I keep a large classroom map from the 1950s hanging on my living room wall. Titled “Beginnings of European Ascendancy to 1600,” it’s an outsized lesson on the politics of historical imagination. The map traces the “Great European Discoveries” across space in colorful lines originating in Spain, Portugal, England, and…
Big History – by Stephanie DeGooyer
According to David Graeber and David Wengrow, the first human communities were far more “complex,” “quirky,” and “interesting” than early modern political thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau made them out to be. No community was ever completely brutish or egalitarian, they argue. For example, the introduction of…
Yes, We Do Know Everything – by Tony C. Brown
Between the title (“The Dawn of Everything”) and the subtitle (“A New History of Humanity”) we have, perhaps, the book in nuce: a big headline claim (everything!) announcing what seems a more limited offering (of humanity), itself presented in familiar fashion (it is a history), though, like all good commodities,…
Radical Enlightenment – by Blanca Missé
David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything makes a compelling invitation to Enlightenment scholars to revisit the “Indigenous critique” of European society, by “taking seriously contributions to social thought that come from outside the European canon and in particular from those Indigenous peoples whom Western philosophers tend to…
The Indigenous Critique – by Robbie Richardson
The notion of the “Indigenous critique” that David Graeber and David Wengrow put forth in their important book, The Dawn of Everything, is a contentious claim. They locate what they believe to be the authentic voice of the Huron-Wendat statesman Kandiaronk in the writings of French aristocrat Baron de la Hontan,…
The Reenchantment of Humanity – by Ashley L. Cohen
In Part 8 of Capital Volume 1, “So-Called Primitive Accumulation of Capital,” Karl Marx takes on capitalism’s origin story. How to explain the existence of haves and have-nots? How is it that some people possess land and the resources to cultivate it, while others have only the skin on their backs and…
Qing Encounters – by Craig Clunas
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Ning Ding, with Lidy Jane Chu, eds., Qing Encounters: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2015) This collection of sixteen essays gives a good sense of the much-increased body of work now being carried out on cultural contacts between the…