The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

David Graeber · David Wengrow

Nov 2021 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.

Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

Ratings and reviews

The Dawn of Everything challenges popular beliefs about the origin of civilization and the implications of social complexity. It also credits indigenous peoples for the rise of values like freedom and equality in Europe during the Enlightenment. The examination of societies throughout history and throughout the globe brings new insights that expose how racism and patriarchy have poisoned Western understanding of how human cultures organize themselves. This book is transformational. It's long but worth the read. The audiobook is a good choice—well narrated and easy to listen to. Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

The book launches by shattering long standing assumptions and commonly held beliefs, and only gets better from there. There were many instances where I was smacking myself in the head for having taken some of these foundational beliefs for granted without challenging them, but regardless it was a joy to see them dissected and left found wanting. I thoroughly enjoyed the read, including the often punchy or enlightening footnotes. I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes to read "long history" tomes. At least in the genes of anthropology and sociology, this one is the best I've read in many years.

Enjoyed reading this book. Haven't finished, but I hope to, and keep this.

About the author

David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on September 2, 2020.

David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and has been a visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of several books, including What Makes Civilization?. Wengrow conducts archaeological fieldwork in various parts of Africa and the Middle East.