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
