The Dawn of Everything

A New History of Humanity

Hardcover, 704 pages

English language

Published Nov. 8, 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

ISBN:
978-0-374-15735-7
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4 stars (3 reviews)

The renowned activist and public intellectual David Graeber teams up with the professor of comparative archaeology David Wengrow to deliver a trailblazing account of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the emergence of "the state," political violence, and social 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, …

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The Dawn of Everything review

4 stars

Another really interesting book from Graeber. As with previous works of his, I understand what the different pieces of the book are saying, but often it may be hard to understand how it is relating back to an overall point. Despite this, it is still a very interesting book that I'd recommend for anyone interested in overall human history and common perception of it.

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