Tlaxcala are not an anomaly, but lie in one broad stream of urban development which can be traced back, in outline, to the experiments in social welfare undertaken 1,000 years earlier at Teotihuacan.

After all, it was the Aztec rulers of Tenochtitlan who finally broke with tradition, creating a predatory empire that was in some ways closer to the dominant European political models of the time, or what has since come to be known as ‘the state’. In the next chapter, we intend to turn back and consider this term. What precisely is a state? Does it really mark an entirely new phase of human history? Is the term even useful any more?

Rudolf von Ihering, who, in the late nineteenth century, proposed that a state should be defined as any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory (this definition has since come to be identified with the sociologist Max Weber).

a more flexible or nuanced definition. Marxists offered one: they suggested that states make their first appearance in history to protect the power of an emerging ruling class.

Evidence of ‘social complexity’ is automatically treated as evidence for the existence of some sort of governing apparatus.

but its logic is entirely circular. Basically, all it says is that, since states are complicated, any complicated social arrangement must therefore be a state.

One might then argue that ‘states’ first emerged when the two forms of governance (bureaucratic and heroic) merged together. A case could be made. But equally we might ask if this is really such a significant issue in the first place? If it is possible to have monarchs, aristocracies, slavery and extreme forms of patriarchal domination, even without a state (as it evidently was); and if it’s equally possible to maintain complex irrigation systems, or develop science and abstract philosophy without a state (as it also appears to be), then what do we actually learn about human history by establishing that one political entity is what we would like to describe as a ‘state’ and another isn’t? Are there not more interesting and important questions we could be asking?

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.

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.

when one speaks of ‘landed property’ what one is really talking about is an individual’s claim to exclusive access and control over all the soil, stones, grass, hedges, etc. within a specific territory. In practice, this means a legal right to keep anyone else off it. Land is only really ‘yours’, in this sense, if no one would think to challenge your claim over it, or if you have the capacity to summon at will people with weapons to threaten or attack anyone who disagrees, or just enters without permission and refuses to leave. Even if you shoot the trespassers yourself, you still need others to agree you were within your rights to do so. 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.

everything comes down to whether that someone is actually willing to follow orders. 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.

there is a second way of ensuring that one has access to rights others do not have: the control of information.

these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power.

administrative organizations are always based not just on control of information, but also on ‘official secrets’ of one sort or another. This is why the secret agent has become the mythic symbol of the modern state. James Bond, with his licence to kill, combines charisma, secrecy and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine.

The combination of sovereignty with sophisticated administrative techniques for storing and tabulating information introduces all sorts of threats to individual freedom – it makes possible surveillance states and totalitarian regimes – but this danger, we are always assured, is offset by a third principle: democracy. Modern states are democratic, or at least it’s generally felt they really should be. Yet democracy, in modern states, is conceived very differently to, say, the workings of an assembly in an ancient city, which collectively deliberated on common problems. Rather, democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers.

Elections were assumed to belong to the aristocratic mode (aristocracy meaning ‘rule of the best’), allowing commoners – much like the retainers in an old-fashioned, heroic aristocracy – to decide who among the well born should be considered best of all; and well born, in this context, simply meant all those who could afford to spend much of their time playing at politics.

Just as access to violence, information and charisma defines the very possibilities of social domination, so the modern state is defined as a combination of sovereignty, bureaucracy and a competitive political field.

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).

All these accounts seem to assume that there is only one possible end point to this process: that these various types of domination were somehow bound to come together, sooner or later, in something like the particular form taken by modern nation states in America and France at the end of the eighteenth century, a form which was gradually imposed on the rest of the world after both world wars. What if this wasn’t true?

the sixteenth-century Aztecs seemed to the Spaniards to present a rather familiar picture of human government; certainly, more familiar than anything they encountered in the Caribbean or in the swamps and savannahs of Yucatán. Monarchy, ranks of officialdom, military cadres and organized religion (however ‘demonic’) were all highly developed.

Enlightenment thinkers like Madame de Graffigny and her readers formed their first impression of what a welfare state, or even state socialism, might be like by contemplating accounts of the empire in the Andes.

In many ways, these two great polities – Aztec and Inca – were ideal targets for conquest. Both were organized around easily identifiable capitals, inhabited by easily identifiable kings who could be captured or killed, and surrounded by peoples who were either long accustomed to obeying orders or, if they had any inclination to shrug off power from the centre, were likely to do so precisely by joining forces with would-be conquistadors.

Where there are no such powerful kingdoms – either because they had never existed, as in much of North America or Amazonia, or because a population had consciously rejected central government – things could get decidedly trickier.

indeed, you could argue that the same rebellion continues, in another form, with the Zapatista movement that controls large parts of Chiapas today. As the Zapatistas also show, it was in these territories, where no major state or empire had existed for centuries, that women came most prominently to the fore in anti-colonial struggles, both as organizers of armed resistance and as defenders of indigenous tradition.

there’s every reason to believe that the spirit of rebellion which has marked this particular region can be traced back to at least the time of Charlemagne (the eighth century AD); and that across the centuries, overbearing Maya rulers were quite regularly and repeatedly disposed of.

Part of the reason is simply the designation ‘Post-Classic’, which suggests little more than an afterthought. It may seem a trivial issue – but it matters, because such habits of thought are one reason why periods of relative freedom and equality tend to get sidelined in the larger sweep of history.

Some periods are dismissed as prefaces, others as postfaces. Still others become ‘intermediary’.

To take just one example, at Thebes between 754 and 525 BC – spanning the Third Intermediate and Late periods – a series of five unmarried, childless princesses (of Libyan and Nubian descent) were elevated to the position of ‘god’s wife of Amun’, a title and role which acquired not just supreme religious, but also great economic and political weight at this time.

To have a situation in which women not only command power on such a scale, but in which this power is linked to an office reserved explicitly for single women, is historically unusual. Yet this political innovation is little discussed, partly because it is already framed within an ‘intermediate’

or ‘late’ period that signals its transitory (or even decadent) nature.

One might assume the division into Old, Middle and New Kingdoms is itself very ancient, perhaps going back thousands of years to Greek sources like the third-century BC Aegyptiaca, composed by Egyptian chronicler Manetho, or even to the hieroglyphic records themselves. Not so. In fact, the tripartite division only began to be proposed by modern Egyptologists in the late nineteenth century, and the terms they introduced (initially ‘Reich’ or ‘empire’, later ‘kingdom’) were explicitly modelled on European nation states. German, particularly Prussian, scholars played a leading role here. Their tendency to perceive ancient Egypt’s past as a series of cyclical alternations between unity and disintegration clearly echoes the political concerns of Bismarck’s Germany, where an authoritarian government was trying to assemble a unified nation state from an endless variety of tiny statelets. After the First World War, as Europe’s own regime of old monarchies was coming apart, prominent Egyptologists such as Adolf Erman granted the ‘Intermediate’ periods their own place in history, drawing comparisons between the end of the Old Kingdom and the Bolshevik Revolution of their own time.36

With hindsight, it’s easy to see just how much these chronological schemes reflect their authors’ political concerns.

our conventional vision of world history is a chequerboard of cities, empires and kingdoms; but in fact, for most of this period these were exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants, if visible at all to historians’ eyes, are variously described as ‘tribal confederacies’, ‘amphictyonies’ or (if you’re an anthropologist) ‘segmentary societies’ – that is, people who systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority.

A truly radical account, perhaps, would retell human history from the perspective of the times and places in between.

One way to test the value of a new approach is to see if it helps us explain what had previously seemed anomalous cases: that is, ancient polities which undeniably mobilized and organized enormous numbers of people, but which don’t seem to fit any of the usual definitions of a state. Certainly, there are plenty of these.

It is easy to see why the Olmec, with their intense fusion of political competition and organized spectacle, are nowadays seen as cultural progenitors of later Mesoamerican kingdoms and empires; but there is little evidence that the Olmec themselves ever created an infrastructure for dominating a large population. So far as anyone knows, their rulers did not command a stable military or administrative apparatus that might have allowed them to extend their power throughout a wider hinterland.

if these were ‘states’ in any sense at all, then they are probably best defined as seasonal versions of what Clifford Geertz once called ‘theatre states’, where organized power was realized only periodically, in grand but fleeting spectacles.

In South America we find a somewhat analogous situation. Before the Inca, a whole series of other societies are identified tentatively by scholars as ‘states’ or ‘empires’.

The first Europeans to study these civilizations, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, assumed that any city or set of cities with monumental art and architecture, exerting its ‘influence’ over a surrounding region, must be the capitals of states or empires (they also assumed – just as wrongly, it turns out – that all the rulers were male).

The art of Chavín is not made up of pictures, still less pictorial narratives – at least, not in any intuitively recognizable sense. Neither does it appear to be a pictographic writing system. This is one reason why we can be fairly certain we are not dealing with an actual empire. Real empires tend to favour styles of figural art that are both very large but also very simple, so their meaning can be easily understood by anyone they wish to impress.

the arts of Chavín appear to be an early (and monumental) manifestation of a much wider Amerindian tradition, in which images are not meant to illustrate or represent, but instead serve as visual cues for extraordinary feats of memory.