The Dawn of Everything
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity is a 2021 book by the anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow.
Describing the diversity of early human societies, the book critiques traditional narratives of history's linear development from primitivism to civilization. Instead, The Dawn of Everything posits that humans lived in large, complex, but decentralized polities for millennia. The book suggests that social emancipation can be found in a more accurate understanding of human history, based on recent scientific evidence with the assistance of the fields of anthropology and archaeology.
Graeber and Wengrow finished the book around August 2020. Its American edition is 704 pages long, including a 63-page bibliography. It was first published in the United Kingdom on 19 October 2021 by Allen Lane.
The Dawn of Everything received substantial attention in mainstream and academic publications, becoming an international bestseller, and was translated into more than thirty languages. It was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and was awarded the Wenjin Book Prize, given by the National Library of China and considered one of China's highest literary honours. In 2025, The Dawn of Everything was awarded the J.I. Staley Prize by the School for Advanced Research in recognition of ‘exceptional scholarship and writing that expand the boundaries of anthropological thought.’
Summary
The authors open the book by suggesting that current popular views on the progress of western civilization, as presented by Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Yuval Noah Harari, Charles C. Mann, Steven Pinker, and Ian Morris, are not supported by anthropological or archaeological evidence, but owe more to philosophical dogmas inherited unthinkingly from the Age of Enlightenment. The authors refute the Hobbesian and Rousseauian view on the origin of the social contract, stating that there is no single original form of human society. Moreover, they argue that the transition from foraging to agriculture was not a civilization trap that laid the ground for social inequality, and that throughout history, large-scale societies have often developed in the absence of ruling elites and top-down systems of management.Origins of inequality
Rejecting the "origins of inequality" as a framework for understanding human history, the authors consider where this question originated, and suggest it occurred during encounters between European settlers and the Indigenous populations of North America. They argue that the latter provided a powerful counter-model to European civilisation and a sustained critique of its hierarchy, patriarchy, punitive law, and profit-motivated behaviour, which entered European thinking in the 18th century through travellers' accounts and missionary relations. This was then imitated by the thinkers of the Enlightenment. They illustrate this process through the historical example of the Wendat leader Kondiaronk, and his depiction in the best-selling works of the Baron Lahontan, who had spent ten years in the colonies of New France.The authors further argue that the standard narrative of social evolution, including the framing of history as modes of production and a progression from hunter-gatherer to farmer to commercial civilisation, originated partly as a way of silencing this Indigenous critique, and recasting human freedoms as naïve or primitive features of social development.
Archaeological and anthropological evidence
Subsequent chapters develop these initial claims with archaeological and anthropological evidence. The authors describe ancient and modern communities that self-consciously abandoned agricultural living, employed seasonal political regimes, and constructed urban infrastructure with egalitarian social programs.The authors then present extensive evidence for the diversity and complexity of political life among non-agricultural societies on different continents, from Japan to the Americas, including cases of monumental architecture, slavery, and the self-conscious rejection of slavery through a process of cultural schismogenesis. They then examine archaeological evidence for processes that eventually led to the adoption and spread of agriculture, concluding that there was no Agricultural Revolution, but a process of slow change, taking thousands of years to unfold on each of the world's continents, and sometimes ending in demographic collapse. They conclude that ecological flexibility and sustained biodiversity were key to the successful establishment and spread of early agriculture.
The authors then go on to explore the issue of scale in human history, with archaeological case studies from early China, Mesoamerica, Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa. They conclude that contrary to standard accounts, the concentration of people in urban settlements did not lead mechanistically to the loss of social freedoms or the rise of ruling elites. While acknowledging that in some cases, social stratification was a defining feature of urban life from the beginning, they also document cases of early cities that present little or no evidence of social hierarchies, lacking such elements as temples, palaces, central storage facilities, or written administration, as well as examples of cities like Teotihuacan, that began as hierarchical settlements, but reversed course to follow more egalitarian trajectories, providing high quality housing for the majority of citizens. They also discuss at some length the case of Tlaxcala as an example of Indigenous urban democracy in the Americas, before the arrival of Europeans, and the existence of democratic institutions such as municipal councils and popular assemblies in ancient Mesopotamia.
Reception
Critical reception and sales
The book was widely praised in various publications and received substantial attention in mainstream publications. Gideon Lewis-Kraus said in The New Yorker that the book "aspires to enlarge our political imagination by revitalizing the possibilities of the distant past". In The Atlantic, William Deresiewicz described the book as "brilliant" and "inspiring", stating that it "upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change." Andrew Anthony in The Observer said the authors persuasively replace "the idea of humanity being forced along through evolutionary stages with a picture of prehistoric communities making their own conscious decisions of how to live". Bryan Appleyard in his review for The Sunday Times called it "pacey and potentially revolutionary." The anthropologist Giulio Ongaro, stated in Jacobin that "Graeber and Wengrow do to human history what did to astronomy and biology respectively". Reviewing for Science, Erle Ellis described The Dawn of Everything as "a great book that will stimulate discussions, change minds, and drive new lines of research".The book entered The New York Times best-seller list at No. 2 for the week of November 28, 2021, while its German translation entered Der Spiegel Bestseller list at No.1. It was named a Sunday Times, Observer and BBC History Book of the Year. The book was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Historian David Edgerton, who chaired the judges panel, praised the book, saying it "genuinely is a new history of humanity" and a "celebration of human freedom and possibility, based on a reexamination of prehistory, opening up the past to make new futures possible."
Academic reception
The book was awarded the J.I. Staley Prize for exceptional scholarship by the School for Advanced Research. Morris W. Foster, President of SAR, stated that ‘The Staley Prize honors work that redefines how we understand humanity. The Dawn of Everything does exactly that.’Numerous anthropologists and archaeologists praised the book's ambition and synthesis of recent archaeological evidence. The book was praised by professional anthropologists and archaeologists for challenging traditional narratives of history with depth and rigor. In Anthropology Today, social anthropologist Luiz Costa compared its scope and importance to classic works by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Writing for the New York Journal of Books, anthropologist James H. McDonald suggested that The ''Dawn of Everything "may well prove to be the most important book of the decade, for it explodes deeply held myths about the inevitability of our social lives dominated by the state". Anthropologist Matthew Porges, writing in The Los Angeles Review of Books'' suggested the book is "provocative, if not necessarily comprehensive", and that its "great value is that it provides a much better point of departure for future explorations of what was actually happening in the past".
Historians offered mixed assessments, criticizing and praising the book. Historian David Priestland argued that Peter Kropotkin had already and more powerfully addressed the sorts of questions that a persuasive case for modern-day anarchism should address, but lauded the authors' historical "myth-busting" and called it "an exhilarating read". Historian Walter Scheidel criticized the book for its lack of "materialist perspectives", but also called it "timely and stimulating". Historian David A. Bell, responding solely to Graeber and Wengrow's arguments about the Indigenous origins of Enlightenment thought and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, accused the authors of coming "perilously close to scholarly malpractice."
Justin E. H. Smith suggested "Graeber and Wengrow are to be credited for helping to re-legitimise this necessary component of historical anthropology, which for better or worse is born out of the history of the missions and early modern global commerce."
Historian Brad Bolman and archaeologist Hannah Moots praised the book and drew comparisons with the work of V. Gordon Childe.