BlackOxford's Reviews > The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Rekindling Historical Imagination

David Graeber and David Wengrow are super-heroes in the scholarship of human development, the equivalent, perhaps, of a Howard Zinn for world history. In The Dawn of Everything they expose the culturally biased pseudo-histories of the likes of Fukuyama, Diamond, and Pinker, not to mention the influential fictions of Hobbes and Rousseau on which they are based. These and many others are little more than literate rumour-mongers, closet racists, and tellers of tedious time-worn tales lacking evidence or logic. That David Graeber died almost immediately upon completion of this original and provocative work is a tragedy. There are so many more idols that need toppling; so many better historical questions to ask.

Here are just several highlights of the meticulously documented conclusions in The Dawn of Everything:

1. The 18th century European Enlightenment was in large part sparked by exposure to the indigenous tribes of the forests of Northeast North America.

2. The so-called European ‘cultural efflorescence ‘ of Homo Sapiens about 40,000 years ago is mythical and was in any case likely preceded by real events of equal significance in Africa that have little to do with an economic shift from hunting to farming.

3. So-called primitive peoples existing today on the fringes of modern states are not ‘windows to the past’ but sophisticated cosmopolitan societies which demonstrate imaginative solutions to perennial problems of human political organisation.

4. Our modern problems of economic, sexual, and political inequity arise not because of anything inherent in human nature but at the historical moment when personal wealth can be transformed into political power and coercive authority.

5. The formal freedoms provided in modern democracies are far more restrictive (and restricted) than the substantive freedoms afforded widely in pre-industrial, non-European societies.

6. Montesquieu’s The System of Laws (1748), a book highly influential in the constitutional deliberations of the Founders of the United States, was very likely the product of contact with the Osage people of the Great Plains.

7. Our traditions of social dominance and coercive authority are derived from Roman Law which conceived of the male head of the family as literally owning the lives of everyone in the household.

The list of interesting propositions contained in The Dawn of Everything could be easily trebled. They are purposely provocative, sometimes counter-intuitive, but always framed by outstanding scholarship. Above all, they are interesting. By challenging conventional wisdom, they demand consideration and attention to the logic behind the historical facts as conventionally reported.

So The Dawn of Everything is really not so much a human history as it is an historiographical critique of the sources, methods, presumptions, prejudices, and criteria of historical validity employed by the humans who have written human history. History is a political activity. And so are the anthropological and sociological studies upon which much of history has been based. This is the point. Whether or not any of the propositions presented by Graeber and Wengrow are ultimately verified is of secondary importance. They are serious hypotheses which have been crushed by lack of imagination.

The tales of human development we tell ourselves are riddled with the politics of the day and form the context of the politics of the future. Every once in a while someone comes along to shake the intellectual cages in which we have trapped ourselves to reveal just how much we have allowed ourselves to be lied to, misled, or deluded. We are beyond fortunate to have Graeber and Wengrow do that for today’s world. They will undoubtedly be castigated and derided but they cannot be ignored.