The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

We like to tell ourselves that Europeans introduced the Americas not just to these agents of destruction but also to modern industrial democracy, ingredients for which were nowhere to be found there, not even in embryo. All this supposedly came as a single cultural package: advanced metallurgy, animal-powered vehicles, alphabetic writing systems and a certain penchant for freethinking that is seen as necessary for technological progress. ‘Natives’, in contrast, are assumed to have existed in some sort of alternative, quasi-mystical universe. They could not, by definition, be arguing about political constitutions or engaging in processes of sober deliberation over decisions that changed the course of world history; and if European observers report them doing so, they must either be mistaken, or were simply projecting on to ‘Indians’ their own ideas about democratic governance, even when those ideas were hardly practised in Europe itself.

does Maxixcatzin deem these people gods, who seem more like ravenous monsters thrown up by the intemperate sea to blight us, gorging themselves on gold, silver, stones, and pearls; sleeping in their own clothes; and generally acting in the manner of those who would one day make cruel masters … There are barely enough chickens, rabbits, or corn-fields in the entire land to feed their bottomless appetites, or those of their ravenous ‘deer’ [the Spanish horses]. Why would we – who live without servitude, and never acknowledged a king – spill our blood, only to make ourselves into slaves?

Cortés may have praised Tlaxcala as an agrarian and commercial arcadia but, as Motolinía explains, when its citizens thought about their own political values, they actually saw those values as coming from the desert.

But perhaps the first to attempt a systematic definition was a German philosopher named 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). On this definition, a government is a ‘state’ if it lays claim to a certain stretch of land and insists that, within its borders, it is the only institution whose agents can kill people, beat them up, cut off parts of their body or lock them in cages; or, as von Ihering emphasized, that can decide who else has the right to do so on its behalf.

IN WHICH WE LAY OUT A THEORY CONCERNING THE THREE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF DOMINATION, AND BEGIN TO EXPLORE ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR HUMAN HISTORY The best way to go about this task, we suggest, is by returning to first principles. 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. Can we speak similarly about elementary forms of domination?

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.

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.

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

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.

As we’ve noted, an egalitarian ethos can take one of two directions: it can either deny such individual quirks entirely, and insist that people are (or at least should be) treated as if they were exactly the same; or it can celebrate their quirks in such a way as to imply that everyone is so profoundly different that any overall ranking would be inconceivable. (After all, how do you measure the best fisherman against the most dignified elder, against the person who tells the funniest jokes, and so on?).

In modern states, the very same kind of power is multiplied a thousand times because it is combined with the second principle: bureaucracy. As Weber, the great sociologist of bureaucracy, observed long ago, 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.

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.

there were very few limits on what the king could do to those in his physical presence, but there was also nothing remotely resembling an administrative apparatus to translate his sovereign power into something more stable or extensive: no tax system, no system to enforce royal orders, or even report on whether or not they had been obeyed.

When historians, philosophers or political scientists argue about the origin of the state in ancient Peru or China, what they are really doing is projecting that rather unusual constellation of elements backwards: typically, by trying to find a moment when something like sovereign power came together with something like an administrative system (the competitive political field is usually considered somewhat optional). What interests them is precisely how and why these elements came together in the first place.

If there were prophetic movements or periodic insurrections during the Classic Maya period, as there were in the colonial period, we would currently have few ways to know about them;

IN WHICH WE OFFER A DIGRESSION ON ‘THE SHAPE OF TIME’,31 AND SPECIFICALLY HOW METAPHORS OF GROWTH AND DECAY INTRODUCE UNNOTICED POLITICAL BIASES INTO OUR VIEW OF HISTORY

History and archaeology abound with terms like ‘post’ and ‘proto’, ‘intermediate’ or even ‘terminal’. To some degree, these are products of early-twentieth-century cultural theory.

Even in the Maya case, to describe the entire period between AD 900 and 1520 as ‘Post-Classic’ is to suggest that the only really significant thing about it is the degree to which it can be seen as the waning of a Golden Age. In a similar way, terms like ‘Proto-palatial Crete’, ‘Predynastic Egypt’ or ‘Formative Peru’ convey a sense of impatience, as if Minoans, Egyptians or Andean peoples spent centuries doing little but laying the groundwork for such a Golden Age – and, it is implied, for strong, stable government – to come about.

A truly radical account, perhaps, would retell human history from the perspective of the times and places in between. In that sense, this chapter is not truly radical: for the most part, we are telling the same old story; but we are at least trying to see what happens when we drop the teleological habit of thought, which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states. We are considering, instead, the possibility that – when looking at those times and places usually taken to mark ‘the birth of the state’ – we may in fact be seeing how very different kinds of power crystallize, each with its own peculiar mix of violence, knowledge and charisma: our three elementary forms of domination.

If Chavín – a remote precursor to the Inca – was an ‘empire’, it was one built on images linked to esoteric knowledge. Olmec was, on the other hand, an ‘empire’ built on spectacle, competition and the personal attributes of political leaders.

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.

People have an unfortunate tendency to see the successful prosecution of arbitrary violence as in some sense divine, or at least to identify it with some kind of transcendental power. We might not fall on our knees before any thug or bully who manages to wreak havoc with impunity (at least, if he isn’t actually in the room), but insofar as such a figure does manage to establish themselves as genuinely standing above the law – in other words, as sacred or set apart – another apparently universal principle kicks in: in order to keep him apart from the muck and mire of ordinary human life, that same figure becomes surrounded with restrictions. Violent men generally insist on tokens of respect, but tokens of respect taken to the cosmological level – ‘not to touch the earth’, ‘not to see the sun’ – tend to become severe limits on one’s freedom to act, violently or indeed in most other ways.63

Shilluk appear to have made a conscious choice that the sporadic appearance of an arbitrary and sometimes violent sovereign was preferable to any gentler but more systematic method of rule.

why did early kingdoms ever do this sort of thing at all? And why did they stop doing it once their power became more established?

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

would be easy to go on from here to generalize. Perhaps this is what a state actually is: a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion.

There is obviously a paradox here. Caring labour is in a way the very opposite of mechanical labour: it is about recognizing and understanding the unique qualities, needs and peculiarities of the cared-for – whether child, adult, animal or plant – in order to provide what they require to flourish.96 Caring labour is distinguished by its particularity. If those institutions we today refer to as ‘states’ really do have any common features, one must certainly be a tendency to displace this caring impulse on to abstractions; today this is usually ‘the nation’, however broadly or narrowly defined. Perhaps this is why it’s so easy for us to see ancient Egypt as a prototype for the modern state: here too, popular devotion was diverted on to grand abstractions, in this case the ruler and the elite dead. This process is what made it possible for the whole arrangement to be imagined, simultaneously, as a family and as a machine, in which everyone (except of course the king) was ultimately interchangeable. From the seasonal work of tomb-building to the daily servicing of the ruler’s body (recall again how the first royal inscriptions are found on combs and make-up palettes), 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.97 All this activity was seen as generating a downward flow of divine blessings and protection, which occasionally took material form in the great f...

Indeed, if we are trying to understand the appeal of monarchy as a form of government – and it cannot be denied that for much of recorded human history it was a very popular one – then likely it has something to do with its ability to mobilize sentiments of a caring nature and abject terror at the same time. The king is both the ultimate individual, his quirks and fancies always to be indulged like a spoilt baby, and at the same time the ultimate abstraction, since his powers over mass violence, and often (as in Egypt) mass production, can render everyone the same.

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.

Both money and administration are based on similar principles of impersonal equivalence.

Over the course of this book we have had occasion to refer to the 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. We also noted how the English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ – since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends because they cannot make commitments or promises. The freedom to make promises is about the most basic and minimal element of our third freedom, much as physically running away from a difficult situation is the most basic element of the first. In fact, the earliest word for ‘freedom’ recorded in any human language is the Sumerian term ama(r)-gi, which literally means ‘return to mother’ – because Sumerian kings would periodically issue decrees of debt freedom, cancelling all non-commercial debts and in some cases allowing those held as debt peons in their creditors’ households to return home to their kin.132 One might ask, how could that most basic element of all human freedoms, the freedom to make promises and commitments and thus build relationships, be turned into its very opposite: into peonage, serfdom or permanent slavery? It happens, we’d suggest, precisely when promises become impersonal, transferable – in a nutshell, bureaucratized. It is one of history’s great ironies that Madame de Graffigny’s notion of the Inca state as a model of a benevolent, bureaucratic ...

To understand the realities of power, whether in modern or ancient societies, is to acknowledge this gap between what elites claim they can do and what they are actually able to do. As the sociologist Philip Abrams pointed out long ago, failure to make this distinction has led social scientists up countless blind alleys, because the state is ‘not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.’ To understand the latter, he argued, we must attend to ‘the senses in which the state does not exist rather than to those in which it does’.138 We can now see that these points apply just as forcefully to ancient political regimes as they do to modern ones – if not more

On reflection, it’s odd that the term ‘civilization’ – one we’ve not discussed much until now – ever came to be used this way in the first place. When people talk about ‘early civilizations’ they are mostly referring to those very same societies we’ve been describing in this chapter and their direct successors: Pharaonic Egypt, Inca Peru, Aztec Mexico, Han China, Imperial Rome, ancient Greece, or others of a certain scale and monumentality. All these were deeply stratified societies, held together mostly by authoritarian government, violence and the radical subordination of women. Sacrifice, as we’ve seen, is the shadow lurking behind this concept of civilization: the sacrifice of our three basic freedoms, and of life itself, for the sake of something always out of reach – whether that be an ideal of world order, the Mandate of Heaven or blessings from insatiable gods. Is it any wonder that in some circles the very idea of ‘civilization’ has fallen into disrepute? Something very basic has gone wrong here.

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.

Perhaps the most straightforward way to counteract this sort of argument is by citing a text, which describes a concept the Wendat (Huron) called Ondinnonk, a secret desire of the soul manifested by a dream: Hurons believe that our souls have other desires, which are, as it were, inborn and concealed … They believe that our soul makes these natural desires known by means of dreams, which are its language. Accordingly, when these desires are accomplished, it is satisfied; but, on the contrary, if it be not granted what it desires, it becomes angry, and not only does not give its body the good and the happiness that it wished to procure for it, but often it also revolts against the body, causing various diseases, and even death.

Evidence from more recent times suggests that the tradition of mound-building could have been, in some cases, a side effect of creating dancing-grounds or other flat open spaces for feasts, games and assemblies.

One thing we can definitely say is that they were artistically brilliant. For all their modest living arrangements, Hopewellians produced one of the most sophisticated repertories of imagery in the pre-Columbian Americas: everything from effigy pipes topped by exquisite animal carvings (used to smoke a variety of tobacco strong enough to induce trance-like states, along with other herbal concoctions); to fired earthen jars covered in elaborate designs; and small copper sheets, worn as breastplates, cut into intricate geometrical designs. Much of the imagery is evocative of shamanic ritual, vision quests and soul journeys (as we noted, there is a particular emphasis on mirrors), but also periodic festivals of the dead. Like Chavín de Huántar in the Andes, or indeed Poverty Point, social influence derived from control over esoteric forms of knowledge.

It’s informative, at this point, to compare and contrast the Hopewell Interaction Sphere with a phenomenon we discussed in the previous chapter: the ‘Ubaid village societies of Mesopotamia in the fifth millennium BC. The comparison might seem a stretch, but both can be conceived as culture areas on the grandest possible scale, the first in their respective hemispheres to encompass the entire span of a great river system – the Mississippi and the Euphrates respectively – from headwaters to delta, including all the surrounding plains and coastlands.25 The establishment of regular cultural interaction on such a scale, across sharply contrasting landscapes and environmental niches, often marks an important turning point in history. In the case of the ‘Ubaid it created a certain self-conscious form of standardization, a social egalitarianism, that laid foundations for the world’s first cities.26 What happened in the case of Hopewell seems rather different.

In Mississippian cosmology, watery places like this were connected to the chaotic underworld – seen as the diametrical opposite of a precise, predictable celestial order – and it’s no doubt significant that some of the first large-scale construction at Cahokia centred on a processional walkway known as the Rattlesnake Causeway, designed to rise from the surrounding waters and leading towards the surrounding ridge-top tombs (a Path of Souls, or Way of the Dead). To begin with, then, Cahokia was likely a place of pilgrimage, much like some of the Hopewell sites.31

As we’ll see, 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.

Now, if all this sounds suspiciously reminiscent of an Enlightenment coffee-house it isn’t a total coincidence. Tobacco, for example, was adopted around this period by settlers then taken back and popularized in Europe itself, and it was indeed promoted in Europe as a drug to be taken in small doses to focus the mind. Obviously, there is no direct cultural translation here. There never is. 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.59 No doubt it would be too much to suggest that the Enlightenment itself had its first stirrings in seventeenth-century North America. But it’s possible, perhaps, to imagine some future non-Eurocentric history where such a suggestion would not be treated as almost by definition outrageous and absurd.

In Europe these battles played out over the medium of scripture: the translation of the Bible from obscure ancient languages into regional vernaculars, and its release from the closed sanctuary of the High Faith into mass dissemination via the printing press. In the pre-Columbian Americas, the equivalent media revolution focused instead on the (quite literal) reformation of mathematical principles underlying the creation of complex geometrical earthworks which captured the sacred in spatial form.

In both cases, such reformations determined who could and could not partake of a sacred power encapsulated in stories and myths, encoded on the one hand as complex layers of scripture (the Old and New Testaments and other holy books), and on the other as a network of landscape monuments, just as complex in their own way.

While every Osage was expected to spend an hour after sunrise in prayerful reflection, the Little-Old-Men carried out daily deliberations on questions of natural philosophy and their specific relevance to political issues of the day. They also kept a history of the most important discussions.

As we’ve said before, there are certain freedoms – to move, to disobey, to rearrange social ties – that tend to be taken for granted by anyone who has not been specifically trained into obedience (as anyone reading this book, for instance, is likely to have been).

Since Haudenosaunee names are passed on like titles, there has continued to be an Adodarhoh, just as there is also still a Jigonsaseh and Hiawatha, to this day. Forty-nine sachems, delegated to convey the decisions of their nation’s councils, continue to meet regularly. These meetings always begin with a rite of ‘condolence’, in which they wipe away the grief and rage caused by the memory of anyone who died in the interim, to clear their minds to go about the business of establishing peace (the fiftieth, the Peacemaker himself, is always represented by an empty place).

Even in more recent times, the danger of being accused of witchcraft was deployed against office holders to ensure that none could accumulate any appreciable advantage over their fellows – particularly in wealth. Here we have to return to the Iroquoian theory about dreams as repressed desires, mentioned earlier in the chapter. One interesting twist of this theory is that it was considered the responsibility of others to realize a fellow community member’s dream: even if one dreamed of appropriating a neighbour’s possession, it could only be refused at the risk of endangering their health. To do so was considered beyond awkward; almost socially impossible. Even if one did it would cause outraged gossip, and very possibly bloody revenge: if somebody was thought to have died because somebody else refused to grant a soul wish, his or her relatives might retaliate physically, or by supernatural means.

In other words, 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. In this sense, at least, the Wendat won the argument. It would be impossible for a European today, or anyone, really – whatever they actually thought – to take a position like that of the seventeenth-century Jesuits and simply declare themselves opposed to the very principle of human freedom.

This book began with an appeal to ask better questions. We started out by observing that to inquire after the origins of inequality necessarily means creating a myth, a fall from grace, a technological transposition of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis – which, in most contemporary versions, takes the form of a mythical narrative stripped of any prospect of redemption. In these accounts, the best we humans can hope for is some modest tinkering with our inherently squalid condition – and hopefully, dramatic action to prevent any looming, absolute disaster. The only other theory on offer to date has been to assume that there were no origins of inequality, because humans are naturally somewhat thuggish creatures and our beginnings were a miserable, violent affair; in which case ‘progress’ or ‘civilization’ – driven forward, largely, by our own selfish and competitive nature – was itself redemptive. This view is extremely popular among billionaires but holds little appeal to anyone else, including scientists, who are keenly aware that it isn’t in accord with the facts.