David Wengrow The History Of Human Civilization

TITLE: David Wengrow: The History of Human Civilization | Doomscroll CHANNEL: Joshua Citarella DATE: 2026-02-10 URL: https://youtu.be/GEJ8WAiHRE0

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Where was Atlantis?

Uh, I can’t tell you. You can’t or won’t? I can’t tell you because I am an archaeologist and uh apparently my job is to hide the truth about Atlantic. It sounds like you are gatekeeping a location from me. This is why I spent most of my adult life training to be an archaeologist so that I could hide the truth. Yeah. From people like you, like me, because I want it for myself. like podcasters. Is that it? Okay. Yeah. When you’re all suffering down here, I will be in Atlantis with the other archaeologists just living it up.

Welcome to Tombscroll. I’m your host Joshua Citarella. My guest is David Wengrow, an archaeologist and professor at University College London.

I mean, the idea that the pyramids of Egypt were not constructed by ordinary African people comes straight out of the the roots the foundations of Egyptology and archaeology.

You know, this is an important story if you would maybe share for people who haven’t heard that before.

Yeah. So in the late 19th and early 20th century, the leading archaeologist in the world was this guy uh William Matthew Flinders Petrie who worked a lot in Egypt and Palestine and is credited if you study archaeology you learn about Petrie as the kind of father of archaeological science. He made a huge number of innovations which became central to the way that the discipline functioned.

He was also a eugenicist who firmly believed that the working classes needed to be either controlled or turned into a sort of hereditary underclass and that intelligence and IQ were the preserve of certain select races.

And in his work on ancient Egypt there is an enormous kind of paradox at the heart of it because on the one hand he actually produced a lot of the evidence and did a lot of the fieldwork that actually made visible for the first time the cultural roots of ancient Egyptian civilization. You know what existed before the pharaohs, before the pyramids and all that. Petrie was one of the main contributors to that. But in the process of actually producing all that knowledge, he also did something else which was to place an absolute division between the origins of Egyptian civilization and the continent of Africa. He explicitly denied that Africans could have achieved or produced literacy, monumental architecture, urbanization, all those other things that happened in that part of the world and he attributed them to what he called initially the new race. He just called it the new race.

Who is the new race?

He wrote numerous articles trying to get to the bottom of his self-created question which ultimately came down to craniometry and measuring skulls collected from ancient graves. And he came to the conclusion initially that the new race was definitely not African but had migrated from somewhere in western Asia possibly with links up towards the Caucuses. You see we’re getting closer and closer to white people.

I see. And then there’s a category called Hamite or Hamitic civilization which was also believed to be more kind of Eurasian than African. And these may sound like very obscure ideas but actually the classifications that were created at that time fed into the modern conflicts, ethnic conflicts in countries like Rwanda right up until the modern era. So that actually is at the root of our own discipline and by creating that initial division, it opened that kind of window into which you can insert whatever you like. The basic premise is that it couldn’t possibly have been Africans, and then you can talk about whatever you like. You can talk about the master race. You can talk about aliens from Venus, whatever you like.

But actually, and this is what I mean when I say you’re never going to refute this stuff by correcting their facts. It’s a mythical structure, the intention of which is essentially to keep saying and keep saying and keep saying it wasn’t Africans.

This migration of people, this new race, are these who we sometimes refer to as the Indo-Europeans?

Well, Indo-European is a perfectly legitimate concept in historical linguistics. It goes back to William Jones who pointed out the resemblances and connections among a whole series of languages from Iran to Ireland which are real linguistic connections. But there’s another history to Indo-European studies which goes way beyond language and which posited links between language, culture and biological race, which generally in the early 20th century meant trying to reconstruct and search for an Indo-European homeland, a place where language, culture and race formed a kind of perfect unity.

If you ask a bona fide historical linguist, they’ll explain to you that a proto-language is not a spoken language. There were people walking around using these terms. I think there was someone once who tried to write a poem in proto-Indo-European as a kind of joke. But these are constructions. We don’t have anything like the full range of languages that actually existed. We have a tiny part of the spectrum of what was actually spoken from which it’s possible to reconstruct a proto form. But it’s construction. It’s a historical construction. It’s not a population. It’s not a group of people.

And it’s well documented that in the early 20th century in the mid 20th century this whole field of research was basically hijacked by the Nazis and linked to the search for an Aryan homeland. There are whole books and studies about this and obviously after the second world war nobody wanted to talk about this very much but in fact through the genuine scientific innovations that have been made particularly in the field of genetics and ancient DNA, suddenly this whole language is back again and it’s very prominent in my field. There was even a paper published recently just last year in a top science journal called the genetic origins of the proto-Indo-Europeans.

We’re back to a discourse which says that culture (and we’re talking here about things that happened 5,000 years ago in a part of the world north of the Black Sea for which there’s no written evidence at the time, so we’re talking about archaeological finds, burials, artifacts, that kind of thing) and what’s being reintroduced and I would say normalized again is the idea that culture, language and biology form a kind of unity. The idea that one can sort of escape from the complexity and the mixture of human cultures and get back to some kind of pure essence.

And remarkably the kind of entities which are identified in this way, these sort of proto groups, map very faithfully onto the racial categories that were invented in the early 20th century. And you get very similar looking maps of migrations, human populations moving often in rather bizarre ways that ignore the topography, sort of striding across seas and rivers and mountains, spreading outwards from some kind of original homeland.

Is there some historical record of a real migration that has to do with people out of the north of India into the Middle East that would be described as this Aryan origin of civilization?

This is an explosive topic in India. First of all, it makes the assumption that language is transmitted by people moving around in population groups. Actually, there are a myriad other ways that languages are transmitted. What it’s supposed to conjure up in the imagination is this idea of a sort of tribal society in which everybody speaks the same language, buries their dead in the same way, builds houses the same way, rides horses, whatever it may be. This is a very obvious projection of the modern idea of a nation and of the nation state. All nation states have these kind of myths. The Dutch are supposed to go back to the ancient Batavians, the Germans come from the proto-Germanic groups, the French from the Gauls. This is part and parcel of the romance and the mythology of modern nations projected back onto a mythical past.

But these are very recent ideas. If you actually look at the way that language is transmitted in so-called tribal societies including many of the ones we’ve been talking about, Aboriginal Australia, people are multilingual. They may speak four or five different languages. I’m not just talking about variations of vocabulary or syntax, actually different languages. And there are many other ways, kinship systems, that language is transmitted other than a group of people literally upping sticks and walking around the landscape.

The basic approach is always to try and retreat from the complexity of the present back to some kind of root, some kind of cultural, biological, linguistic purity. Ultimately you come back to the fact that humans evolved on the continent of Africa. You could look completely differently at the whole thing. You could emphasize or research the connections, degrees of connectedness among things. The idea that everything forms a kind of treelike formation that gets you back to some pure original source is a model. It’s an image. There’s nothing essential about it.

[ON THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT AND ITS DEBTS]

I have noticed in the course of trying to research these things that there is still a remarkable resistance to the idea that this thing called the European Enlightenment owed an intellectual debt to anything that wasn’t homegrown on European, Western European soil, which if you think about it is a very counterintuitive thing. This is all happening after the so-called age of discovery, which of course was only an age of discovery for Western Europeans. They weren’t discovering anything. People lived there.

The French historian Paul Hazard in the 1930s wrote a book in English. It’s called The Crisis of the European Mind. I like this book a lot because it goes against the grain of what we’re usually told about the European Enlightenment, which is that it was a manifestation of confidence of Europe’s growing economic power, growing military might, not just in the Americas, but in the Indian Ocean, and that the kind of mental habits that developed at the time, particularly the habit of feeling one could confidently classify all the world’s cultures and societies and arrange them into a sort of hierarchy at which European civilization was always at the top, that this was a manifestation of cultural superiority.

But actually what Hazard argues and I think shows quite compellingly is in the title of his book. This was also a kind of mental crisis for European nations which had only known monarchy and which had only known church dogma and top-down forms of authority. They are suddenly exposed to a kaleidoscope of other ways of living with the encounter with the new world. Not just also in Africa on the west coast when the Portuguese round the Cape, there are Europeans suddenly on the west coast of the Indian subcontinent, before you know it there are Dutch in places like Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. China is suddenly accessible to the European mind.

Hazard’s book shows that in some ways this was the opposite of a confident reaction. It was more like a meltdown. All of the received wisdom about the possibilities, the alternatives, the freedoms that are or are not available to us as human beings are thrown into question in the most dramatic way. These are exactly the kind of topics that people would have been discussing in salons, in coffee houses. So this encounter with other societies that are living in different social forms, different social hierarchies, causes European philosophers to reflect maybe for the first time about the ingrained hierarchies in their own society.

[ON THE INDIGENOUS CRITIQUE — LAHONTAN AND KANDIARONK]

One of the things that I’ve heard you talk about in the past is this practice of writing fictitious dialogues of European philosophers conversing with natives. Could we maybe summarize some of what that is?

Yeah. So if we start with the later writings, chronologically we’re in the second half of the 18th century, writers like Voltaire, Diderot, it becomes extremely fashionable to craft these dialogues with purely imaginary what they would have referred to as a savage. An imaginary exotic character and they would pick and choose. Sometimes it might be somebody from China, it might be a Tahitian, a Peruvian princess, an Inca princess. It was always the exotic figure of somebody who culturally was a total outsider peering in on the oddities, the peculiarities of French or other European civilizations and scolding and berating them for the obsession with material wealth, deference to rank and hierarchy, and the endemic poverty and inequality that existed in Europe at that time.

There’s a huge scholarly literature on this in which it is nearly always assumed that that is all there was to it. But if you trace the origins of the genre, the first real blockbuster bestseller book of this kind was different. It was written by a minor French aristocrat who went around calling himself the baron, Lahontan.

He was different because he was not simply conjuring savages out of his brain. This was a person who as a relatively young man had gone out to the French colonies in what they then called New France, not a million miles from where we’re sitting, but north of the Great Lakes, mostly parts of what’s now Canada and I guess upstate New York. He had about 10 years worth of adventures discovering lost landscapes and rivers. He became fluent in at least two indigenous languages. So these would have been people speaking Iroquoian and Algonquian languages. He was a troublemaker and constantly having difficulties with the French authorities and particularly with the Jesuits who he doesn’t seem to have got along with at all.

But he does seem to have struck up a rapport with a number of important indigenous people who were involved at the time in these very tumultuous and complicated struggles going on between the French, the English, the Dutch and various indigenous nations over the fur trade and so on.

Lahontan ends up being part of what you might describe as an enlightenment salon before the enlightenment. We assume that these kind of conversations about the proper way for human societies to function, about human freedoms, about marriage, divorce and many other topics of concern really took off in Europe first. But actually what Lahontan appears to have witnessed in what’s now the area of Montreal was something very similar that was going on at the time and which is described not just by him but by a number of other independent sources. It was a kind of war of words between the then French governor of that region who was a man called Frontenac, who clearly fancied himself as something of a debater, and a Wendat statesman called Kandiaronk who is described again in numerous independent sources as first of all a famous warrior and diplomat but also a really formidable intellect. People were multilingual at that time. This was somebody who had been to France.

I discovered a letter after the book I wrote with David Graeber which describes some of these encounters. I discovered a letter which I wish I’d found before we finished writing it because it’s actually debated whether Kandiaronk went to Europe and where he got his picture of European societies from. Was it just the colonies or did he really see Paris for example?

The book is called Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled, and in this book which Lahontan writes after he goes back to Europe again he’s fallen out of favor he finds himself in Amsterdam working as a sort of part-time spy and other dishonorable things. And then he publishes these books which become hugely successful describing his time in the Americas. In one of them he stages a battle of wits which features two characters. One is him and his role is to lose all the arguments and the other one is a character called Adario. Adario is generally recognized even by skeptics to be based on Kandiaronk.

In the dialogues, Lahontan sort of plays devil’s advocate and tries to defend all of the sort of received political habits and attitudes including religious convictions of French society at the time. And this other character, Adario/Kandiaronk, basically rips him to shreds throughout the whole thing and points out in this very witty intelligent way all the crazy logical inconsistencies and absurdities and sheer cruelty of a society of the kind that he is witnessing with the French. He’s very critical of the way French people converse with each other. They’re always sort of cutting each other off and being rude to each other. And he says you’re the same with material things. Could you imagine me not sharing? If I have food, I will share it with somebody. I come to your towns and I see people in the street. You let people fall between the cracks. I found this absolutely scandalous. How can you have a society that allows this to happen?

He points out that the various Christian sects who he’s encountered are always arguing with each other. They’re always divided over theological matters. He says, well, if what you say is true and there is just one God who sent his son down to earth and he is so mighty and so omnipotent, how come we never heard of him? Why did you guys have to come over and explain all this to us? And why are you always arguing about it and divided among yourselves?

So it’s this funny, witty, rational takedown of European civilization and it becomes hugely popular. It’s translated into multiple European languages. There are stage plays based on it that run for years and years. And Lahontan suddenly becomes a celebrity and he actually ends up in Hanover at court and he befriends the great polymath Leibniz and there is in fact a letter which I discovered where Leibniz throws into a private letter to a mate of his called Beiring, “Oh, and by the way, you know, this book everyone’s reading, you know, this Adario character, he’s real, you know, he came to Europe and he thought his society was better than ours.”

Most of what I’ve been saying has been pointed out before. It’s not something that David Graeber discovered or that I discovered. It’s one of those topics because of course it carries deep implications. Yes, it implies that what we Europeans consider to be the florescence of our most important values and philosophical achievements are not our own. The west, western civilization is in fact a composite, an outcome of encounters, mixtures on a much more level playing field than we’re used to hearing about.

Because I think any of us who are educated in a broadly Anglo-American European tradition, we get this sense of the western tradition as this kind of impregnable hermetically sealed thing that couldn’t possibly… what could somebody like Leibniz or Rousseau possibly have learned from a non-literate Native American person at that time or an Amazonian chief or whatever or a Malay?

As a result, the way these things are studied tends to get reduced to what was written. It’s studied by experts in French literature. It’s studied by experts in European history who never really feel the need to familiarize themselves with what a Malay person or a Wendat person might actually have been thinking at the time or where those views might have originated.

If you look at the writings of Madame de Graffigny who also wrote an incredibly popular book but this time it is in fact an Inca princess called Zilia who is kidnapped and brought back to Europe and she gives her critique of European civilization, if you look at the content of the critiques, that’s where you see the continuity back to something which is partly imaginary but is partly rooted in the reality, the shock of the European encounter with the societies of the eastern woodlands, the eastern coastlands of North America. So in a way Kandiaronk’s voice carries through this body of literature.

But all of this was written out of the European Enlightenment. People have tried to bring it back in over the centuries and at least since the early 20th century perhaps the late 19th century the standard response has been to say well you’re romanticizing, you’re conjuring tropes of the noble savage. This is often linked to the writings of Rousseau although actually Rousseau didn’t really have a noble savage in that sense at all. It’s a rhetorical strategy which is very effective as a way of basically making fun of anybody who has the temerity to suggest that people of non-European origin could actually have had intellectual or technical achievements that were in any way more progressive than what was happening in Europe itself. It’s a way of shutting down that conversation.

There is a book by a scholar called Ter Ellingson called The Myth of the Noble Savage where he actually chases the origin of that trope. It really comes onto American campuses through the writings of Gabriel Chinard in the 1930s I believe where he writes about America and the dream of the exotic. This idea that all such literature, all such writings are basically mental projections of fantasies or concepts that are dreamed up purely in the heads of European thinkers projected onto non-European peoples who effectively play the role of sock puppets. It’s a kind of ventriloquism. The argument is always that Europeans would have done this because they were terrified of the repercussions if they’d said these things themselves. So they put their critiques of their own society into the mouth of an imaginary person. I’ve never understood the logic of that argument because it’s still them writing the book, but whatever.

[ON ROUSSEAU AND THE ORIGINS OF INEQUALITY MYTHOLOGY]

Much of your work in the last few years, you’ve spoken a lot about the origins of inequality. Maybe define some of that early mythology of what is the Rousseauian story about these origins of inequality.

The kind of literature we’ve been discussing would have been extremely familiar to someone like Jean-Jacques Rousseau who moved in the same circles as many of the other people I’ve been talking about. Rousseau in 1753 takes part in an essay competition. He’s already a well-known composer and a well-known philosopher and a figure in court. In 1753 he enters this competition which is proposed by an academy in the city of Dijon. And they pose an open question which is about whether inequality is a natural feature of human societies and what is its origin.

Rousseau writes a piece which has become surely one of the most widely debated and discussed pieces of writing ever written. In English it’s often just referred to as the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality or the Second Discourse. He doesn’t win. He comes second. Nobody has heard of the guy who came first. He didn’t win the competition apparently because he was over the word length. So they refused to read it.

But then he went on to obviously conquer the whole of human history in another way because the story that he tells in this fable, it’s a fable, it’s a parable. It was never meant to be the basis for a scientific accurate understanding of world history although in many ways that is what happened. Rousseau himself says at the beginning, I am going to do this as a thought experiment.

What are the roots of inequality? He starts off in a way that will be familiar to just about everybody because it is still what we imagine to be the beginning of human history. You’re supposed to begin with this kind of imaginary set of basically egalitarian folk who don’t practice agriculture, have no concept of private property, basically these happy little bands of hunter gatherers. Actually, Rousseau doesn’t even have bands. He has this completely fictitious character that he conjures up who’s not really noble at all but is sort of happy and stupid and also very afraid of coming close to anybody else. This is how he describes humanity in a state of nature. In our sort of primordial soup. This is what we were like, sort of slightly idiotic, unable to really anticipate the consequences of our own actions, but blissfully happy in our stupidity and our ignorance.

And then something terrible happens. People invent farming, they invent agriculture. One day, he says, imagine one day somebody comes out and draws a line and creates a fence, a boundary around a piece of earth and says, “This is mine and that’s yours.” And people begin cultivating wheat, keeping animals and so on. And this is the enlightenment equivalent to the biblical fall from grace. This is where everything goes wrong, changes forever. Humanity is sent on a kind of spiraling downward journey into inequality on the one hand, but at the same time civilization.

So you get the division you referred earlier to surplus for the first time. People have more food than they need. They’re producing their own food. So you get the elementary division of classes and you get food producers and then you get those who benefit from their production but also have time to do other things like invent metal working and chronological systems and organized religion, literature, philosophy. Populations grow, cities emerge, but with each step forward, we slip backwards into more inequality, deeper inequality. So that actually inequality becomes the leitmotif of civilization. It becomes the necessary price that we pay for being civilized.

This was intended as a kind of thought experiment, a provocation. It was meant to make people think about the challenges, the possibilities for human liberty and what we would have to do to reclaim some of those original freedoms. But the idea of original freedom that Rousseau gives us is so bizarre and so divorced from anything real that it becomes the basis of fantasies in the same way that we end up in left-wing thought with a completely fictitious idea of primitive communism as the original human state.

But it is combining what I’ve been talking about which we might describe as the indigenous critique of European civilization, because Rousseau like a lot of other enlightenment thinkers openly attributes a lot of these ideas about the possibilities of human freedoms to the Americas, to indigenous Americans. And it’s always again assumed that this is a kind of rhetorical strategy. But what Rousseau does which has this catalyzing effect is combine that indigenous critique with something else which is a paradigm a way of thinking about human history that is just emerging around the same time around the 1750s.

Rousseau has an associate, a physiocrat and economist called Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, who is also an associate of Graffigny, who’s by no means opposed to ideas of liberty and equality but is rather skeptical about bringing these ideas directly into European society. There is a fascinating exchange between him and Graffigny where he proposes to her that she should change the ending of her book, the one about the Inca princess so that Zilia, Princess Zilia, realizes in the end that this idea of taking apart the monarchy and doing away with money is a bit risky and a bit silly and really we need to be more sensible. Because those things may be fine for primitive or simple societies although the Inca Empire was in no way that, but they could never possibly work in a modern sophisticated nation. Graffigny of course ignores him publishes it the way that she intended.

It’s almost exactly at that time that Turgot sort of gets his intellectual revenge and he publishes a number of essays of his own on what he calls universal history which established for the first time some of the elementary divisions of human history that we still use today, particularly the habit of classifying all societies according to how they get food, what we now call modes of subsistence or modes of production. So he starts off with this elementary division of human societies into hunters, foragers, herders, farmers and then you have urban commercial civilization.

It’s a very profound move because what it allows him to say in effect is that although these savages clearly do have forms of freedom including women’s freedoms which are ahead — these are progressives, they want European society to stop being the way it is, they’re ahead of us — but in these essays, he comes up with a paradigm, a way of saying, well, those freedoms are appropriate to their technological level. Those freedoms are possible, but they’re only possible because these are simple societies, by which he means materially simple. They don’t have advanced weaponry. They wear very few clothes. They live in tepees. Half of which is simply not true anyway. Half of the people who he describes as hunters actually grow crops. But it’s really an idea that almost by virtue of having these freedoms, these people belong in some earlier more primitive form of human society that we have evolved beyond in material terms in technological terms and particularly around the issue of food production.

So you get for the first time this way of thinking about the history of the human species which pretty much everyone takes for granted now which is the most important thing is how do they get their food? Are we talking about hunter gatherers? Are we talking about agriculturalists?

Rousseau’s essay in many ways is a kind of weird fusion between the biblical narrative of fall from grace, an indigenous critique that celebrates these freedoms, and a story about technological progress which really comes from Turgot. It’s the story about how with each advance we kind of get further and further away from those original freedoms. So it’s a hybrid of a number of different things but it is the root of so many things. It’s the root in many ways of a kind of orthodox Marxian or Engelsian view of human history but it’s also the root of stories that are now more likely to be told by conservative thinkers who say that the most intractable inequalities of the present day world are rooted in… I think it was Jared Diamond who described agriculture, the origins of agriculture was the worst mistake in human history.

This has been conventional wisdom up until very very recently. A lot of my work and the work I was doing with the anthropologist David Graeber was trying to push back. We noticed particularly around the time of the financial crisis of 2008 there was a real slew of literature not by people in our fields. I’m an archaeologist. He was an anthropologist. But literature written by philosophers, economists, biologists, geographers, which was quite explicitly going back to these enlightenment fables and treating them as science as history. People refer to themselves as you know I am a neo-Rousseauian thinker. I am a neo-Hobbesian thinker. We thought, “Wow, this is fascinating.” Why is this stuff coming back with such force? And why are so many people who write about it turning a blind eye to everything we’ve actually discovered about the deep human past since about the 1950s?

It’s this strange sort of slipping back into what I would describe as mythical structures of thought which have a very clear function in the present. We said at the beginning of our book The Dawn of Everything there are basically three problems with these very entrenched narratives. Problem number one, they are wrong. They’re just factually wrong on every count. Problem number two, they’re boring. We’ve been going around with these stories for 300 years. Problem number three, they’re actually slightly dangerous because, if you are of the opinion, as I think a lot of people are, that something has to change in the present global arrangements, if our species is going to progress into something beyond the 21st century, the essential message of these stories not as they were originally told (these were originally radical ideas, they were going to shake up the world) but the way they’re told today, is done in such a way as to say, well, basically real change, structural change is unfathomable in a world of 8 billion people. Forget it. Human societies have evolved in such a way that there is no going back to anything else. There is no alternative to what we have now. It’s simply a matter of the best we can do is to sort of tinker around the edges of a system that by the same people’s admission is getting worse all the time. They have the statistics, they have the Gini indexes and the inequality ratios that show you that this system just keeps producing this kind of outcome.

[ON SOCIETIES TURNING HIERARCHY ON AND OFF]

In the broad scope of your work you’re looking at many different instances of which people have been conscripted into forms of agriculture, and we have this narrative about the slow emergence of surplus and hierarchy and a lot of people actually just drop out and leave those societies and that they will voluntarily disband from that more hierarchical formation.

You don’t even have to think about agriculture. Even before the origins of farming which in terms of human history don’t go back that far. Our species is thought to have existed in roughly the psychological and biological form that we have now for something between 200 and 300,000 years. Farming was invented in various parts of the world over roughly the last 8 to 10,000 years, often much later than that.

Long before that, you’ve already got examples of societies that do what you described, which is kind of turn hierarchy on and off. The problem with the traditional way of looking at things is that all of these people would be instantly classified as hunter gatherers because farming hasn’t been invented yet, which means they must all be roughly the same sort of thing. Except that they’re not. We have evidence from non-farming societies, so-called hunter-gatherer fisher societies that kept slaves, even hereditary slaves, that had kings, that had cities. Equally we have evidence for non-farming societies that were intensely egalitarian and rejected all notions of private possessions and insisted on sharing everything. To classify all these people in the same way would be roughly the equivalent as I think we say in the book. It would be like saying that a Texas oil baron and a medieval Egyptian poet are the same kind of people because they both eat a lot of wheat. It makes no sense.

Hunter-gatherer — this is the magic of Turgot’s scheme is that it flattens out history in this way. So suddenly these people are not fully human. They’re not really relevant anymore. Whatever political worlds they thought they were creating are all kind of locked up in this mode of food production which means they haven’t really got anything to say about the present or about the course of human history after agriculture.

But in fact if you look at societies or even societies that came into agriculture and then came out of it again, like the societies of the American great plains, these confederacies like the Cheyenne, the Lakota, who had had agriculture and then picked up horses from the Spaniards and actually became nomadic again. These are societies that did in fact turn hierarchical systems on and off on a seasonal basis. This was a routine part of the annual calendar and it’s an example that was described in some detail for example by the anthropologist Robert Lowie. In their case it’s very closely connected to hunting and to the great buffalo, the bison drives which were absolutely crucial for these societies. That’s when you stored up food for the winter. That’s when you got hides and horn and other materials that were essential for survival.

In those times of year, the societies of the great plains would form into incredibly hierarchical structures. Martial law during the Buffalo season. It’s literally described as a police force. You have buffalo police and these little militias that were given full sovereignty. They could punish people. They could physically whip people, beat them up, incarcerate them if they did anything to endanger the organization of the hunt. And then the Sundance rituals that come afterwards. But the point was that as soon as all of that was over, these groups would disband and they would lose those coercive powers. So these are societies that moved in and out of hierarchy and for the rest of the year you’d have a much more egalitarian set of arrangements.

What was the method for the allocation of the surplus that they would accumulate in that time under this Buffalo police structure?

Women often had very important roles in making those kinds of decisions and also decisions about war and peace. I just wanted to make the point about these police groups that they would also rotate the membership between the clans. So you have clan systems and they would take turns. So if you were dishing out hard justice one year, you’re going to be on the receiving end the next year, which is a very interesting theory of policing.

There are many other examples of societies in human history that have done this. If you go back actually before the invention of agriculture it’s very clear that this was a deeply rooted feature of human societies to move between different systems either seasonally. Or you have examples which are quite famous iconic archaeological sites like Stonehenge in England on Salisbury Plain. Those great megalithic structures go back to around 3,300 BC. So 5,000 years ago or more. But what we know now is that they were just the final iteration of a whole series of monuments that were constructed there. Some of them in wood. So all you see now are the little shadows of the holes in the soil where these great wooden pillars would have been. Structures that could have been put up and taken down over many generations.

It’s been shown scientifically that the period when Stonehenge was constructed and the so-called blue stones which were dragged all the way from Wales down to southern England in order to do this happened at a time when prehistoric societies in the British Isles had experienced cereal agriculture and turned their backs on it. They actually go back to wild nuts and berries as their staple plant food. They keep herding animals, cattle, pigs, and so forth. And they have these great feasts and festivals close to Stonehenge at a site known as Durrington Walls where I’ve done a little bit of archaeological work with a colleague of mine. It’s another example of people sort of taking the measure of agriculture. There’s no obvious push factor. It’s not that there’s some sort of climate crisis that anyone’s found or massive crop failure. It really does seem to be the case that for whatever reason, people in that situation just decided that’s not how they want to live anymore and they went back to something else. And there were many examples of this in the Americas as well when Europeans showed up. In the southwest, there were people who had gone back to living from wild resources.

What do you make of this story I may have picked this up from James C. Scott — early human societies were forced to grow crops like wheat or rice or things that would be collected during one season in a harvest. They would be gathered in a surplus because that allowed the tax man to come around and take 20% of your wheat for the year. And then one of the ways that people found, an early form of tax evasion, was to retreat into the hills and grow root vegetables. Would have to dig up all the potatoes.

Absolutely. It’s a very well documented phenomenon of stealth farming where if you’re growing root vegetables, potatoes, that sort of thing, first of all they’re much harder to quantify. They’re also much harder to appropriate. So this has been a classic form of tax evasion for millennia.

You mentioned Jim Scott. He wrote a book called Against the Grain. If you read his argument carefully, it doesn’t say what people often think it says. People often seem to think he’s suggesting that the mere fact of people growing cereal crops almost mechanically gave rise to things like taxation and authoritarian governments. That’s not at all what he’s saying. He’s perfectly aware that there are many situations of cereal growing societies including very large scale ones much larger than Neolithic England that didn’t go in that direction. What he points out, and I’m sure this is the case, is that there is what he calls a kind of elective affinity between growing wheat and authoritarian systems of control.

What often happens first of all is it roots people in place. So it’s much harder to do surveillance on nomadic people. They’re mobile. They’re shifting around. They may be practicing shifting cultivation slash and burn. Once you have people doing rice paddy farming or irrigated wheat agriculture, you get a peasantry. You get human beings whose lives are literally dependent on staying in that one place all year round. So you immediately have a capacity to control large numbers of people which wasn’t there before. Actually what Scott talks about, and what seems to be the case in many different parts of the world, is that it actually happens the other way around. First you get the formation sometimes on a very small scale of these highly predatory groups who really are out to monopolize and control as many resources as possible. And once those groups get embedded in cities for example they begin to impose monoculture. They begin to impose these very rigid farming regimes where rather than having some kind of loose combination of hunting, fishing, foraging and farming, you just grow wheat or you just become rice cultivators. He often cites East Asian sources where you have government directives from the Han Empire basically rewarding retired soldiers for starting a farming estate because it’s a colony. It’s a settler colonial enterprise, which allows you to push out people who have perhaps had more communalistic arrangements who are just harder to control.

[POVERTY POINT]

On this topic of more communalistic arrangements, maybe one of the examples we could cover is Poverty Point as a counter example to this sedentary agricultural society.

Poverty Point is completely remarkable. We’re going back to about 1,600 BC. So more than three and a half thousand years into the past. This is an archaeological site in modern day Louisiana. It goes against every stereotype you have of a hunter-gatherer. When you say hunter gatherer or forager, I guess most people’s image is tiny groups of people roaming around the landscape sort of living from the wild. Poverty Point is a site of urban proportions. Its vast earthworks are as large as the earliest cities in Eurasia, places like Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan or Uruk in southern Iraq, which everybody acknowledges to be the world’s first cities, Liangzhu in China. Poverty Point is on that scale.

But nobody claims and there’s not a shred of evidence to suggest that these people grew crops. These were hunter fisher forager people from the point of view of subsistence who created this extraordinary center. I don’t think anybody really understands what the social arrangements of Poverty Point were. But what we do know is that they were drawing in people and resources from an enormous hinterland. What’s less clear is what was going out of Poverty Point.

Because we’re so used to the idea of trade as the driver of human history, people tend to assume this must have been about commodities. That’s what happens in other parts of the world, including areas that I’ve spent a lot of my career working in. If you go walking over an ancient city in the Middle East, you’re literally treading all the time on ceramics, which are the fragments of these old bits of storage vessels, that were commodity containers, the things they shipped around, beer and wine and other packaged goods, grain, whatever it may be. Poverty Point has none of that. There’s none of this sense of an industrial center which has factory-type systems of putting out goods as a way of creating an economic hinterland.

So what’s it all about? One theory which I think is quite compelling is when you look at the nature of the site itself. It’s been shown rather astonishingly that Poverty Point and a whole range of other indigenous urban scale sites in Florida and actually all over the continent at that time are built to a certain standard, a certain architectural standard, which respects certain ideas about cosmology and orientation to the cardinal points. It is a knowledge system and somebody, even an archaeologist, even figured out the metric unit. He thinks they were using string to basically design these sites in miniature and then scale it up. It kind of fans out in different orbits or different tracks around a central point. It’s like a navel of the world kind of thing where this is the cosmic center.

Maybe it’s a pilgrimage center where people are coming which then extends over a much wider landscape, which would imply that actually if they are controlling anything, it may be something quite intangible. It may be knowledge. It may be access to certain songs or rituals or myths. This is something that was still the case when Europeans did begin to pay attention to such things. They realized that actually the most treasured possessions in a lot of indigenous societies are actually forms of knowledge. They’re almost like copyrights or patents. The right to stitch something on your lapel, the right to perform a certain ritual. Similarly the case with a lot of Australian Aboriginal societies. Even ones that share material possessions very equally will have very rigid and hierarchical arrangements for ritual knowledge. You have to be initiated. You can’t just do that stuff which obviously creates problems for kind of vulgar materialism which assumes that the most precious things will always be the kind of things that we value, in other words that material wealth can somehow always magically be turned into power.

Actually this is one of the things that you find in Kandiaronk and in a lot of indigenous critiques of European societies is that they sort of marveled at the way that Europeans could turn material goods into forms of authority. Just having more stuff in itself would allow you to make people work and do your commands was actually quite an alien principle to many other societies.

Wage labor is actually not particularly common in human history. These things had to be created and I think part of the importance of doing history is to understand and remind ourselves that all of these things were once figments of somebody’s imagination. They exist in the mind before they become systemic before they become rooted in the world. Actually the stories that we tell about capitalism are often very weird. They’re very contrary to what really happened.

For example, it’s often suggested that the rise of capitalism has something to do with free markets and free trade and the release of economic activity from stringent hierarchical monopolies. Actually historically we know that this was not the case. What in fact happened for example in the Indian Ocean is that the Portuguese and subsequently the Dutch and the English actually went in and destroyed entire civilizations that were actually based on free trade and replaced them with very strict monopolies that were enforced. The Dutch East India Company, this was all about monopolizing the spice trade. This is the episode that in grand surveys of world history is called the birth of capitalism. It’s nothing to do with free trade. It’s to do with monopolies which are backed up by gunships.

There’s a case for going back and untangling the histories of these processes and trying to make sense of them and not using this vague language which is ultimately mystifying. So capitalism, oh my god, it’s so complicated. We have to break it down so that we can see that these things that seem like they are immovable like mountains, so that we begin to see and understand again how they were actually created in the first place. It’s precisely this capacity to create things which implies the possibility of creating something different again which I think we’ve lost. This is, if there is something that our species seems to have lost sight of it’s precisely that. It’s that ability to create ourselves. We’ve lost sight of it in the process of doing it. It’s not equality. That’s not what we’ve lost because it’s clear that that never existed in any straightforward sense. If there’s one thing that I think human beings probably did take for granted for most of the history of our species which we have now apparently lost sight of, it’s precisely this ability to make our own histories.

[ON CAPITALISM AND EMPIRE]

How did it spread so rapidly and effectively, or what makes this mode of production capitalism so much more transmittable than other forms in the past?

Empire. It spread through empire. This is the history of capitalism. I don’t think that this is hugely mysterious. These are systems that were imposed by force, plantation systems, forms of slavery that didn’t exist before. Forms of surveillance, work regimes which were often created first out in the colonies. The Spanish silver mines in Bolivia, the Portuguese sugar plantations, forms of labor and discipline. We all talk about line managers these days. Where do you think that idea comes from? Which are then imported back into European societies under a new regime of industrialization. It’s pretty well documented that many of those ways of extracting value from human beings come from empire.

What is the origin of the expansion of empire? Because I think the argument goes that capitalism needs to grow and so based on this dynamic market system. It has to flow to where labor and resources are the cheapest which means expanding and then you have a kind of bourgeois merchant class like the owners of industry and capital that then apply political pressure to expand the empire through military force. But are you suggesting that it works the other way around?

Yeah, it did work the other way around. If you look at an example like the Dutch East India Company, which by the later part of the 17th century had achieved an incredible monopoly over the spice trade in the Indian Ocean. They controlled all the key choke points, the straits of Malacca, the strait of Hormuz, the Bab el Mandeb in the way into the Red Sea. How did they do that? Well, they were first of all following in the footsteps of the Portuguese who basically burnt and blasted their way around the whole circuit of the Indian Ocean, breaking into all these pre-existing trading systems, which had actually been functioning on what some people would probably describe as a vaguely proto-capitalist basis. These societies with joint stock ventures and they used money and they had systems of weights and measures. They had law codes about trade and what should go on with cargo on a ship. These were not primitive societies by any means.

What they didn’t have were gunships. Now Europeans got gunpowder from East Asia when the Mongols invaded China. Also print technology comes into Western Europe at that time. I’ve been to this museum in southern China in Fujian province in Quanzhou which was then the greatest maritime port in the world in the days of Marco Polo. They have a maritime museum there where they show you the evolution of ships. The Chinese at that time were building these huge ships. They call them junks. They’re like floating hotels. You get thousands of people on these things. The only innovation that Europeans really introduced into this mercantile maritime civilization was putting cannons on the ships and then basically just sitting off the coastline and blasting the hell out of Calicut or these other places and just literally blasting Muslims into submission. So there’s nothing terribly complicated about this. It’s empire.

What they also did was insist on fixed prices and monopolies. There was a genocide on the Banda Islands which at the time, it’s very nicely described very painfully described in Amitav Ghosh’s book The Nutmeg’s Curse. This was the only place in the world where nutmegs and mace grew at that time. The Dutch were frustrated in the Banda Islands. They were used to getting to port cities, finding the big chief, the sultan, the raja, and basically bullying them into submission and getting what they wanted. In the Banda Islands, they’d actually done away with all the big chiefs. They’d done away with the sultans and they’d created a kind of democracy where actually decisions were made collectively. I think it’s more of an oligarchy I would say. Where you had the heads of trade, the big merchant families would meet in these big collectives and they would go through this rather arduous process of decision-making which the Dutch had no patience for and weren’t really getting anywhere. And one particular admiral took it upon himself to wipe out the entire population of the Banda Islands. They killed everybody and then they brought slaves to work on plantations. They actually decimated the nutmeg groves and replanted them in other places where they could control the trade.

You can call that capitalism if you want to, but I don’t see any great magical mystery about it. It’s a very brutal extractive thing which then creates the kind of wealth. Why did this happen? It happened because the Spanish crown, the Habsburg Empire cut off the Dutch ports. They’d always been the middlemen. When the Portuguese monopolized the spice trade, Spain and Portugal form a union, the so-called Iberian Union. There’s a succession crisis in Portugal and Portugal is basically incorporated into the Habsburg Empire and as a result of that the Dutch who’d always been the intermediaries between the very lucrative spice trade which is funding their cities, funding the Dutch golden age, funding their wars of freedom against the Spanish Empire. After the Iberian Union the Spanish crown cuts what was then the United Provinces of the Netherlands of which Holland was just one of seven. It cuts them off completely from that trade. So they begin to take things into their own hands and found their own colonies and start to actually compete for access to these routes.

One only has to wonder what would have happened if China which until then had actually been the dominant economic power in those regions, maritime power, withdrew from the Indian Ocean about 80 years before the Portuguese arrive. There is a change of policy in China under the Ming dynasty which is completely against any kind of private trade especially overseas. So when the Portuguese show up in places like southern India, there’s still a memory of these great treasure fleets coming from China, the great Admiral Zheng He who’s like their equivalent of Magellan or Columbus. They were sailing Chinese fleets all the way to East Africa. Some people think they even got down to the straits of Madagascar. This is just a few decades before the Portuguese arrived. Then China withdraws entirely from the Indian Ocean. It’s a great illustration of the sense in which human history is sometimes a product of accidents. If they would have just hung on 50 years, 80 years longer, Vasco da Gama and Alfonso de Albuquerque would have showed up and run headlong into a Chinese thalassocracy, a Chinese maritime empire in the Indian Ocean. What would modern history have looked like then? Would capitalism even have unfolded in the same way? What would have happened to the slave trade? Most of the silver that was being mined by indigenous and African slave labor in South America in places like Bolivia in the Andes was actually feeding the Chinese market because there was a terrible shortage of silver there. So all of these things were already connected on a global scale.

[ON INTERNATIONAL LAW AND HUGO GROTIUS]

Take international law for example, which is on everyone’s lips and minds right now. What are the roots of international law? If you read the books by legal historians, they generally trace it back either to the Spanish philosophers of the school of Salamanca who were basically coming up with rationalizations for the Spanish Empire in the Americas or more usually to the work of a Dutch lawyer and philosopher called Hugo Grotius who’s often credited with coming up with the foundations of the modern political order and the idea of a rules-based system of international relations is always traced back to him.

Now what was the context in which Grotius was writing? The text which is often held up as being the root the foundation of modern international law is a short text which was published by Grotius initially anonymously in 1609 called Mare Liberum which means the freedom of the seas and it’s a justification for why the Dutch should be allowed to trade in the Indian Ocean as against the Portuguese monopoly which was being enforced at the time. So it’s always presented as an argument for free trade. It was originally part of a much larger treatise which also laid out a theory of justice and a theory of just war and peace.

What’s sometimes referred to as the Grotian tradition is basically the idea that we should have a rules-based order where the decision to go to war or to make peace or to trade openly on the seas and on land is not made at the whim of some individual or some great ruler but functions according to a set of general principles that nations subscribe to. This is essentially the basis of what theorists call an idealist notion of international relations as opposed to a realist idea which is the idea that basically international relations is this kind of Hobbesian dog eat dog brutal space in which the strong man will always prevail. The alternative to that is often said to be the Grotian subversion where we do things in the United Nations and the World Trade Organization and so on.

If you actually go back and look at the origins of all this, why was that document written in the first place? The Mare Liberum, the freedom of the seas. It was actually the legal justification for an act of piracy committed by the Dutch against a Portuguese spice ship in the straits of Singapore. They literally blasted this ship called the Santa Catarina to smithereens, carted the remnants back to Amsterdam and sold the cargo which was at the time worth about half the value of the stocks and shares of the Dutch East India Company. It was an enormous act of robbery on the high seas. And then they basically employ Hugo Grotius, who’s this sort of genius young lawyer, to come up with a legal justification for why it was okay to do this. And weirdly, this is the root of what we now consider to be international law.

There’s clearly a story there that needs to be unpicked and understood not just by legal historians but I think by all of us right now who are saying well what happened to this idea of a world governed by law and rules. Well it’s never really looked that way to more than half of the world who were perfectly conscious that this system of international law was stacked against them from the very beginning.

[ON THE NEW RIGHT AND VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE]

The left has abandoned its relationship to the enlightenment in many cases and we have seen within a generation now the right is reclaiming Hobbes, is reclaiming monarchy, brands itself as the dark enlightenment. And we don’t necessarily have many of the tools to push back against that right now. In a similar sense, the left has moved away from this more orthodox Marxist interpretation of teleology and within a generation, the right is now proposing its own teleology, which is the emergence of network states, the private non-contiguous state, the most pronounced acute form of neoliberalism. What are the tools that we have in our arsenal to push back against this new advocacy for monarchy and dictatorship?

The first thing I’d want to ask anybody who advocated for a dictatorial monarchic system is where they see themselves within it. Often as the king. And then what’s my role? I think we have to bring things back to human beings to actual people and not abstractions. What exactly is envisaged? When you say monarchy, that can mean so many different things.

I’m a little wary of the intellectualization of the new right. At the root, I think of a lot of what’s going on, and I think this is a terrible problem for the left in general, is a lack of introspection, and a lack of interest in why ordinary working people are voting for and supporting the kind of things that you’re talking about.

I think there is a tendency to think that if we can somehow fathom what the inner cabal of these far-right movements you’re talking about, what do they really want or what is their intellectual genealogy? Is it some kind of strange iteration of Friedrich Hayek or something? I don’t think the vast majority of people in the world give a frankly. I’m sure in their own minds they do, but would they still be doing it if there wasn’t a kind of center of gravity to all this? There’s been a power grab, multiple power grabs around the world to which a whole rag of people are gravitating, whether it’s the tech aspect of that or the so-called race realists, let’s just call them racists. These things don’t necessarily have any great coherence or scheme around them. They’re things that basically gravitate to a center of power.

I think there is a risk when you start, before we even know what the outcome of any of this is going to be before you even start trying to really resist, you start trying to construct genealogies and histories of this. It may be very interesting at some point in the distant future to try and do that as a sort of intellectual exercise but in terms of resistance, I think it’s either beside the point or possibly even counterproductive.

I think we need to be worrying about ordinary people who are attracted to these ideas. What is it that the idea of living in a sort of caste system or a rigid class system, we’re back to really classic questions. What was his name in the 16th century? Étienne de la Boétie. Not as famous as Rousseau, but he probably should be because he asked the question about voluntary servitude. Why do people like it? Why they like being slapped around? Why do they like authority? Where does that come from?

I don’t think you’re going to find the answers to that in some kind of intellectual genealogy. I think you find the answers to that in the home, in the workplace, in relations that are comprehensible and accessible to people. Not in the books and the theories that are written about them. I think you find them in gender relations. I think you find them in relations between the elderly and the young. And I think you find them in problems that people have with things like loneliness and friendship and actually being able to form meaningful bonds with each other and forms of solidarity that would actually give them the freedom and the security to experiment or try other ways of organizing. I think that is deliberate. There is a great deal around us in the world that pushes people into these situations of enormous isolation and atomization. Along with that you have the breakdown of very fundamental social bonds.

I completely agree with you that we need much more serious attention to how right-wing thought really functions in society. Actually, I think one of the most interesting thinkers on this actually started as an archaeologist. It was an Italian polymath died very young in the 1960s. Guy called Furio Jesi. He was from an interesting family background. His father was a man called Bruno Jesi. They were Italian Jewish family from a sort of rabbinical background. But Bruno Jesi the father became an ardent supporter of fascism and actually fought with Mussolini’s cavalry in Ethiopia and was such an efficient killing machine that he was granted the great honor of being Aryanized. So he didn’t have to be Jewish anymore. So poor little Furio grows up with this legacy and ends up writing a book called Cultura di Destra, the culture of the right, which is partly and very unfortunately my Italian is virtually non-existent. Some of it is I think quite badly translated into English, but it is a really intriguing and fascinating analysis of right-wing thought, which actually focuses a lot on myth and on the idea of myth and what he calls the myth machine. How do you take fundamental social concepts, things like friendship or love, and turn them into their opposites so that they actually become conduits for violence and exploitation and ostracization and oppression?

These to me are the things we need to understand. How these structures of violence and hierarchy managed to embed themselves in people’s hearts so that they actually feel they’re doing something good. That’s the level at which I personally think these problems need to be understood and addressed. I can’t say I’m a great fan or take any great interest in the more sort of abstract theorization around it. These issues are just too urgent.

[ON THE THIRD FREEDOM]

Can I ask you about some of the research you’re doing now? This third freedom that we discussed before. What is the third freedom?

Actually, it’s very appropriate to talk to you about it here in New York because I had the idea for the book I’m writing here. It took me a long time relatively long time after my co-author on The Dawn of Everything died in a very sudden and shocking way. Before that book was actually published. The book that I wrote with David Graeber basically took over my life for about two years. A lot of that has been fantastic. But it’s all also very bittersweet because he was really looking forward to it coming out and we should have been having all those conversations together.

If you spent 10 years working closely with a person like David Graeber. He had a really exceptional mind. I think he was certainly the most important social thinker of my generation or adjacent generations. When you write with somebody and you have that level of intellectual intimacy for such a long period of time, it’s like you kind of sort of slightly rent out part of your brain to them and they do the same for you.

It took me a long time to figure out what to do next because we put all these ideas out there. The book we wrote was just meant to be the beginning of a much larger project. A trilogy. He’d always insisted that we do that book and then we’d have to do three more. David would always say that this one is like The Hobbit and then we have to do The Lord of the Rings. As I pointed out to him, it doesn’t work because The Hobbit’s quite a short book and The Dawn of Everything is more like The Return of the King or The Two Towers or something. And there’s no way without him that I’m going to embark on something like that.

But I got a sabbatical. I got some research leave a couple of years ago from my university and I didn’t want to waste that time and I was here in New York. I must have had David on my mind because this is where I got to know him really, in Manhattan. I decided to do a deep dive into some of his early work, which I’d read some of. By no means all of it. He was very prolific. His PhD at the University of Chicago and his ethnographic work was all in the central highlands of Madagascar.

To my surprise, once I really got into it, I realized that actually a lot of his early work was about trauma and memory, which I think is not something that mostly people associate with him. It resonated with me at many levels. It also kind of gave me a way in to carrying this on in a way which remains in dialogue. Obviously not with him because he’s gone but with his ideas and it also gave me a geographical point of orientation which is Madagascar.

If you know anything about the history of Madagascar, it immediately gets you into a whole series of connections. Coming back to language, the original population of Madagascar can be traced linguistically and genetically to the other side of the Indian Ocean. Borneo areas like that. And weirdly enough that whole region, basically the whole rim of the Indian Ocean, is hardly touched on. It’s one of many areas that are hardly touched on in the book we wrote together. I’m sure we would have come on to it. I don’t think there’s even any mention of Madagascar in The Dawn of Everything because our interests took us in a totally different direction.

That kind of gave me a way in. I’ve become very interested in not just the connections around the Indian Ocean but also the way that relates to some of the things we talked about earlier to do with the origins of our present global order, international law, international relations very much comes out of the European, the northern European encounter with the Indian Ocean.

What I’m working on follows a rather similar structure to The Dawn of Everything. It actually begins with Hugo Grotius and the origins of international law, the freedom of the seas and the way that our present world order comes out of those cultural and intellectual encounters. But also then how the same body of water contains materials for a completely different understanding of human freedoms.

The rest of the book explores a way of looking at history that we developed together in The Dawn of Everything which is based around the idea that there are in fact certain elementary forms of human freedom which are interconnected. Elementary not in the sense that they’re primordial necessarily but in the sense that if you take one of them away it has effects on the other.

Those are firstly the freedom to move away from your surroundings, relocate, and receive hospitality at your point of destination. So for example that would be the basis of these very extensive clan systems that we were talking about in North America or indeed in Australia.

The second elementary form of freedom is the freedom to disobey commands, which is something that goes back to what we originally talked about. It was observed by many of the first Europeans particularly the Jesuits were incredibly frustrated that there weren’t really structures of command in the Iroquoian and Algonquian societies they were encountering in the Great Lakes region and they perceived a very clear connection between that and the very highly developed traditions and forms of oratory and discussion and debate that existed in those societies. The basic premise is that if you have chiefs who can’t command and who are not automatically obeyed the only way to really engage people in any kind of social project is through persuasion, discussion and debate. This is a logical relationship and the basis of what you might call a participatory form of democracy.

So to move away, to disobey, and then the third freedom, the most important freedom, is precisely the freedom to imagine and create alternative forms of society or move between different social realities. The book will explore in a more systematic way with a whole new range of historical and archaeological examples, the connections among these forms of freedom.

Part of the fascination of that whole region the Indian Ocean is that it lies on the cusp of some of the largest and oldest empires in world history. But it’s not part of them. I think we’re very bad at conceptualizing the history of those kinds of societies. So that’s roughly the scope of what I’m working on.

David Wengrow, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you.