The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

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Stefanos Geroulanos (New York University)

The Invention of Prehistory

Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

Stefanos Geroulanos (New York University)

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English

WW Norton & Co
02 April 2024

History; General & world history; 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000; Social & cultural history; Archaeology; Palaeontology

Books about the origins of humanity dominate best-seller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. In this coruscating work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture but gave rise to our modern world.

The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favour of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples “savages” allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of “killer apes” who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West’s imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric IndoGermans; the idea that colonialised peoples could be “bombed back to the Stone Age” was made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilisation advanced in stages.

As Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past—and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past.

By: Stefanos Geroulanos (New York University)
Imprint: WW Norton & Co
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 236mm, Width: 163mm, Spine: 41mm
Weight: 798g
ISBN: 9781324091455
ISBN 10: 1324091452
Pages: 512
Publication Date: 02 April 2024
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Stefanos Geroulanos is the Director of the Remarque Institute and a Professor of History at New York University. The author of Transparency in Postwar France: A Critical History of the Present and other books, he lives in New York, NY.

Reviews for The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

"""Stefanos Geroulanos reveals how the quest for human origins emerged from the imperial mandate—to possess the earth and control its peoples. His subtle, passionate book steers us away from an unreal past and toward an equal, peaceful, and sustainable future for all."" -- Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing ""In a brilliant masterstroke, Stefanos Geroulanos turns the tables on those shining a lamp on human origins, documenting how they have always held up a mirror to themselves and their own times. . . . [T]his magnificent book reminds us that inquiry is always political—and that the continuing fashion of exploring the birth of civilization and the dawn of everything has the darkest roots."" -- Samuel Moyn, author of Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War ""The idea that some people have stayed behind in a savage state while others have ascended to civilization has caused and continues to cause immense suffering for those supposed to be human animals, bombed back to the Stone Age or otherwise disappeared from history. Covering an enormous territory from Rousseau to Wakanda, displaying a firework of erudition, written with verve, The Invention of Prehistory will be a milestone on the path to a less destructive relation to the deep past."" -- Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline ""Nimbly moving across a great expanse of space and time, The Invention of Prehistory dismantles our most widely accepted ideas about the origins of humanity. This is intellectual history as it should be written: serene in its mastery of intransigent material, yet endlessly provocative in argument, and ultimately fatal to long-cherished assumptions and prejudices."" -- Pankaj Mishra, author of Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire"