Dawn Of Everything
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
This strange, fascinating, and extraordinary book argues that the conventional story of the dawn of agriculture is wrong. People didn’t leap into agriculture, cities, and states: they appear to have tried it out, decided that they didn’t like it, and found ways to go back to “hobby farming” with a more egalitarian society.
This pattern was both widespread and persistent: the Eastern Woodlands societies that the Europeans encountered, Graeber and Wengrow argue, had been shaped out of revolutionary resistance to the agricultural despotism of Cahokia. Against Cahokia, the American — that is to say, people born in North America — emphasized three core freedoms: the freedom not to take orders, the freedom to move away if things were going sour, and the freedom to invent a new social order if you could convince some other people to adopt it. What’s more, they speculate that a Wendat/Huron diplomat, on a mission to the court of Louis XIV, may have been the origin of The Enlightenment.