The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

(One reason why each new ruler was obliged to expand the empire was precisely this: they only inherited the old ruler’s army. His court, lands and retainers remained in the dead Inca’s hands.)

This, as much as the need to carry armies and supplies, required enormous investment in road systems, converting one of the world’s most complex and rugged terrains into a continuous network of well-maintained highways and stepped paths, punctuated by shrines (huacas) and way stations, stocked and staffed from the royal coffers.

As with the Aztecs, consolidation of the Inca’s empire seems to have involved a great deal of sexual violence, and resulting changes in gender roles. In this case, what began as a customary system of marriage became a template for class domination.

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.

As early as 1546, a coalition of Maya rebels rose up against Spanish settlers and, despite brutal reprisals, resistance never really died down. Prophetic movements brought a second major wave of insurrections in the eighteenth century; and in 1848, a mass rising almost drove the settlers’ descendants out of Yucatán entirely, until the siege of their capital, at Mérida, was interrupted by the planting season. The resulting ‘Caste War’, as it was called, continued for generations. There were still rebels holding out in parts of Quintana Roo at the time of the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century; 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.

There are no obvious military fortifications or administrative quarters. Almost everything, on the other hand, seems to have something to do with ritual performance and the revelation or concealment of esoteric knowledge.54 Intriguingly, this is exactly what indigenous informants were still telling Spanish soldiers and chroniclers who arrived at the site in the seventeenth century.

The Natchez case illustrates, with unusual clarity, a more general principle whereby the containment of kings becomes one of the keys to their ritual power. Sovereignty always represents itself as a symbolic break with the moral order; this is why kings so often commit some kind of outrage to establish themselves, massacring their brothers, marrying their sisters, desecrating the bones of their ancestors or, in some documented cases, literally standing outside their palace and gunning down random passers-by.

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

These extreme forms of ritual killing around royal burials ended fairly abruptly in the course of Egypt’s Second Dynasty. However, the patrimonial polity continued to expand – not so much in the sense of expanding Egypt’s external borders, which were established early on through outward violence directed at neighbours in Nubia and elsewhere,79 but more in terms of reshaping the lives of its internal subjects.

leavened bread and fermented wheat beer, the pot-containers for which now start to become standard fixtures of well-appointed grave assemblages. 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.

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 By the time of the Spanish conquest, maize was a ritual necessity for rich and poor alike. Gods and royal mummies dined on it; armies marched on it; and those too poor to grow it – or who lived too high up on the altiplano – had to find other ways of obtaining it, often ending up in debt to the royal estate as a result.

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,

It is also worth observing that monarchy is probably the only prominent system of government we know of in which children are crucial players, since everything depends on the monarch’s ability to continue the dynastic line.

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.

It’s only at this point, in the First Intermediate period, that we see a hereditary aristocracy coming into its own in Egypt, as local magnates like Ankhtifi began transferring their powers to their offspring and extended families.

In ancient Egypt, as so often in history, significant political accomplishments occur in precisely those periods (the so-called ‘dark ages’) that get dismissed or overlooked because no one was building grandiose monuments in stone.

Intriguingly, it is possible that we are witnessing the birth of an overt ideology of equality in the centuries prior to the emergence of the world’s first cities, and that administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening.

Of course, the danger of such accounting procedures is that they can be turned to other purposes: the precise system of equivalence that underlies them has the potential to give almost any social arrangement, even those founded on arbitrary violence (e.g. ‘conquest’), an air of even-handedness and equity. That is why sovereignty and administration make such a potentially lethal combination, taking the equalizing effects of the latter and transforming them into tools of social domination, even tyranny.

By ignoring the unique history of every household, each individual, by reducing everything to numbers one provides a language of equity – but simultaneously ensures that there will always be some who fail to meet their quotas, and therefore that there will always be a supply of peons, pawns or slaves.

As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of maths and violence.

In this manner, the king would become the necessary means by which his subjects established relations with each other, in much the same way as later heads of state would insist on putting their faces on money.

If ‘the state’ means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.

this time with a notion that the power of kings is held by an entity called ‘the people’ (or ‘the nation’), that bureaucracies exist for the benefit of said ‘people’, and in which a variation on old, aristocratic contests and prizes has come to be relabelled as ‘democracy’, most often in the form of national elections.

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

All this might seem like an oddly clumsy projection of Freudian theory, but for one thing. The text is from 1649. It was written by a certain Father Ragueneau in a Jesuit Relation, precisely 250 years before the appearance of the first edition of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), an event which, like Einstein’s theory of relativity, is widely seen as one of the founding events of twentieth-century thought.

What’s so striking about this pattern is its suggestion of an almost complete dismantling of any self-governing communities outside the city. For those who fell within its orbit, there was nothing much left between domestic life – lived under constant surveillance from above – and the awesome spectacle of the city itself.

While something endured of the earlier clan organizations, the old moiety system was transformed into an opposition between nobles and commoners.

Nobles could only marry commoners, and after several generations of such intermarriage the descendants of kings might lose their noble status entirely. So a pool of nobles-turned-commoners always existed from which warriors and administrators could be drawn.

After AD 1400 the entire fertile expanse of the American Bottom (which at the city’s height had contained perhaps as many as 40,000 people), along with the territory from Cahokia up to the Ohio River, became what’s referred to in the literature as the Vacant or Empty Quarter: a haunted wilderness of overgrown pyramids and housing blocks crumbling back into swamp,

occasionally traversed by hunters but devoid of permanent human settlement.

Hence in tenth-century China or eighteenth-century Germany, aspiring civil servants had to pass exams on proficiency in literary classics, written in archaic or even dead languages, just as today they will have had to pass exams on rational choice theory or the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. The arts of administration are really only learned later on and through more traditional means: by practice, apprenticeship or informal mentoring.

Here we begin to comprehend what it might have meant actually to stop creating such monuments entirely, or to repurpose drugs like tobacco towards collective, rational debate.

It could also mean the democratization of such knowledge – or at least the transformation of what had once been a theocratic elite into a kind of oligarchy.

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.

As one historian of the Osage notes, it is hard to imagine Montesquieu would not have attended.

Eliade himself had been close to the fascist Iron Guard in his student days, and his basic argument was that the ‘terror of history’ (as he sometimes called it) was introduced by Judaism and the Old Testament – which he saw as paving the way for the further disasters of Enlightenment thought.

For most of history, then, the zone of ritual play constituted both a scientific laboratory and, for any given society, a repertory of knowledge and techniques which might or might not be applied to pragmatic problems.

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.

Play kings cease to be play kings precisely when they start killing people; which perhaps also helps to explain the excesses of ritually sanctioned violence that so often ensued during transitions from one state to the other.

All of them deployed spectacular violence at the pinnacle of the system (whether that violence was conceived as a direct extension of royal sovereignty or carried out at the behest of divinities); and all to some degree modelled their centres of power – the court or palace – on the organization of patriarchal households.

On reflection, the same combination of features can be found in most later kingdoms or empires, such as the Han, Aztec or Roman. In each case there was a close connection between the patriarchal household and military might.

An answer is suggested by the West Indian sociologist Orlando Patterson, who points out that Roman Law conceptions of property (and hence of freedom) essentially trace back to slave law.

Our very word ‘family’ shares a root with the Latin famulus, meaning ‘house slave’, via familia, which originally referred to everyone under the domestic authority of a single paterfamilias or male head of household. Domus, the Latin word for ‘household’, in turn gives us not only ‘domestic’ and ‘domesticated’ but dominium, which was the technical term for the emperor’s sovereignty as well as a citizen’s power over private property. Through that we arrive at (literally, ‘familiar’) notions of what it means to be ‘dominant’, to possess ‘dominion’ and to ‘dominate’.

As a Wendat traveller observed of the French system, anyone – guilty or innocent – might end up being made a public example. Among the Wendat themselves, however, violence was firmly excluded from the realm of family and household. A captive warrior might either be treated with loving care and affection or be the object of the worst treatment imaginable.

Wendat households, in other words, were defined in exactly opposite terms to the Roman familia.

Ultimately, the house of the Bourbon monarchs – like the palace of an Egyptian pharaoh, Roman emperor, Aztec tlatoani or Sapa Inca – was not merely a structure of domination but also one of care, where a small army of courtiers laboured night and day to attend to the king’s every physical need and prevent him, as much as was humanly possible, from ever feeling anything but divine.

If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?