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Start giftingThe Dawn of Everything
A New History of Humanity
Narrator
Mark Williams
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Length
24 hours 13 minutes
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“What do you do when a 700-page book about the entirety of human history has been sitting unopened on your desk for weeks, taunting you every time you pass it because you know you're going to love it but, man, it's intimidating? You download the audiobook. I've been listening to this radical, invigorating reexamination of the history of civilization in bits and pieces, usually on evening walks, and there's something about being out in the world while listening to these brilliant minds suggest new ways of understanding it that is so powerful. It's a thoroughly researched refutation of the stories we've been told about who we are and why we live the way we do, and an invitation to imagine a better future.”
— Arianna • P&T Knitwear
Bookseller recommendation
“In this brilliant and sometimes funny reexamination of human history, the authors argue that we are less free than our ancestors, and that it was not inevitable "progress" that brought us here. Using evidence from the last few decades of archeology, the authors contend that the centralization of power in the hands of a few was often avoided in prehistory. This analysis is a hopeful one of a world where we could again have three basic freedoms: the freedom to disobey, the freedom to go somewhere else, and the freedom to create new social arrangements.”
— Michael • A Great Good Place for Books
"An all-encompassing treatise on modern civilization, offering bold revisions to canonical understandings in sociology, anthropology, archaeology and political philosophy that led to where we are today." - The New York Times
A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.
Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.
The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux
David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, among many others books, and co-author with David Wengrow of the New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on September 2, 2020.
David Wengrow is Professor of Comparative Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and has been a visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of What Makes Civilization? and other books, and co-author with David Graeber of the New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Wengrow has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Africa and the Middle East, and contributed op-eds to The Guardian and The New York Times.
Mark Williams is a Reader in Sports Science at the Research Institute for Sports and Exercise Sciences at Liverpool John Moores University. He is the co-author of Mindfulness.