The Dawn of Everything

The Dawn of Everything PDF Author: David Graeber
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721106
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

The Dawn of Everything

The Dawn of Everything PDF Author: David Graeber
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721106
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. Includes Black-and-White Illustrations

The Conquest of Bread

The Conquest of Bread PDF Author: Peter Kropotkin
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 048631118X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Written by a Russian prince who renounced his title, this work promotes an anarchist market economy — a system of autonomous cooperative collectives. A century after its initial publication, it remains fresh and relevant.

The Anarchy

The Anarchy PDF Author: Oliver Hamilton Creighton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1781382425
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
The first ever archaeologically based study of the turbulent period of English history often known as the 'Anarchy' of King Stephen's reign in the mid-twelfth century, covering battlefields and conflict landscapes, arms, armour and material culture, fortifications and the church.

The Art of Not Being Governed

The Art of Not Being Governed PDF Author: James C. Scott
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300156529
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
From the acclaimed author and scholar James C. Scott, the compelling tale of Asian peoples who until recently have stemmed the vast tide of state-making to live at arm’s length from any organized state society For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states. In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

Demanding the Impossible

Demanding the Impossible PDF Author: Peter Marshall
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007375832
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1013

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Book Description
A fascinating and comprehensive history, 'Demanding the Impossible' is a challenging and thought-provoking exploration of anarchist ideas and actions from ancient times to the present day.

Taming the Anarchy

Taming the Anarchy PDF Author: Tushaar Shah
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136524029
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
In 1947, British India-the part of South Asia that is today's India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh-emerged from the colonial era with the world's largest centrally managed canal irrigation infrastructure. However, as vividly illustrated by Tushaar Shah, the orderly irrigation economy that saved millions of rural poor from droughts and famines is now a vast atomistic system of widely dispersed tube-wells that are drawing groundwater without permits or hindrances. Taming the Anarchy is about the development of this chaos and the prospects to bring it under control. It is about both the massive benefit that the irrigation economy has created and the ill-fare it threatens through depleted aquifers and pollution. Tushaar Shah brings exceptional insight into a socio-ecological phenomenon that has befuddled scientists and policymakers alike. In systematic fashion, he investigates the forces behind the transformation of South Asian irrigation and considers its social, economic, and ecological impacts. He considers what is unique to South Asia and what is in common with other developing regions. He argues that, without effective governance, the resulting groundwater stress threatens the sustenance of the agrarian system and therefore the well being of the nearly one and a half billion people who live in South Asia. Yet, finding solutions is a formidable challenge. The way forward in the short run, Shah suggests, lies in indirect, adaptive strategies that change the conduct of water users. From antiquity until the 1960‘s, agricultural water management in South Asia was predominantly the affair of village communities and/or the state. Today, the region depends on irrigation from some 25 million individually owned groundwater wells. Tushaar Shah provides a fascinating economic, political, and cultural history of the development and use of technology that is also a history of a society in transition. His book provides powerful ideas and lessons for researchers, historians, and policy

The Luso-Anarchist Reader

The Luso-Anarchist Reader PDF Author: Plínio de Góes
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1681237202
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
No book has ever presented a selection of writings of anarchists from the Portuguese?speaking world to an English?speaking audience. In The Luso?Anarchist Reader, writings by feminist radicals such as Maria Lacerda de Moura and anarchist communists such as Neno Vasco are made available in English for the first time. Researchers and activists interested in achieving a more comprehensive understanding of people's movements could certainly stand to benefit from exposure to these texts. Groups such as the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro are organizing in both urban and rural Brazil, sometimes working as part of a larger umbrella organization known as Brazilian Anarchist Coordination or CAB coordinating the efforts of various anarchist associations. Anarchists participated in the massive 2013 protests in Brazil, protests that brought together millions of people to speak out against corruption and for a variety of social causes. Anarchists are active in anti?austerity protests in Portugal against the European troika. Given the visibility of anarchism in the Portuguese?speaking world, Brazil in particular, the need to understand the roots of this anarchist tradition is especially salient. Anarchism in the Portuguese?speaking world during the early twentieth century brought together immigrants, people of African and indigenous descent, and feminists to forge a solidarity?based alliance for change. The young anarchist activists questioning the status quo today stand on ground seeded by the hard work of their predecessors.

Anarchism

Anarchism PDF Author: George Woodcock
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 9781551116297
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
Also includes information on anarcho-syndicalism, Michael Bakunin, Bakuninism, Louis-Auguste Blanqui, Blanquism, Paul Brousse, Carlo Cafiero, Guiseppe Fanelli, Sebastien Faure, Mohandas Gandhi, Giuseppe Garibaldi, William Godwin, Emma Goldman, James Guillaume, Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, Karl Marx, Marxism, Guiseppe Mazzini, William Morris, pacifism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Elisee Reclus, Spanish Civil War, Max Stirner, Leo Tolstoy, utopias and utopianism, Gerrard Winstanley, etc.

A Short History of English Agriculture

A Short History of English Agriculture PDF Author: W. H. R. Curtler
Publisher: Oxford, Clarendon
ISBN:
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description


Seeing Like a State

Seeing Like a State PDF Author: James C. Scott
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300252986
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University