The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

This may be the most important book I've ever read. I read it once, slowly. Then skimmed it again to assemble the highlights for this review. And finally I read all of my highlights quite closely as I was writing this. On each pass, I learned more. This is a history book that simultaneously condemns cruelty and domination while attesting to the brilliant creativity and beauty of the human spirit.

Foreword, dedication, and acknowledgments

The book starts with a very sad dedication (by co-author David Wengrow) to Graeber, who died three weeks after completing it.

Chapter one

"Most of human history is irreparably lost to us," starts the book, which will proceed to explore these shadows of our collective ignorance to uncover that brilliant humanities behind them.

This is of little consequence to most people... In so far as the question comes up at all, it's usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly... Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terrible wrong?

It is basically a theological debate. Essentially, the question is: are humans innately good, or innately evil?

The authors take this question in three directions:

• The modern view that there is no "good" or "evil" (his view)

• The Hobbesian view that humans are evolved from a terrible natural state, which was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"

• The Rousseauian view that humans are estranged from a natural state of primordial innocence

Both the Hobbesian and Rousseauian view fit cleanly into the popular map of human progress: humans evolved as bands of hunter-gatherers, who gathered into semi-organized foraging tribes, which then invented agriculture and settled into pastoral lives, which gave rise to city states and urbanism. The Hobbesian view says that we were rescued from our primitive nature by our ingenuity. The Rousseauian view says we put ourselves in bondage, because we didn't know better.

The authors criticize the Rousseauian concept of "equality," which is rooted in Rousseau's myth of naive, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands. What would equality actually look like? The concept is fraught. Ultimately, the Enlightenment view of equality is a conveniently unattainable ideal on a pedestal.

The book sets out to dispel this crude oversimplification of human history.

We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles htat we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

The authors use Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday (2012) as an example of a text predicated on the Rousseauian simple view of history, and highlights some basic inaccuracies in Diamond's characterization of prehistoric civilization — and takes a swipe back at Diamond in response to a lazy dismissal of anarchism.

Then, the authors take some time to refute Steven Pinker, "a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along." They take issue with Pinker's thesis that human beings have been getting less violent over the course of history — a view that the authors say has effectively no basis.

Pinker positions himself as a rational centrist, condemning what he considers to be the extremists on either side. But why then insist that all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as 'the white race' (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, 'Western civilization')? There is simply no reason to make this move. It would be just as easy (actually, rather easier) to identify things that can be interpreted as the first stirrings of rationalism, legality, deliberative democracy and so forth all over the world, and only then tell the story of how they coalesced into the current global system.

Insisting, to the contrary, that all good things come only from Europe ensures one's work can be read as a retroactive apology for genocide, since (apparently, for Pinker) the enslavement, rape, mass murder and destruction of whole civilizations — visited on the rest of the world by European powers — is just another example of humans comporting themselves as they always had; it was in no sense unusual. What was really significant, so this argument goes, is that it made possible the dissemination of what he takes to be 'purely' European notions of freedom, equality before the law, and human rights to the survivors.

The authors proceed to ask: has Western civilization made people happier, as Pinker would have us believe? The authors say that it's impossible to tell with statistics. The only way to really find out would be to effectively focus group the difference between Western civilization and indigenous civilizations. So, he breaks down a number of accounts from indigenous people from traditional societies who came to live in American or European cities and accounts from White Europeans and Americans who came to live in traditional indigenous societies. The common thread is that most people who have been immersed in both situations prefer the indigenous lifestyle, and say truly damning things about the European experience. European life offered hunger, dejection, loneliness, thankless work, oppression, repression, and poverty.

The authors conclude the first chapter by say, "In this book we will not only be presenting a new history of humankind, but inviting the reader into a new science of history, one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity."

Chapter two

Chapter two is perhaps the most provacative and fast-paced in the book, focusing on the indigenous critique of European society. (Therefore, this chapter summary will likely be the longest.) The authors argue that the indigenous critique was well-reasoned, persuasive, and effective, and that it informed great thinkers like Rousseau.

Much of this chapter focuses on Rousseau's 1754 Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, which Rousseau wrote for an essay contest. The theme of th econtest was, "What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?" The authors ask, hy would these scholars "have felt this was an appropriate question in the first place? The way the question is put, after all, assumes that social inequality did have an origin; that is, it takes for granted that there was a time when human beings were equals... That is actually quite a startling thing for people living under an absolutist monarchy like that of Luois XV to think."

The authors say that social inequality was a new intellectual preoccupation in the 1700s, following Europe's integration into the global economy. Prior to the Renaissance, northern Europe was considered by outsiders "an obscure and uninviting backwater full of religious fanatics who, aside from occasional attacks on their neighbors ('the Crusades'), were largely irrelevant to global trade and world politics. European intellectuals of that time were just redicsovering Aristotle and the ancient world, and had very little idea what people were thinking and arguing about anywhere else."

This changed with the advent of Portuguese trade to the East and the Spanish conquest of the Americas, in the late fifteenth century. "Suddenly, a few of the more powerful European kingdoms found themselves in control of vast stretches of th eglobe, and European intellectuals found themselves exposed, not only to the civilizations of China nd India, but to a whole plethora of previously unimagined social, scientific, and political ideas. The ultimate result of this flood of new ideas came to be known as the 'Enlightenment.'"

History tells that Enlightenment thinking was a European innovation and ignores the coincidence that many Enlightenment ideas look very similar to ideas and practices from "exotic" regions. To say that these ideas are patently European is not only "remarkably arrogant" but also "pretty obviously untrue." As an example, through the 18th and 19th centuries, European governments adopted models of governance that looked very similar to Chinese ones, which German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had urged German statesmen to adopt.) But this makes sense, since "when [Leibniz] lived, Church authorities still wielded a great deal of power in most of Europe: anyone making an argument that non-Christian ways were in any way superior might find themselves facing charges of atheism, which was potentially a capital offense."

Turning to inequality, the authors say that rather than asking about inequality, it's more interesting to investigate the question of inequality. Where did the question arise? He argues that the greatest influence is French encounters with indigenous Americans from the Eastern woodlands of modern-day Canada and USA. The authors say that European conversations about Indigenous political philosophy, "make reference to arguments that took place between Europeans and indigenous Americans about the nature of freedom, equality or for that matter reationality and revealed religion — indeed, most of the themes that would alter become central to Enlightenment political thought."

Summary: After encounters with Americans, Europeans become aware of an "original state of man," which challenges the idea of the Garden of Eden. Hobbes maps his ideal of European supremacy onto this new knowledge, arguing that Europeans innovated their way out of this primitive state. After many decades of intellectual exchange with Americans, the view of the "original state" changes to one that is more critical of modern life, and Rousseau maps his subversive views of European society onto this new knowledge, arguing that Europeans condemned themselves to modernity.

The authors say that "[m]any influential Enlightenment thinkers did in fact claim that some of their ideas on the subject were directly taken from NAtive American sources — even though, predictably, intellectual historians today insist this cannot really be the case."

European traders, missionaries, and settlers had abundant intellectual exchange and cultural immersion with Americans, "even as they colluded in their destruction." Some Europeans who upheld principles of freedom and equality claimed that they were influenced by Americans. The principles were almost non-existent in Europe prior to American contact. Many scholars — mostsly of indigenous descent — have started making these arguments. From the notes:

The literature... has become bogged down in an argument about the specific 'influence' of the Haudenosaunee political confederation on the American Constitution. The original argument was actually much broader, suggesting that European settlers in the Americas only came to think of themselves as 'Americans' (rather than English or French or Duthc) when they began to adopt certain elements of Native American standards and sensisiblities, from the indulgent treatment of children to ideals of republican self-governance.

The authors are bold in his assertion: "For European audiences, the indigenous critique would come as a schock to the system, revealing possibilities for human emancipation that, once disclosed, could hardly be ignored. Indeed, the ideas expressed in that critique came to be perceived as such a menace to the fabric of European society that an entire body of theory was called into being, specifically to refute them." (This is explored later in the chapter.)

Note that this speaks to why it would have been so important for the Europeans to eradicate the Americans. They not only occupied valuable land, but they had a strong poltical worldview that posed an existential threat to European powers.

On the quesiton of social equality, the authors make persuasive points:

The first thing to emphasize is that 'the origin of social inequality' is not a problem which would have made sense to anyone in the Middle Ages. Ranks and hierarchies were assumed to have existed from the very beginning. Even in the Garden of Eden... Adam clearly outranked Eve. 'Social equality' — and therefore, its opposite, inequality — simply did not exist as a concept. A recent survey of medieval literature by two Italian scholars in fact finds no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or the English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus. So one cannot even say that medieval thinkers rejected the notion of social equality: the idea that it might exist seems never to have occurred to them.

In fact, the terms 'equality' and 'inequality' only begane to enter common currency in the early seventeenth century, under the influence of natural law theory. And natural law theory, in turn, arose largely in the course of debates about the moral and legal implications of European's discoveries in the New World.

The authors explain that natural law theory was an idea that arose to deal with heathens from an a-Christian society. What rights do they have in the laws of the church, if they are not Christian but have also never rejected Christianity? This laid the groundword for writers like Hobbes to speculate on the natural or original state of man, "skip[ping] past the bibilcal narratives everyone used to start with, and begin instead with a question such as: what might humans have been like in a State of Nature, when all they had was their humanity?" Based on limited exposure to indigenous societies — which they viewed as the original state — these thinkers took an extremely oversimplistic view that the original state is one of freedom and equality, "for better or worse (Hobbes, for example, definitely felt it was worse)."

The authors note that it would have been an intellectual leap for these thinkers to see tribal American as primordial, or "original." "Sixteenth-century scholars were more likely to conclude they were looking at the fallen vestiges of some ancient civilization, or refugees who had... forgotten the arts of metallurgy and civil governance. Such a conclusion would have made obvious sense common sense for people who assumed that all truly important knowledge had been revealed by God at the beginning of time, that cities had existed before the Flood, and that saw their own intellectual life largely as attempts to recover the lost wisdom of ancient Greeks and Romans."

Note: Perhaps this also speaks to Columbus's mistake that he had found India, as it was unfathomable that there could have been some unknown, separate part of the world.

Europeans were also very familiar with the dissasterous collapse of prosperous societies. So, the idea of progress from a state of nature took time to take root.

The authors offer a caveat that there were some corrolaries to the modern idea of equality in the European Middle Ages, such as the idea that all men were equal before God, or in the eyes of the law. But, the authors ask, how did Europeans come to expand this idea to an absolute equality — of opportunity, of wealth — as an original state for mankind?

The authors reiterate that there was ample intellectual exchange between Europeans an Americans, and that these philosophical exchanges formed a body of popular literature in Europe, and so American philosophy was widely read and disseminated from the seventeenth century onwards. "Such books were appreciated because they contained surprising and unprecedented ideas." However, historians — without much reason — have largely dismissed the notion that these American ideas could have been genuine or influential, rather than mere rhetorical devices for more weighty European philosophy.

One of the reasons that missionary and travel literature became so popular in Europe was precisely because it exposed its readers to... a sense of social possibility: the knowledge that familiar ways were not the only ways, since — as these books showed — there were clearly societies in existence that did things very differently.

Next, the authors start discussing the Mi'kmaq:

... if French assessments of the character of 'savages' tended to be decided mixed, the indigenous assessment of French character was distinctly less so. Father Pierre Biard, for example, was a former theology professor assigned in 1608 to evangelize the Algonkian-speaking Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia, who had lived for some time next to a French fort. Biard did not think much of the Mi'kmaq, but reported that the feeling was mutual: 'They consider themselves better than the French: "For," they say, "You are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peaceably. You are envious and are all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; and for us, if we have a morself of bread we share it with our neighbour." They are saying these and like things continually.' What seemed to irritate Biard the most was that the Mi'kmaq would constatnly assert that they were, as a result, 'richer' than the French. They French had more material possessions, the Mi'kmaq conceeded; but they had other, greater assets: ease, comfort and time.

The authors then go on to recount similar impressions of the Wendat, adding that the French were surprised by the Wednday's "eloquence and powers of reasoned argument." These impressions — written by Brother Gabriel Sagard became a bestseller in France (Le grand voyage du pays des Hurons) and was cited by Locke and Voltaire. A separate work with multiple authors, Jesuit Relations, was also very popular. The authors say these accounts generally take for granted that indigenous people lived relatively "free" lives, while Europeans did not.

... in many ways, the authors of these texts were nothing like us. When it came to questsions of personal freedom, the equality of men and women, sexual mores or popular sovereignty — or even, for that matters, theories of depth psychology — indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader's own than seventeenth-century European ones... missionaries frequently reported that American women were considered to have full control over their own bodies, and that therefore unmarried had secual liberty and married women could divorce at will. This, for Jesuits, was an outrage.

About the concept of equality, the authors write:

About the only specific reference to political equality that appears in the seventy-one volumes of The Jesuit Relations occurs almost as an aside, in an account of an event in 1648. It happened in a settlement of Christianized Wendat near the town of Quebec. After a disturbance caused by a shipload of illegal liquor finding its way into the community, the governor persuaded Wendat leaders to agree to a prohibition of alcolohic beverages, and published an edict to that effect — crucially, the governor notes, back up by threat of punishment. Father Lallemant, again, record the story. For him, this was an epochal event:

'From the beginning of the world to the coming o fthe French, the Savages have never known what it was so solemnly to forbid anything to their people, under any penalty, however slight. They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much sonequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only in so far as it pleases them.'

Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of 'equality before the law', which is ultimately equality before the sovereign... equality in common subjugation. Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were equally free to obey or disobey orders as they saw fit.

The authors say that intellectual Europeans found indigenous Americans to be formidable intellectual foes, capable of sophisticated debate and reasoning.

The authors summarize: by the mid-seventeenth century, Europeans were starting to conceive of an egalitarian State of Nature, and the terms "equality" and "inequality" were coming into usage. Europeans were interested in primordial societies, but had no way to conceive of a State of Nature. (In 1884, Friedrich Engels would come to use the Iroquois as an example of primitive communism in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.)

Next, the authors recount the incredible story of the Wendat statesman and philosopher Kandiaronk. The story starts with a Frenchman, Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de la Hontan, aka Lahontan. Kandiaronk was known as a courageous warrior, brilliant orator, and skilful politician. He was also an opponent of Christiainity. Lahontan is known for having defended Nova Scotia against the English before being forced to flee to Europe for insubordination. In Amsterdam, Lahontan wrote about his experience in Canada. His book Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled (1703) is a collection of conversations he had with Kandiaronk. It's believed that Kandiaronk visited France as an ambassador of the Wendat Confederation and visited the court of Louis XIV in 1691. Lahontan described the same indigenous critiques of European society as other writers. "They brand us for slaves, and call us miserable souls, whose life is not worth having, alleging that we degrade ourselves in subjecting ourselves to one man [the king]."

In the dialogue, Kandiaronk argues that punitive law is not necessitated by human nature, but by the European style of social organization that encourages selfish and acquisitive behavior. "What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment?" He continues, "we are determined not to have laws — because, since the world was a world, our ancestors have been able to live contendly without them." Kandiaronk says that European society is inuman, that money is "the devil of devils." He says Europe would be better off if the social system was dismantled. Lahontan argues that if Europe did away with money, merchants and priests would starve. Kandiaronk says,

"If you abandoned conceptions of mine and thine, yes, such distinctions between men would dissolve; a levelling equality would then take its place among you as it now does among the Wenday... Over and over I have set forth the equalities that we Wenday believe out to define humanity — wisdom, reason, equity, etc. — and demonstrated that the existence of separate material interests knocks all these on the head. A man motivated by interested cannot be a man of reason."

The authors say, "Here, finally, 'equality' is invoked as a self-conscious ideal... only as the result of a prolonged confrontation between American and European institutions and values."

Next, the authors introduce the concept of schismogenesis, people's tendency to define themselves against one another.

The authors say that Lahontan's book was a huge success, translated into German, English, Dutch, and Italian. "Any self-respecting intellectual of the eighteenth century would have been almsot certain to have read them." The book inspired a genre of books and plays featuring indigenous (or otherwise exotic forieng) critique of European society. One such book was Letters of a Peruvian Woman, by Madame de Graffigny (1747). Graffigny received a comment on her draft of A.R.J. Turgot. The authors say Turgot's comment "marks a key moment in [Turgot's] intellectual development: the point where he began to turn his most lasting contributions to human thought — the idea of material economic progress — into a general theory of history."

Turgot argued that hierarchy and dominance is a feature of advanced civilization. He said that social evolution begins with hunters, then to pastoralism, then to farming, and then to urban commercial civilization. This is a linear development. Turgot was friends with Adam Smith, who adopted Turgot's ideas and shared them with his contemporaries. Write the authors, "The new paradigm soon began to have a profound effect on how indigenous people were imagined by European thinkers." This came to be accepted as the sole measure of the sophistication of a society. "Egalitarian" societies were seen not as evolved but as completely unevolved and naive. "Turgot's case reveals just how much those particular notions of civilization, evolution and progress — which we've come to think of as the very core of Enlightenment thought— are, in fact, relative late-comers to that critical tradition... these notions came in direct response to the power of the indigenous critique."

Next, the authors go into Rousseau's life. Rousseau famously won an essay contest in 1750 with an essay titled Discourse on the Origins of Social Inequality. The prompt was, "Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to moral improvement?" Rousseau argued that they had not. He argued that our moral intuition is fundamentally decent and sound, and society corrupts them. The essay draws from Greek and Roman inspiration, but in the footnotes, he cites the "American savages whose simple and natural ways of keeping public order Montaigne does not hesitate to prefer." The authors describe this view as "arch-conservative" — "that seeming progressing leads only to moral decay." Rousseau says our ancestors "ran headlong into their chains."

The authors say that Rousseau's essay was rather confusing, but the most important part is Rousseau's suggestion that humanity had a fall from grace with the emergence of property relations. Rousseau insists that his model of human society is a thought experiment.

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars and murders, how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this impostor. Your are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone.'

The authors argue that Rousseau would have been familiar with Lahontan. The authors also say that Rousseau blends the indigenous critique with the European biblical notion of the fall (appealing to Christian guilt) and Turgot's idea of material development.

In folding together the indigenous critique and the doctrine of progress originally developed to counter it, Rousseau did in fact write the founding document of the left as an intellectual project.

In Europe, freedom was always understood as something exercised at the cost of others — not something achieved in cooperation with others. Therefore, Rousseau's treatise had a hopelessness. European freedom is about not being dependent on others.

American and French revolutionaries also cited the indigenous critique. One French manifesto in 1776 cited the origin of property.

The authors then take a detour on how the "myth of the noble savage" was an idea popularized by British racists in the 19th century.

They then start unpacking the implications of all of this. In the 1960s, French anthropologist Pierre Clastres suggested that, rather than the idea that early humans were too naive to see the consequences of property and inequality,

... precisely the opposite was the case. What if the sort of people we like to imagine as simple and innocent are free of rulers, governments, bureaucracies, ruling classes and the like, not because they are lacking in imagination, but because they're actually more imaginative than we are... if there is really a toxic element in [Rousseau's] legacy, it is this: not his promulgation of the image of the 'noble savage', which he didn't really do, but his promulgation of what we might call the 'myth of the stupid savage' — even if one he considered blissful in its state of stupidity. Nineteenth-century imperialists adopted the stereotype enthusiastically, merely adding on a variety of ostensibly scientific justifications — from Darwinian evolutionism to 'scientific' racism — to elaborate on that notion of innocent simplicity, and thus provide a pretext for pushing the remaining free peopls of the world (or increasingly, as European imperian expansion continued, the formerly free peoples) into a conceptual space where their judgments no longer seemed threatening.

To conclude the chapter, the authors discuss the concept of equality.

It remains entirely unclear what 'egalitarian' means.... any historical work which purports to be about the origins of social inequality is really an inquiry into the origins of civilization, which in turn implies a vision of history like that of Turgot... we should reject the impulse to treat our distant ancestors as some sort of primordial human soup.... the people of prehistoric times had very specific ideas about what was important in their societies... these varied considerably... describing such societies as uniformly 'egalitarian' tells us almost nothing about them.

Chapter three

"dinosaurs are the quintessential modernist animal, since in Shakespeare's time no one knew such creatures had ever existed. In a similar way, until quite recently most Christians assumed anything worth knowing about early humans could be found in the Book of Genesis."

"Prehistory" refers to a period of more than 3 million years, most of which has very little evidence to show for itself. As such, even renowned scientists and archaeologists project their own ideas onto prehistory.

The authors say a little bit about what prehistory was like. For millions of years, Homo Sapiens lived alongside other humans, who were likely vastly different from ourselves. Modern humans first appeared in Africa.

The only thing we know about early humans is that social orders were very diverse.

Early humans inhabited a wide range of natural environments, from coastlands and tropical forest to moutntains and savannah... there is no 'original' form of human society. Searching for one can only be a matter of myth-making. (p.94)

There's a misperception that humans suddenly evolved in Europe 40,000 years ago. This is because around that time Homo Sapiens displaced neanderthals in Europe, and European governments spend more money on archaeology, so there's more evidence of prehistoric humans in Europe. In reality the evolution of Homo Sapiens and their culture was very gradual and global.

The authors examine prehistoric burials to understand prehistoric peoples. These early burials show forms of class stratification and globalization in "egalitarian hunter-gatherer" bands.

The authors then discuss the monumental architecture of Gobekli Tepe, built around 9000BC. He says that there's evidence for monumental architecture extended back into the Ice Age, and describes some such structures.

The authors say that this evidence doesn't necessarily point to prehistoric inequalities — because there's not other evidence like fortifications, storehouses, or palaces. He raises the question as to whether magnificent burials and monumental architecture could point to different social norms.

Next, the authors make the case that prehistoric (and indigenous) peoples were capable of conscious reflection and political philosophy. He renames Rousseau's myth of the "noble savages" the myth of the "stupid savage," because it assumes that prehistoric peoples were too ignorant to get into much trouble. He then drags Yuval Noah Harari into his argument, with this quote from Sapiens:

The sociopolitical world of the foragers is another area about which we know next to nothing ... scholars cannot even agree on the basics, such as the existence of private property, nuclear families and monogamous relationships. It’s likely that different bands had different structures. Some may have been as hierarchical, tense and violent as the nastiest chimpanzee group, while others were as laid- back, peaceful and lascivious as a bunch of bonobos.

The authors respond,

So not only was everyone living in bands until farming came along, but these bands were basically ape-like in character. If this seems unfair to the author, remember that Harari could just as easily have written ‘as tense and violent as the nastiest biker gang’, and ‘as laid-back, peaceful and lascivious as a hippie commune’. One might have imagined the obvious thing to compare one group of human beings with would be ... another group of human beings. Why, then, did Harari choose chimps instead of bikers? It’s hard to escape the impression that the main point of difference is that bikers choose to live the way they do. Such choices imply political consciousness: the ability to argue and reflect about the proper way to live – which is precisely, as Boehm reminds us, what apes don’t do. Yet Harari, like so many others, chooses to compare early humans with apes anyway.

The authors ask what it means to be a self-conscious political actor. He argues that for many societies, this thinking would be taken for granted. It was Europeans who blindly followed tradition for many centuries up to the Enlightenment, when the idea of political debate emerged as a novel activity. In some societies, oddballs (read: neurodivergents) and contrarians would likely have been welcomed for helping to create new political ideas.

Next, the authors introduce Claude Levi-Strauss, "one of the few mid-twentieth-century anthropologists to take seriously the idea that early humans were our intellectual equals." Levi-Strauss argued that "mythological thought, rather than representing some sort of pre-logical haze, is better conceived as a kind of ‘neolithic science’ as sophisticated as our own, just built on different principles."

Levi-Strauss explored different social arrangements in anthropology, and was the most famous anthropologist in the world for a while, but some of his keys arguments were ignored because a new pop anthropology was growing in popularity, exemplified by TV documentaries about the Kalahari Bushmen, which confirmed the Turgotist image of prehistoric humans living in small tribes and foraging to eke out a difficult life in egalitarian communities. Write the authors,

The fact that these African societies were, in some cases at least, refugee populations living in places no one else wanted, or that many foraging societies documented in the ethnographic record (who had by this time been largely wiped out by European settler colonialism and were thus no longer available for quantitative analysis) were nothing like this, was occasionally acknowledged. But it was rarely treated as particularly relevant. The image of tiny egalitarian bands corresponded perfectly to what those weaned on the legacy of Rousseau felt hunter-gatherers ought to have been like. Now there seemed to be hard, quantifiable scientific data (and also movies!) to back it up.

This new pop anthropology looked for case studies that confirmed its central beliefs, and ignored ones that didn't as outliers. (p. 112)

The authors argue that, in Ice Age settlements, in "anomolous" individuals (people with what we would today call physical or mental disabilities) were sometimes treated with respect as exceptional individuals. He also argues that prehistoric social structures likely varied throughout the year.

[this] suggests we might have to shelves any premature talk of the emergence of hereditary elites. It seems extremely unlikely that Paleolithic Europe produced a stratified elite that just happened to consist largely of hunchbacks, giants, and dwarfs.

(The authors have already shown evidence that people with physical deformities are overrepresented in prehistoric burials.)

Second, we don't know how much the treatment of such individuals after death had to do with their treatment in life.

The authors say that almost all Ice Age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture were created by societies that dispersed into foraging bands at some part of the year and gathered in settlements at another.

"Such oscillating patterns of life endured long after the invention of agriculture. To take just one example, they may be key to understanding the famous neolithic monuments of Salisbury Plain in England, and not just because the arrangements of standing stones themselves seem to function as giant calendars. Stonehenge, framing the midsummer sunrise and the midwinter sunset, is the most famous of these. It turns out to have been the last in a long sequence of ceremonial structures, erected over the course of centuries in timber as well as stone, as people conveged on the plain from remote corners of the British Isles at significant times of years. Careful excavation shows that many of these structures — now plausibly interpreted as monuments to the ancestors of a Neolithic aristocracy — were dismantled just a few generations after their construction.

Still more striking, the people who built Stonehen ge were not farmers, or not in the usual sense. They had once been; but the practice of erecting and dismantling grand monuments coincides with a period when the peoples of Britain, having adopted the Neolithic farming economy from continental Europe, appear to have turned their backs on at least one crucial aspect of it: abandoning the cultivation of cereals and returning, from around 3300 BC, to the collection of hazelnuts as their staple source of plant food. On the other hand, they kept hold of their domestic pigs and herds of cattle, feasting on them seasonally at nearby Durrington Walls, a prosperous town of some thousands of people — with its own Woodhenge — in winter, but largely empty and abandoned in summer. The builders of Stonehenge seem to have been neither foragers nor herders, but something in between.

All this is crucial because it's hard to imagine how giving up agriculture could have been anything but a self-conscious decision. There is no evidence that one population displaced another, or that farmers were somehow overwhelmed by powerful foraged who forced them to abandon their crops. The Neolithic inhabitants of England appear to have taken the measure of cereal farming and collectively decided that they preferred to live another way... even in the third millennium BC, coordination of some sort was clearly possible across large parts of the British Isles. If Stonehenge was a shrine to exalted founders of a ruling clan — as some archaeologists now argue — it seems likely that members of their lineage claimed significant, even cosmic roles by virtue of their involvement in such events.

This raises a question:

if there were kings and queens at Stonehend, what sort could they have been?

There courts and kingdoms existed and dispersed throughout the year. Why?

The authors then gives anthropological examples of societies with seasonally variable governance. He argues that communities with these practices were "conscious political actors," aware of the danger of authoritatiran power, which factored into their political mutability.

The authors point out that Turgot's evolutionism would suggest that these politically variable societies shift back and forth from state to band throughout the year.

With such institutional flexibility comes the capacity to step outside the boundaries of any given structure and reflect; to both make and unmake the political worlds we live in. If nothing else, this explains the 'princes' and 'princesses' of the last Ice Age, who appear to show up, in such magificent isolation, like characters in some kind of fairy tale or costume drama. Maybe they were also literally so. If they reigned at all, then perhaps it was, like the ruling clans of Stonehenge, just for a season.

Now, the authors raise the question that will drive the rest of the book. It's not, "What are the origins of social inequality," but "how did we get stuck?

We'll be tackling such questions in the chapters to come. For the moment, the main thing to stress is that this flexiblity, and potential for poltiical self-consciousness, was never entirely lost. Mauss point out much the same thing. Seasonality is still with us — even if it is a pale, contracted shadow of its former self. In the Christian world, for instance, there is still the midwinter 'holiday season' in which values and forms of organization do, to a limited gree, reverse themselves: the same media and advertisers who for most of the year peddle rabid consumerist individualism suddenly start announcing that social relations are what's really important, and that to give is better than to receive. (And in enlightened countries like Mauss's France, ther's also the summer grandes vacances in which everybody downs tools for a month and flees the cities.)

There is a direct historical connection here. We’ve already seen how, among societies like the Inuit or Kwakiutl, times of seasonal congregation were also ritual seasons, almost entirely given over to dances, rites and dramas. Sometimes these could involve creating temporary kings or even ritual police with real coercive powers (though often, peculiarly, these ritual police doubled as clowns).52 In other cases, they involved dissolving norms of hierarchy and propriety, as in the Inuit midwinter orgies. This dichotomy can still be observed in festive life almost everywhere. In the European Middle Ages, to take a familiar example, saints’ days alternated between solemn pageants where all the elaborate ranks and hierarchies of feudal life were made manifest (much as they still are in, say, a college graduation ceremony, when we temporarily revert to medieval garb), and crazy carnivals in which everyone played at ‘turning the world upside down’. In carnival, women might rule over men, children be put in charge of government, servants could demand work from their masters, ancestors could return from the dead, ‘carnival kings’ could be crowned and then dethroned, giant monuments like wicker dragons built and set on fire, or all formal ranks might even disintegrate into one or other form of Bacchanalian chaos.

...

What’s really important about such festivals is that they kept the old spark of political self-consciousness alive. They allowed people to imagine that other arrangements are feasible, even for society as a whole, since it was always possible to fantasize about carnival bursting its seams and becoming the new reality. In the popular Babylonian story of Semiramis, the eponymous servant girl convinces the Assyrian king to let her be ‘Queen for a Day’ during some annual festival, promptly has him arrested, declares herself empress and leads her new armies to conquer the world. May Day came to be chosen as the date for the international workers’ holiday largely because so many British peasant revolts had historically begun on that riotous festival. Villagers who played at ‘turning the world upside’ would periodically decide they actually preferred the world upside down, and took measures to keep it that way... The first kings may well have been play kings. Then they became real kings. Now most (but not all) existing kings have been reduced once again to play kings – as least insofar as they mainly perform ceremonial functions and no longer wield real power.

The authors say that what really makes us humans is our capacity to negotiate moral and social questions, such as "Are we inherently cooperative or competitive? ... It makes no sense to ask any such questions of a fish or a hedgehog. Animals already exist in a state 'beyond good and evil.'"

Let us bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man’ and acknowledge (as Lévi-Strauss insisted) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them – at least the most reflexive among them – just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others. They were neither ignorant savages nor wise sons and daughters of nature. They were, as Helena Valero said of the Yanomami, just people, like us; equally perceptive, equally confused.

Chapter four

Titled "Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property"

We still have collective political rituals, though diminished:

Most of these rituals have been gradually brushed aside as pagan superstition or repackaged as tourist attractions (or both). For the most part, all we’re left with as an alternative to our mundane lives are our ‘national holidays’: frantic periods of over-consumption, crammed in the gaps between work, in which we entertain solemn injunctions that consumption isn’t really what matters about life.

While forager societies are small, they are not closely related:

in fact, primarily biological relations constitute on average a mere 10 per cent of total membership. Most members are drawn from a much wider pool of individuals, many from quite far away, who may not even speak the same first languages.

Totemic tribes might have existed across an entire continent, so a traveler could go thousands of miles to a foreign land where they no nothing of the language, but they still have brethren who will host them (and whom they cannot marry).

The authors argue that the world has gotten smaller with more people; "[social relations] doesn't get bigger and bigger; it actually gets smaller and smaller."

The authors break down the idea of equality: no one can agree what value is equalized in equality (opportunity, resources, prestige). Europeans created a totalizing idea of equality based on property, subjugating other cultural values. This relates to the idea that inequality was born from private property (Rousseau); therefore equality must be based on property.

Rousseau's logic says that inequality breeds crime, so property-holders create the "state."

We will scrutinize this conventional wisdom in more detail later. For now, suffice to say that while there is a broad truth here, it is so broad as to have very little explanatory power. For sure, only cereal-farming and grain storage made possible bureaucratic regimes like those of Pharaonic Egypt, the Maurya Empire or Han China. But to say that cereal-farming was responsible for the rise of such states is a little like saying that the development of calculus in medieval Persia is responsible for the invention of the atom bomb. It is true that without calculus atomic weaponry would never have been possible. One might even make a case that the invention of calculus set off a chain of events that made it likely someone, somewhere, would eventually create nuclear weapons. But to assert that Al-Tusi’s work on polynomials in the 1100s caused Hiroshima and Nagasaki is clearly absurd. Similarly, with agriculture. Roughly 6,000 years stand between the appearance of the first farmers in the Middle East and the rise of what we are used to calling the first states; and in many parts of the world, farming never led to the emergence of anything remotely like those states.

At this juncture, we need to focus on the very notion of a surplus, and the much broader – almost existential – questions it raises. As philosophers realized long ago, this is a concept that poses fundamental questions about what it means to be human. One of the things that sets us apart from non-human animals is that animals produce only and exactly what they need; humans invariably produce more. We are creatures of excess, and this is what makes us simultaneously the most creative, and most destructive, of all species. Ruling classes are simply those who have organized society in such a way that they can extract the lion’s share of that surplus for themselves, whether through tribute, slavery, feudal dues or manipulating ostensibly free-market arrangements.

In the nineteenth century, Marx and many of his fellow radicals did imagine that it was possible to administer such a surplus collectively, in an equitable fashion (this is what he envisioned as being the norm under ‘primitive communism’, and what he thought could once again be possible in the revolutionary future), but contemporary thinkers tend to be more sceptical. In fact, the dominant view among anthropologists nowadays is that the only way to maintain a truly egalitarian society is to eliminate the possibility of accumulating any sort of surplus at all.

The authors explore a case study of a Tanzanian tribe where "food brought home is eaten the same day or the next; anything extra is shared out, but never preserved or stored."

Far from rushing blindly for their chains like Rousseau’s savages, Woodburn’s ‘immediate return hunter-gatherers’ understand precisely where the chains of captivity loom, and organize much of their lives to keep away from them. This might sound like the basis of something hopeful or optimistic. Actually, it’s anything but. What it suggests is, again, that any equality worth the name is essentially impossible for all but the very simplest foragers. What kind of future might we then have in store? ... In other words, this is the Garden of Eden narrative all over again – just, this time, with the bar for paradise set even higher.

“What’s really striking about Woodburn’s vision is that the foragers he focuses on appear to have reached such profoundly different conclusions from Kandiaronk, and several generations of First Nation critics before him, all of whom had trouble even imagining that differences of wealth could be translated into systematic inequalities of power. Recall that the American indigenous critique, as we described it in Chapter Two, was initially about something very different: the perceived failure of European societies to promote mutual aid and protect personal liberties. Only later, once indigenous intellectuals had more exposure to the workings of French and English society, did it come to focus on inequalities of property. Perhaps we should follow their initial train of thought..

Few anthropologists are particularly happy with the term ‘egalitarian societies’, for reasons that should now be obvious; but it lingers on because no one has suggested a compelling alternative. The closest we’re aware of is the feminist anthropologist Eleanor Leacock’s suggestion that most members of what are called egalitarian societies seem less interested in equality per se than what she calls ‘autonomy’.

Perhaps the best thing, then, would be to call these ‘free societies’; or even, following the Jesuit Father Lallemant’s verdict on the Montagnais-Naskapi’s Wendat neighbours, ‘free people.'

...

The freedom to abandon one’s community, knowing one will be welcomed in faraway lands; the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures, depending on the time of year; the freedom to disobey authorities without consequence – all appear to have been simply assumed among our distant ancestors, even if most people find them barely conceivable today. Humans may not have begun their history in a state of primordial innocence, but they do appear to have begun it with a self-conscious aversion to being told what to do. If this is so, we can at least refine our initial question: the real puzzle is not when chiefs, or even kings and queens, first appeared, but rather when it was no longer possible simply to laugh them out of court.

These three freedoms are what the authors say are "taken for granted by anyone who has not been specifically trained into obedience."

The Overworked American argues that medieval peasants worked fewer hours than American office workers and the people who built Stonehenge probably worked still less.

In response to trade unionists, Victorian intellectuals argues that 'primitive man' had been engaged in a perpetual struggle to survive. Peasants of the era worked from dawn to dusk, so that must have always been the case.

Poverty Point provides evidence for foraging people with an understanding of calculus?

Recall how - long before Sahlins's notion of the 'original affluent society' indigenous critics of European civilization were already arguing that hunter-gatherers were really better off than other people because they could obtain the things they wanted and needed so easily. Such views can be found as early as the sixteenth century - remember, for instance, the Mi kmag interlocutors who annoyed Père Biard so much by insisting they were richer than the French, for exactly that reason. Kandiaronk made similar arguments, insisting the Savages of Canada, notwithstanding their Poverty, are richer than you, among whom all sorts of crimes are committed upon the score of Mine and Thine." ... Colonial appropriation of indigenous lands often began with some blanket assertion that foraging peoples really were living in a State of Nature - which meant that they were deemed to be part of the land but had no legal claims to own it. The entire basis for dispossession, in turn, was premised on the idea that the current inhabitants of those lands weren't really working. The argument goes back to John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he argued that property rights are necessarily derived from labour. In working the land, one 'mixes one's labour' with it, in this way it becomes, in a sense, an extension of oneself. Lazy natives, according to Locke's disciples, didn't do that. They were not, Lockeans claimed, 'improving landlords' but simply made use of the land to satisfy their basic needs with the minimum of effort. James Tully, an authority on indigenous rights, spells out the historical implications: land used for hunting and gathering was considered vacant, and 'if the Aboriginal peoples attempt to subject the Europeans to their laws and customs or to defend the territories that they have mistakenly believed to be their property for thousands of years, then it is they who violate natural law and may be punished or "destroyed" like savage beasts.'

Consider how land use became a fetish after the beginning of the Little Ice Age.

Evidence of early humans in North America has mostly been destroyed by rising oceans.

"Of the many distinct cultural universes beginning to take shape across the world in the Early Holocene, most were likely centered on environments of abundance rather than scarcity."

There are tribes where the only allowed form of private property are sacred objects.

In such societies, there turns out to be a profound similarity between the notion of private property and the notion of the sacred. Both are, essentially, structures of exclusion.

Much of this is implicit - if never clearly stated or developed - in Emile Durkheim's classic definition of 'the sacred' as that which is 'set apart: removed from the world, and placed on a pedestal, at some times literally and at other times figuratively, because of its imperceptible connection with a higher force or being. Durkheim argued that the clearest expression of the sacred was the Polynesian term tabu, meaning 'not to be touched'. But when we speak of absolute, private property, are we not talking about something very similar - almost identical in fact, in its underlying logic and social effects?

As British legal theorists like to put it, individual property rights are held, notionally at least, 'against the whole world'. If you own a car, you have the right to prevent anyone in the entire world from entering or using it. (If you think about it, this is the only right you have in your car that's really absolute. Almost anything else you can do with a car is strictly regulated: where and how you can drive it, park it, and so forth. But you can keep absolutely anyone else in the world from getting inside it.) In this case the object is set apart, fenced about by invisible or visible barriers - not because it is tied to some supernatural being, but because it's sacred to a specific, living human individual. In other respects, the logic is much the same.

To recognize the close parallels between private property and notions of the sacred is also to recognize what is so historically odd about European social thought. Which is that - quite unlike free societies - we take this absolute, sacred quality in private property as a paradigm for all human rights and freedoms. This is what the political scientist C. B. Macpherson meant by 'possessive individualism'. Just as every man's home is his castle, so your right not to be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned rests on the idea that you own your own body, just as you own your chattels and possessions, and legally have the right to exclude others from your land, or house, or car, and so on. As we've seen, those who did not share this particular European conception of the sacred could indeed be killed, tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned - and, from Amazonia to Oceania, they often were.4 ... What makes the Roman Law conception of property - the basis of almost all legal systems today - unique is that the responsibility to care and share is reduced to a minimum, or even eliminated entirely. In Roman Law there are three basic rights relating to possession: usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy). If one has only the first two rights this is referred to as usufruct, and is not considered true possession under the law. The defining feature of true legal property, then, is that one has the option of not taking care of it, or even destroying it at will... If private property has an 'origin', it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself. The pertinent question to ask is not so much when this happened, as how it eventually came to order so many other aspects of human affairs.

...

Decisions such as whether or not to adopt agriculture weren't just calculations of caloric advantage or matters of random cultural taste, but also reflected questions about values, about what humans really are (and consider themselves to be), and how they should propertly relate to one another.

Chapter five

Max Weber asked why capitalism emerged in western Europe in his essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

Capitalism, as he defined it, was itself a kind of moral imperative. Almost everywhere in the world, he noted, and certainly in China, India and the Islamic world, one found commerce, wealthy merchants and people who might justly be referred to as 'capitalists'. But almost everywhere, anyone who acquired an enormous fortune would eventually cash in their chips. They would either buy themselves a palace and enjoy life, or come under enormous moral pressure from their community to spend their profits on religious or public works, or boozy popular festivities (usually they did a bit of both).

Capitalism, on the other hand, involved constant reinvestment, turning one's wealth into an engine for creating ever more wealth, increasing production, expanding operations, and so forth. But imagine, Weber suggested, being the very first person in one's community to act this way. To do so would have meant defying all social expectations, to be utterly despised by almost all your neighbours - who would, increasingly, also become your employees. Anyone capable of acting in such a defiantly single-minded manner, Weber observed, would 'have to be some sort of hero. This, he said, is the reason why it took a Puritanical strain of Christianity, like Calvinism, to make capitalism possible. Puritans not only believed almost anything they could spend their profits on was sinful; but also, joining a Puritan congregation meant one had a moral community whose support would allow one to endure the hostility of one's hell-bound neighbours.

It is very expensive to keep slaves, which is why most slaves are prisoners of war. Most societies would never breed slaves, because it's too demanding.

Indigenous Californians didn't maintain a "rational" diet — the food that they ate was not necessarily the most nutritious or easiest to gather.

Environmental determinists have an unfortunate tendency to treat humans as little more than automata, living out some economist's fantasy of rational calculation. To be fair, they don't deny that human beings are quirky and imaginative creatures - they just seem to reason that, in the long run, this fact makes very little difference. Those who don't follow an optimal pathway for the use of resources are destined for the ash heap of history. Anthropologists who object to this kind of determinism will typically appeal to culture, but ultimately this comes down to little more than insisting that explanation is impossible: English people act the way they do because they are English, Yurok act the way they do because they're Yurok; why they are English or Yurok is not really ours to say. Humans - from this other perspective, which is just as extreme in its own way - are at best an arbitrary constellation of cultural elements, perhaps assembled according to some prevailing spirit, code or ethos, and which society ends up with which ethos is treated as beyond explanation, little more than a random roll of the dice.

Putting matters in such stark terms does not mean there is no truth to either position. The intersection of environment and technology does make a difference, often a huge difference, and to some degree, cultural difference really is just an arbitrary roll of the dice: there's no 'explanation' for why Chinese is a tonal language and Finnish an agglutinative one; that's just the way things happened to turn out. Still, if one treats the arbitrariness of linguistic difference as the foundation of all social theory - which is basically what structuralism did, and post-structuralism continues to do - the result is just as mechanically deterministic as the most extreme form of environmental determination. 'Language speaks us.' We are doomed to endlessly enact patterns of behaviour not of our own creation; not of anyone's creation really, until some seismic shift in the cultural equivalent of tectonic plates lands us somehow in a new, equally inexplicable arrangement.

In other words, both approaches presume that we are already, effectively, stuck. This is why we ourselves place so much emphasis on the notion of self-determination. Just as it is reasonable to assume that Pleistocene mammoth hunters, moving back and forth between different seasonal forms of organization, must have developed a degree of political self-consciousness - to have thought about the relative merits of different ways of living with one another - so too the intricate webs of cultural difference that came to characterize human societies after the end of the last Ice Age must surely have involved a degree of political introspection. Once again, our intention is simply to treat those who created these forms of culture as intelligent adults, capable of reflecting on the social worlds they were building or rejecting.

...

Since this book is mainly about freedom, it seems appropriate to set the dial a bit further to the left than usual, and to explore the possibility that human beings have more collective say over their own destiny than we ordinarily assume. Rather than defining the indigenous inhabitants of the Pacific Coast of North America as 'incipient' farmers or as examples of 'emerging complexity - which is really just an updated way of saying they were all 'rushing headlong for their chains - we have explored the possibility that they might have been proceeding with (more or less open eyes, and found plenty of evidence to support it.

Chapter six

Wheat was domesticated when a genetic mutation caused the seeds to cling to the stalk, rather than fall off and disperse. This made wheat easier to cultivate.

Yuval Harari waxes eloquent on this point, asking us to think 'for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat'. Ten thousand years ago, he points out, wheat was just another form of wild grass, of no special significance; but within the space of a few millennia it was growing over large parts of the planet. How did it happen? The answer, according to Harari, is that wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. This ape', he writes, had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat.' If wheat didn't like stones, humans had to clear them from their fields; if wheat didn't want to share its space with other plants, people were obliged to labour under the hot sun weeding them out; if wheat craved water, people had to lug it from one place to another, and so on.

There's something ineluctable about all this. But only if we accept the premise that it does in fact make sense to look at the whole process 'from the viewpoint of wheat'. On reflection, why should we? Humans are very large-brained and intelligent primates and wheat is, well...a sort of grass. Of course, there are non-human species that have, in a sense, domesticated themselves - the house mouse and sparrow are among them, and so too probably the dog, all found, incidentally, in Early Neolithic villages of the Middle East. It's also undoubtedly true that, over the long term, ours is a species that has become enslaved to its crops: wheat, rice, millet and corn feed the world, and it's hard to envisage modern life without them.

But to make sense of the beginnings of Neolithic farming, we surely need to try and see it from the perspective of the Palacolithic, not of the present, and still less from the viewpoint of some imaginary race of bourgeois ape-men. Of course, this is harder to do, but the alternative is to slip back into the realms of myth-making: retelling the past as a 'just-so' story, which makes our present situation seem somehow inevitable or preordained. Harari's retelling is appealing, we suggest, not because it's based on any evidence, but because we've heard it a thousand times before, just with a different cast of characters. In fact, many of us have been hearing it from infancy. Once again, we're back in the Garden of Eden. Except now, it's not a wily serpent who tricks humanity into sampling the forbidden fruit of knowledge. It's the fruit itself (i.e. the cereal grains).

You can domesticate wheat in between two decades and two centuries using basic cultivation techniques. Paleolithic humans would have been very savvy botanists.

Villages settlement preceded the agricultural revolution and began cultivating grasses for straw and other uses. It took 3000 years for the domestication of wheat ("the Agricultural Revolution") to happen. (Compare also to the Renaissance.)

We need to understand this 3,000-year period as an important phase of human history in its own right. It's a phase marked by foragers moving in and out of cultivation - and as we've seen, there's nothing unusual or anomalous about this flirting and tinkering with the possibilities of farming... but in no way enslaving themselves to the needs of their crops or herds. So long as it didn't become too onerous, cultivation was just one of many ways in which early settled communities managed their environments. Separating wild and domestic plant populations need not have been a major concern for them, even if it appears that way to us.

On reflection, this approach makes perfectly good sense. Cultivating domestic cereals, as the 'affluent foragers of the Pacific Coast knew well, is enormously hard work. B Serious farming meant serious soil maintenance and weed clearance. It meant threshing and winnowing after harvest. All these activities would have got in the way of hunting, wild food collection, craft production, marriages and any number of other things, not to mention storytelling, gambling, travelling and organizing masquerades. Indeed, to balance out their dietary needs and labour costs, early cultivators may even have strategically chosen practices that worked against the morphological changes which signal the onset of domestication in plants.

Recap:

Back in the 1970s, a brilliant Cambridge archaeologist called David Clarke predicted that, with modern research, almost every aspect of the old edifice of human evolution, 'the explanations of the development of modern man, domestication, metallurgy, urbanization and civilization - may in perspective emerge as semantic snares and metaphysical mirages."66 It is beginning to seem like he was right.

Let's recap a little further. A founding block in that old edifice of human social evolution was the allocation of a specific place in history to foraging societies, which was to be the prelude to an 'Agricultural Revolution' that supposedly changed everything about the course of history. The job of foragers in this conventional narrative is to be all that farming is not (and thus also to explain, by implication, what farming is. If farmers are sedentary, foragers must be mobile; if farmers actively produce food, foragers must merely collect it; if farmers have private property, foragers must renounce it; and if farming societies are unequal, this is by contrast with the 'innate' egalitarianism of foragers. Finally, if a particular group of foragers should happen to possess any such features in common with farmers, the dominant narrative demands that these can only be 'incipient, 'emergent' or 'deviant' in nature, so that the destiny of foragers is either to 'evolve' into farmers, or eventually to wither and die.

It will by now be increasingly obvious to any reader that almost nothing about this established narrative matches the available evidence. In the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, long regarded as the cradle of the 'Agricultural Revolution', there was in fact no "switch' from Palacolithic forager to Neolithic farmer. The transition from living mainly on wild resources to a life based on food production took something in the order of 3,000 years. And while agriculture allowed for the possibility of more unequal concentrations of wealth, in most cases this only began to happen millennia after its inception. In the centuries between, people were effectively trying farming on for size, 'play farming' if you will, switching between modes of production, much as they switched their social structures back and forth.

Chapter seven

Ian Morris and Jared Diamond's materialist argument that Eurasia developed relatively quickly due to easy East–West exchange is sound.

Alfred Crosby coined the term "Columbian exchange" to describe the ecological transformation after 1492. He argued that "the global ascendance of European economies since the sixteenth century could be accounted for by a process he called'ecological imperialism.''"

"Given that humans have been around for upwards of 200,000 years, why didn't farming develop much earlier?"

Since our species came into existence, there have been only two sustained periods of warm climate of the kind that might support an agricultural economy for long enough to leave some trace in the archaeological record.! The first was the Eemian interglacial, which took place around 130,000 years ago. Global temperatures stabilized at slightly above their present-day levels, sustaining the spread of boreal forests as far north as Alaska and Finland. Hippos basked on the banks of the Thames and the Rhine. But the impact on human populations was limited by our then restricted geographical range. The second is the one we are living in now. When it began, around 12,000 years ago, people were already present on all the world's continents, and in many different kinds of environment. Geologists call this period the Holocene, from Greek holos (entire), kainos (new).

The Little Ice Age may have been caused by reforestation during the conquest of the Americas.

Murray Bookchin coined the term "ecology of freedom" to describe the opposite of peasantry — "play farming":

The ecology of freedom describes the proclivity of human societies to move (freely) in and out of farming; to farm without fully becoming farmers; raise crops and animals without surrendering too much of one's existence to the logistical rigours of agriculture; and retain a food web sufficiently broad as to prevent cultivation from becoming a matter of life and death.

Starting in 5500BC, various Neolithic sites in Austria and Germany tell a recurring story of a farming community that ended with mass graves:

The contents of these graves attest to the annihilation, or attempted annihilation, of an entire community: crudely dug trenches or reused ditches containing chaotic jumbles of human remains, including adults and children of both sexes, disposed of like so much refuse. Their bones show the telltale marks of torture, mutilation and violent death - the breaking of limbs, taking of scalps, butchering for cannibalism. At Kilianstädten and Asparn, younger women were missing from the assemblage, suggesting their appropriation as captives.

The Neolithic farming economy had arrived in central Europe, carried by migrants from the southeast, and with ultimately catastrophic consequences for some of those whose ancestors brought it there.

Farming brought an upsurge in population, followed by boom and bust. "These Early Neolithic groups arrived, they settled, and then in many (but, we should emphasize, not all) areas their numbers dwindled into obscurity... Only after a hiatus of roughly 1,000 years did extensive cereal-farming take off again in central and northern Europe."

Play farming takes place in societies that don't necessarily depend on agriculture. They might hunt and forage but also plant.

Agriculture was supporting great cities by 2000BC. By 500BC food-producing societies covered most of Eurasia.

How did farming get popular?

Farming often started out as an economy of deprivation: you only invented it when there was nothing else to be done, which is why it tended to happen first in areas where wild resources were thinnest on the ground.

Early farmers created more obvious settlements, which is why they are over-represented in the historical record. But that doesn't necessarily mean they were more successful or prosperous than hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers also erected monuments and undertook infrastructure projects.

Agriculture eventually came to feed the 8 billion people of the world today — but that doesn't mean that's why the original farmers did it, nor that they knew what they were getting into.

Chapter eight

In some regions, we now know, cities governed themselves for centuries without any sign of the temples and palaces that would only emerge later; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all. In many early cities, there is simply no evidence of either a class of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum. In others, centralized power seems to appear and then disappear. It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply and particular form of political organization, and never did.

We often argue that small groups are cohesive and large groups are discordant. But we know this to be untrue: small groups are always discordant. (Think about holiday dinners.) Larger groups can absorb conflict. Today it's normal for youth to travel far from home to make new connections or get away from old ones; it turns out that's not a new phenomenon.

New work on the demogophy of modern hunter gatherers drawing statistical comparisons From a global sample of cases, ranging from the Hadza in Tanzania to the Australian Martu' shows that residential groups turn out not to be made up of biological kin at all; and the burgeoning field of human genomics is beginning to suggest a similar picture for ancient hunter-gatherers as well, all the way back to the Pleistocene.

The idea of a "kin group" is actually a "metaphor for social attachments, in much the same way we'd say 'all men are brothers' when trying to express internationalism (even if we can't stand our actual brother and haven't spoken to him for years)." These metaphors might be far-reaching, spanning continents. "This made it a relatively simple matter for anyone disenchanted with their immediate biological kin to travel very long distances and still find a welcome."

Larger settlements, on the scale of tens of thousands of members, start to appear around 6,000 years ago on almost every continent, "at first in isolation. Then they multiply." These early cities are almost unrecognizable to the modern civil bureaucrat.

It's not just that some early cities lack class divisions, wealth monopolies, or hierarchies of administration. They exhibit such extreme variability as to imply, from the very beginning, a conscious experimentation in urban form.

In genera, early cities show no signs of authorianism. They produced some or all of their food with their own gardens, livestock, waterways along with hunting and foraging. Dependence on heavy crop production came later. The citizenry often came from far afield. The size of cities wasn't connected to their technologies. Cities without metallurgy or beasts or draft animals were sometimes the largest early cities. Teotihuacan in modern-day Mexico had a population of 100,000.

In point of fact, the largest early cities, those with the greatest populations, did not appear in Eurasia with its many technical and logistical advantages but in Mesoamerica, which had no wheeled vehicles or sailing ships, no animal-powered traction or transport, and much less in the way of metallurgy or literate bureaucracy.

The rise of cities followed environmental changes 7,000 years ago:

Across many parts of Eurasia, and in a few parts of the Americas, the appearance of cities follows quite closely on a secondary, post-Ice Age shuffling of the ecological pack which started around 5000 BC... At the beginning of the Holocene, the world's great rivers were mostly still wild and unpredictable. Then, around 7,000 years ago, flood regimes started changing, giving way to more settled routines. This is what created wide and highly fertile floodplains along the Yellow River, the Indus, the Tigris and other rivers that we associate with the first urban civilizations. Parallel to this, the melting of polar glaciers slowed down in the Middle Holocene to a point that allowed sea levels the world over to stabilize, at least to a greater degree than they ever had before. The combined effect of these two processes was dramatic; especially where great rivers met the open waters, depositing their seasonal loads of fertile silt faster than seawaters could push them back. This was the origin of those great fan-like deltas we see today at the head of the Mississippi, the Nile or the Euphrates, for instance. Comprising well-watered soils, annually sifted by river action, and rich wetland and waterside habitats favoured by migratory game and waterfowl, such deltaic environments were major attractors for human populations. Neolithic farmers gravitated to them, along with their crops and livestock. Hardly surprising, considering these were effectively scaled-up versions of the kind of river, spring and lakeside environments in which Neolithic horticulture first began, but with one other major difference: just over the horizon lay the open sea, and before it expansive marshlands supplying aquatic resources to buffer the risks of farming, as well as a perennial source of organic materials (reeds, fibres, silt) to support construction and manufacturing. All this, combined with the fertility of alluvial soils further inland, promoted the growth of more specialized forms of farming in Eurasia, including the use of animal-drawn ploughs (also adopted in Egypt by 3000 BC), and the breeding of sheep for wool. Extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization. Choices about which crops and animals to farm often had less to do with brute subsistence than the burgeoning industries of early cities, notably textile production, as well as popular forms of urban cuisine such as alcoholic drinks, leavened bread and dairy products. Hunters and foragers, fishers and fowlers were no less important to these new urban economies than farmers and shepherds. Peasantries, on the other hand, were a later, secondary development. Wetlands and floodplains are no friends to archaeological survival. Often, these earliest phases of urban occupation lie beneath later deposits of silt, or the remains of cities grown over them.

These early cities — with populations in the tens of thousands — may have had very light ecological impacts. They might have been occupied seasonally. They might have been carefully managed ecologically. In one Ukranian mega site,

This is consistent with archaeological studies of their economy, which suggest a pattern of small-scale gardening, often taking place within the bounds of the settlement, combined with the keeping of livestock, cultivation of orchards, and a wide spectrum of hunting and foraging activities.

This was "play farming on a grand scale." The urban population supported itself through "small-scale cultivation and herding, combined with an extraordinary array of wild foods." Even without industrial agriculture, these cities produced and stored surpluses, "with it ample potential for some to seize control of the stocks and supplies, to lord it over others or battle for the spoils; but over eight centuries we find little evidence for warfare or the rise of social elites."

These early cities had complex system for collective projects. By way of illustration, the authors point to modern Basque societies that use circular geometry to allocate tasks. Homes are arranges in a circle wher e"no one is first, and no one is last."

In the commune of Sainte-Engrâce, for instance, the circular template of the village is also a dynamic model used as a counting device, to ensure the seasonal rotation of essential tasks and duties. Each Sunday, one household will bless two loaves at the local church, eat one, then present the other to its 'first neighbour' (the house to their right); the next week that neighbour will do the same to the next house to its right, and so on in a clockwise direction, so that in a community of 100 houscholds it would take about two years to complete a full cycle.

At the same time, care of the dead and dying travels in the counter-clockwise direction. Further, the geometry serves as a basis for economic cooperation.

If any one house. hold is for any reason unable to fulfil its obligations when it is time to do so, a careful system of substitution comes into play, so neighbours at first, second and sometimes third remove can temporarily take their place. This in turn provides the model for virtually all forms of co-operation. The same system of 'first neighbours' and substitution, the same serial model of reciprocity, is used to call up anything that requires more hands than a single family can provide: from planting and harvesting to cheese-making and slaughtering pigs.

These seemingly "simple" social arrangements are actually deep and complex, yet function without centralized control or bureaucracy. This system is already well beyond Dunbar's theoretical limit of 150 people, and the villages used to be even larger, providing a theoretical example of a society that runs on egalitarian cooperation.

Chapter nine

The monumental city of Teotihuacan collapsed around the 530s CE. In the coming centuries, everything about the city was forgotten, down to its name. By the 1200s, the Mexica people — the rulers of the Aztec Empire — regarded Teotihuacan as a mythical and alluring. They built their own city, Tenochtitlan, in its image.

Teotihuacan became a city of such grandeur and sophistication that it could easily be put on a par with Rome at the height of its imperial power... even conservative estimates place its population at around 100,000... At its zenith, there were probably at least a million people distributed across the Valley of Mexico and surrounding lands, many of whom had only visited the great city once, or perhaps only knew someone who had, but nonetheless considered Teotihuacan the most important place in the entire world.

At the height of its power, Teotihuacan governed itself without overlords. The city had 2,000 well-constructed multi-family apartments on an orthogonal grid, aligned with the two pyramids at the heart of the city. Evidence shows that the citizenry put resources into monumental construction and then suddenly stopped, instead channeling their efforts into "urban renewal," creating housing for all, "regardless of wealth or status." Ritual killings at the pyramids came to an end.

Even the more modest apartments show signs of a comfortable lifestyle, with access to imported goods and a staple diet of corn tortillas, eggs, turkey and rabbit meat, and the milk-hued drink known as pulque.

A thousand years later, Cortés described the city of Tlaxcala. He estimated the population around 150,000.

There is a market in this city, he reported back to Charles V, in which more than thirty thousand people are occupied in buying and selling, and the province contains many wide-spreading fertile valleys all tilled and sown, no part of it being left wild, and measures some ninety leagues in circumference. Also, the order of government so far observed among the people resembles very much the republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa for there is no supreme overlord.

Chapter ten

The idea of "the state" came into being in the 1500s, coined by the French lawyer Jean Bodin (who also wrote about witchcraft and werewolves and hated women). In the 1800s, German philosopher Rudolf von Ihering proposed that a state is an institution "that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory" — a definition more closely associated with Max Weber today.

The authors expand on von Ihering to propose three bases for social power:

• Control of violence

• Control of information

• Individual charisma

These three bases underlie all political power. "What really concerns us about these three principles is that each has become the basis for institutions now seen as foundational to the modern state."

Violence is the "most dependable," which is why it is so ubiquitous in modern law. Charisma is the "most ephemeral." Information is quite mercurial, "it doesn't even particularly matter what that knowledge is about." It might be technical know-how or esoteric spirituality.

We see violence in the idea of "sovereignty." States hold the power formerly associated with kings, which is really the idea of the monopoly on coercive force. Kings are above the law. However, this power is difficult to assert and even more difficult to scale. However, "In modern states, the very same kind of power is multiplied a thousand times because it is combined with the second principle: bureaucracy." Bureaucracy is always concerned with controlling official secrets, which is why James Bond is the mythical hero 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." The violence and secrecy of the state has a theoretical counterbalance in the principle of charisma as embodied in democracy. Our modern democracy bares little resemblance to Athenian democracy — where a privileged elite actively engaged in social debate. Rather, the authors liken it to "aristocratic contests of heroic ages... races, duels, games, gifts and sacrifices." To the Greeks, elections were aristocratic rather than democratic. Their image of democracy was sortition — like modern jury duty.

In history, we see these three bases of power — violence, information, and charisma — arising separately, diverging, converging, playing together, and falling apart over and over again. They have separate origins and enabling conditions.

As we can now begin to see, modern states are, in fact, an amalgam of elements that happen to have come together at a certain point in human history and, arguably, are now in the process of coming apart again (consider, for instance, how we currently have planetary bureaucracies, such as the WTO or IMF, with no corresponding principle of global sovereignty). 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... What we are challenging here is not any particular formulation, but the underlying teleology. All these accounts seem to assume that there is only one possible end point to this process: that these various types of domination were somehow bound to come together, sooner or later, in something like the particular form taken by modern nation states in America and France at the end of the eighteenth century, a form which was gradually imposed on the rest of the world after both world wars. What if this wasn't true? What we are going to do here is to see what happens if we approach the history of some of the world's first kingdoms and empires without any such preconceptions. Along with the origins of the state, we will also be putting aside such similarly vague and teleological notions as the 'birth of civilization' or the 'rise of social complexity' in order to take a closer look at what actually happened. How did large-scale forms of domination first emerge, and what did they actually look like? What, if anything, do they have to do with arrangements that endure to this day?

The authors define society that employ a single basis of social power as a "first-order regime." They offer the Chavin culture as an example of knowledge control, the Olmec as an example of charismatic politics, and the Natchez as an example of violence-based politics.

The Natchez ruler "enjoyed an absolute power of command that would have satisfied a Sapa Inca or Egyptian pharaoh; but they had a minimal bureaucracy, and nothing like a competitive political field." However, the Natchez village was mostly empty for most of the year because the village people wanted to stay as far from their violent ruler as possible.

Away from the Great Village, ordinary Natchez appear to have led very different lives, often showing blissful disregard for the wishes of their ostensible rulers. They conducted their own independent commercial and military ventures, and sometimes flatly refused royal commands conveyed by the Great Sun's emissaries or relatives... Historically such arrangements are not particularly unusual. The Great Sun was a sovereign in the classical sense of the term, which is to say he embodied a principle that was seen as higher than law. Therefore no law applied to him... Just as gods (or God) are not seen as bound by morality since only a principle existing beyond good and evil could have created good and evil to begin with so 'divine kings' cannot be judged in human terms; behaving in arbitrarily violent ways to anyone around them is itself proof of their transcendent status. Yet at the same time, they are expected to be creators and enforcers of systems of justice. Such with the Natchez too.

The Great Sun was said to be descended from a child of the Sun who came to earth bearing a universal code of laws, among the most prominent of which were proscriptions against theft and murder. Yet the Great Sun himself ostentatiously violated those laws on a regular basis, as if to prove his identification with a principle prior to law and, therefore, able to create it. The problem with this sort of power (at least, from the sovereign's vantage point) is that it tends to be intensely personal. It is almost impossible to delegate. The king's sovereignty extends about as far as the king himself can walk, reach, see or be carried. Within that circle it is absolute. Outside it, it attenuates rapidly. As a result, in the absence of an administrative system (and the Natchez king had only a handful of assistants), claims to labour, tribute or obedience could, if considered odious, be simply ignored. Even the 'absolutist' monarchs of the Renaissance, like Henry VIII or Louis XIV, had a great deal of trouble delegating their authority that is, convincing their subjects to treat royal representatives as deserving anything like the same deference and obedience due to the king himself. Even if one does develop an administrative apparatus (as they of course did), there is the additional problem of how to get the administrators actually to do what they're told and, by the same token, how to get anyone to tell you if they aren't. As late as the 1780s, as Max Weber liked to point out, Frederick the Great of Prussia found that his repeated efforts to free the country's serfs came to nothing because bureaucrats would simply ignore the decrees or, if challenged by his legates, insisted the words of the decree should be interpreted as saying the exact opposite of what was obviously intended.

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. Yet that very act establishes the king as potential lawmaker and high tribunal, in much the same way that High Gods' are so often represented as both throwing random bolts of lightning, and standing in judgment over the moral acts of human beings. 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. For most of history, this was the internal dynamic of sovereignty. Rulers would try to establish the arbitrary nature of their power; their subjects, insofar as they were not simply avoiding the kings entirely, would try to surround the godlike personages of those rulers with an endless maze of ritual restrictions, so elaborate that the rulers ended up, effectively, imprisoned in their palaces or even, as in some of the cases of divine kingship' first made famous by Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, facing ritual death themselves.

Emphasis added. This is such an important passage on the nature of violence, especially how the application of violence marks one as above law, identified with a "prior principle, above the law, and therefore able to create it." This explains why people who reject violence generally will tolerate state violence — it the violence that precedes and justifies law. It is how a president can claim to to above the law.

The authors contend that around 6000 years ago, Egyptians made some conscious decision that the dead need food — bread and beer, creating a massive need for crops.

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. The two processes agronomic and ceremonial were mutually reinforcing, and the social effects epochal. In effect, they led to the creation of what might be considered the world's first peasantry.

The land around the Nile was historically difficult to divide into plots due to periodic flooding. But with the advent of industrial agriculture for ceremonial purposes, Egyptians started dividing land out of necessity. This is "widely treated as the world's first known example of 'state formation.'" The authors then go on to distinguish the mechanical labor involved in state formation from the caring labor associated with community.

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. 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.

In "state formation," the acts of caring — grooming, feeding, attending, healing — are gradually abstracted in hierarchical relationships. The pharaoh becomes a parental figure who bestows blessings on the people and receives their care. This evolves into a bureaucratic system of land management and agricultural supply chains.

The three forms of domination (violence, knowledge, charisma) can each crystallize into a unique institutional form: sovereignty, administration, and heroic politics. Any state with two of these forms of power are "second-order" regimes. These regimes are "typically far more violent."

Egypt's early rulers combined sovereignty and administration; Mesopotamian kings mixed administration and heroic politics; Classic Maya ajaws fused heroic politics with sovereignty.

In these states, all three forms of power exist, but only two of them are embodied in the rulers, while the third was "pushed out of the realm of human affairs altogether and displaced on to the non-human cosmos." In this case of Ancient Egypt, the rulers engaged in no form of competitive politics, which instead existed in the realm of the gods. Historians regard Ancient Egypt as the first true state because it synthesized a monarch's absolute sovereignty with a massive bureaucracy. All later states seem to mimic this model in some way.

However, these politics did not last continuously through the history of Ancient Egypt. There were multiple "intermediate periods" in Ancient Egypt when central authority broke down and power devolved to local governors, often called "warlords." The governors held authority as popular heroes, sometimes becoming saints. The first intermediate power saw the rise of hereditary aristocracy in Egypt. "In other words, whenever state sovereignty broke down, heroic politics returned with charismatic figures... 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."

The authors return to the idea of Dunbars Number, that humans need complex bureaucracy to organize infrastructure projects like irrigation:

In fact, it turns out that farmers are perfectly capable of co-ordinating very complicated irrigation systems all by themselves, and there's little evidence, in most cases, that early bureaucrats had anything to do with such matters. Urban populations seem to have a remarkable capacity for self-governance in ways which, while usually not quite 'egalitarian', were likely a good deal more participatory than almost any urban government today... Meanwhile most ancient emperors, as it turns out, saw little reason to interfere, as they simply didn't care very much about how their subjects cleaned the streets or maintained their drainage ditches. We've also observed that when early regimes do base their domination on exclusive access to forms of knowledge, these are often not the kinds of knowledge we ourselves would consider particularly practical (the shamanic, psychotropic revelations that seem to have inspired the builders of Chavin de Huántar would be one such example). In fact, the first forms of functional administration, in the sense of keeping archives of lists, ledgers, accounting procedures, overseers, audits and files, seem to emerge in precisely these kinds of ritual contexts: in Mesopotamian temples, Egyptian ancestor cults, Chinese oracle readings and so forth. So one thing we can now say with a fair degree of certainty is that bureaucracy did not begin simply as a practical solution to problems of information management, when human societies advanced beyond a particular threshold of scale and complexity.

That is to say, bureaucratic power evolves from aristocratic spiritual cults, not from social organizing. The authors argue that this form of bureaucracy is also the root of unfreedom:

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. 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. 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.

To be free is to have friendships (the Germananic root of "friend" is actually more general and refers to all amicable relationships, including family). To lose your freedom is to lose your friendships, as you cannot engage in mutual aid — you are property and your work belongs to your master.

Bureaucracy is the standardization of commitments and promises into laws and contracts. It inverts the freedom to engage in commitments into an obligation to do so. This is because bureaucracy removes the personal element from personal interactions. The interaction becomes an entity in itself, divorced from the parties. The ultimate form of this is money — an entity that originally described an interaction between two parties but now exists independently of them. A dollar found in the street is just a dollar.

The typical story of the formation of the state recounts that as agriculture took hold, early states produced a surplus of grain that was reinvested into military, bureaucratic, and cultural projects. But the authors argue that this is probably inaccurate, since even the polities of Ancient Egypt weren't staffed by full-time specialists and didn't have standing armies.

Warfare was largely a business for the agricultural off-season. Priests and judges rarely worked full-time either; in fact, most government institutions in Old Kingdom Egypt, Shang China, Early Dynastic Mesopotamia or for that matter classical Athens were staffed by a rotating workforce whose members had other lives as managers of rural estates, traders, builders or any number of different occupations. One could go further. It's not clear to what degree many of these 'early states" were themselves largely seasonal phenomena... Could it be that, in the same way that play farming our term for those loose and flexible methods of cultivation which leave people free to pursue any number of other seasonal activities turned into more serious agriculture, play kingdoms began to take on more substance as well?

Perhaps politics was invented in seasonal periods of creative play. This is an interesting idea that paints state formation as a more deliberate and creative project than the standard narrative that describes hunter-gatherers accidentally forming settlements around fields of wheat. But the authors caution, "it's also possible that both these processes, when they did happen, were ultimately driven by something else, such as the emergence of patriarchal relations and the decline of women's power within the household."

Here, they specifically outline a dichotomy: perhaps the rise of agrarian society was a creative project, or perhaps it was a patriarchal one. Could it have been both?

The authors bring this to a conclusion about the origin of the state:

What we now regard as states turn out not to be a constant of history at all, not the result of a long evolutionary process that began in the Bronze Age, but rather a confluence of three political forms sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition that have different origins. Modern states are simply one way in which the three principles of domination happened to come together, but 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.

States and civilizations are not simply organisms that have evolved over millennia, rather they are "complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins." The authors gesture toward the future, arguing that these three elements are now in the process of drifting apart — as institutions like the IMF and WTO divorce bureaucracy from sovereignty and democracy.

Seen this way, to rethink the basic premises of social evolution is to rethink the very idea of politics itself.

The authors argue that early civilizations ("Pharaonic Egypt, Inca Peru, Aztec Mexico, Han China, Imperial Rome, ancient Greece") were all " deeply stratified societies, held together mostly by authoritarian government, violence and the radical subordination of women." Civilization is built on sacrifice — figurative and literal. "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." In this light, the idea of civilization seems completely backward. The origin of the term, civilis originally referred to the qualities of "political wisdom and mutual aid that permit societies to organize themselves through voluntary coalition," which is quite different from what we see in Ancient Egypt or Imperial Rome. If we study the historical record carefully we can see civilizations that look quite different — not the famous monumental ones, but "far-flung networks of kinship and commerce."

In all parts of the world small communities formed civilizations in that true sense of extended moral communities. Without permanent kings, bureaucrats or standing armies they fostered the growth of mathematical and calendrical knowledge. In some regions they pioneered metallurgy, the cultivation of olives, vines and date palms, or the invention of leavened bread and wheat beer; in others they domesticated maize and learned to extract poisons, medicines and mind-altering substances from plants. Civilizations, in this true sense, developed the major textile technologies applied to fabrics and basketry, the potter's wheel, stone industries and beadwork, the sail and maritime navigation, and so on. A moment's reflection shows that women, their work, their concerns and innovations are at the core of this more accurate understanding of civilization. As we saw in earlier chapters, tracing the place of women in societies without writing often means using clues left, quite literally, in the fabric of material culture, such as painted ceramics that mimic both textile designs and female bodies in their forms and elaborate decorative structures. To take just two examples, it's hard to believe that the kind of complex mathematical knowledge displayed in early Mesopotamian cuneiform documents or in the layout of Peru's Chavin temples sprang fully formed from the mind of a male scribe or sculptor, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Far more likely, these represent knowledge accumulated in earlier times through concrete practices such as the solid geometry and applied calculus of weaving or beadwork. What until now has passed for 'civilization' might in fact be nothing more than a gendered appropriation by men, etching their claims in stone of some earlier system of knowledge that had women at its centre.

We equate monuments and militaries with civilization. But if civilization refers to people working together to take care of each other, then the idea is both very more expansive than typically thought and also quite misunderstood.

The authors crack open our imagination with their theory of states by arguing that "there seem to be both logical and historical constraints on the variety of ways in which power can expand its scope; these limits are the basis of our three principles' of sovereignty, administration and competitive politics."

On one hand, it's provocative to assert such a simple theory of domination. On the other hand, these basic principles are actually much more nuanced than the mainstream view (civilization versus barbarism) and gives us tangible concepts to interpret social systems.

Chapter eleven

In the eighteenth century, European writers created a theory of history that assumed that "as societies grew larger, they inevitably grew more complex; and that complexity means not just a greater differentiation of functions, but also the reorganization of human societies into hierarchical ranks, governed from the top down." These historians saw indigenous philosophers as naive, since they didn't have a recognizable form of industrial agriculture — the first requirement of a modern civilization. This model of history proceeds from hunter-gatherer bands to capitalist nation states. In this worldview, "huge swathes of the human past disappear from the purview of history." As a result, many chroniclers of world history,

"who profess themselves believers in freedom, democracy and women's rights continue to treat historical epochs of relative freedom, democracy and women's rights as so many 'dark ages.' Similarly, as we've seen, the concept of civilization is still largely reserved for societies whose defining characteristics include high-handed autocrats, imperial conquests and the use of slave labour."

How do we ignore so much of human history? The history outside of the monumental agrarian civilizations?

Until around a half-millennium ago, a large proportion of the world's population still lived either beyond the tax collector's purview or within reach of some relatively straightforward means of escaping it. Yet today, in our twenty-first-century world, this is obviously no longer the case. Something did go terribly wrong at least from the point of view of the barbarians.

Unfortunately, we have collectively failed to explore this question sufficiently. That is, in part, because our 18th-century historical narrative was hammered into place with 19th-century science. Darwin's theories embedded evolutionism as the dominant scientific approach to all biological and social systems. Following from evolutionism, in 1877 the historian Lewis Henry Morgan proposed a theory of human civilization that progresses from 'savagery' through 'barbarism' to 'civilization.' Anthropologists widely adopted Morgan's theory. Meanwhile, communists made a similar move, drawing a map of history from primitive communism to feudalism then to capitalism and socialism and communism — another evolutionary view of history.

Morgan's theory coalesced into a basic rubric that was widely held through the 20th century,. "As many twentieth-century anthropologists pointed out at the time, this scheme doesn't really work." It looked like this:

• Band societies: Hunter gatherers living in living in small, egalitarian "mobile groups of twenty to forty individuals, without any formal political roles and minimal division of labour."

• Tribes: Egalitarian horticulturalists without complex political systems who farm but don't use irrigation or ploughs and organize themselves into lineages or clans, generally ruled by "big men."

• Chiefdoms: Kinship groups with some aristocracy, agricultural surpluses, and specialized artisan craftspeople.

• States: Large groups with intensive cereal agriculture, a legal monopoly on the use of force, professional administration, and a "complex division of labor."

The authors argue that the real motivation for this thinking is our teleological mindset:

We find it so difficult to imagine history... in a way which does not imply that current arrangements were somehow inevitable... one of the most puzzling aspects of living in history is that it's almost impossible to predict the course of future events; yet, once events have happened, it's difficult to know what it would even mean to say something else 'could' have happened.

Next, the authors explore the question: how inevitable was our current arrangement?

We have seen the rise of monumental agrarian civilizations across the Afro–Eurasian landmass over the past 10,000 years or so. However, Afro-Eurasia is relatively integrated, culturally. Even in antiquity, ideas from Japan could (and did) travel to Africa or Scandinavia and vice versa. In fact, "dramatic political an economic changes often appeared to occur in more or less coordinated fashion across the Eurasian land mass." The authors put forward the Axial Age — centering around the 5th century BC — as an example: a period when all major extant schools of speculative philosophy were founded (Pythagoras in Greece; the Buddha in India; Confucius in China). A few centuries prior, Zoroaster had founded Zoroastrianism. A few centuries later, Christ would establish Christianity. And by the year 600 AD Muhammed would establish Islam. These schools emerged in cities that had already adopted coined money and corresponded with the spread of chattel slavery ("even in places where it had barely existed before"), which would fall eventually decline again along with the Axial Age empires and their currencies. That being the case, we can't reasonably make any scientific statements about the evolution of states by looking at Afro-Eurasia, since all states therein are connected.

However, we can compare Afro-Eurasia against the Americas.

Was the rise of monarchy as the world's predominant form of government inevitable? Is cereal agriculture really a trap, and can one really say that once the farming of wheat or rice or maize becomes suffciently widespread, it's only a matter of time before some enterprising overlord seizes control of the granaries and establishes a regime of bureaucratically administered violence? And once he does, is it inevitable that others will imitate his example? Judging by the history of pre-Columbian North America, at least, the answer to all these questions is a resounding 'no.'

In the centuries before the European invasion of North America, Plains societies moved away from agriculture. The "Mississippian civilization" of Cahokia had adopted and abandoned agriculture. Should we interpret this as a historical accident?

The authors then go into a long discussion of Indigenous philosophical traditions. As one example, they describe Iroquoian dream analysis, which seems like "an oddly clumsy projection of Freudian theory." For the Iroquois, one of the highest callings was the actualization of dreams. If, for example, one Iroquois dreamed of owning a neighbor's possession, the neighbor would have been expected to gift their belonging to the dreamer or else risk gossip and even revenge. One chief gave away his prized European cat to a woman who dreamt of owning it. Accounts of Iroquoian dream analysis date back,

"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... The point here is that it would be very unwise to dismiss such intellectual traditions as inferior or for that matter, entirely alien to our own."

Perhaps egalitarian Indigenous political institutions also arose from self-conscious philosophizing. Perhaps Cahokia was the result of such a political movement. Or perhaps it was an accidental change that then inspired centuries of Indigenous thought across North America.

Whatever happened in Cahokia, the backlash against it was so severe that it set forth repercussions we are still feeling today. What we are suggesting is that indigenous doctrines of individual liberty, mutual aid and political equality, which made such an impression on French Enlightenment thinkers, were neither (as many of them supposed) the way all humans can be expected to behave in a State of Nature. Nor were they (as many anthropologists now assume) simply the way the cultural cookie happened to crumble in that particular part of the world... Still, the societies that European settlers encountered, and the ideals expressed by thinkers like Kandiaronk, only really make sense as the product of a specific political history: a history in which questions of hereditary power, revealed religion, personal freedom and the independence of women were still very much matters of self-conscious debate, and in which the overall direction, for the last three centuries at least, had been explicitly anti-authoritarian... [Indigenous commentators] were not only keenly aware of alternative political possibilities, but for the most part saw their own social orders as self-conscious creations, designed as a barrier against all that Cahokia might have represented or indeed, all those qualities they were later to find so objectionable in the French.

In another instance, the authors recount a conflict between Louis XIV of France and the Iroquois. Louis XIV one of his governors, the Marquis de Denonville, to drive the Iroquois from New York. Denonville invited representatives from the confederacy of the Iroquois Five Nations to discuss a peace settlement, and then arrested all 200 delegates who arrived to negotiate, pressing them into bondage as galley slaves on ships bound for France. He then ordered his men to invade the Five Nations territory. After the deception, a leading woman known as the Jigonsaseh — "Mother of Nations," famous for her impartiality — remained as the highest-ranking Iroquois official. She rallied the remaining clan mothers and together they raised an army, including many women. The Jigonsaseh routed Denonville's troops in New York and then led her troops to Montreal before the French government sued for peace, agreeing to dismantle one of their forts and return the slaves. About a dozen of the slaves made it back alive. After the defeath, the Jigonsaseh demobilized her army and helped select officials to reconstitute the governing council. Perhaps she could have attempted to seize power as a dictator, but that was not the political sensibility of her or her people.

Conclusion

Modern Western observers have a biased view of foreign cultures. Most recent ethnographic research was carried out in colonial possessions, where the Indigenous population had no freedom to reorgnize themselves politically, creating an impression that the Indigenous peoples had "a way of life that was timeless and unchanging."

In fact, these worlds were full of experimentation, innovation, and creativity:

As we've seen, what actually took place was nothing like that. Instead of some male genius realizing his solitary vision, innovation in Neolithic societies was based on a collective body of knowledge accumulated over centuries, largely by women, in an endless series of apparently humble but in fact enormously significant discoveries. Many of those Neolithic discoveries had the cumulative effect of reshaping everyday life every bit as profoundly as the automatic loom or lightbulb. Every time we sit down to breakfast, we are likely to be benefiting from a dozen such prehistoric inventions. Who was the first person to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can be almost certain she was a woman and would most likely not be considered 'white' if she tried to immigrate to a European country today; and we definitely know her achievement continues to enrich the lives of billions of people. What we also know is that such discoveries were, again, based on centuries of accumulated knowledge and experimentation. Everything we know about farming comes from early "gardens of Adonis" — play farms. Ceramics were invented to make figurines. We first dug mines to extract pigments to create color. Mesoamericans never used wheels for transportation, but they created toys with spoked wheels and axles for their children. The Greeks invented a steam engine to theatrically open temple doors. The Chinese invented gunpowder for fireworks.

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... What is true of technological creativity is, of course, even more true of social creativity. One of the most striking patterns we discovered while researching this book indeed, one of the patterns that felt most like a genuine breakthrough to us was how, time and again in human history, that zone of ritual play has also acted as a site of social experimentation even, in some ways, as an encyclopedia of social possibilities. The contrast with our present situation could not be more stark. Nowadays, most of us find it increasingly difficult even to picture what an alternative economic or social order would be like. Our distant ancestors seem, by contrast, to have moved regularly back and forth between them. If something did go terribly wrong in human history — and given the current state of the world, it's hard to deny something did — then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such a degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly even existed, or was barely exercised, for the greater part of human history.

The authors then discuss how the three fundamental freedoms relate to one another. They argue that the freedom to relocate and the freedom to disobey support the freedom to create new social realities. As long as the first two freedoms existed, "the only kings that could exist were always, in the last resort, play kings. If they overstepped the line, their erstwhile subjects could always ignore them or move someplace else."

Something changed, whereby todays humans can't comprehend relocating or disobeying or imagining new social realities — to the point where a different world seems altogether impossible. "How did we get stuck?" they ask.

The authors don't reach an ultimate conclusion, but they do speculate. For starters, the explore warfare, "Because violence is often the route by which forms of play take on more permanent features." Ethnographers have many examples of "play war," where battles involving thousands of combattants might only produce a few casualties after a day of fighting. But even play competitions and battles are playful until someone dies. A play king is playful until he commits murder. The dead stay dead.

War itself is a slightly strange business. In full-scale war, any soldier can kill any other soldier, which is called "social substitutability." This is a strange, perhaps unnatural, psychic trick, and studies of the paleolithic record show little evidence for indiscriminate warfare of this variety. At the same time, the record shows evidence for intermitten massacres.

What strikes us is just how uneven such evidence is. Periods of intense inter-group violence alternate with periods of peace, often lasting centuries, in which there is little or no evidence for destructive conflict of any kind. War did not become a constant of human life afer the adoption of farming—indeed, long periods of time exist in which it appears to have been successfully abolished. Yet it had stubborn tendency to reappear, if only many generations later. At this point another new question comes into focus. Was there a relations ship between external warfare and the internal loss of freedoms that opened the way, first to systems of ranking and then later on to large-scale systems of domination?

The fundamental forms of domination — violence, knowledge, charisma — "can operate on any scale of human interaction, from the family or household all the way up to the Roman Empire or the super-kingdom of Tawantinsuyu." Todays politics are "magifinications" of these basic forms of domination. That being the case, we can understand political systems in terms of how they might have "developed one axis of social power to an extraordinary degree."

The monumental civilizations of the past often "deployed spectacular violence at the pinnacle of the system" and "all to some degree modelled their centres of power—the court or palace—on the organization of patriarchal households. Is this merely a coincidence?" Many great states had "a close connection between the patriarchal household and military might."

To answer this question, we need a new framework — one not, like our own, based on Roman Law, a law of slavery and domination. Ancient Rome was a place where the head of the household (a man) had absolute power over his family and the many slaves in his charge. A master could do whatever he wanted with his slaves, as they were technically foreigners captured in battle without any rights to speak of. Roman society brought a degree of unthinkable violence into the most intimate space — an arrangment that leaves a large impression on society today. The word "family" comes from the Latin familia, which referred to everyone under the authority of the head of the household — primarily slaves. Domus, the Latin for "house", gives us dominium, the word for the emperor's sovereignty and a citizen's power over their own property. This is where we get the idea of "dominance" — literally a reference to the home.

The history of warfare, massacre, and captive-taking precedes the arrival of kingdoms and empires. So what happened to those captives? The authors look to pre-conquest Wendat society for an indication. Wendat wars were "mourning wars," serving to assuage the grief of a murder. Traditionally, the war party would return with a few captives. The community would adopt women, children, and — sometimes — even the men. The men might become a full member of the community after a few years. If he wasn't adopted into the society, he would instead endure "excruciating death by torture," with everyone in the village participating in the torture. This is in a society where people refused to spank their children or harm thieves or murderers. "In virtually all other areas of social life they were enowned for solving their problems through calm and reasoned debate."

Missionary observers were horrified by these displays of violence. But, in much the same way, Wendat visitors to France at the same time were "equally appalled by the tortures exhibited during public punishments and executions." To them, this violence was unthinkable specifically because it was enacted on people from within the community. For the Wendat, punishment of captives brought the community together.

In France, by contrast, the people were unified as potential victims of the king's violence... Among the Wendat themselves, 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. No middle ground existed... Wendat households, in other words, were defined in exactly opposite terms to the Roman familia.

Imperial France embodied the same synthesis of patriarchal household and sovereign power. King James I of England wrote that the King is like a father to his subject, delivering both care and wrath. In the West, we regard domination as an expression of love.

It seems to us that this connection or better perhaps, confusion between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger question of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relations with one another. It is critical, that is, to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.

To conclude the book, the authors pose a question:

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?

Slavery has been abolished multiple times in history. War has virtually disappeared from regions for centuries at a time. These periods might "represent the vast majority of human experience." The anthropologist Carole Crumley, an expert on Iron Age Europe, says that complex human systems don't require top-down organization. What is stopping us from imagining a reality like this?