The Dawn of Everything

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 statedemocracyand inequality–and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation For generationsour remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike–either free and equal innocentsor thuggish and warlike. Civilizationwe are toldcould be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or 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 dialectic has startling implications for how we make sense of human history todayincluding the origins of farmingpropertycitiesdemocracyslaveryand civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropologythe authors illustrate how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual blinders and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gathererswhat were they doing during all that time? If agriculture and cities did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and dominationthen what kinds of social and economic organizations did they lead to? The answers are often unexpectedand suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stoneand more open to playfulhopeful possibilitiesthan we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and begins to imagine new forms of freedomnew ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual rangeanimated by curiositymoral visionand a faith in the power of direct action.