The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

Agriculture is essentially about the production of food, which was just one (quite limited) aspect of the Neolithic relationship between people and plants. Domestication usually implies some form of domination or control over the unruly forces of ‘wild nature’.

What it really seems to have been about is creating garden plots – artificial, often temporary habitats – in which the ecological scales were tipped in favour of preferred species.

Whether one calls these figures ‘goddesses’ or ‘scientists’ is perhaps less important than recognizing how their very appearance signals a new awareness of women’s status, which was surely based on their concrete achievements in binding together these new forms of society.

Recall that flood-retreat farming required people to establish durable settlements in mud-based environments, like swamps and lake margins.

Neolithic farming began in Southwest Asia as a series of local specializations in crop-raising and animal-herding, scattered across various parts of the region, with no epicentre.

The transition from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production took something in the order of 3,000 years.

Communal tenure, ‘open-field’ principles, periodic redistribution of plots and co-operative management of pasture are not particularly exceptional and were often practised for centuries in the same locations.

None followed a linear trajectory from food production to state formation.

‘Columbian exchange’, the remarkable crossover of non-human species set in motion by Europeans’ arrival in the Americas after 1492, and its transformative effect on the global configuration of culture, economy and cuisine. Tobacco, peppers, potatoes and turkeys flowed into Eurasia; maize, rubber and chickens entered Africa; and citrus fruits, coffee, horses, donkeys and livestock travelled to the Americas. Crosby went on to argue that the global ascendance of European economies since the sixteenth century could be accounted for by a process he called ‘ecological imperialism’.10

While European plants thrived in the absence of pests, diseases brought with domestic animals (or by humans accustomed to living alongside them) wreaked havoc on indigenous populations, creating casualty rates as high as 95 per cent, even in places where settlers were not enslaving or actively massacring the indigenous population – which, of course, they often were.

But first there is a more basic point to address: why is our discussion of these issues confined only to the last 10,000 or so years of human history? Given that humans have been around for upwards of 200,000 years, why didn’t farming develop much earlier?

Since our species came into existence, there have been only two sustained periods of warm climate of the kind that might support an agricultural economy for long enough to leave some trace in the archaeological record.

When it began, around 12,000 years ago, people were already present on all the world’s continents, and in many different kinds of environment. Geologists call this period the Holocene, from Greek holos (entire), kainos (new).

However, the cultural roots of this and all later Nilotic civilizations lay in much earlier transformations, linked to the adoption of farming between 5000 and 4000 BC, with their centre of gravity more firmly in Africa. These first African farmers reinvented the Neolithic in their own image.

In Mexico, domestic forms of squash and maize existed by 7000 BC.49 Yet these crops only became staple foods around 5,000 years later.

After all, by no later than 2000 BC agriculture was supporting great cities, from China to the Mediterranean; and by 500 BC food-producing societies of one sort or another had colonized pretty much all of Eurasia, with the exception of southern Africa, the sub-Arctic region and a handful of subtropical islands.

You can’t simply jump from the beginning of the story to the end, and then just assume you know what happened in the middle.

Here it’s worth recalling that in most of the Americas, before the European invasion, there were neither metal tools nor horses, donkeys, camels or oxen.

In point of fact, the largest early cities, those with the greatest populations, did not appear in Eurasia – with its many technical and logistical advantages – but in Mesoamerica, which had no wheeled vehicles or sailing ships, no animal-powered traction or transport, and much less in the way of metallurgy or literate bureaucracy.

Extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization.17 Choices about which crops and animals to farm often had less to do with brute subsistence than the burgeoning industries of early cities, notably textile production, as well as popular forms of urban cuisine such as alcoholic drinks, leavened bread and dairy products.

The trouble is just that ‘we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid.’ Le Guin has a point.

But the point remains: why do we assume that people who have figured out a way for a large population to govern and support itself without temples, palaces and military fortifications – that is, without overt displays of arrogance, self-abasement and cruelty – are somehow less complex than those who have not?

Its floodplains cross the otherwise arid landscape of southern Iraq, turning to marshland as they near the head of the Persian Gulf.40 Urban life here goes back at least to 3500 BC.

The earliest Mesopotamian cities – those of the fourth and early third millennia BC – present no clear evidence for monarchy at all.

From 3100 BC, across the hilly country of what’s now eastern Turkey, and then in other places on the edge of urban civilization, we see evidence for the rise of a warrior aristocracy, heavily armed with metal spears and swords, living in what appear to be hill forts or small palaces.

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

We have already talked about fundamental, even primary, forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey orders; the freedom to reorganize social relations.

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.

If an empire is based largely on military force, it is relatively easy for a superior force of the same kind to seize control of its territory, since if one takes control of that centre

For some readers, the idea of a dead monarch sent off to the afterlife amid the corpses of his retainers might evoke images of early pharaohs. Some of Egypt’s earliest known kings, those of the First Dynasty around 3000 BC (who, in fact, were not yet referred to as ‘pharaoh’), were indeed buried in this way.

When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship.

The most spectacular, at Hierakonpolis, includes not only a male dwarf (they seem to have become a fixture of courtly society very early on), but a significant number of teenage girls, and what seem to be the remains of a private zoo:

It is no coincidence that arable wheat-farming – though long familiar in the valley and delta of the Nile – was only refined and intensified around this time, at least partly in response to the new demands of the dead.87

Families who found themselves unable to command such resources had to obtain beer and loaves elsewhere, creating networks of obligation and debt. Hence important class distinctions and dependencies did, in fact, begin to emerge,88 as a sizeable sector of Egypt’s population found itself deprived of the means to care independently for ancestors.

Peru. Here, too, we find a contrast between the traditional, varied and flexible regime of everyday foodstuffs – in this case centring on cuisine made from freeze-dried potatoes (chuño) – and the introduction of a completely different sort of food, in this case, maize beer (chicha), which was considered fit for the gods and also gradually became, as it were, the food of empire.89

For instance, it is around 3500 BC that we begin to find remains of facilities used for both baking and brewing – first alongside cemeteries, and within a few centuries attached to palaces and grand tombs.

By the time of the Great Pyramids (c.2500 BC), bread and beer were being manufactured on an industrial scale to supply armies of workers during their seasonal service on royal construction projects,

most of human activity was directed upwards, either towards tending rulers (living and dead) or assisting them with their own task of feeding and caring for the gods.

In other words, whenever state sovereignty broke down, heroic politics returned – with charismatic figures just as vainglorious and competitive, perhaps, as those we know from ancient epics, but far less bloodthirsty.

three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.

slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises.

We began this chapter by noting how often the expansion of ambitious polities, and the concentration of power in a few hands, was accompanied by the marginalization of women, if not their violent subordination.

Pretty much all the available evidence from Minoan Crete suggests a system of female political rule – effectively a theocracy of some sort, governed by a college of priestesses.

As the Mongolian adage went, ‘One can conquer a kingdom on horseback, to rule it one must dismount.’

social influence derived from control over esoteric forms of knowledge.

Most later indigenous societies had a separation between peace chiefs and war chiefs: an entirely different administration came into force in times of military conflict, then melted away as soon as matters were resolved.

Whatever happened in Cahokia, it appears to have left extremely unpleasant memories.

But 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.

When Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian historian of religion, proposed that ‘traditional’ societies lived in ‘cyclical time’, innocent of history, he was simply drawing the obvious conclusion. As a matter of fact, he went even further.

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.