Often playful and accessible in style, The Dawn of Everything guides readers on an ambitious intellectual adventure through thousands of years and across continents. Open the book at any page and you will instantly get drawn into fascinating accounts of states that are not states, vanishing cities, kings with no authority, clown policemen and other lively confusions.
In Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Mankind (1754), Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw human history as a fall from grace from the…