The Dawn of Everything summary

In the 1690s, a leader from the Huron-Wendat people in North America sat down with French colonists in Montréal to debate a variety of socio-political topics. His name was Kandiaronk, and his French interlocutors loved him. They described him as both witty and singularly brilliant. A book of his ideas sold like hotcakes throughout Europe, and inspired a response from nearly every Enlightenment thinker. 

To put his views very simply, Kandiaronk was curious to understand why people in Europe were so obsessed with money and private property. And – come to think of it – why did their kings have so much power, whereas everyone else had practically none. What’s all this poverty about? Why do people put up with it? He didn’t hold back: “I have spent six years reflecting on the start of European society and I still can’t think of a single way they act that’s not inhuman . . .”

Humans were around for more than three million years before they started writing things down. As there’s no written record, we know very little about what happened during that time. 

One thing we can glean from the archeological record, though, is that humans were far more physically, and culturally, diverse than any of us are today. Human-like species coexisted alongside each other, much as giants, hobbits, and elves coexist in fantasy narratives. 

In earlier centuries, shared cultural norms and practices spanned thousands of miles, even continents. Aboriginal Australians and North Americans could travel halfway across the continent and still be among people with the same totemic designations that they had at home.

Our distant ancestors assumed three central freedoms, which are largely forgotten today. 

Scholars often see indigenous and pre-agricultural communities not as what they were in their own right but, they saw them as what they were on their way to becoming: a proper kingdom, whose subjects paid tribute to a ruler. But some peoples, including indigenous peoples of the California region, weren’t pre-agricultural. They were actually anti-agricultural.

Take the indigenous peoples of California. The evidence suggests that they developed their society in opposition to the society of their northerly neighbors of the Northwest Pacific coast.

The ancient Athenians had a strange ritual. On a certain sweltering midsummer day, women would carry little gardens in baskets, planted with quick-sprouting grains and herbs, onto rooftops. There, they would be left in the sun to wilt. It was a botanical reenactment of the death of Adonis, slain in his prime. 

This ritual, which had been going on from way before the ascent of agriculture, can be understood as a type of play farming. It was a game representing a foray into the world of agriculture – a game that eventually became the serious business of producing food to feed large populations.

Given the perils of farming, and the work involved, it seems strange that humans did ultimately decide to settle together in urban environments?

Well, what’s clear is that early cities – which could have millions of inhabitants – weren’t hierarchical.

Some of the societies we’ve considered begin to resemble what we might think of as a state. A state, according to conventional definition, claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force within a given territory.

Three principles form the basis of social power: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma. Each of these has become the basis for institutions the modern state depends on, such as bureaucracy. Many assume that these three modes of domination were destined to come together at a certain time. But how did domination at scale first emerge?

Remember the indigenous critique of European colonist political systems we mentioned back in the second blink? The critique itself didn’t just come out of nowhere. It was an amalgamation of centuries of political conflict and debate among indigenous North Americans. 

From 400 to 800 CE, people began cultivating maize as a staple crop along the Mississippi River floodplain. Soon after, there was an intensification of armed conflict, finally culminating in an urban explosion at the site of Cahokia in modern-day Illinois. Cahokia soon became the greatest city in the Americas north of Mexico. Around 1050 CE, Cahokia exploded in size, ultimately totalling somewhere around 40,000 inhabitants.