The dawn of everything : a new history of humanity

Farewell to humanity's childhood, Or, why this is not a book about the origins of inequality -- Wicked liberty: The indigenous critique and the myth of progress -- Unfreezing the Ice Age: In and out of chains: the protean possibilities of human politics -- Free people, the origin of cultures, and the advent of private property (not necessarily in that order) -- Many seasons ago: Why Canadian foragers kept slaves and their Californian neighbours didn't; or, the problem with 'modes of production' -- Gardens of Adonis: The revolution that never happened: how Neolithic peoples avoided agriculture -- The ecology of freedom: How farming first hopped, stumbled and bluffed its way around the world -- Imaginary cities: Eurasia's first urbanites - in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Ukraine and China - and how they built cities without kings -- Hiding in plain sight: The indigenous origins of public housing and democracy in the Americas -- Why the state has no origin: The humble beginnings of sovereignty, bureaucracy, and politics -- Full circle: On the historical foundations of the indigenous critique -- Conclusion: The dawn of everything.

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal, 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 reaction to indigenous critiques of European society, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilization itself.

Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we begin to see what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 per cent 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 history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful 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 faith in the power of direct action.