The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Unleashed on such fresh environments, Old World domesticates went into reproductive overdrive, even going feral again in some cases. Outgrowing and out-grazing local flora and fauna, they began to turn native ecosystems on their heads, creating ‘Neo-Europes’ – carbon copies of European environments, of the sort one sees today when driving through t

Farming, as we can now see, often started out as an economy of deprivation: you only invented it when there was nothing else to be done, which is why it tended to happen first in areas where wild resources were thinnest on the ground.

diseases brought with domestic animals (or by humans accustomed to living alongside them) wreaked havoc on indigenous populations, creating casualty rates as high as 95 per cent, even in places where settlers were not enslaving or actively massacring the indigenous population – which, of course, they often were.

‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state’s monopoly of violence within a territory – just within a much smaller territory than a nation state

The systematic rejection of all domesticated foodstuffs is even more striking when one realizes that many Californians and Northwest Coast peoples did plant and grow tobacco, as well as other plants – such as springbank clover and Pacific silverweed – which they used for ritual purposes, or as luxuries consumed only at special feasts.3 In other wor

the three primordial freedoms, those which for most of human history were simply assumed: the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey and the freedom to create or transform social relationships. We also noted how the English word ‘free’ ultimately derives from a Germanic term meaning ‘friend’ – since, unlike free people, slaves cannot have friends

Consider the social milieu from which Buddhist monasteries, or sangha, arose. The word sangha was actually first used for the popular assemblies that governed many South Asian cities in the Buddha’s lifetime – roughly the fifth century BC – and early Buddhist texts insist that the Buddha was himself inspired by the example of these republics, and i

It’s precisely this capacity to shift between scales that most obviously separates human social cognition from that of other primates.5 Apes may vie for affection or dominance, but any victory is temporary and open to being renegotiated. Nothing is imagined as eternal. Nothing is really imagined at all. Humans tend to live simultaneously with the 1

a state should be defined as any institution that claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory (this definition has since come to be identified with the sociologist Max Weber).