Chapter 9 of The Dawn of Everything reveals one of history’s most overlooked urban experiments: Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that demolished its pyramids and human sacrifice altars to build apartment complexes for thousands. Graeber and Wengrow then turn to the Spanish conquest, showing how Indigenous allies like the democratic republic of Tlaxcala made strategic decisions that shaped American history—decisions that had nothing to do with Guns, Germs, and Steel.
From Hierarchy to Democracy: The Teotihuacan Transformation
The story of Teotihuacan challenges every assumption about urban development and social scale. Around year zero (Common Era), this city began with massive pyramid construction, human sacrifice, and clear signs of hierarchical organization. But then something extraordinary happened: the people stopped building monuments, ceased the sacrifices, and embarked on perhaps the most ambitious social housing project in human history.
What replaced the pyramids? Approximately 2,000 apartment complexes where the majority of the population lived in relatively comfortable conditions. These weren’t hovels for the masses while elites lived in splendor—they were substantial residences where kin groups lived together, enjoyed diverse diets, and accessed goods from distant regions. Archaeological evidence shows no central palace, no royal tombs, no monuments to individual rulers. Instead, we find evidence of neighborhood councils and local assemblies, governance structures similar to those discovered in Ukrainian mega-sites and the Indus Valley civilization.
The artistic record reinforces this interpretation. Unlike typical Mesoamerican art featuring dynastic rulers and hierarchical displays, Teotihuacan’s murals show people of equal size holding hands, walking together, perhaps consuming psychoactive plants—celebrations of collective activity rather than individual power. Some murals are veritably psychedelic, showing mushrooms raining down on celebrants. This represents an inversion of the usual Mesoamerican artistic tradition, suggesting a fundamentally different social organization.
Archaeologist Michael Smith describes this as “living the good life in Teotihuacan,” noting that this level of widespread urban comfort has rarely been achieved since. The city maintained this relatively egalitarian structure for several centuries before eventually being abandoned, likely due to complex factors involving external connections and resource access.
The Spanish Conquest and the Guns, Germs, and Steel Myth
Jared Diamond’s popular narrative attributes Spanish conquest to technological and biological advantages: steel weapons, guns, horses, and especially epidemic diseases derived from agricultural proximity to domesticated animals. While these factors played roles, Graeber and Wengrow argue they fundamentally misunderstand how the conquest actually succeeded.
The crucial factor was Indigenous political decisions. Cortez could not have conquered the Aztec Empire without substantial Indigenous allies—particularly the Tlaxcalans, who had been resisting Aztec expansion for years. The Aztecs claimed they kept Tlaxcala unconquered merely as a training ground for warriors and source of sacrifice victims, but this likely understates Tlaxcalan military and political capacity.
The nature of these allies matters enormously. Were the Tlaxcalans a kingdom that allied with Spain through royal decree? Or something else entirely?
Tlaxcala: An Indigenous Democratic Republic
Cortez himself described Tlaxcala as “like a republic like in Venice”—remarkable words from a man accustomed to monarchies and kings. This wasn’t casual observation. Francisco Cervantes de Salazar’s unfinished manuscript Chronicle of New Spain, based on interviews with participants shortly after the conquest, reveals that Tlaxcala had a functioning urban parliament that made decisions through deliberation and consensus-building.
The decision to ally with Spain wasn’t automatic or inevitable. The Tlaxcalan parliament debated the question, with some arguing they should resist or defeat the Spanish rather than welcome them. This was democratic deliberation about one of history’s most consequential decisions.
Archaeological evidence supports the documentary sources. Like Teotihuacan, Tlaxcala shows no central palace or temple complex. Housing was relatively high-quality and widely distributed. Assembly spaces were located outside the city proper, suggesting deliberative governance rather than monarchical control.
Leadership in Tlaxcala followed specific preparation protocols. Aspiring leaders underwent trials, moral instruction, and had to embody the values of the Chichimeca—the hunter-gatherer peoples to the north. This preference for ascetic, “hunter-like” virtues in urban leaders represents a fascinating reversal of expectations about civilization and political authority.
The Chichimeca War: When “Primitive” Defeats “Advanced”
The Guns, Germs, and Steel narrative completely fails to explain the Chichimeca War (1550-1590). After conquering the Aztec Empire and establishing control over central Mexico, the Spanish attempted to extend authority over the Chichimeca peoples to the north—groups often dismissed as simple hunter-gatherers compared to the “civilized” agricultural empires.
The result? A 40-year conflict ending in Chichimeca military victory. Despite having horses, steel weapons, firearms, and an established colonial base, the Spanish could not defeat these supposedly primitive peoples. Eventually, Spain abandoned military conquest in favor of missionary activity and negotiation, often sending Christianized Tlaxcalans as intermediaries.
The outcome preserved Chichimeca culture, identity, and language to a degree impossible in the rapidly conquered empire centers. This challenges every assumption about technological determinism and military superiority. The decentralized, mobile societies proved far more difficult to conquer than the centralized empires with their fixed capitals and administrative hierarchies.
What This Means for Understanding Conquest and Resistance
Graeber and Wengrow’s analysis reveals that political structure, not technology, determined conquest outcomes. The Aztec and Inca empires fell quickly precisely because they were recognizable to Europeans—kingdoms with clear hierarchies, centralized authority, and administrative apparatus that could be captured and repurposed. Once you defeated the emperor and seized the capital, the imperial machinery could serve new masters.
Democratic and decentralized societies offered no such convenience. Tlaxcala negotiated as a republic. The Chichimeca peoples couldn’t be defeated because there was no central authority to capture, no fixed capital to occupy, no administrative hierarchy to co-opt. Indigenous political diversity meant diverse forms of resistance and accommodation.
This reframes the entire narrative of European expansion in the Americas. It wasn’t a story of technologically superior Europeans conquering helpless natives through biological and metallurgical advantages. It was a complex political process in which Indigenous peoples made strategic decisions based on their own interests, governance structures, and assessments of Spanish power. Some allied with newcomers to defeat old enemies. Others fought successful defensive wars. Still others negotiated terms that preserved significant autonomy.
The Legacy of Teotihuacan and Mesoamerican Political Diversity
The Aztecs claimed inspiration from Teotihuacan—they certainly adopted the grid pattern and were awed by the pyramids. But they fundamentally misunderstood or deliberately rejected the city’s actual legacy. Where Teotihuacan had built apartments for thousands, the Aztecs built an empire. Where Teotihuacan’s art celebrated collective activity, Aztec art emphasized dynastic power and military prowess. Where Teotihuacan appears to have governed through local assemblies, the Aztecs created the kind of centralized monarchy immediately recognizable to European invaders.
The real legacy of Teotihuacan was a tradition of urban democracy that waxed and waned across Mesoamerica for centuries. These cities demonstrated that large-scale urban life didn’t inevitably produce hierarchy and kingship. They showed that people could build pyramids, then choose to stop building them in favor of housing everyone comfortably. They proved that scale doesn’t automatically equal inequality.
By the time of Spanish arrival, the Aztec Empire represented just one possible form of Mesoamerican political organization—and arguably an aberration from longer democratic traditions. The fact that Europeans recognized and could easily conquer the Aztecs tells us more about European political assumptions than about Indigenous American political possibilities.
Implications for Social Scale and Political Choice
Chapter 9 completes an argument that Graeber and Wengrow have been building throughout the book: social scale does not determine political structure. The evidence from Teotihuacan shows that even after beginning with hierarchy (pyramids, human sacrifice, apparent rulership), urban populations can reorganize themselves democratically. The Chinese examples from Chapter 8 showed hierarchy transforming into democracy. Together, these cases demonstrate that political arrangements flow in multiple directions—not inevitably from egalitarian to hierarchical as populations grow.
Moreover, the Spanish conquest narrative reveals how political structure affects vulnerability. Centralized empires with clear hierarchies proved easier to conquer than decentralized democracies or mobile hunter-gatherer societies. The very features that made the Aztec and Inca empires “advanced” in conventional narratives—centralized administration, fixed capitals, hierarchical command structures—made them vulnerable to quick military defeat and administrative capture.
This has profound implications for how we understand political development, state formation, and historical change. If political structures are choices rather than evolutionary inevitabilities, then Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas were making strategic decisions about governance based on their own values, circumstances, and assessments of trade-offs. The “primitiveness” attributed to some societies might actually represent sophisticated political choices to preserve autonomy, equality, or flexibility.
Previous: Early Cities and Democratic Governance (Chapter 8)
Next: The Shape of Time and Historical Possibilities (Chapter 10)