The Dawn A Monthly Monthly Magazine, Edited And Run By Satis Chandra Mukherjee For Sixteen Years From 1897 To 1913, Holds A Unique Place In The History Of Modern India.

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

This book gives a flavour of the Indian response to modern science by analysing the lives and careers of four scientifically influential personalities in Bengal. His analysis of the careers of two scientists, J. C. Bose and P. C. Ray, and two institution builders, Mahendralal Sircar and Asutosh Mookerjee, brings to light the issues related to science at a time of colonialism and nationalism. Scientists often had to depend on British institutions for legitimation and funding, while also supporting the nationalist cause for greater autonomy. One of the central claims of this book is that the protagonists aimed to contribute to a modern world science, one based on a strong sense of universalism. They did not aim to construct any alternative sciences, though they did express and apply their work by drawing on their cultural heritage. This makes Science and National Consciousness a work of particular relevance today, when a homogenous, instrumentalist and totally Western conception of science is being globally accepted.