The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

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

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

Communal tenure, ‘open-field’ principles, periodic redistribution of plots and co-operative management of pasture are not particularly exceptional and were often practised for centuries in the same locations.

for much of human history, the geographical range in which most human beings were operating was actually shrinking. Palaeolithic ‘culture areas’ spanned continents. Mesolithic and Neolithic culture zones still covered much wider areas than the home territory of most contemporary ethno-linguistic groups (what anthropologists refer to as ‘cultures’).

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.

Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong? It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyo

We have already talked about fundamental, even primary, forms of freedom: the freedom to move; the freedom to disobey orders; the freedom to reorganize social relations. Can we speak similarly about elementary forms of domination?

Very large social units are always, in a sense, imaginary. Or, to put it in a slightly different way: there is always a fundamental distinction between the way one relates to friends, family, neighbourhood, people and places that we actually know directly, and the way one relates to empires, nations and metropolises, phenomena that exist largely, o

Many earth scientists now consider the Holocene over and done. For at least the last two centuries we have been entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which for the first time in history human activities are the main drivers of global climate change. Where exactly the Anthropocene begins is a scientific bone of contention. Most exper