A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals (Neil Faulkner)

This magisterial analysis of human history—from "Lucy," the first hominid, to the current Great Recession—combines the insights of earlier generations of Marxist historians with radical new ideas about the historical process. Reading history against the grain, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past was not predetermined. Choices were frequent and numerous. Different outcomes—liberation or barbarism—were often possible. Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives great events. At the beginning of the 21st century—with economic disaster, war, climate catastrophe and deep class divisions—humans face perhaps the greatest crisis in the long history of our species. The lesson of A Marxist History of the World is that, if we created our past, we can also create a better future.

A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals
Author	Neil Faulkner
Publisher	Pluto Press
First published	2013
Type	Book
ISBN	9781849648653
Source	Anna's Archive

Introduction: Why History Matters

History is a weapon. How we understand the past affects how we act in the present. Because of this, history is political and contested.

All knowledge of the present – of its crises, wars, and revolutions – is necessarily historical. We can no more make sense of our own world without reference to the past than we can manufacture a computer without reference to the accumulated knowledge of many decades. Our rulers know this, and because they have a vested interest in defending their own property and power, they use their control of education and the mass media to present a sanitised view of history. They stress continuity and tradition, obedience and conformity, nationalism and empire. They purposefully underplay exploitation, the violence of the ruling class, and the struggles of the oppressed.

Their version of history has become more dominant over the last 30 years. Past empires, such as the Roman and the British, have been held up as models of civilisation by ‘neo-conservative’ supporters of imperialist wars today. Medieval Europe has been reinterpreted as an exemplar of the ‘new classical’ economics favoured by millionaire bankers. Attempts to construct grand narratives of history – that is, to explain the past, so that we can understand the present, and act to change the future – have been disparaged by fashionable postmodernist theorists who argue that history has no structure, pattern, or meaning. The effect of these ideas is to disable us intellectually and render us politically inert. Do nothing, is the message, because war promotes democracy, there is no alternative to the market, and history cannot be shaped by conscious human action.

This book stands in a different tradition. It is encapsulated in something the revolutionary thinker and activist Karl Marx wrote in a political pamphlet published in 1852: ‘Men [and women] make their own history, but not of their own free will, and not under circumstances of their own choosing.’ The course of history, in other words, is not predetermined; things can move in a different direction according to what people do. Nor is history shaped only by politicians and generals; the implication is that if ordinary people organise themselves and act collectively, they too can shape history.

This book has its origin in a series first published in weekly instalments on the Counterfire website (www.counterfire.org). It has been extensively revised for book-format publication. This introduction has been added, as has a rather longer conclusion. The short weekly web chapters have been grouped together as the sections of longer book chapters, and each chapter has been given a short introduction. A bibliography has been added so that readers can check my sources and search for further reading, and so has a timeline to help readers keep their bearings through the narrative.

The reorganisation and editing of the original web series should make this a book that can be read cover to cover, but it does not have to be read that way. It should work equally well as a volume of short analytical essays on key historical topics which can be accessed when needed. Either way, it is first and foremost a book for activists – for people who want to understand the past as a guide to action in the present.

Many changes are due to the following people, all of whom took time and trouble to read the text, in whole or in part, and offer invaluable critical comment: William Alderson, Dominic Alexander, David Castle, Lindsey German, Elaine Graham-Leigh, Jackie Mulhallen, John Rees, Alex Snowdon, Alastair Stephens, Fran Trafford, and Vernon Trafford. Needless to say, I have sometimes proved stubborn and rejected their advice, so the final result is entirely my own.

A common criticism was that I have neglected certain places and periods; that the book suffers from Eurocentrism, even Anglocentrism. This criticism is justified. I have done my best to correct it, but I have succeeded only in part. The reason is simple and obvious: I am a British-based archaeologist and historian with uneven expertise. Like all generalists, I can never wholly escape the constraints of my training, experience, and reading, and must therefore seek the indulgence and forbearance of readers who are neither British nor European.

Even on the ground I have covered, I suspect I leave a trail of errors and misunderstandings – inviting denunciation by diverse cohorts of specialists. That, too, is the inevitable fate of the generalist. There is only one defence. Would correcting the errors and misunderstandings invalidate the main arguments? If so, the project fails. If not – if the Marxist approach provides a convincing explanation of the main events and developments of human history irrespective of misconstrued details – then the project succeeds.

Hopefully, though, it will achieve something more: it will persuade some that, since humans make their own history, such that the future is determined by what each of us does, they need to get active. For, as Marx himself put it: ‘The philosophers have merely interpreted the world; the point is to change it.’

Neil Faulkner

December 2012

1. Hunters and Farmers (2.5 million—3000 BC)

Our story begins with a rapid survey of a vast span of time from about 2.5 million years ago to about 3000 BC. During this period, as a product of biological, cultural, and social evolution, four radical transformations took place. First, in East Africa, 2.5 million years ago, some apes evolved into the earliest hominids – animals that walked upright and whose hands were henceforward free to fashion tools. Second, about 200,000 years ago, again in Africa, certain hominids evolved into modern humans, creatures with larger brains and a greater capacity for tool-making, collective labour, social organisation, and cultural adaptation to different environments. Third, about 10,000 years ago, under the impact of climate change and food shortages, some communities made the transition from hunting and gathering to farming. Fourth, about 6,000 years ago, new techniques of land reclamation and intensive farming allowed some communities in favoured locations to increase their output substantially by moving from hoe-based cultivation to plough-based agriculture.

I call these transitions revolutions to signal the fact that they were relatively abrupt: moments in history when the steady drip-drip of evolutionary development suddenly tipped over into qualitative change – from walking on all fours to walking on two legs; from a hominid of limited intellect to one of exceptional ability; from a way of life based on foraging or hunting for food to one based on producing it; and from hoe-based to plough-based farming. By the end of this period, around 3000 BC, farming was supplying human societies with agricultural surpluses sufficient to support religion, war, and groups of specialists. From among the latter, who usurped control of the surplus, the first classes of exploiters would emerge.

The Hominid Revolution

A new form of ape roamed the Afar Depression of Ethiopia 3.2 million years ago: Australopithecus afarensis (‘southern ape of Afar’). Anthropologists recovered 47 fossil bones of one of these ‘australopithecines’ in 1974, some 40 per cent of a complete skeleton. From the slight, gracile form, they assumed she was female and dubbed her ‘Lucy’, but she may in fact have been male.

Lucy stood just 1.1 m tall, weighed around 29 kg, and was probably about 20 years old when she died. With short legs, long arms, and a small brain case, Lucy would have looked rather like a modern chimpanzee. But there was a crucial difference: she walked upright. The shape of her pelvis and legs, and the knee joint of another member of the species found a short distance away, proved this beyond reasonable doubt.

Lucy was probably one of a small foraging group that moved around gathering fruit, nuts, seeds, eggs, and other foodstuffs. As climate change reduced the forests and created savannah, natural selection had favoured a species able to range over greater distances in search of food. But Lucy’s bipedalism (walking on two legs) had revolutionary implications. It freed the hands and arms for tool-making and other forms of labour. This in turn encouraged natural selection in favour of larger brain capacity. A powerful dynamic of evolutionary change was set in motion: hand and brain, labour and intellect, skill and thought began an explosive interaction – one which culminated in modern humans.

We do not know whether Lucy made tools. None was found in association with her remains or with those of her companions. But 2.5 million years ago Lucy’s descendants certainly did. Choppers made from crudely chipped pebbles represent the archaeological imprint of a new family of species defined by tool-making behaviour: the hominids. Tools embody conceptual thought, forward planning, and manual dexterity. They reveal the use of intellect and skill to modify nature in order to exploit its resources more efficiently. Other animals simply take it as it comes.

The hominids, like the australopithecines before them, evolved in Africa, and for about 1.5 million years that is where they largely remained. Although 1.8-million-year-old fossil remains have been found in Georgia, near the Black Sea, these appear to represent only a brief foray into Western Asia. Not until about a million years ago did a species of early human, Homo erectus, migrate from Africa to colonise much of South and East Asia. Later again, a more developed hominid, Homo heidelbergensis, settled in much of Western Asia and Europe. But these populations were tiny and unstable.

Hominids are creatures of the Ice Age epoch which began 2.5 million years ago. Ice Age climate is dynamic, shifting between cold glacials and relatively warm interglacials. We are currently in an interglacial, but 20,000 years ago much of Northern Europe and North America was in the middle of a glacial and covered by ice-sheets up to 4 km thick, with winters lasting nine months, and temperatures below –20°C for weeks on end. The early hominids were not adapted to the cold, so they migrated north in warm periods and moved south again when the glaciers advanced. They first arrived in Britain, for example, at least 700,000 years ago, but then retreated and returned at least eight times. Britain was probably occupied for only about 20 per cent of its Old Stone Age (c. 700,000–10,000 years ago).

Homo heidelbergensis seems to have inhabited coastal or estuarine regions, where animal resources were rich and varied. The standard tool was either an ‘Acheulian’ handaxe – essentially a chopper – or a ‘Clactonian’ flake – a cutter. These general-purpose tools were mass-produced as needed. Excavations at Boxgrove in England recovered 300 handaxes and much associated flint-knapping debris dating to around 500,000 years ago. They had been used to butcher horse, deer, and rhinoceros on what was then a savannah-like coastal plain.

During the last glaciation, however, there was no wholesale retreat. Homo neanderthalensis was a cold-adapted hominid that evolved out of Homo heidelbergensis in Europe and Western Asia about 200,000 years ago. Neanderthal adaptation was a matter of both biological evolution and new technology. With large heads, big noses, prominent brows, low foreheads, little chin development, and short, squat, powerfully built bodies, the Neanderthal was designed to survive winters with average temperatures as low as –10°C. But culture was more important, and this was linked to brain power.

Hominid brains had been getting bigger. Selection for this characteristic was a serious matter. Brain tissue is more expensive than other kinds: the brain accounts for only about 2 per cent of our body weight but no less than 20 per cent of food-energy consumption. It is also high-risk. Humans are adapted for walking upright, which requires a narrow pelvis, yet have a large brain-case, which imposes a strain on the woman’s pelvis in childbirth; the result is slow, painful, and sometimes dangerous birth trauma. But the advantages are considerable. Large brains enable modern humans to create and sustain complex social relationships with, typically, about 150 others. Humans are not just social animals, but social animals to an extreme degree, with brains especially enlarged and sophisticated for this purpose.

Sociability confers enormous evolutionary benefits. Hominid hunter-gatherer bands were probably very small – perhaps 30 or 40 people. But they would have had links with other groups, perhaps half a dozen of similar size, with whom they shared mates, resources, labour, information, and ideas. Sociability, cooperation, and culture are closely related, and achieving them requires high levels of intelligence: in biological terms, brain tissue.

The Neanderthals were certainly clever. The ‘Mousterian’ tool-kit of the classic Neanderthals contained a range of specialised points, knives, and scrapers – as many as 63 different types according to one famous study of archaeological finds from south-western France. Intelligent, networked, and well equipped, the Neanderthals were superbly adapted to Ice Age extremes, building shelters, making clothes, and organising themselves for large-scale hunting on the frozen plains. Lynford in England is a hunting site dating from 60,000 years ago. Here, archaeologists found Neanderthal tools associated with the bones, tusks, and teeth of mammoths.

But natural organisms are conservative in relation to their evolutionary perfection. The Neanderthals, in adapting so well to the cold, had entered a biological cul-de-sac. Meanwhile, in Africa, the crucible of species, a new type of super-hominid had evolved out of the ancient erectus line. Such was its creativity, collective organisation, and cultural adaptability that, migrating from Africa 85,000 years ago, it spread rapidly across the world and eventually colonised its remotest corners. This new species was Homo sapiens – modern humans – and it was destined to out-compete all other hominids and drive them to extinction.

The Hominid Revolution, which began around 2.5 million years ago, had culminated in a species whose further progress would be determined not by biological evolution, but by intelligence, culture, social organisation, and planned collective labour.

The Hunting Revolution

Somewhere in Africa, 200,000 years ago, lived a woman who is the common ancestor of every human being on earth today. She is the primeval progenitor of the entire species Homo sapiens – modern humans. We know her as ‘African Eve’. It is DNA analysis that has revealed this, confirming and refining the conclusions reached by other scientists based on the evidence of fossilised bone.

DNA is the chemical coding within cells which provides the blueprint for organic life. Similarities and differences can be studied to see how closely various life forms are related. Mutations occur and accumulate at fairly steady rates. This allows geneticists not only to measure biological diversity within and between species, but also to estimate how much time has passed since two groups separated and ceased interbreeding. Mutations in our DNA therefore constitute ‘fossil’ evidence of our past inside living tissue.

The DNA date for African Eve matches the date of the earliest known fossils of Homo sapiens. Two skulls and a partial skeleton found at Omo in Ethiopia in 1967 have been dated to c. 195,000 BP (before the present; the usual term when discussing hominid evolution).

The new species looked different. Early humans had long, low skulls, sloping foreheads, projecting brow ridges, and heavy jaws. Modern humans have large, dome-shaped skulls, much flatter faces, and smaller jaws. The change was mainly due to increased brain size: Homo sapiens was highly intelligent. Big brains make it possible to store information, think imaginatively, and communicate in complex ways. Language is the key to all this. The world is classified, analysed, and discussed through speech. African Eve was a non-stop talker. Because of this, in evolutionary terms, she was adaptable and dynamic.

Homo sapiens had this unique characteristic: unlike all other animals, including other hominids, she was not restricted by biology to a limited range of environments. Thinking it through, talking it over, working together, Homo sapiens could adapt to life almost anywhere. Biological evolution was therefore superseded by cultural evolution. And the pace of change accelerated. Handaxe-wielding Homo erectus had remained in Africa for 1.5 million years. In a fraction of that time, the descendants of African Eve were on the move. Or some of them were. The genetic evidence appears to show that the whole of Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas were populated by the descendants of a single group of hunter-gatherers who left Africa about 3,000 generations ago – around 85,000 BP. South Asia and Australia were colonised by 50,000 BP, Northern Asia and Europe by 40,000 BP, and the Americas by 15,000 BP.

Why did people move? Almost certainly, as hunter-gatherers, they went in search of food, responding to resource depletion, population pressure, and climate change. They were adapted for this – adapted to adapt. Designed for endurance walking and running, they were capable of long-distance movement. Their manual dexterity made them excellent tool-makers. Their large brains rendered them capable of abstract thought, detailed planning, linguistic communication, and social organisation.

They formed small, tight-knit, cooperative groups. These groups were linked in loose but extensive networks based on kinship, exchange, and mutual support. They were, in the sense in which archaeologists use the term, ‘cultured’: their ways of getting food, living together, sharing tasks, making tools, ornamenting themselves, burying the dead, and much else were agreed within the groups and followed set rules.

This implies something more: they were making conscious, collective choices. You talk things through and then you decide. The challenges of the endless search for food often posed alternatives. Some groups will have made a more conservative choice: stay where you are, carry on as before, hope for the best. Others will have been more enterprising, perhaps moving into unknown territory, trying new hunting techniques, or linking up with other groups to pool knowledge, resources, and labour.

A dominant characteristic of Homo sapiens, therefore, was an unrivalled ability to meet the demands of diverse and changeable environments. Initially, they would have migrated along resource-rich coastlines and river systems. But they seem soon to have spread into the hinterland; and wherever they went, they adapted and fitted in. In the Arctic, they hunted reindeer; on the frozen plains, mammoth; on the grasslands, wild deer and horses; in the tropics, pigs, monkeys, and lizards.

Toolkits varied with the challenges. Instead of simple handaxes and flakes, they manufactured a range of ‘blades’ – sharp-edged stone tools longer than they were wide which were struck from specially prepared prismatic cores. They also made clothes and shelters as conditions demanded. They used fire for heating, cooking, and protection. And they produced art – paintings and sculptures of the animals they hunted. Above all, they experimented and innovated. Successes were shared and copied. Culture was not static, but changeable and cumulative. Homo sapiens met environmental challenges with new ways of doing things, and the lessons learned became part of a growing store of knowledge and know-how.

Instead of modern humans either evolving biologically or dying out when environmental conditions changed, they found solutions in better shelters, warmer clothes, and sharper tools. Nature and culture interacted, and through this interaction, humans became progressively better at making a living.

In some places, for a while, Homo sapiens coexisted with early humans. Between c. 40,000 and 30,000 BP, Europe was inhabited by both moderns and Neanderthals. There is DNA evidence for some interbreeding – and, by implication, social interaction – but the main story seems to be the slow replacement of one species by the other. The Neanderthals eventually died out because they could neither adapt nor compete as the climate changed, as Homo sapiens populations grew, and as the big game on which all hominids depended were over-hunted.

Stone-tool technology seems to shadow this species displacement. Neanderthal fossils are associated with Mousterian flakes. Cro-Magnon fossils (as Homo sapiens remains are known in European archaeology) are associated with a range of sophisticated Aurignacian blades. The terms reflect two tool-making traditions recognised in the archaeological record. But that is not all. The new culture was diverse and dynamic, producing, in the course of time, spear-throwers, the harpoon, and the bow, and domesticating the dog for use in the hunt. The Neanderthals had been at the top of the food chain, but the new arrivals engaged them in a ‘cultural arms race’ they could not win.

Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge in England is a classic Homo sapiens site. It has yielded human remains, animal bones, thousands of stone tools, and artefacts made of bone and antler. These date to around 14,000 BP and belonged to a community of horse hunters. The cave offered shelter and a vantage point overlooking a gorge through which herds of wild horses and deer regularly passed. Here was a community of Homo sapiens adapted to a very specific ecological niche: a natural funnel on the migration routes of wild animals during the latter part of the last great glaciation.

The period from 2.5 million years ago, when tool-making began, to 10,000 BP is known as the Old Stone Age or Palaeolithic. Its last phase, the Upper Palaeolithic, is the period of Homo sapiens. It represents a revolutionary break with earlier phases. The Upper Palaeolithic Revolution was both biological and cultural. A new species of super-hominid emerged from Africa and spread across the world. In this first globalisation, the species adapted to diverse environments and opportunities by creating numerous distinctive ‘cultures’ – repertoires of tools, work methods, social customs, and ritual practices.

But by 10,000 BP there was a problem. The big game were dying out because hominids had been too successful: mammoths, giant deer, and wild horses had been hunted to extinction. At the same time, the earth was warming and the open plains were disappearing, overtaken by regenerated forest. The Upper Palaeolithic world had reached an impasse. The existing way of making a living could no longer ensure survival. Homo sapiens faced a supreme test of evolutionary fitness.

The Agricultural Revolution

Around 20,000 years ago the ice of the last glaciation began to melt. By c. 8000 BC global temperatures had stabilised at levels similar to today’s. By c. 5000 BC the world had assumed its current form. Europe, for example, took shape as rising sea levels broke through land bridges and flooded the Baltic, North Sea, and Black Sea. The result was a slowly evolving ecological crisis for the peoples of the world. In the North the open tundra gave way to dense forest, reducing the biomass of animals available to hunters by about 75 per cent. In Central and Western Asia the crisis was more serious: there climate change turned large areas into desert, and life retreated towards damp uplands, river valleys, and oases.

It was not the first time. During the 2.5 million years of the Ice Age, the glaciers had advanced and retreated many times. The difference now was the identity of the hominids faced with the challenge of a warming world. Homo sapiens was far better equipped than her predecessors, both intellectually and culturally, to cope with ecological crisis.

In the forested lands of the North, most humans settled by rivers, lakes, deltas, estuaries, and seashores, where food was both abundant and varied. Around 7500 BC, Star Carr in Yorkshire was the site of a seasonal camp used in late spring and summer each year. The Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) people who used it hunted wild cattle, elk, red deer, roe deer, and wild pig, and also smaller animals like pine marten, red fox, and beaver. Stalking and close-range ambush was their chosen method. As well as scrapers, borers, and other stone implements, their toolkit included barbed spearheads made from antler.

The people of Star Carr had a fairly easy life. Refined techniques of hunting and gathering enabled them to exploit the new food resources of a wet and wooded landscape. But in the arid regions of Asia something more radical was necessary: not new variants of food gathering, but food production.

Hunters had long existed in a symbiotic relationship with their prey. They created clearings, channelled movement, provided food, warded off predators, and spared the young. For maintaining plentiful game close by was in their interests. The transition from hunting to pastoralism (the rearing of domesticated animals on pasture) could be gradual and seamless.

That plants grow from seeds is a matter of observation. That people should sow seeds in order to harvest plants was therefore not a giant leap. But it involved a choice – and not necessarily a welcome one. Farming is hard work: it involves long, repetitive, back-breaking toil – clearing land, breaking up the soil, hoeing the ground, scattering seed, weeding, warding off vermin, irrigating or draining the fields, harvesting the crop; and doing so with the ever-present danger of drought, flood, or blight. Then the same again, year after year after year. Farming is rarely an ideal option. Hunting and fishing, gathering and scavenging are much easier.

The Agricultural Revolution is therefore an example of human beings making their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. They were driven to the hard labour of cultivation and animal husbandry by necessity in an increasingly desiccated landscape depleted of natural food supplies. El-Beidha near Petra in modern Jordan, for example, was home to a community of Early Neolithic (New Stone Age) farmers in c. 6500 BC. They lived in communal ‘corridor’ houses made of stone, timber, and mud, ground grain to make flour on saddle querns (grinding stones in the shape of a horse’s saddle), and manufactured many and varied flint-flake tools, including arrowheads, knives, and scrapers.

Geography and climate interacted with human ingenuity to produce different economies in different places. Farming developed in Western and Central Asia partly because it was drier and the pressure on food resources greater, and partly because wild varieties of key species were available for domestication – barley and emmer wheat, and cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. But climate change was global and farming was invented independently at different times in widely separate places. In Highland Papua New Guinea, for instance, a Neolithic economy developed in c. 7000 BC based on sugar cane, bananas, nuts, taro, grasses, roots, and green vegetables. It remained essentially unchanged into the twentieth century.

The first European farmers were Asian pioneers who crossed the Aegean into eastern Greece in 7500–6500 BC. They brought the ‘Neolithic package’ with them – cultivated crops and domesticated animals; permanent settlements and square houses; spinning and weaving; hoes, sickles, and polished axes; pottery and quern-stones; and ceramic ‘Venus’ or ‘fat lady’ figurines representing fertility deities. It all appears suddenly in the archaeological record alongside the burials of people with a distinctive ‘Asian’ DNA.

The spread of farming took thousands of years, and even now is still not universal. Since c. 7500 BC, hunting-gathering, pastoralism, and cultivation have coexisted. Many Early Neolithic communities operated a mixed economy with elements of all three. Others resisted farming altogether. Not before c. 5500 BC did it spread from the Balkans, across the Hungarian Plain, to Northern and Western Europe. There it halted again. For a thousand years the Mesolithic hunters of the Baltic, the North Sea coasts, the Atlantic fringes, and the British Isles held out. Then, between 4300 and 3800 BC, they too went Neolithic. Others again, like the Australian Aborigines or the Kalahari Bushmen, retained a hunting-gathering economy into recent times.

Farming may always have been a reluctant choice, but once begun there was no going back. Because farming exploited the landscape more intensively, it could support much larger populations than hunting-gathering. This meant that if farmers were to abandon their work, their community would starve, for there were now too many people simply to live off the wilderness. Humanity was trapped in toil by its own success.

By c. 5000 BC Neolithic farmers (known to archaeologists as the Linear-bandkeramik culture) had settled across much of Europe. They lived in villages of two or three dozen timber longhouses, up to 30–40 m long and 5 m wide. Building them would have required collective effort. Each one would have accommodated an extended family group. Neither houses nor burials give any indication of social inequality; one assumes that everyone contributed and everyone consumed on an equal basis according to their ability. So Early Neolithic society had neither class divisions nor nuclear families. There is nothing ‘natural’ about either. Like hunter-gatherers, the first farmers were what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels called ‘primitive communists’.

But this was a communism of scarcity. Early agriculture was wasteful: land was cleared, cultivated, exhausted, and then abandoned. Fallowing and manuring to keep the land ‘in good heart’ were not yet common practice. And as the population expanded, so accessible and workable land began to run out. These contradictions of the Early Neolithic economy eventually exploded into warfare.

The Origins of War and Religion

The bodies of 34 people, half of them children, had been dumped in a 3 m-wide pit. Two of the adults had been shot in the head with arrows. Twenty others, including children, had been clubbed. The archaeologists were in no doubt that it was a massacre site. The Talheim death pit in south-west Germany revealed a gruesome truth about the Early Neolithic world of 5000 BC: humans had begun to engage in warfare.

In the beginning, there had been no war. For 2.5 million years, throughout the Old Stone Age, small bands of hominids had roamed the land in search of food by hunting, gathering, and scavenging. Meetings were few; clashes of any kind scarcer still. Only later, as the numbers of people increased, were there occasional conflicts over resources. Cave art shows hunters with bows shooting not only animals but sometimes each other. But this was not war as such. War is large-scale, sustained, organised violence between opposing groups. There is no evidence for this before the Agricultural Revolution which began around 7500 BC.

Farming was a much more efficient way of getting food than hunting, so the population increased enormously in the New Stone Age. Palaeolithic fossils number in the hundreds, Neolithic skeletons in the tens of thousands. But herein lay the problem. Technique was primitive, productivity low, surpluses small. People lived close to the edge, susceptible to natural disasters like crop blight, animal disease, and extreme weather. Early Neolithic farming communities were haunted by the spectres of famine, hunger, and death.

The problem was rooted in the very success of the Early Neolithic economy, for the population kept growing, but the land was finite. As the nutrients were taken from the soil and not replenished, new fields had to be hacked from the wilderness. As populations grew, existing villages could not feed everyone, and groups of pioneers headed off to found new settlements. As the last tracts of wilderness close to the earliest settlements were cleared, the wasteful Early Neolithic economy reached its limits. Land hunger and food hunger could then drive neighbouring groups into conflict.

Early farmers had communal property – fields, animals, store houses, permanent homes – to defend in hard times. This combination of poverty and property, scarcity and surplus, was the root cause of the first wars. The starving might eat by seizing the grain and sheep of their neighbours. The Talheim death pit seems to bear witness to just such a primeval struggle.

But if you want to wage war, you need warriors, allies, and defence works. Groups with more of these will defeat those with fewer. Groups that invest surplus in warfare will dominate those that do not. Archaeologists now see the decades around 3500 BC as the time of the first wars in Britain, for example, just a few centuries after the start of the Neolithic Revolution there. Great hilltop causewayed camps were built. Windmill Hill in Wiltshire, enclosed by three concentric rings of bank and ditch, is the size of 15 football pitches. It was probably used for political meetings, religious rituals, and defence. It symbolised a new order – one that united people from distant villages in a single tribal polity. At the same time, people were buried in communal tombs of monumental stone slabs and mounds of earth. West Kennet long barrow in Wiltshire is 100 m long and 20 m wide. Built to impress, it was an assertion of territorial control. That it was necessary shows that control was contested.

Causewayed camps like Windmill Hill were places of worship; long barrows like West Kennet were mausoleums. The larger polities of the Early Neolithic were being cemented together by collective belief and ritual. Magic and religion were taking on new functions, becoming mechanisms for creating stronger social groups, better able to compete with other groups for control of territory and scarce resources.

Magic (an attempt to get what you want by mimicry) and religion (an attempt to do so by supplicating higher powers) have long histories. Upper Palaeolithic hunters had painted game beasts on the walls in the dark depths of their caves. In the prehistoric mind, the symbol, the painted image, seems to have conjured the reality, the future kill. Not only in art, but through dance, music, and personal ornament, magic was performed. Choreographic movement, rhythmic noise, and costume embodied collective desires and hopes. Psychically charged by ritual, hunters then resumed the quest for food with renewed confidence.

The human group – its cohesion, fertility, and survival – was also a matter of cult. Totemism is a primeval amalgam of magic and religion: it equates the human group with an animal and then venerates that animal to secure the well-being of the group. Ancestor worship is equally ancient: it conceives dead kinsmen as benevolent spirits hovering protectively over living progeny. But full-fledged religion involves the worship of deities – the sun, the moon, the earth-mother. Alienation – lack of control over nature – then acquires its most elaborate expression. Humans seek to protect themselves from forces they cannot control through entreaties (prayers) and bribes (sacrifices and offerings) to those they imagine can.

Early forms of religion – totemism, ancestor worship, cults of the sun, the moon, and the earth – survive ‘fossilised’ in later cults. Much of what we know derives from this. Artemis, Greek goddess of wild nature, was worshipped in Ancient Athens by dancing girls dressed as she-bears. Lupercus, an Italian god of the countryside, was worshipped in Ancient Rome by young noblemen who feasted in a cave and then raced around the city wearing the skins of slaughtered goats.

Religion took on new significance as Early Neolithic villages were welded into tribal polities. Competition and war over territory forced small groups to seek security in larger units. Common worship of totems, ancestors, and deities created new social identities. Shared beliefs and rituals fostered solidarity. But the result could be murderous clashes between rival groups. The Early Neolithic causewayed camp at Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire was attacked and burned. Over 400 flint arrowheads were found around the perimeter. Many of the dead found in Early Neolithic long barrows were killed by arrowshot or by clubs, picks, axes, or stones.

A combination of radiocarbon determinations (based on the decay of carbon-14 in organic remains) and Bayesian statistics has produced new dates for these events. The construction of causewayed camps and long barrows and the advent of mass killing were broadly simultaneous. Between c. 3700 and 3400 BC, a new order, one based on territorial control, tribal groups, large-scale ritual, and warfare, was established in Britain. This order empowered a new social layer of war chiefs and high priests. From them, in the course of time, a ruling class would evolve.

The Rise of Specialists

The Early Neolithic economy, riddled with intractable contradictions, was doomed. Technique was primitive and wasteful. Society lacked reserves to see them through natural disasters and hard times. Virgin land ran out as old fields became exhausted and populations grew.

War was an expression of these contradictions. It offered some groups a way out of poverty by seizing the property of others. But it was not a solution, for it did nothing to increase productivity; it merely redistributed existing reserves of wealth in land, animals, and grain stores.

A defining characteristic of Homo sapiens is inventiveness. Modern humans respond to challenges by developing new tools and techniques. They are adapted to adapt. They flourish through cultural innovation. The economic impasse of the Early Neolithic was broken by revolutionary advances in agriculture, transport, and tool-making.

Plough-based ‘agriculture’ (the tillage of fields) replaced hoe-based ‘horticulture’ (the working of garden plots). An ox-drawn plough allows farmers to work large fields, to break up the soil, and to tap reserves of nutrients. Traction animals also produce manure to fertilise the soil.

Irrigation schemes brought water to arid land. When communities of farmers organised themselves to dig, maintain, and operate networks of dams, channels, and sluices, this compensated for the risk of irregular rainfall and brought fertile land into permanent cultivation. Drainage schemes, on the other hand, turned swamps into fields, bringing nutrient-rich land into cultivation where none previously had existed. Again, communal labour was necessary, both to dig the channels and to keep them clear.

Land transport was transformed by the invention of the wheel and the breeding and rearing of pack animals (oxen, asses, horses, and camels). Loads were no longer limited to what a human could carry or haul. Water transport was transformed by the sail. In this case, wind power was harnessed to replace (or supplement) the muscle power of the rower.

Tools made of stone, bone, and wood are limited. They can be fashioned only by hacking bits off. Once broken, they have to be discarded. Metals seemed magical by comparison. They could be melted, mixed, and moulded into countless different forms. On cooling, they became solid, hard, and durable. And there was no waste: scrap metal could be endlessly recycled.

Copper was the first metal to be worked. Later, it was mixed with others to make harder alloys. By 3000 BC it was being mixed with tin to make bronze. For the next two millennia, this was to be the preferred material for making weapons, ornaments, and prestige items.

Metalworking technology was altogether new. Ceramic technology was already established, but it now developed apace with the introduction of the potter’s wheel. A serviceable vessel – and, if desired, one of finer quality and decoration – could be formed on a wheel in a fraction of the time taken to mould one by hand from coils or slabs of clay.

In sum, between c. 4000 and 3000 BC, a series of innovations transformed the work of farmers in Western Asia. Land was reclaimed by irrigation and drainage, was more easily worked with the plough, and was improved by regular manuring. Metalworkers added to the range of artefacts, and potters used wheels to manufacture more and better containers. Pack animals, wheeled vehicles, and sailing vessels allowed heavy loads to be moved and goods to be traded.

Though many of the new ideas originated in Western Asia, some were imported from elsewhere. The steppe nomads of Central Asia may have been the first to domesticate the horse and construct carts. The metalworkers of Europe were in the forefront of their craft. Good ideas soon catch on. The improved farming methods of the Late Neolithic spread quickly from Western Asia to Europe. In more far-flung regions there was independent development at a later date. The Chinese, for example, invented the wheelbarrow, terraced hillsides, and pioneered the laborious cultivation and transplanting of rice seedlings.

The new techniques brought social change. The low-tech economy of the Early Neolithic did not require specialised labour: everyone participated. The high-tech world of the Late Neolithic, the Chalcolithic (Copper Age), and the Bronze Age depended on a range of specialists. Skilled carpenters were needed to make ploughs, carts, and boats. Potters mass-produced wheel-thrown vessels in exchange for a share of farm produce. Metalworkers served long apprenticeships to learn the mysteries of smelting and smithing.

Specialisation separated labour from the homestead. Traders travelled long distances with valuable loads of copper, obsidian, lava, ornamental shells, and semi-precious stones. Many prehistoric craft workers, like their historical descendants, were itinerants, selling their skills from village to village. As a result, ties of family, clan, and tribe weakened. In addition to social relationships based on kinship, there were now new relationships based on patronage and commerce.

Relations between the sexes also changed. If social groups were to survive and prosper, they required a steady supply of adolescents and young adults for economic labour. To provide this, and because of high mortality rates, young women had to spend much of their lives either pregnant or suckling. But whereas Palaeolithic gathering and Early Neolithic hoeing could be combined with child care, Late Neolithic ploughing could not.

In hunter-gatherer and early farming communities, women had performed different roles but had had equal status with men. There was a sexual division of labour, but no oppression of women. Men hunted, women gathered, and everyone discussed when to move camp. The nuclear family did not exist in its modern form. Early Neolithic long-houses accommodated extended families. Group marriage may have been common practice. Matrilocal residence (men living with their wives’ families) and matrilineal descent (tracing family membership through the female line) almost certainly were.

But the Late Neolithic was a man’s world. Herding, ploughing, long-distance trade, and itinerant craftsmanship could not be combined with carrying children. The plough, the ox-cart, and the forge created the social preconditions for male domination.

A second agricultural ‘revolution’ – more accurately, a slow accumulation of radical innovations – had transformed the Neolithic economy and subverted the Neolithic social order. The hoe and the temporary garden plot had been replaced by the plough and the irrigated and manured field. Because of this, matriarchal, family-based, and egalitarian communities were being transformed by new notions of authority and hierarchy.

2. The First Class Societies (3000—1000BC)

In certain parts of the world, from around 3000 BC, especially in the fertile river valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Pakistan, and China, the first fully formed class societies emerged. Priests, war leaders, and civil officials used their positions to monopolise control over surpluses, impose their authority on the rest of society, and begin to exploit the labour of others in their own interest.

In this period, known to archaeologists as the Bronze Age, metals were used to fashion weapons, ornaments, and trinkets, but the main tools of everyday labour continued to be made of stone, wood, and bone. Because of this, productivity remained low and surpluses small, the spread of civilisation was limited, and, while empires rose and fell, most of humanity continued to live beyond their reach.

Owing to the conservatism of the Bronze Age elites, technical innovation occurred on the periphery of the world system rather than at its core, and, by c. 1000 BC, one such innovation was helping to topple the old empires and start an economic revolution: ironworking.

The First Ruling Class

Prehistoric Sumer, a tract of land in the Tigris–Euphrates delta of southern Iraq, was made up of swamp and desert. But here, by c. 3000 BC, Neolithic pioneers had created a real-life version of the mythic Garden of Eden.

They drained the swamps and irrigated the sandbanks between them. In doing so, they created fields of exceptional fertility. By 2500 BC, the average yield on a field of barley was 86 times the sowing. We know this from written records inscribed on baked clay tablets. The Sumerians had invented writing because the complex, urban, class-based society they created required them to maintain detailed records – especially records of tax and other dues.

Ancient Sumer was roughly the size of modern Denmark. Once its rich soils were under cultivation, it could produce massive agricultural surpluses. These made possible a qualitative shift from living in villages to living in towns. Sumer accomplished what the great interwar archaeologist Gordon Childe called the ‘Urban Revolution’.

The main archaeological markers of this revolution are the ‘tells’ of Sumer (and other parts of the Middle East) – flat-topped artificial mounds formed by thousands of years of settlement. Layers of soil representing levelled, mud-brick buildings tell the story of successive generations of inhabitants. They show Copper Age villages expanding into Bronze Age cities between the fourth and third millennium BC.

Excavations have revealed cities dominated by large temples and artificial mounds known as ziggurats. At Erech, a ziggurat of Early Dynastic date (c. 2900-2300 BC) was 10 m high, built of sun-dried bricks, faced with thousands of pottery goblets, and topped by an asphalt platform. The city as a whole, with its residential and industrial districts, covered 5 square km.

The temples, and the estates in the surrounding countryside that supported them, belonged to the gods. The territory of Lagash was divided among some 20 deities. The goddess Baü owned 44 square km. Some of this was allocated to individual families, and some was worked as Baü’s personal estate by wage-labourers, tenant-farmers, or ‘clansmen’ doing customary labour-service.

In the absence of Baü herself, the property was managed on her behalf by temple priests. Many of Baü’s people held only 0.32–1 ha of land. But one high temple official is known to have held 14.4 ha. So the priests formed a social elite, with both private wealth from their own estates and collective control over the wealth of temple estates.

Wealth made them powerful, and their power was used to accumulate more wealth. A decree aimed to restore the old order of Lagash ‘as it had existed from the beginning’; it records that priests were stealing from the poor, practising various kinds of extortion, and treating temple land, cattle, equipment, and servants as their private property or slaves.

From the ranks of the priests came city governors (later styled kings). At Lagash, the city governor was both high priest of the chief god and commander-in-chief of the citizen army. He enjoyed the use of 246 ha of Baü’s estate. The city governor of Lagash was one of many rulers, for Sumer was divided into separate city-states. These were often at war. The Standard of Ur – a highly decorated box from a royal tomb dating to around 2600 BC – depicts four-wheeled chariots trampling enemies, spearmen wearing helmets and metal-studded cloaks, and naked prisoners in front of the king.

Each polity lived in fear of its neighbours. Each had land, flocks, granaries, treasure, and a workforce to protect. Military power was imperative for defence. But military power, once acquired, could be used proactively. Pre-emptive aggression might be the best guarantee of future security. Predatory aggression might enhance the wealth and power of a ruler.

Military power also had an internal function. The state – the ruler, the priests, a bureaucracy of officials and clerks, and the armed bodies of men they commanded – was a mechanism for maintaining the new social order of the city. Bureaucracy was itself an instrument of class power. The complexity of urban society demanded writing for record-keeping, standardised weights and measures for trade, and geometry and arithmetic for land measurement. In an increasingly complex and class-dominated society, who owed what to whom needed to be measured, written down, and enforced.

New sorts of specialists were trained in these arts. Their education was esoteric and exclusive. The state hierarchy imbued them with authority and status. Older categories of specialists – traders and artisans – were also embedded in the new class structure. There was no free market. The economy of the ancient city was embedded in the political order. Rulers controlled what was traded, where it was sold, and by whom. In particular, they maintained a monopoly of metals, especially bronze and gold.

Early Dynastic Sumer, in short, was the world’s first fully developed class society. At the bottom were slaves. Above them were commoners of subordinate status. Above these were free citizens. One baked-clay tablet refers to 205 slave girls and children, probably employed in a centralised weaving establishment. Another describes the occupational hierarchy at the temple of Baü in Lagash. At the top were clerks, officials, and priests. At the bottom were bakers, brewers, and textile workers, many of them women, many of them slaves.

The houses excavated at Eshnunna reveal clear class differences. The larger houses on the main roads occupied 200 m² or more. But smaller houses, often only 50 m² and lining narrow alleys, were far more numerous.

Class inequality was resented and resisted. Sumerian tablets allude to the tensions. It was not based on consensus. It had to be imposed and maintained by force.

How had a minority acquired the power to elevate itself above the majority? What enabled the few to accumulate wealth at the expense of the many?

Class is both a social relationship between rich and poor, and an economic process of exploitation and surplus accumulation. It has to be continually reproduced. And because it is contested, it involves class struggle. The rulers’ drive for wealth and power gained traction from the combination of poverty and property – a combination that holds all pre-industrial class societies in a vice-like grip.

Poverty is a general condition. Traditional agricultural economies do not produce enough to provide abundance for all. Sometimes they do not produce enough to provide even the necessities. Property is a privileged, a priori claim to scarce resources. It allocates wealth to certain individuals, families, landowners, temples, tribes, or city-states. Property can be private or collective, but is never universal.

This contradictory pairing – poverty and property – gave rise to class inequality, state power, and warfare. The religious and military specialists of prehistoric Sumer had been granted control over the surplus so that they could carry out their functions on behalf of society as a whole. At first, their position had depended on public sanction. But control over surplus made them powerful, and as they consolidated their authority, they found that they could use it to enrich themselves further and maintain their position without public sanction. In this way, the high priests, war chiefs, city governors, and petty kings of urban Sumer evolved into an exploitative ruling class accumulating and consuming surplus in its own interest: a power over society, no longer a power of society.

The Spread of Civilisation

Something similar occurred at around the same time or somewhat later in several other places. Civilisation did not spread outwards from a single centre: it arose independently where circumstances made it possible.

In Sumer, priests formed the core of the ruling class, temple estates provided their wealth, and temple ziggurats their most imposing monuments. City governors and war leaders were recruited from the theocracy. In Egypt, the reverse was true. Menes, chief of the Falcon clan and legendary first pharaoh, united the Nile Delta (Lower Egypt) and the Nile Valley (Upper Egypt) by military conquest. Having created a centralised state, he proclaimed himself a god-king (pharaoh). Priests, officials, merchants, artisans, and peasants were all subordinate to the pharaoh. The ruling class – priests and officials – owed their estates and position to royal patronage. The pyramids, iconic monuments of Old Kingdom Egypt (2705–2250 BC), were not temples, but royal tombs.

Like the Sumerian priests and city governors, the pharaohs fostered the cultural prerequisites of the Urban Revolution: irrigation works, long-distance trade (especially in metals, timber, and stone), literacy and record-keeping, numerical notation and geometry, standard weights and measures, the calendar and timekeeping, and the science of astronomy.

This urban package reflected the needs of the state and the elite. Control of the waters of the Nile ensured abundant harvests, large surpluses, and a healthy workforce. Official trade missions secured the raw materials needed for arms manufacture, monumental architecture, and luxury consumption. A literate and numerate bureaucracy managed the tribute and labour services on which state power depended.

Independent Urban Revolutions occurred in several other places. This shows that all humans are capable of the highest achievements. There are no ‘superior races’ or ‘nations’ that give the lead to the rest. It is culture and circumstance – not biology – that determine historical differences.

Around 2600 BC, urban civilisation emerged in the Indus Valley in modern Pakistan. The great monuments and residential suburbs of Mohenjo-daro cover 2.6 square km. The walled perimeter of Harappa is 4 km long. Inscribed seal stamps and standard weights and measures indicate complex administration.

Ancient Anyang in the Yellow River region of northern China was an unwalled complex measuring almost 10 km in length by 4 km in width. It was probably the capital of the Shang Dynasty in the thirteenth century BC. Excavations have revealed rich royal tombs, great caches of decorated bronzes, and tens of thousands of cracked and inscribed ‘oracle bones’.

If we glance forward in time, we see the same pattern elsewhere. Teotihuacan in Mexico, at its peak between AD 450 and 650, was a city of 20 square km and around 150,000 people. At its centre was a monumental complex dominated by giant pyramids. The Pyramid of the Sun is 210 square m at the base and 64 m high.

Great Zimbabwe (AD 1100–1500) in the heart of Africa was a city of 20,000 people. Its wealth was based on cattle, crop cultivation, and trade in gold, copper, ivory, and slaves. Its territory extended over 100,000 square km between the Rivers Zambezi and Limpopo.

It was once believed that civilisation was exported from a single centre. Scholars wrote of ‘light from the Ancient East’. This fitted with nineteenth-century notions of the ‘White Man’s Burden’ – the ‘civilising mission’ of European imperialists. Archaeology has demonstrated something different: civilisation developed independently at different places at different times. The message is that all people share a common humanity and similar creative potential.

But the major centres of civilisation did have an impact on surrounding societies. There was interaction between ‘core’ – more advanced metropolitan areas – and ‘periphery’ – less-developed areas economically dependent on them.

The Egyptian pharaoh obtained wood from Lebanon, copper from Cyprus, and gold from Sudan. Sometimes this was a matter of peaceful exchange. The city of Byblos in Lebanon grew rich on the timber trade. Local merchants employed clerks who could read Egyptian. There was cultural interaction. But it could also be a matter of conquest. Northern Sudan was annexed and forced to pay gold tribute. The interaction between core and periphery was therefore multifaceted – it had economic, political, military, and cultural dimensions.

The demands of trade encouraged merchants, sea captains, and shipbuilders. Longboats powered by rowers were used in the Aegean from c. 3000 BC onwards. The citadel of Troy in 2700 BC (known as Troy II) was built to guard a harbour at the entrance to the Dardanelles in north-western Turkey. The Thalassocracy (sea power) of Minos rose to dominance in c. 1950–1450 BC on the basis of Crete’s central location in the Eastern Mediterranean and the islanders’ revolutionary design of deep-hulled, high-capacity, sail-powered cargo ships. The rulers of Minoan Crete lived in sprawling stone palaces decorated with frescos, and had storerooms packed with giant ceramic containers.

The Greek poet Homer, describing Odysseus’ travel-worn appearance, says he was like ‘some captain of a merchant crew, who spends his life on a hulking tramp, worrying about his outward freight, or keeping a sharp eye on the cargo when he comes home with extortionate profits’. Seafarers and merchants were familiar figures in many Bronze Age societies.

Trade drove change on the periphery of the great empires. So, too, did the threat of war. Sargon of Akkad united the cities of Mesopotamia some time after 2330 BC, forging an empire that eventually extended from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. The Old Kingdom pharaohs conquered Sinai for its copper. Threatened by superpower militarism, the minor states and tribes of the periphery therefore organised for war. Warriors, weapons, and war fleets dominated the Bronze Age world. An arms race gathered pace through the centuries. Frescos depict merchant ships loaded with goods, but also warships filled with armed men.

Through trade and war, and by the movement of goods, people, and ideas, the societies of core and periphery influenced one another. The sharing and spreading of culture is what archaeologists call diffusion. It is one of the primary mechanisms by which knowledge and productivity advance. Progress is impeded by barriers and facilitated by bridges.

But a world of competing elites and rival armies also harboured the potential for waste and regression. As we shall see, the contradictions of Bronze Age civilisation repeatedly plunged humanity into crisis and barbarism.

Crisis in the Bronze Age

Bronze Age empires rose and fell. The 140-year Akkadian Empire, based in Iraq, collapsed suddenly around 2190 BC. Equally sudden had been the overthrow of the Old Kingdom pharaohs in Egypt a short time before, around 2250 BC.

Why did Early Bronze Age civilisation fail? Detail is lacking, but Egyptian sources record famine, a fragmentation of the state, and incursions by Libyan raiders from the west and Nubians from the south. What is not clear is why these events should have happened. Why was the once-strong centralised state of the pyramid builders no longer able to feed the people, enforce its authority, and defend its borders?

This pattern of rise and fall repeated itself. New empires emerged from the chaos of the Early Bronze Age crisis. Between 1600 and 1200 BC, the eastern Mediterranean was again divided among rival empires – New Kingdom Egypt, the Hittites of Anatolia (Turkey), the Mitanni of northern Mesopotamia (Iraq), and the Mycenaean Greeks. But this Late Bronze Age geopolitical system also collapsed amid storm and strife during the twelfth century BC. The embattled New Kingdom pharaohs record coordinated attacks by Libyans and ‘northerners coming from all lands’. The latter were the more dangerous. The multi-ethnic Sea Peoples amassed great pirate fleets. ‘All at once,’ declared Ramesses III, ‘these peoples were on the move ... No country could stand up to them.’

Pre-eminent as seafarers and warriors, Greeks were among these Sea Peoples. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are probably based on an oral record of real events that took place around 1190 BC. His epics have transformed them into tales of derring-do by legendary heroes. The kernel of truth about the Trojan War appears to be that it was a massive seaborne raid by Greek pirates out for plunder.

So the Late Bronze Age empires collapsed as the Early Bronze Age empires had done. And when we look beyond the Mediterranean, to places where civilisation developed at different times, we see the same pattern of rise and fall.

The Indus civilisation of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in Pakistan collapsed around 1900 BC. Excavators found numerous unburied remains of people suddenly and violently killed in the uppermost levels of the great city of Mohenjo-daro.

Chinese history, from the Shang of the second millennium BC to the Manchu of AD 1644–1911, records the rise and fall of a long succession of imperial dynasties, with occasional periods, sometimes lasting centuries, of division and civil war. Throughout this epoch, despite impressive technical achievements and huge increases in output and population, Chinese civilisation remained essentially conservative. The socio-economic order simply replicated itself, from generation to generation, from dynasty to dynasty. China provides an extreme example of the cyclical trajectory of ancient civilisation.

So we have two historical problems. Why did ancient empires rise and fall? And why did this contradictory social form replicate itself over such long periods of time?

The ancient world was characterised by stagnation of technique. On several occasions, humans had escaped the contradictions of an existing ‘mode of production’ (an economic and social system) by transforming it. Climate change had destroyed the habitats of the big game on which Upper Palaeolithic hunters depended. The response – the Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution – had achieved massive increases in productivity, output, and population through the adoption of crop cultivation and stock raising. Soil exhaustion and population pressure had later created a crisis for this Early Neolithic mode of production. In the Urban Revolution, the contradictions were resolved with a second leap forward, based on land reclamation, irrigation schemes, and ploughing. But the Urban Revolution also erected an impediment to further progress: the existence of a ruling class. We have charted its emergence. We have noted its roots in specialised religious, military, and political functions, and in the shortages and insecurities inherent in a primitive economic system: the first rulers were those whose social roles gave them control over scarce resources.

Why should the ruling class have been a barrier to new ideas? Surely it was in their interest to improve techniques in order to increase surplus? Yes and no: as with all things in social life, there were contradictory pressures.

The new ruling classes sat uneasily on their pedestals. They were divided among themselves, family against family, city against city, tribe against tribe, empire against empire. To overcome domestic rivals, top families had retinues of loyalists and bodyguards. Against foreign enemies, they needed armies and fortresses. The rulers were also divided from the mass of the people, who, because they were exploited, were potentially rebellious and had to be cowed by a judicious combination of force and fraud.

Force meant the threat posed by aristocratic retinues and state forces. Fraud meant the ideological claim that the rulers played an essential role and acted in the public interest. Both were embodied in the great monuments that dominate the archaeological record. Take the pyramids of Old Kingdom Egypt. They were the royal tombs of god-kings who were expected to live for eternity: monuments to a false ideology by which the ruler was elevated into a figure of awesome and intimidating power. The pyramids were designed to teach people their place. They were ideological weapons in a class war.

So the Bronze Age elites did not invest the surplus they controlled in improved technique and higher productivity. Instead they squandered resources on military competition, prestige monuments, and, of course, luxury lifestyles. Power, propaganda, and privilege – not productivity – consumed the surpluses created by the labour of Bronze Age peasants.

Innovation, indeed, was more likely to be perceived as a threat than an opportunity. The ruling class itself did not get its hands dirty; productive labour was performed by the common people. For this reason, new inventions, in so far as they appeared at all, were likely to come from below, empowering ordinary people, disrupting established economic arrangements, and perhaps destabilising the social order. They were therefore viewed with suspicion.

Bronze Age rulers were rarely interested in new technology unless it had military applications. Their focus was on accumulating power in a competitive geopolitical system. That is why the greed of the rich was never sated. The grandeur of past monuments set a standard to be surpassed by those who followed. Rulers competed in the luxury of their palaces, the splendour of their tombs, the art and architecture of their great cities. But above all, they competed militarily as rival polities expanded and clashed. A slow-motion arms race can be detected in the Late Bronze Age world. There seem to be more soldiers, better armed, defending stronger fortresses in 1200 BC than there had been in 1600 BC. The world was becoming ever more militarised.

Technique was stagnant, therefore, but surplus consumption was rising. War, monuments, and luxury meant higher levels of exploitation were necessary, and over-accumulation at the top was mirrored by the degradation of society’s agricultural base. The proud warrior-lords of the Late Bronze Age were a parasitic social elite whose economic cost was increasingly unsustainable. That is the fundamental reason for the implosion of their world in the twelfth century BC.

But this was a problem without an internal solution. Stagnant technique meant socio-economic conservatism. There were no new forces developing inside the old society. The choice, therefore, was between the barbarism of invading hordes and a reincarnation of the old (failed) imperial civilisation. Humanity was again at an impasse. Only this time, the existence of classes and states had raised formidable barriers to human creativity and progress.

How History Works

The Bronze Age impasse provides a useful occasion to pause and take stock. All the elements of a complex society are now in place, so it is convenient to ask: how does history work?

Three engines drive the historical process. First, there is the development of technique. Progress can be defined as the accumulation of knowledge that makes possible better control over nature, increases in labour productivity, and a bigger store of economic resources available for the satisfaction of human need.

Progress in this sense is not inevitable. Entire generations of peasants in, say, Shang China, Mycenaean Greece, or Norman England might live out their entire lives without experiencing a significant innovation in either agricultural or domestic equipment. Only in modern capitalist society is the development of technique inherent in the mode of production. In making this point, Marx explicitly states: ‘Conservation of old modes of production in unaltered form was ... the first condition of existence of all earlier industrial classes.’

Progress in pre-capitalist society was haphazard, not intrinsic to the dynamic of the socio-economic system. In pre-class society, for example, ecological crisis threatening the survival of human groups was probably of critical significance. The Neolithic Revolution seems to have been a response to climate change and a sharp decline in game. In early class society, on the other hand, the development of technique was subject to a wider variety of influences, some of them catalysts of innovation, others barriers to progress. To understand this, we need to review the other two engines of the historical process.

The second engine is competition among rulers for wealth and power. This takes the form of conflict within ruling classes – among rival aristocratic factions, for example – and conflict between ruling classes, as in wars between rival states and empires.

In modern capitalist society, such competition has both economic and politico-military dimensions. The two world wars were essentially wars between rival national-capitalist blocs.

In pre-capitalist class societies, by contrast, competition between rulers was essentially political and took the form of competitive military accumulation. The world was divided into rival factions and polities. Political insecurity was a permanent condition. The result was military competition – a relentless drive to amass soldiers, fortifications, and armaments faster than one’s rivals.

The third engine of the historical process is the struggle between classes. In the ancient world, competitive military accumulation required the ruling class to increase the rate of exploitation and extract more surplus from the peasantry. But there were two limits to this process. First, the peasantry and the economic system had to be able to reproduce themselves: over-taxation would – and sometimes did – destroy the material foundations of the social order. The second was the peasants’ resistance to exploitation.

We know very little about the class struggle in the Bronze Age. One exception is provided by documents of the second millennium BC from Thebes (modern Luxor) in Egypt. They concern a community of skilled quarrymen, stonemasons, and carpenters who made the temples and tombs of the elite. These documents record class tension. Though the craftsmen were relatively well paid and worked moderate hours, bullying managers sometimes tried to tighten the screws. On one occasion, those deemed ‘surplus’ to requirements were made to undertake forced labour. But the exploited sometimes fought back. One of the documents records that, in 1170 BC, backed by their wives, the craftsmen went on strike – the first recorded example in history – when their rations were delayed and their families faced hunger.

So we see three engines of history at work: the development of technique, competition among rival rulers, and a struggle between classes. Each engine is very different. Each operates in a different register, at varying speed, and with intermittent effect. Because of this, the historical process is immensely complex. Not only is each engine itself a nexus of contradictions, but all three engines operate simultaneously, pulling sometimes in the same direction, sometimes in opposite directions. For this reason, each historical situation is unique. Each one is a distinctive conjuncture of economic problems, social tensions, political antagonisms, cultural differences, and personal influences. The conjuncture provides the context in which historical action takes place. But the context does not determine the outcome. It is the clash of social forces – of organised human groups – that decides history’s future direction.

Let us return to the successive crises of Bronze Age civilisation. Waste expenditure drained resources from productive technique and effectively choked off experiment and innovation. More than that: the advance of knowledge was blocked by magic, religion, and other forms of mystification, and by the ruling class’s innate suspicion of things they did not understand and feared might prove subversive.

Progress is contingent on ‘true consciousness’ – knowledge of the world which, because it corresponds with external reality, is an effective guide to human action. ‘False consciousness’ – belief in god-kings, divine inspiration, or the efficacy of ritual, for example – has the opposite effect: it is a barrier to knowledge, to practical work, and therefore to social progress. Instead of theory and practice interacting in the real world to improve technique and productivity, the two – mind and matter, literacy and labour – became separated in the imperial civilisations. Egyptian priests studied the stars, not the soil, and wrote manuals on mummification, not of natural science. The wealth produced by Egyptian peasants was wasted on monuments to mysticism. The skills of Egyptian artisans were despised precisely for being manual.

So progress was blocked in the old civilisations. No new forces capable of breaking through the impasse were fostered. History’s energy was wasted turning the wheel of imperial rise and fall.

But if the core of the world system in c. 1200 BC can be seen as a froth of geopolitical turmoil above stagnant depths of socio-economic conservatism, the periphery was more dynamic. Here, relatively free of the control of kings, priests, and bureaucrats, the nomads, farmers, and artisans of the wider Bronze Age world were pushing at the limits of knowledge and skill.

Many were the innovations, but one was to be of supreme importance. Bronze was expensive, aristocratic, and too soft to make strong tools and weapons. A metal that was cheap, hard, and available to all would conquer the world.

Into the storm and strife of the Late Bronze Age crisis came new invaders from the North: men of iron.

Men of Iron

Many revolutions occur on the periphery rather than at the core of global systems. Life on the periphery is less secure, less entrenched, and therefore less conservative.

Manual labour was both exploited and despised in the old imperial civilisations of the Bronze Age. Vast surpluses were extorted and wasted on war, monuments, and luxury. There was little left for investment in new technology and little incentive to use it for that purpose. Innovation involved thought, questioning, imagining new possibilities. So human creativity was not only denied the material resources on which to work; it was also mesmerised by the spells and mysticism of priests.

The occasional spark of ingenuity stands out against a backcloth of stagnation. The Egyptians invented glass-working, the Babylonians accounting, the Phoenicians the alphabet. The exceptions to the rule are revealing: a luxury commodity, a way of measuring wealth, and a script for recording it. Such inventions are of little use to farmers or artisans. They concern the consumption and control of wealth, not its production. They reflect a society in which the world of learning was divorced from the world of labour.

Not so in the periphery. Here, around 1300 BC, an industrial revolution had begun that was to transform the world. Where exactly it took place we do not know; but it was for sure beyond the reach of over-mighty rulers.

The archaeological record is unequivocal: from this time onwards, the quantity, range, and sophistication of metal objects exploded. Mining technology advanced to provide an ever greater supply of copper, tin, and gold. Smelting technique improved. And metalsmiths began to use multiple moulds and the lost-wax technique to produce objects of unprecedented complexity.

There are bronze figurines of warriors from Sardinia, bronze trumpets from Danish bogs, bronze breastplates moulded to look like pectoral muscles, bronze shields, swords, scabbards, spearheads, axes, horse harnesses, knives, and much more. Sometimes it is found in massive hoards. Thousands of Late Bronze Age hoards are known to archaeologists. One at Isleham in Cambridgeshire contained 6,500 pieces of metal.

Soon something even more momentous occurred: metalworkers started experimenting with ways of extracting iron from its stubbornly intractable ores.

Iron was not new. For centuries, crude implements of wrought iron had occasionally been used. But no technique had been developed for the mass production of quality ironwork at an economical cost. This may have been the achievement of a barbarian tribe living in the Caucasus mountains in remote antiquity. The new technology seems to have spread from there to the Hittite Empire of Anatolia (Turkey). Its further spread was then delayed by the determination of the Hittite imperial ruling class to monopolise iron weaponry.

Iron artefacts did not become widespread until after 1200 BC, when ironworking took off amid the collapse of the Bronze Age empires. As it did so, the greatest advances in technique, productivity, and output were registered on the periphery of, and in the interstices between, the great powers.

Ironworking launched a chain of economic, social, and political changes. Bronze was expensive and relatively soft, which is why most Bronze Age farmers continued to work with tools of wood and stone. Iron is abundant, cheap, and hard, but the barrier to its use until then had been its high melting point.

Smelting required specialised bloomeries – furnaces in which bellows were used to force air through iron ore and charcoal to achieve very high temperatures. Once the technique had been invented, ordinary farmers could build their own bloomeries and equip themselves with metal tools.

Anyone who doubts the increase in productivity made possible by iron should try digging with a wooden spade or chopping wood with a stone axe. Three thousand years ago, iron revolutionised agriculture, industry, and war. Its impact was as transformative as that of steam power in the nineteenth century. It also threatened to turn the social world upside down. Bronze was the prerogative of the aristocracy. The Bronze Age world was dominated by chariot-mounted warlords equipped with expensive arms and armour. They were supported by peasant masses bound to ceaseless toil with primitive tools.

Iron was the supreme chopper and cutter. Men with iron axes could clear thick forests and jungles to create new farms. Then, with iron ploughs, they could till heavy clay soils. Iron technology unleashed a new wave of agricultural pioneers and free peasants.

Iron was also democratic. The bronzesmiths worked for the palaces, the blacksmiths for the villages. Iron gave the common man a spear, even a sword. If he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with other men – if he formed a phalanx – he could stop a chariot charge. And if he could do that, he could kill the landlord. The ironworkers of 1000 BC, had they but known it, were smelting revolution.

Moving from settlement to settlement in zones ruled by petty chieftains, trading his wares and his skills, the metalsmith of the Early Iron Age was the unwitting agent of a new world order. Rival chieftains competed for his services, which raised his economic value, his social standing, and his own valuation of himself and his craft. This, in turn, gave him the rewards, independence, and self-confidence to be an innovator.

Homer captures something of this. The Iliad and the Odyssey span four centuries. They purport to describe events in the twelfth century BC, but, as they were orally transmitted, they achieved their final form only in the eighth. Sometimes Homer describes the Late Bronze Age, sometimes his own Archaic Age. When he says that ‘a soothsayer, a doctor, a singer, and a craftsman are sure of a welcome everywhere’, he tells us how things were in a post-imperial age, in the ‘Dark Age’ of the eighth century BC, in a world of petty chieftains and itinerant ironsmiths. The new class of free artisans that first emerged in the barbarian north had, by Homer’s time, been long established in the eastern Mediterranean.

In the twelfth century BC, the Late Bronze Age empires had collapsed, exhausted by military struggle against one another, and broken by resistance from within and attack from without. The geopolitical system that replaced them was a mosaic of smaller polities – shrunken imperial states like Egypt, mercantile city-states like Ugarit, and barbarian settlements like Palestine. Ironworking flourished in this new, more open, less top-down world. Cyprus, a centre of maritime commerce, pioneered the iron-based industrial revolution of the twelfth and eleventh centuries BC in the eastern Mediterranean. The old cycle of rise and fall, the recurrent rhythm of Bronze Age civilisation, was broken. A new technology was creating a new economy, new social relationships, and new political forms. History was carving out fresh channels.

3. Ancient Empires (1000—30BC)

4. The End of Antiquity (30BC—650AD)

5. The Medieval World (650AD—1500)

6. European Feudalism (650AD—1500)

7. The First Wave of Bourgeois Revolutions (1517—1775)

8. The Second Wave of Bourgeois Revolutions (1775—1815)

9. The Rise of Industrial Capitalism (1750—1850)

10. The Age of Blood and Iron (1848—1896)

11. Imperialism and War (1873—1918)

12. The Revolutionary Wave (1917—1928)

13. The Great Depression and the Rise of Fascism (1929—1939)

14. World War and Cold War (1939—1967)

15. The New World Disorder (1968—present)

Conclusion: Making the Future