Authors: David Graeber and David Wengrow Publisher: Allen Lane (GB); Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (US). 692pp, 2021

This substantial book is an important corrective to what we think we know about hunter-gathers, pastoralists, early cities and agriculture. The collaboration of an anthropologist (Graeber, who sadly died a year before publication) and an archaeologist (Wengrow), it arises out of their conversations and a realisation that recent research has not been shared across disciplines.

Initially, we are reminded of the contrasting ideas of Hobbes and Rousseau: was the initial state of humanity brutal or blissful? Either way, we have been persuaded that inequality entered the world at some point, whether through the “Fall” or through the “inevitability” of grain surpluses leading to hierarchy and conflict. One or other myth still holds sway over us.

If we say there was once “equality”, of what kind? Standard accounts do not allow for the complexity of egalitarian concepts. Rather than the origins of inequality, this book is about the origin of cultures and of private property, touching on the significance of slave-owning or its rejection. It explores the meaning of sovereignty but also tells of cities without kings.

The first reality check is that the European Enlightenment project was to a great extent a reaction to indigenous critiques of French culture (in particular) by figures such as Kandiaronk (1649-1701), a celebrated orator of the Wendat (Huron) people who was also a regular supper debater with the Governor of Montreal, Hector de Callière.

Indigenous people who experienced European ways were not impressed. And as for European individuals who joined indigenous societies, many did not choose to return. The meeting of American and European cultures from the end of the 15th century is fascinating but only a part of this monumental survey whose scope is the last 40,000 years or so. Other ‘Big History’ authors, Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel, 1997) and Harari (Sapiens, 2014) come in for criticism, for their linear narratives linked to a presumed pattern of ‘progress’.

Particular studies contrast the aristocratic hunters of the North Pacific Coast with the foragers of what is now Northern California. Another myth to combat is that the human spread from Asia to America required a land bridge: it was much more likely accomplished by sea.

The Fertile Crescent and North Africa are the areas of Wengrow’s own excavations, and here he makes useful comparisons of the beginnings of agriculture: not an inevitable progress from gathering to grain-growing but, in many cases, a sort of play-farming on a seasonal basis.

One factor is schismogenesis – the self-conscious differentiation of neighbouring cultures, to bolster identity. Who are we? We are not like them! Nor does history have to be teleological. There is no inevitable transition from foraging to farming. In some cases, for example on Salisbury Plain, cereal farmers gave up cereal farming to forage hazelnuts.

There are important theses around social power. The three bases of social power are said to be violence, knowledge and charisma. There are obvious parallels in elements of the state: sovereignty, bureaucracy, competitive politics. The sovereign state has a monopoly on violence against its own people and may sanction anonymous, indiscriminate violence against enemies in war. In fact, the evidence shows that not all earlier state-like entities employed all three elements, but they have now come to define what we mean by a nation-state. Many earlier societies valued freedoms that we have surrendered in adopting the state as normative: the freedom to relocate, to disobey arbitrary authority, and to imagine and shape entirely new social realities and relationships.

The book has met with mixed reviews, but its supporters lavish their praise: for the New York Journal of Books reviewer, this “may well prove to be the most important book of the decade, for it explodes deeply held myths about the inevitability of our social lives dominated by the state.”

A last word to the Davids: “If something did go terribly wrong in human history then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence, to such degree that some now feel this particular type of freedom hardly ever existed.” (p.502).

Bleak times in our contemporary world need the hope that we can indeed imagine alternative ways of being much as Jesus did in his time.