Book Club - The Dawn of Everything David Graeber and David Wengrow

So, we thought we’d make some space in Citizens of Boomtown to share our recommendations for films, books, recipes and things – this is an open invitation for you to let us know about your favourites. There’s no need to post a full-depth review – though you’re welcome to. Alternatively, just give us a title and a couple of words and that’ll be fine!

I thought I’d kick off with this and for no other reason than I’ve just finished reading it. This may not be to everyone’s taste – but I think in time it will be seen as a very significant book and for that reason alone, it deserves a mention.

There are lots of messages to take away from The Dawn of Everything but for me, the main premise of the book is that we’ve probably got our reconstruction of man’s prehistory wrong – perhaps even very wrong.

We’ve become used to the idea that for the best part of 200,000 years, mankind just drifted around on the planet, hunting meat, gathering acorns and living in caves. Basically what we’ve been told is that over all that time, we didn’t change much. Then about 7,000 years ago, we discovered agriculture.....

.......societies based on agriculture needed governments and accountants and merchants and in that way, our modern cultures developed – or at least that’s what we’re generally told. We’ve been taught that this process was almost inevitable and that it played out in pretty much the same way all across the world.

In their book, Graeber and Wengrow challenge this. They show that agriculture wasn’t inevitable, that the so-called agricultural revolution actually happened in fits and starts – and that some people tried it and rejected it. They show that some very successful early cultures evolved without governments, without accountants and without merchants….wouldn’t that be nice???

Perhaps the most important message of the book though, is what all this means for the social inequalities we see everywhere around the world today. No matter what political doctrine is in place, every culture seems to have its haves and the have-nots. The authors of The Dawn of Everything, argue that it doesn’t always have to be like this.

Challenging stuff.