The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

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).

per stirpes,

It is as though modern forager societies exist simultaneously at two radically different scales: one small and intimate, the other spanning vast territories, even continents.

A self-conscious ethos of egalitarianism, at any point in history, might take either of two diametrically opposing forms. We can insist that everyone is, or should be, precisely the same (at least in the ways that we consider important); or alternatively, we can insist that everyone is so utterly different from each other that there are simply no c

imagine we framed the problem differently, the way it might have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like ‘inequality’ sounds like it’s practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise. It’s possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking

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

‘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 first farmers were reluctant farmers who seem to have understood the logistical implications of agriculture and avoided any major commitment to it.

is there a causal relationship between scale and inequality in human societies?