The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

When our ancestors, Rousseau wrote, made the fatal decision to divide the earth into individually owned plots, creating legal structures to protect their property, then governments to enforce those laws, they imagined they were creating the means to preserve their liberty. In fact, they ‘ran headlong to their chains’.

Here, Rousseau asks exactly the same question that puzzled so many indigenous Americans. How is it that Europeans are able to turn wealth into power; turn a mere unequal distribution of material goods – which exists, at least to some degree, in any society – into the ability to tell others what to do, to employ them as servants, workmen or grenadie

as any intellectual of the time would have been, and his work is informed by the same critical questions: why are Europeans so competitive? Why do they not share food? Why do they submit themselves to other people’s orders?

When in 1754 the Académie de Dijon announced a new contest on the origins of social inequality, they clearly felt they had to put the upstart in his place.

Académie de Dijon, on the question, ‘Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to moral improvement?’

As societies evolve, Turgot reasoned, technology advances. Natural differences in talents and capacities between individuals (which have always existed) become more significant, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labour.

Zilia wondering why the French king, despite levying all sorts of heavy taxes, cannot simply redistribute the wealth in the same manner as the Sapa Inca.

(Kandiaronk had a point, as we’ve seen in the last chapter; settlers adopted into indigenous societies almost never wanted to go back.)

stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living.