The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

The authors begin the book with a chapter subtitled “Or, why this is not a book on the origins of inequality,” explicitly identifying their intentions from the start; this is not a book on the origins of inequality precisely because the authors argue that there are no specific, concrete, and singular origins of inequality (just as there is no origin of the city, or the state). Rather, what the authors intend to reveal over the course of the book is that early human societies—and underrepresented groups, particularly from the Americas—provide modern readers with a variety of examples of how human societies organize themselves. This is supported by a wealth of archeological and anthropological evidence that gives lie to the conventional wisdom that inequality is an inevitable result of sovereign rule, bureaucratic management, and political power, which often go hand-in-hand with the accumulation of private property and the inception of social classes.

Instead, the authors endeavor to demonstrate that, throughout human history and across the globe, human societies often organized themselves in egalitarian ways, and that the processes by which inequality and hierarchical structures come into play are various, regionally specific, and never inexorable. In fact, there is reason to believe—the historical evidence bears this out—that egalitarianism is equally a possibility for the organization of human societies.

For example, the authors turn to evidence from such different societies as the Mesoamerican city of Teotihuacan (its heyday from circa 100 BCE to 600 CE) to Mesopotamian communities in the ‘Ubaid period (circa 5500 BCE to 4000 BCE) to illustrate their point. While Teotihuacan displays some of the markings of authoritarian rule—grand pyramids, elaborate burials, ceremonial art—at some point in its history, around 300 CE, it changed course. The authors speculate that “possibly there was a revolution of sorts, followed by a more equal distribution of the city’s resources and the establishment of a kind of ‘collective governance’” (332). They provide additional evidence by examining Teotihuacan’s “pictorial art”: “nowhere among some thousands of such images do we find even a single representation of a ruler striking, binding or otherwise dominating a subordinate” (331).

This is distinct from other nearby civilizations of the era. Some historians even go so far as to suggest that “Teotihuacan was not just ‘anti-dynastic’ in spirit, it was itself a utopian experiment in urban life” (332). Further, as the authors note, “[t]he general consensus among those who know the site best is that Teotihuacan was, in fact, a city organized along some sort of self-consciously egalitarian lines” (332). It is quite a different picture from the typical one of early Mayan or Aztec city-states, wherein warfare and royal rule dominated, and it reveals that social equality was as much a possibility in the story of human development as inequality.

In Mesopotamia, at sites such as Tell Sabi Abyad in modern-day Syria, there are clear signs of a kind of republican rule. The author’s note that “what’s striking about the remains of this community is their uniformity,” suggesting that social stratification was absent (421). In addition, while there are signs of significant technological innovation—“in metallurgy, horticulture, textiles, diet and long-distance-trade” (422)—and bureaucratic accountability, in the form of “geometric tokens” (420), these did not result in the entrenchment of social inequality or authoritarian rule. Instead, “it is possible that we are witnessing the birth of an overt ideology of equality in the centuries prior to the emergence of the world’s first cities, and that administrative tools were first designed not as a means of extracting and accumulating wealth but precisely to prevent such things from happening” (422-23). This, once again, reveals that the roots of social equality are embedded within the history of humanity. The global inequality under which the modern world is governed was not inevitable.

The authors offer some explanation of how such arrangements get altered over time. In the case of such places as Tell Sabi Abyad, the calcification of bureaucratic systems sometimes led to the hardening of authoritarian rule. That is, when “equality could be viewed as making people (as well as things) interchangeable, which in turn allowed rulers, or their henchmen, to make impersonal demands that took no consideration of their subjects’ unique situations,” then faceless bureaucracy is engendered, and autocratic rule often followed (426). The freedoms once afforded to citizens are subverted by the “impersonal, transferable” nature of bureaucracy (427).

The authors further argue that this process, while not unavoidable, does often alter human relationships: “As money is to promises, we might say, state bureaucracy is to the principle of care: in each case we find one of the most fundamental building blocks of social life corrupted by a confluence of maths and violence” (427). Later (520-21), the authors provide another explanation of how these originally egalitarian social arrangements turn into hierarchical rule and social stratification: the extension of charity—to widows and orphans, say, or to conquered peoples—sometimes becomes the catalyst for the establishment of indentured servitude or slavery, or at least the emergence of a permanent underclass.

Still, their larger point is that such hierarchical social arrangements are not inescapable and that there are numerous examples of how large-scale and complex human societies were able to maintain egalitarian social relationships and variations on republican governance. In their conclusion, the authors believe that their work is a step toward a fuller understanding of the possibilities for human society: “We can see more clearly now what is going on when, for example, a study that is rigorous in every other respect begins from the unexamined assumption that there was some ‘original’ form of human society” (526). That, they argue, is the process of mythmaking not the task of truth-telling.