Book Review: The Dawn of Everything

“How too, for that matter, could such large populations be fed, without chains of command to organize the masses, formal offices of leadership; full-time administrators, soldiers, police, and other non-food-producers, who in turn could only be supported by the surpluses that agriculture provides? These seem like reasonable questions to ask, and those who make the first point almost invariably make the second. But in doing so, they risk parting company with history. You can’t simply jump from the beginning of the story to the end, and then assume you know what happened in the middle” (Pg. 274). In the monograph The Dawn of Everything from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow discuss the consequences of state formation theory, and how countless anthropological and archaeological cases disprove common assumptions regarding the evolution of civilization.