David Wengrow

the whole story we summarized in the last chapter – our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique

Play farming’ of this sort, in the Amazon as elsewhere, has had its recent advantages for indigenous peoples. Elaborate and unpredictable subsistence routines are an excellent deterrent against the colonial State: an ecology of freedom in the literal sense. It is difficult to tax and monitor a group that refuses to stay in one location, obtaining its livelihood without making long-term commitments to fixed resources, or growing much of its food invisibly underground (as with tubers and other root vegetables).47 While this may be so, the deeper history of the American tropics shows that similarly loose and flexible patterns of food production sustained civilizational growth on a continent-wide scale, long before Europeans arrived.

Farming, as we can now see, often started out as an economy of deprivation: you only invented it when there was nothing else to be done, which is why it tended to happen first in areas where wild resources were thinnest on the ground.

Since the first farmers made more rubbish, and often built houses of baked mud, they are also more visible to archaeologists.

although we should keep an open mind; after all, who could have predicted on logistical grounds that a motley crew of Spaniards would bring down a Mesoamerican empire of many millions?

states make their first appearance in history to protect the power of an emerging ruling class. As soon as one has a group of people living routinely off the labour of another, the argument ran, they will necessarily create an apparatus of rule, officially to protect their property rights, in reality to preserve their advantage

Weber, the great sociologist of bureaucracy, observed long ago, administrative organizations are always based not just on control of information, but also on ‘official secrets’ of one sort or another. This is why the secret agent has become the mythic symbol of the modern state. James Bond, with his licence to kill, combines charisma, secrecy and the power to use unaccountable violence, underpinned by a great bureaucratic machine.

the political philosophers of later Greek cities did not actually consider elections a democratic way of selecting candidates for public office at all. The democratic method was sortition, or lottery, much like modern jury duty. Elections were assumed to belong to the aristocratic mode (aristocracy meaning ‘rule of the best’), allowing commoners – much like the retainers in an old-fashioned, heroic aristocracy – to decide who among the well born should be considered best of all; and well born, in this context, simply meant all those who could afford to spend much of their time playing at politics

competitive sports served as a substitute for war.

three elementary principles of domination – control of violence (or sovereignty), control of knowledge, and charismatic politics