Nishant’s Reviews > The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity > Status Update

“even the most powerful – Roman, Han, Ming, Inca – could not prevent large-scale movements of people into and out of their spheres of control. Until around a half-millennium ago, a large proportion of the world’s population still lived either beyond the tax collector’s purview or within reach of some relatively straightforward means of escaping it.”

“Where we once assumed ‘civilization’ and ‘state’ to be conjoined entities that came down to us as a historical package (take it or leave it, forever), what history now demonstrates is that these terms actually refer to complex amalgams of elements which have entirely different origins and which are currently in the process of drifting apart.”

“When sovereignty first expands to become the general organizing principle of a society, it is by turning violence into kinship… ritual designed to produce kinship becomes a method of producing kingship”

“the case of Taosi invites us to consider the world’s earliest cities as places of self-conscious social experimentation, where very different visions of what a city could be like might clash... Increasing the number of people living in one place may vastly increase the range of social possibilities, but in no sense does it predetermine which of those possibilities will ultimately be realized.”

“How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients.. but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?”

“from the very beginning, or at least as far back as we can trace such things, human beings were self-consciously experimenting with different social possibilities”