CHALLENGING ELITIST OVERVIEWS OF GLOBAL HISTORY

Alvin Finkel

Since the 1970s the proliferation of social histories has challenged once-dominant historical paradigms focused narrowly on elites and ignoring or diminishing women, colonized peoples, workers, and farmers as unworthy of consideration as agents of social change.^[1] A sole dependence on archival sources for historical research had favoured the literate few and dismissed pre-literate societies as “prehistoric.” Reliance on such limited subjects and sources for history is now broadly challenged by historians. But elitist paradigms continue to predominate in global histories, largely untouched by the work of social historians. My new book, Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality, attempts to retell the history of our species from the vantage point of the masses rather than the classes. Humans, privileging the works of social historians, challenges many long-accepted conclusions about various historical eras that traditional global histories have kept alive. 

The boundaries of traditional, elite-focused global histories of “civilization” are evident in even the few that claim to oppose Western-centrism and uncritical praise of elites. Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, first published in 2015, disputes “the importance of the Mediterranean as a cradle of civilization.”^[2] But his notion of what constitutes civilization and when history begins is encapsulated in his opening sentence: “From the beginning of time, the centre of Asia is where empires were made.”^[3] Time, it soon becomes clear, began about 4000 years ago.

Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari upends Frankopan’s world. Foraging societies, he demonstrates, were societies of egalitarianism and peace whereas so-called “civilizations” were marked by oppressive social hierarchies, wars, and imperialism. Unfortunately, a focus on technologies rather than social relations propels Harari to proclaim that “the Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud,” the destroyer of equality.^[4] The Industrial Revolution, he argues, was the second biggest fraud. While Harari denounces inequalities, he ignores revolts of slaves, serfs, workers, women, and colonized Indigenous peoples throughout the post-foraging period. His narrow focus on technologies and ideologies of ruling classes has won praise for Sapiens from Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates who applaud his argument that post-foraging societies necessarily lead to control by multi-billionaires like themselves.

Anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, both committed anarchists, demolish Harari’s assumption that agricultural societies are inherently hierarchical and oppressive. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity demonstrates that early farmers, being former foragers, carefully preserved collectivist values.^[5]But, if Harari fetishizes technology as a spoiler of equality, Graeber and Wengrow fetishize the establishment of state institutions as the burial ground for egalitarianism. Their notion that non-state societies always favour equality causes them to treat the slaveholding Pacific societies of North America as a curiosity, and to speak kindly of Mesopotamian society as it first urbanized, ignoring historian evidence of horrendous exploitation of the worker majority.^[6] By contrast, though scholars and Inca descendants alike stress the cooperative nature of a technologically brilliant Inca people, Graeber and Wengrow lump Inca with the imperial-minded Aztec who oppressed their subjects, because both societies developed formal state institutions. They end their “new history of humanity” about 5000 years ago, content to ignore efforts of the masses to restore equality because they rarely rejected state institutions as such.

One book that does attempt to cover the entire history of humans and to critique elites throughout is Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. Harman is a Marxist champion of common folk, but his book is misnamed. His real aim is to demonstrate the callousness of elites but not to give much time to the revolts of the masses. Harman imposes a Leninist standard on revolts and therefore dismisses most mass uprisings, when he mentions them at all, as lacking in correct organizational principles.^[7]

So, how does Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality change our understanding of historical phenomena with its focus turned from the ruling classes to slaves, peasant women and men, colonized peoples, and industrial workers? First, it discredits the Western-centric notion that “democracy” originated in Athens. The earliest societies were democracies and, even after hierarchical societies prevailed in much of the world, Indigenous societies in southern Africa and parts of the Americas remained egalitarian until European conquests that began in the 1400s. More stratified India was home to about 800 democratically elected assemblies a hundred years before Athens experimented with democracy.^[8] The “democracy” of Athens, a slave-holding city-state was the product of endless slave revolts and revolts of free commoners. The small, land-rich ruling group worried that simultaneous revolts of slaves and commoners would overwhelm them. As a result, they granted free commoners an assembly with restricted powers and opportunity to serve temporarily on the paid executive group by winning a lottery.^[9]

A focus on the common people and democracy also refutes elite-focused claims that  collapse of the slaveholding, tribute-demanding Roman Empire ushered in the “Dark Ages” before a hierarchical, exploitative feudal system supposedly restored stability. In fact, communities freed of Roman rule often as not established democratic structures, divided land equally, and provided collective aid to unfortunates. Such communities fought efforts to impose a system of lords and serfs, successfully in much of Belgium and Holland.^[10] Where feudal lords prevailed, they faced frequent revolts. In parts of Spain, even as that nation plundered the Americas, feudalism was defeated.^[11] Similarly, rebellions of conquered Indigenous peoples in the Americas sometimes forced European conquerors to surrender lands to Indigenous sovereign states. That included areas within British North American colonies, Spanish-controlled Mexico, Chile, and Argentina. When colonizers won independence, they seized lands the imperial power had ceded to Indigenous people.^[12] Slavery in the United States was not overthrown by Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to limit its expansion. Slave revolts and the Black-run Underground Railroad hardened slaveholders against any actions that might encourage further slave revolts. The slaves freed themselves with Lincoln playing a secondary role.^[13]

Peasant revolts and liberation struggles, examined closely, are not solely men’s revolts, as historians sometimes assume. The 1381 English peasant rebellion was women-led. Initiated by Johanna Ferrour in the county of Kent against a crushing poll tax, it transformed into a revolt against feudalism as the Kent rebels recruited over 100,000 people in the march to London begun by Ferrour and other women. Rebel women were responsible for slaying the Archbishop of Canterbury and burning castles of aristocrats.^[14] In the Indian independence movement, despite pressures on women to confine themselves to their homes, hundreds of thousands of women joined the struggle against the British. Over one in five Indians detained for such defiance in 1930-1931 were women.^[15]

Individually, such reconsiderations of important events help us to shift our understanding of the relative significance of elite actions and mass activities in shaping particular historical eras. Collectively, they reshape our understanding of the entire history of humans, and that is the purpose of Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality.

Alvin Finkel is professor emeritus of History at Athabasca University. His latest book is Humans: The 300,000 Year Struggle for Equality, which Chapters has chosen as one of the 100 best new books of 2024.

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Notes

^[1] Research that I did in the 1990s, for example, on how women were treated in histories of the welfare state showed that they were entirely ignored before the 1980s.  The gendered character of social programs received no attention. Alvin Finkel, “Changing the Story: Gender Enters the History of the Welfare State,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 22, 1 (January 1996): 67-81.

^[2] Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (New York: Vintage Books, 2017), xix.

^[3] Frankopan, 3.

^[4] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper, 2015), 79.

^[5] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Toronto: Penguin House Canada, 2021).

^[6] Guillermo Algaze, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization: The Evolution of an Urban Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

^[7] Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (London: Verso, 1999).

^[8] Steve Muhlberger, “Democracy in Ancient India,” World History of Democracy site (2016), https://uts.nipissingu.ca/muhlberger/HISTDEM/INDIADEM.HTM, retrieved November 8, 2024.

^[9] Thomas R. Martin, Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 110.

^[10] Michael Martin, City of the Sun: Development and Popular Resistance in the Pre-Modern West (New York: Algora, 2017), 315.

^[11] Susan M. Culliney, Marisa Peterson, and Ian Roger, The Mapuche Struggle for Land and Recognition: A Legal Analysis (Portland, OR: Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Workshop, Lewis and Clark Law School, 2013).

^[12] Paul Friedman, “Peasant Resistance in Medieval Europe: Approaches to the Question of Peasant Resistance,” Filozofski vestnik, 18, 2 (1997), 189.

^[13] David Brion Davis, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

^[14] Michael Martin, City of the Sun, 339.

^[15] Meenal Shrivastava, Amma’s Daughters: A Memoir (Edmonton: AU Press, 2018), xi.