INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
**A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our
most fundamental assumptions about social evolution--from the
development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state,
democracy, and inequality--and revealing new possibilities for human
emancipation.
**
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and
childlike--either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike.
Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those
original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts.
David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in
the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques
of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals.
Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make
sense of human history today, including the origins of farming,
property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.
Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the
authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we
learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really
there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in
tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If
agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and
domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they
lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course
of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful,
hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.
The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of
the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom,
new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable
intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in
the power of direct action.
Includes Black-and-White Illustrations
