The Dawn of Everything

I. Farewell to Humanity's Childhood

p. 1

Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?

2. Wicked Liberty

p. 46

Just like the Jesuits, Enlightenment thinkers and democratic revolutionaries saw [the Wendat form of debate] as intrinsically concerned with the rejection of arbitrary authority.

p. 60

As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances. Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour. We progress from simple societies like those of the Wendat to our own complex ‘commercial civilisation’ in which the poverty and dispossession of some is nonetheless the necessary condition for the prosperity of the society as a whole.

3. Unfreezing the Ice Age

p. 85, note 17: p. 540

Recent efforts to estimate the overall human population at the start of the Upper Paleolithic suggest a mean figure of just 1,500 people for the whole of western and central Europe.

p. 99

For Lévy-Strauss, what was especially instructive about the Nambikwara was that, for all that they were adverse to competition, they did appoint chiefs to lead them [...] it attracted similar personality types: people who ‘unlike most of their companions, enjoy prestige for its own sake, feel a strong appeal to responsibility, and to whom the burden of public affairs brings its own reward’.

p. 107

[Marcel Mauss and Henri Beuchat observe] that the circumpolar Inuits ‘and likewise many other societies... have two social structures, one in summer and one in winter, and that in parallel they have two systems of law and religion’ In the summer, Inuit dispersed into bands of roughly twenty or thirty people to pursue freshwater fish, caribou and reindeer, all under the authority of a single male elder. During this period, property was possessively marked and patriarchs exercised coercive power over their kin. [...] But in the long winter months, when seals and walrus flocked to the Artic shore, there was a dramatic reversal. [...] Virtues of equality, altruism and collective life prevailed.

p. 108

[Similarly] Kwakiutl, Mandan-Hidatsa and Crow.

4. Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property

p. 128

We need to focus on the very notion of a surplus [...] Animals produce only and exactly what they need; humans invariably produce more.

p. 129

Truly equalitarian societies [...] are those with ‘immediate return’ economies [...] anything extra is shared out, but never preserved or stored. [...] Most foragers, and all pastoralists or farmers can be characterized as having ‘delayed return’ economies.

p. 131

The freedoms which form the moral basis of a nation like the United States are, largely formal freedoms. They have rights, provided [...], they are free to [...], unless [...]
Wendats had play chiefs and real freedoms, while most of us today have to make do with real chiefs and play freedoms.

p. 142

Seen from the air Poverty Point's standing remains look like a some sunken, gargantuan amphitheatre; a place of crowds and power. [...] The people of Poverty Point weren't farmers. Nor did they use writing. They were hunters, fishers and foragers, exploiting the superabundance of wild resources in the lower reaches of the Mississipi. [...] The scale of these earthworks implies thousands of people gathering at the site at particular times of year, in numbers outstripping any historically known hunter-gatherer population.

pp. 146-147

Europe, too, bears witness to the vibrant and complex history of non-agricultural peoples after the Ica Age. Take the monuments called in Finnish Jätinkirkko, the ‘Giants' Churches’ of the Botnian Sea [...] raised up by coastal foragers between 3000 and 2000 BC.

p. 149

The Agricultural Argument goes back to John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690), in which he argues that property rights are necessarily derived from labour. In working the land, one ‘mixes one's labour’ with it; in this way, it becomes an extension of oneself. [...] Note 37, p. 550: Locke's position was repudiated [in the UK] in 1823. The related principle of terra nullius was revoked only more recently, in Australia in 1992.

5. Many Seasons Ago

p. 165

While the free peoples of North America's eastern seaboard nearly all adopted at least some food crops, those of the West Coast uniformly rejected them. Indigenous peoples of California were not pre-agricultural. If anything, they were anti-agricultural.

p. 167

Languages are generally assumed to branch off from one another by something like a natural process.
[...] Studying relationships among these various linguistic groups eventually led to the science of glottochronology: how distinct languages diverge from a common source. [...] All this led to the construction of a series of linguistic family trees, and eventually an attempt — still highly controversial — to trace virtually all Eurasian languages to a single hypothetical ancestor called ‘Nostratic’, believed to have existed sometime during the later Paleolithic.

p. 168

An ethno-liguistic map of northern California in the early twentieth century presents a collection of peoples with broadly similar cultural practices, but speaking a jumble of languages, many drawn from entirely different language families — as distant from one another as, say Arabic, Tamil and Portuguese [...]
Neighbouring peoples speaking [very different] languages had more in common with each other than they did with speakers of languages from the same family living in other parts of North America [...]
Arguably, the very idea that the world is divided into homogeneous units, each with its own history, is largely a product of the modern nation state.

p. 178

In California in general, and in its north-west corner in particular, the central role of money in indigenous societies was combined with a cultural emphasis on thrift and simplicity, a disapproval of wasteful pleasures, and a glorification of work that bore an uncanny resemblance to the Puritan attitudes described by Max Weber in his famous 1905 essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

6. Gardens of Adonis

p. 230

Yuval Harari waxes eloquent, asking us to think ‘for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat’. Ten thousands 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 this happen? The answer, according to Harari, is that wheat did it by domesticating Home Sapiens to its advantage.

p. 231

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.
Lured by the prospect of a still easier life we had to tamper with that harmonious State of Nature, and thus unwittingly turned ourselves into slaves.

p. 235

Flood retreat farming [practiced e.g. in Çatalhöyük] takes place on the margins of seasonally flooding lakes or rivers [...]
In terms of labour, it is not only pretty light, it also requires little central management and is practically oriented towards the collective holding of land.

p. 239

Neolithic science was not a science of domination and classification, but one of bending and coaxing, nurturing and cajoling, or even tricking the forces of nature, to increase the likelihood of a favourable outcome.
[Note 50, p. 563: Such ‘magical’ approaches to production came to be associated not just with women but with witchcraft.]

7. The Ecology of Freedom

p. 250

Communal tenure, ‘open-field’ principles, periodic redistribution of plots and co-operative management of pasture are not particularly exceptional [...] The Russin mir is a famous example.

p. 251

In short, there is simply no reason to assume that the adoption of agriculture in more remote periods also meant the inception of private land ownership, territoriality, or an irreversible departure from forager egalitarianism.

p. 255

Seeds can spread very quickly if those carrying them have an army.

p. 274

Neolithic farming was an experiment that could fail — and occasionally did.

8. Imaginary Cities

p. 278

We need to ask how we got things so extraordinarily wrong to begin with.

p. 326

On the banks of the Fen river, we might conceivably be in presence of evidence for the world's first documented social revolution, or at least the first in an urban setting.

9. Hiding in Plain Sight

p. 356

Ancient Greek writers were well aware of the tendency of elections to throw up charismatic leaders with tyrannical pretensions. This is why they considered elections an aristocratic mode of political appointment, quite at odds with democratic principles; and why for much of European history the truly democratic way of filling offices was assumed to be lottery.

p. 358

Modern archaeological investigations confirm the existence of an indigenous republic at Tlaxcala long before Cortés set foot on Mexican soil.

10. Why the State has no Origin

pp. 359-360

[Rudolf von Ihering, late XIXth century] A state should be defined as an institution that claims monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory [...]
However [...] rulers either didn't make such grandiose claims — or, if they did, their claims held about the same status as theirs claims to control the tides or the weather [...]
For much of the twentieth century, social scientists preferred to define a state in more purely functional terms [based on complexity] [...] This logic is entirely circular.

p. 367

Democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers.

p. 408

[Egypt and Peru constitute] what's widely treated as the world's first known example of ‘state formation’ [...] a combination of exceptional violence and the creation of a complex social machine, all ostensibly devoted to acts of care and devotion.

p. 419

As Jared Diamond says, ‘large populations can't function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws.’

p. 428

It is often assumed that states begin when certain key functions of government — military, administrative and judicial — pass into the hands of full-time specialists [...]
However, almost none of the regimes we've been considering in this chapter were actually staffed by full-time specialists.

p. 440

We'd be wise to resist projecting some image of the modern nation state on to the bare surfaces [of the deserts of Saudi Arabia or Peru, the steppes of Kazakhstan and the tropical forests of Amazonia], and consider what other kinds of social possibilities they might attest to.

11. Full Circle

p. 444

The key to the importance of grain [...] is that it was durable, portable, easily divisible and quantifiable by bulk, and therefore an ideal medium to serve as a basis for taxation.
Like money, grain allows a certain form of terrifying equivalence.

pp. 446-447

Original sequence, Turgot: hunting, pastoralism, agriculture, industrial civilisation.
Darwin: Evolution.
Lewis (Ancient society): savagery, babarism, civilisation.
Marxism: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism/communism.
Since 1950, neo-evolutionism (sequence based on how efficiently groups harvest energy from their environment)
Anyone who is not an archaeologistor anthropologist tends to fall back on the older scheme: Band, tribe, chiefdom, state.

p. 449

A properly historical event has two qualities: it could not have been predicted beforehand, but it only happens once.

p. 451

In the case of the Americas, we actually can pose questions such as: 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 sufficiently widespread, it's only a matter of time before some enterprising overloard 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? Juging by the history of pre-Columbian North America, at least, the answer is a resounding ‘no’.

p. 452

From roughly AD 1050 to 1350 there was, in what's now East St Louis, a city whose real name has been forgotten, but which is known to history as Cahokia. It appears to have been the capital of what James Scott would term a classic building ‘grain state’, rising magnificiently and seemingly from nowhere, around the time that the Song dynasty ruled in China and the Abbasid Caliphate in Iraq. Cahokia's population peaked at something in the order of 15,000 people; then it abruptly dissolved. Whatever Cahokia represented in the eyes of those under its sway, it seeems to have ended up being overwhelmingly and resoundingly rejected by the vast majority of its people.

p. 456

Hundreds of languages were spoken in North America, belonging to half a dozen completely unrelated language families.

pp. 457-463

‘Hopewell Interaction Sphere.’

12. Conclusion

p. 519

If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), it is precisely this: 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?