In the middle section of chapter 10 of The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow examine divine kingship, sovereignty without bureaucracy, and “second-order regimes.” From the Natchez Great Sun to ancient Egypt’s beer-producing farmers, they show how societies combined the three elements of domination—violence, knowledge, and heroic politics—in radically different configurations.
The Natchez: Divine Kingship Without the State
The Natchez present a fascinating case—possibly the only undisputed divine kingship north of the Rio Grande. These “people of the Sun” retained independence and fought the French well into the colonial period. You can still visit the Grand Village of the Natchez in Mississippi today—drive down a residential road to a dead end, find a small museum, and see the earthen mounds.
The Natchez were ruled by the Great Sun, a divine king with a crucial twist: matrilineal succession. Power passed not to the king’s son but to his sister’s son, keeping sovereignty within one clan while following matrilineal rules.
Graeber and Wengrow describe this as sovereignty in its purest form: exceptional personal power without bureaucracy, labor mobilization, or competitive politics. Nobody would call this a state, but it definitely has a king. Divine kings could do whatever they wanted—they were above the law. They often took arbitrary violent actions precisely to prove they transcended human law, establishing their godlike status.
But divine kingship faces a fundamental problem: authority can’t extend beyond immediate presence. French colonial observers thought the Great Sun’s situation resembled Versailles, where Louis XIV concentrated nobles around him without truly extending royal authority across France. You have enormous personal power, but it doesn’t travel. People a few villages away might scarcely feel the king’s presence at all.
What did people do about these dangerous divine kings? They contained them through ritual restrictions—the king must stay in this place, only moves when carried on a litter, surrounded by walls and protocols that simultaneously acknowledged and limited the king’s dangerous authority.
The Shilluk: Sovereignty Without State
The Shilluk, herding people near the Nuer in what is now Sudan and South Sudan, provide another example. The Shilluk king, called the reth, held great power in his immediate presence. But beyond that sphere, you were doing your own thing. Like the Nuer, people had a distaste for anyone giving them orders.
Both cases illustrate sovereignty—concentrated personal power exercised through violence—without bureaucracy or competitive politics. These aren’t proto-states evolving toward something else. They’re stable social formations that lasted generations.
The Problem with “Charisma”
Graeber and Wengrow identify three basic forms of domination: control over violence (the Natchez and Shilluk), control over knowledge (Chavín with their hallucinogenic mazes), and what they call charisma or heroic politics (the Olmecs with their giant stone heads depicting ball players).
But “charisma” is circular. Consider Jeff Bezos. In 1998, when Amazon was a book-selling website, he looked like a regular nerdy dude. With a few billion dollars, twenty years later he’s bulked up with personal trainers, partying at Coachella with Bad Bunny in ripped jeans at fifty-something. He didn’t win because he was charismatic—he became charismatic by winning.
What Graeber and Wengrow really mean is a competitive field where people become stars by winning games—political, economic, athletic. You might not be inherently charismatic, but once you win, people want to be around you. Their term “heroic politics” better captures this: competition produces winners, and winning itself generates the aura we call charisma.
First-Order Regimes
“First-order regimes” emphasize one of the three elements while lacking the others. The Natchez concentrated on violence without knowledge monopolies or competitive politics. Chavín controlled knowledge but showed little interest in centralized violence or political competition. The Olmecs created competitive heroic politics but without unified sovereignty or bureaucratic control.
Crucially, these aren’t evolving toward something else. There’s no inevitable progression from first-order to second-order to “full” states. Both Chavín and the Olmecs mobilized labor seasonally for monument building, but this could be festive and equalizing rather than oppressive. Seasonal power dynamics meant structures might form during certain times of year and dissolve during others.
Egypt: From Divine Kingship to Beer Economy
Unlike these cases, ancient Egypt was undeniably a state. But how did it get that way?
Look at early Egyptian rulers: whole groups of people—family, servants, palace dwarfs—buried with the king. This is sacrifice, turning violence into kinship. You’re either dismembering rivals to ensure they have no kin, or making all your people into one big patriarchal grave site, transforming power over kin into extended kingship.
Before the first dynasty, the Nile Basin featured small territorial monarchies like the Shilluk—kings with absolute but geographically limited power. Then came a remarkable debate about what happens to kings after death. Do dead kings still need care? Yes. Do ancestors get hungry? Apparently. What do they eat? Leavened bread and wheat beer.
The archaeological evidence is striking: brewing and bakery operations begin around cemeteries, attach to palaces, then spread throughout society. This probably created the world’s first subservient small-scale farmers—masses producing bread and beer for the dead, for palaces, for the whole system. We’ve come a long way from the ecology of freedom that characterized early agriculture. This is industrial-scale labor organized around mortuary and palatial needs.
The Inca Parallel
If you’re skeptical that beer obligations could mobilize entire populations, look at the Inca. They did the same thing with chicha—fermented maize beer. Spanish chroniclers documented how tribute obligations in chicha production created dependency and subservience.
So does this provide a general model? Sovereignty plus beer-based bureaucracy equals state? In Egypt and the Andes, you have absolute kingship united with large-scale administration.
But it only works in those two cases. It doesn’t apply universally.
Second-Order Regimes
What about Mesopotamia? Sovereignty belongs to the gods, and little kings constantly fight without anyone establishing lasting control. Bureaucracy combined with heroic politics—but no overarching sovereignty.
The Maya? Each ruler claims to be his own god—”tiny squabbling gods” competing with each other. Heroic politics combined with claims of divine sovereignty—but administration projected onto the cosmos, not controlled by any government.
Shang China? The court became a place of divination rather than territorial administration.
Graeber and Wengrow call these “second-order regimes”—combinations of two elements:
Egypt and Inca: Sovereignty plus administration. No competitive politics—succession is predetermined.
Mesopotamia: Administration plus heroic politics. No overarching sovereignty.
Maya: Heroic politics plus sovereignty claims. No centralized administration.
Egypt and the Andes became unified systems—but that was peculiar. Elsewhere, there was always squabbling for control.
The Strange Appeal of Monarchy
Monarchy has been remarkably popular throughout recorded history. Even Americans, supposedly independent of kings, spend enormous attention on royal weddings and coronations. Frankly, a good chunk of the population might prefer having a king—they’ll play along with democracy, but they’d be happier with a monarch.
One peculiar feature: monarchy is the only prominent system where children are crucial political players. You need heirs. In all other systems, children don’t matter politically. But in monarchies, everyone’s always talking about succession.
The British still have their monarchy, though royals aren’t supposed to do anything. Recent polling shows generational divides: 68% of older UK residents support the monarchy, but only 32% of younger people. The appeal is fading, especially when monarchs no longer govern.
Egypt’s “Dark Ages” and Archaeological Bias
When pharaonic rule broke down, competitive politics returned through nomarchs—local heroes operating in heroic political fields. Egyptologists label these “dark ages” or “intermediate periods,” treating them as chaotic interludes between “real” history.
Why ignore times when the competitive field returned? Because they don’t build things for museums. We only celebrate societies that give us wonderful monuments—like the step pyramid at Djoser, a precursor to the famous pyramids that tourists overlook.
But who would want to live in a society where you might get buried at the bottom of a pyramid with the king? Better to live where you’re free to move around and do your own thing, even if the art isn’t as impressive. We celebrate what kings commissioned while ignoring what ordinary people might have chosen.
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