The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

In these lectures, he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization.45 Those who still remain hunters, shepherds or simple farmers are best understood as vestiges of our own previous stages of social development. In this way, theories of social evolution – now so familiar that we rarely dwell on their origins – first came to be articulated in Europe: as a direct response to the power of indigenous critique. Within a few years, Turgot’s breakdown of all societies into four stages was appearing in the lectures of his friend and intellectual ally Adam Smith in Glasgow, and was worked into a general theory of human history by Smith’s colleagues: men like Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson and John Millar. The new paradigm soon began to have a profound effect on how indigenous people were imagined by European thinkers, and by the European public more generally.

economist, A. R. J. Turgot