Investigating the human past in this way is not a matter of searching for utopia, but of freeing us to think about the true possibilities of human existence
His closing message: studying history isn’t just about the past it’s about expanding our imagination for how people can live freely today and in the future.
Until surprisingly recent times, spaces of human freedom existed across large parts of our planet.
This is the essay’s main takeaway. Wengrow says humans have always experimented with different ways of living empire is not inevitable. Recognizing this gives us hope for future alternatives.
It is easy, encouraged by works such as the Atlas, to imagine ancient history as a chequerboard of kingdoms and empires.
He argues that this picture is false. The world wasn’t just divided into empires many people lived freely in flexible, self governing societies that don’t fit our modern political categories.
Guinnane finds the Atlas guilty of sometimes reporting population estimates with no apparent supporting evidence
Wengrow uses this to show that many historians rely on outdated or unreliable data. He calls them zombie statistics numbers that keep getting repeated even though they’re basically guesses.
evidence for a prosperous urban civilisation with no discernible signs of rulership or central authority
He gives examples like Jenne-jeno and Liangzhu to prove that complex societies existed without hierarchical rule. This challenges the idea that “civilization” must mean centralized power.
Over the past few decades, geographical spaces once written off as blanks on the map, or dismissed as ‘an unchanging palaeolithic backwater’ (as our 1978 Atlas puts it, for Aboriginal Australia), have been flooded with new data.
This marks a turning point. Wengrow explains how modern archaeology is rewriting what we thought we knew, revealing advanced, organized societies that existed without kings or empires.
Thinking ‘in quantitative terms’ doesn’t really allow us to bypass these issues, or at least it shouldn’t.
He’s saying that statistics alone can’t tell us whether empires were better for people. Numbers can hide suffering like slavery, inequality, and violence if we don’t question what they really represent.
Empires have always created vivid and disturbingly violent images of tribal life on their frontiers
Wengrow shows how empires justified their own violence by portraying outsiders as dangerous or uncivilized. This propaganda made imperial domination seem necessary or even moral.
It is from such sources that we get, not just our notion of empire as handmaiden to civilisation, but also our contemporary image of life before and beyond empire as being small-scale, chaotic and largely unproductive. In short, everything that is still implied by the word ‘tribal’
Wengrow says historians like Gibbon helped create the stereotype that tribal societies were primitive or childlike compared to “civilized” empires. He’s challenging this bias — showing how empire has shaped how we define civilization and freedom.
For some scholars today, the claims prove that empires are obvious and natural structures for human beings to inhabit
Here, Wengrow is summarizing a common belief — that humans naturally organize into empires. He’s setting up a critique: he’ll argue later that this view ignores other ways people have lived freely, outside of imperial control.
ontemporary historians tell us that, by the start of the Common Era, approximately three-quarters of the world’s population were living in just four empires
Wengrow is questioning the idea that most people have always lived under empires. He wants readers to pause and consider how this assumption influences our perception of history, that an empire might seem normal, even though that may not be the case.