David Wengrow - The History of Human Civilization

ELI5/TLDR

The story we tell ourselves about human history goes like this: people used to be simple and free, then they invented farming, and from then on it was kings, taxes, and inequality forever. David Wengrow, an archaeologist, says this story is wrong. It was made up by 18th-century Frenchmen who were nervous about what Native Americans were saying about them. The actual record shows people building cities without farms, taking up agriculture and then quitting it, and turning kings on and off like a light switch depending on the season.

The Full Story

The myth at the foundation of the field

Wengrow opens with a story about his own discipline. The man called the father of scientific archaeology, William Flinders Petrie, dug up the cultural roots of ancient Egypt at the same time he was insisting Africans could not possibly have built any of it. Petrie was a eugenicist. He measured skulls. He invented a “new race” — never quite named, always migrating in from somewhere east, ideally somewhere whiter — to take credit for the pyramids.

“It’s a mythical structure, the intention of which is essentially to keep saying and keep saying and keep saying it wasn’t Africans.”

The trick, Wengrow notes, is that you cannot defeat this kind of story by correcting its facts. Once you have created the empty slot — “not Africans” — you can fill it with anything. Aryans. Atlanteans. Venusians. The slot is the point.

This framework did not stay in dusty Victorian journals. It seeped into the racial classifications that shaped twentieth-century ethnic conflicts, including the one in Rwanda. And it has come back. A paper appeared last year in a top journal called “the genetic origins of the proto-Indo-Europeans,” a phrase that should be a contradiction in terms, since proto-languages are reconstructions, not populations. Linguists know this. Geneticists, apparently, are rediscovering the old maps with the arrows that march across mountain ranges and seas.

The shock that became the Enlightenment

The standard account of the European Enlightenment is that it was Europe, full of itself, sorting the world into hierarchies with itself on top. Wengrow prefers a 1930s book by Paul Hazard called The Crisis of the European Mind, which argues the opposite. The Enlightenment was a meltdown. European nations that had only ever known monarchy and church dogma were suddenly hearing detailed reports about people on other continents who lived completely differently — and in some cases seemed to be having a much better time.

The fashionable response was to write fake dialogues. A French philosopher would invent a Tahitian or a Peruvian princess and make her scold the French about their inequality. Voltaire did it. Diderot did it. Modern scholars assume this was always just ventriloquism — a French writer using a costume to say things that would have got him in trouble unmasked.

But the genre’s first bestseller was something else. A French aristocrat named Lahontan had actually spent ten years in what is now Quebec, fluent in two indigenous languages, hanging around with people who were hosting their own salon-style debates about freedom, marriage, religion, and the proper organization of society. His book Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled staged a battle of wits between himself and a character called Adario — a thinly veiled version of a real Wendat statesman named Kandiaronk, a famous warrior, diplomat, and intellectual who was almost certainly the smartest person in the room at any given French colonial dinner.

In the dialogues, Lahontan loses every argument. Kandiaronk takes apart French society piece by piece. He marvels that anyone could let people fall through the cracks of their own town. He cannot believe that a religion claiming a single all-powerful god has to be explained to him by visitors and is also being argued about by the visitors themselves. The book became a hit. There were stage adaptations. Leibniz read it, befriended Lahontan, and wrote in a private letter — not a public one, no one to impress — that yes, Adario was real, and yes, he thought his own society was better than Europe’s.

“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.”

Wengrow’s point: a lot of what Europeans congratulate themselves for inventing during the Enlightenment was, in part, what they were hearing back from the people they were colonizing. The standard rebuttal — “you’re romanticizing, that’s just the noble savage trope” — turns out to be a 20th-century invention used to shut down precisely this conversation.

Rousseau as backlash

This is where Rousseau enters, and not in the way most people on the left imagine. In 1753 he wrote his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality for an essay competition. He came second. The winner has been forgotten. Rousseau invented the version of human history nearly everyone still carries around in their head: happy, slightly stupid people running around the woods, then somebody draws a fence, says “this is mine,” and from that moment forward humanity is in a downward spiral. Cities, writing, inequality, oppression. The Garden of Eden, with wheat as the apple.

Rousseau himself called it a thought experiment. But his friend Turgot, an economist, weaponized it. Turgot was the first to organize human history around how people get their food: hunters, herders, farmers, then commercial civilization. The genius of this scheme is that it lets you admit indigenous people had real freedoms — including freedoms for women that Europeans lacked — and then dismiss those freedoms as appropriate to a “primitive” technological stage. The implication is that Europe has evolved past them. The freedoms came with the tepees, and Europeans were already living in stone houses.

This hybrid — biblical fall, indigenous critique, technological progress — became the source code for two centuries of historical thinking, including the Marxist version where modes of production determine consciousness. Wengrow and David Graeber argued in The Dawn of Everything that this whole framework has three problems. It is wrong on the facts. It is boring. And it is dangerous, because it tells anyone who wants real change that real change is impossible in a world of eight billion people, so just adjust around the edges.

Hierarchy with an off switch

The actual archaeological record does not look anything like the staircase. Long before farming was invented, you have hunter-gatherer societies that kept hereditary slaves. You also have hunter-gatherer societies that refused all private property. Calling both of them “hunter-gatherers” is, Wengrow says, like grouping a Texas oil baron with a medieval Egyptian poet on the grounds that they both eat wheat.

The Cheyenne and Lakota of the American Great Plains had farmed, then picked up Spanish horses and went back to hunting bison. During the buffalo hunt season they organized themselves into something that can only be described as martial law. There was a literal police force — bison cops with the authority to whip, beat, or jail anyone who endangered the hunt. When the season ended, the cops disbanded and lost their authority. The clans rotated who got to be the police, so anyone dishing out punishment one year would be on the receiving end the next. It is a striking theory of policing.

Stonehenge tells a similar story. The big stones went up around 3,300 BC, in a region whose people had tried cereal agriculture and walked away from it. They went back to wild nuts and berries, kept their cattle and pigs, and built monuments for seasonal feasting. There is no climate crisis in the record. They just decided farming was not how they wanted to live.

James C. Scott described the related move of growing root vegetables — potatoes, cassava — to escape tax collectors. You cannot count what is underground, and you cannot easily seize it. Stealth farming as a permanent feature of human history. Scott’s point, Wengrow notes, is not that wheat causes tyranny but that wheat is convenient for tyranny: it pins people in place, it stores in countable heaps, and rulers find it irresistible.

Cities without farms

Then there is Poverty Point in Louisiana, around 1,600 BC. Earthworks the size of Mohenjo-Daro or Uruk. A site drawing in people and resources from a vast hinterland. And no agriculture. None. The inhabitants were hunter-fisher-foragers building a city.

What was Poverty Point exporting? Probably nothing material. The architecture is precisely laid out according to a cosmological template — even the unit of measurement has been reverse-engineered. It looks like a pilgrimage center. Whatever the elite there controlled, it was not grain. It was knowledge: rituals, songs, the right to wear a certain insignia, the right to be initiated. Many indigenous societies treat ritual knowledge as their most jealously guarded property, more valuable than any object. This is hard to see if you have inherited the assumption that wealth means stuff and stuff means power.

How capitalism actually moved

Wengrow has no patience for the version of capitalism’s spread that emphasizes free trade liberating itself from feudal monopolies. He points to the Indian Ocean. Before the Portuguese arrived, the region had functioning trade networks with joint stock ventures, contracts, weights and measures, and law codes about cargo. Sophisticated, non-primitive, often based on something close to free trade. Then Portuguese ships arrived. The only thing they brought that the Indian Ocean did not already have was the cannon mounted on the deck. They used it to destroy the existing order and replace it with strict monopolies.

“It’s nothing to do with free trade. It’s to do with monopolies which are backed up by gunships.”

The Dutch East India Company finished the job. When the Dutch reached the Banda Islands, the only place on earth where nutmeg grew, they found a society that had already abolished its sultans and was making decisions through a kind of merchant oligarchy with frustrating amounts of deliberation. One Dutch admiral got tired of waiting and exterminated the entire population, then imported slaves to work the groves.

There is also the historical accident underneath all of this. Eighty years before Vasco da Gama, Chinese treasure fleets under Admiral Zheng He were sailing the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa. Then the Ming dynasty changed policy and pulled out. If China had hung on another fifty years, the Portuguese would have run into a Chinese maritime empire and modern history would look unrecognizable.

Where international law came from

The story most legal historians tell about modern international law traces it to a 1609 text by the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius called Mare Liberum — The Freedom of the Seas. It is held up as the foundation of the rules-based international order, the alternative to the Hobbesian view of states as wolves.

The reason Grotius wrote it is that the Dutch had just blown up a Portuguese spice ship, the Santa Catarina, in the straits of Singapore. The cargo they hauled back to Amsterdam was worth roughly half the value of the entire Dutch East India Company. They needed a legal justification for the robbery. They hired a brilliant young lawyer to write one. That document is the foundation of international law.

“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

The interviewer asks how the left should respond to the rise of monarchism, neoreaction, and “network states.” Wengrow is wary of the question. He thinks the left has a habit of trying to decode the secret intellectual genealogy of the far right — was it Hayek, was it Carl Schmitt, was it some weird Italian — when the real question is much older and much harder. Étienne de la Boétie asked it in the 16th century: why do people consent to their own subjugation? Why do they like authority?

The answer, Wengrow suspects, is not in the books. It is in how lonely people are, how broken their friendships and solidarities have become, how isolated and atomized modern life has made them. A society that has dismantled the basic bonds people use to feel safe is a society where authoritarian structures become emotionally attractive, because at least someone is in charge of the loneliness.

He recommends a book by the Italian polymath Furio Jesi, Cultura di Destra, which analyzes how right-wing thought operates by taking concepts like friendship and love and turning them into machines for violence. Jesi’s father, incidentally, was a Jewish Italian fascist who killed Ethiopians efficiently enough to be officially “Aryanized” by Mussolini, which is the kind of biographical fact you can only state plainly.

The third freedom

Wengrow is writing a new book. The Dawn of Everything was supposed to be the first in a series; Graeber’s death made the rest impossible in the form they had imagined. But Wengrow has gone back into Graeber’s early work on Madagascar, much of it about trauma and memory, and found a way to keep the conversation going.

The new book begins where the Indian Ocean discussion left off — Grotius, the Banda massacre, the origins of the present world order — and then turns to what the same body of water offers as an alternative. He and Graeber had argued that humans have three elementary forms of freedom, and that removing any one of them weakens the others.

The first is the freedom to leave where you are and be received as a guest somewhere else. The second is the freedom to refuse commands, which is what makes persuasion and debate necessary, and which is the actual root of participatory democracy. The third — the most important — is the freedom to imagine and build a different kind of society, or to move between several at once. This is the freedom Wengrow thinks the modern world has most thoroughly lost. Not equality, which never really existed in any pure form. The capacity to make our own histories.

Claude’s Take

Wengrow is on his strongest ground when he is doing what he was trained to do: pointing at specific archaeological sites — Poverty Point, Stonehenge, Çatalhöyük’s absent palaces, the Plains buffalo police — and noting that they do not fit the stairway model. The factual claims here are real. Cities without agriculture exist. Societies that turned hierarchy on and off seasonally exist. The standard hunter-gatherer-to-pharaoh story really does flatten an enormous and weird empirical record.

The Lahontan/Kandiaronk argument is more contested than he lets on. Most specialists agree that Kandiaronk was a real and formidable thinker, and that Lahontan met him, and that the dialogues borrow real material. The stronger claim — that the indigenous critique was a major causal input to the Enlightenment — is harder to prove and has been pushed back on by historians of philosophy who note that most of Voltaire’s and Rousseau’s intellectual moves can be traced through European texts they actually cited. Wengrow’s case is plausible and interesting, not airtight. The Leibniz private letter is good evidence; it is not enough on its own.

His account of capitalism as something imposed by gunships rather than emerging from free markets is broadly correct as historical description and is well-supported by recent scholarship — Amitav Ghosh, Sven Beckert, others. The Banda Islands really were a genocide for nutmeg. The Santa Catarina story really is the embarrassing origin of Mare Liberum. These are not contrarian takes anymore; they are mainstream economic history. The framing as a debunking of “free trade” mythology lands.

Where he gets a little hand-wavy is the alternative. The “three freedoms” are appealing but vague enough that they cannot really be falsified, and at moments the argument shades into the same kind of universal-history move he criticizes Turgot for. The claim that there is no good historical case for primitive equality is honest and worth noting; it cuts against romantic readings of his own work.

His refusal to engage with the new right’s intellectual genealogy is more of a stance than an argument. He is probably right that ordinary loneliness explains more authoritarian voting than Curtis Yarvin does, but the dismissal feels a little too quick for someone who has just spent an hour insisting that ideas have consequences and that the wrong story about the past makes the present feel inevitable. If that is true for Rousseau, it is true for the dark enlightenment too.

The deepest thing he says, and the one worth keeping, is the bit about the lost freedom to make our own histories. Whether or not the archaeology supports every claim he hangs on it, the diagnosis of the modern political imagination as a place where structural change has become literally unthinkable is hard to dispute. Whether the cure is more archaeology or something else is an open question.