THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND SUNDAY TIMES OBSERVER AND BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR
FINALIST FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL WRITING 2022 'Pacey and potentially
revolutionary' Sunday Times 'Iconoclastic and irreverent ... an exhilarating read' The
Guardian 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. 'This is not a book. This is an intellectual feast'
Nassim Nicholas Taleb 'The most profound and exciting book I've read in thirty years' Robin
D. G. Kelley
