HISTORY AND POLITICS AS IF WE STILL LIVED IN THE HOLOCENE

Abstract

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), by David Graeber and David Wengrow, is a monumental, boldly revisionist study of the human past from the last ice age to the present. It is geared explicitly toward the present in political terms and seeks to explain how primordial forms of human freedom were lost in ways that resulted in our current structures of violence and domination. The authors explore a vast range of prehistoric, ancient, and non-Western peoples to undermine (neo)evolutionist, stadial theories of long-term human development, particularly any that imply determinism, inevitability, or teleology. If so many peoples in the past were so much freer than we are today, how is it that we got stuck? And are we really as stuck as we think? Graeber and Wengrow successfully undermine the social scientific template of stage-based human development from hunter-gatherers to modern capitalist nation-states, but their book suffers from two major omissions. First, they ignore almost entirely the Anthropocene epoch and show no grasp of its implications for their analysis of the present or prospects for the future. Second, their “new history of humanity” ignores the history that is most relevant to answering their own questions about how we have arrived globally in our current structures of violence and domination: the early modern and modern history of expansionist, colonialist, capitalist, belligerent, imperialist Western European nations and their extensions since the fifteenth century. These two omissions are connected: it is disproportionately the history of the (early) modern West before and after the Industrial Revolution that explains how the planet arrived in the Anthropocene with the “Great Acceleration” around the mid-twentieth century. But heeding this history and its consequences would have undermined the authors’ upbeat political vision about our prospects for the future—essentially, a recycled Enlightenment vision about human self-determination and individual freedom that depends on environmental exploitation as if we still lived in the Holocene. For all its undoubted achievement, The Dawn of Everything neglects the history that is most salient to answering the main questions its own authors pose. What matters most about that history is not that it was inevitable but that it was actual—and that its cumulative consequences remain with us.