Goliath’s Curse is a large book. It is in a genre pioneered by H. G. Wells (1920) and made popular by Jared Diamond (1998, 2005) and Yuval Noah Harari (2014, 2015), covering the whole history of humanity. It is a book that I read in one swoop and enjoyed every page of. Kemp reviews troves of material from archaeology, anthropology and history, building compelling insights that are impossible to do justice to in this review.
A foundation of Kemp’s argument is that a key difference between humans and apes is that humans are naturally friendly, cooperative, and value equality. Apes are organised around a powerful male whose genome is perpetuated through all females in his area. Human communities, valuing equality, perpetuate the genomes of most males, resulting in populations of high genetic diversity. The genetic evolutionary advantage of equality and sociability, has produced networks of self-organising communities, which enabled our species to thrive throughout the palaeolithic period. The natural sociability of Homo Sapiens was critical in it surviving collapses, that lead to the disappearance of other humans that were more reclusive, like the neanderthals.
Collapses were the order of the day for most of human history. Environmental change, disease and enemies are often to blame, but Kemp argues that inequality is the most important and consistent trigger of collapse in human history. Collapses, triggered by inequality, often strengthened social bonds and were succeeded by periods of more equality and increased social harmony.
Kemp’s view of collapse is neither positive nor negative. Collapse may be experienced by many as a tragedy but does not necessarily lead to chaos. He argues that the theory of Thomas Hobbes (1651) that without a strong ruler human society will collapse in chaos, is wrong. The historical record is against it. Instead of being in perpetual need of a sovereign, people naturally self-organize and live harmoniously in groups. Palaeolithic communities – a phase that lasted at least a couple of hundred thousand years – lived without sovereigns and governors, and without much violence. Those times, Kemp argues, violence was addressed to individuals, mostly to stop them from becoming dominant. Communities despised hierarchy and used violence to stop it from emerging. Most of the first part of the book is dedicated to evidence for this argument.
The rise of hierarchical structures, akin to states, which Kemp calls “Goliaths”, happened when the accumulation of “Goliath fuel” (“lootable resources”, geographic barriers to exit, and monopolistic access to weapons) allowed them to. Agriculture produced grain that could be looted. If the thieves had access to weapons and the farmers could not escape, then the looting could happen repeatedly, developing into a long-term state of subjugation. Hobbes would call this state “a social contract”, while Kemp calls it an “extractive institution” - a regular extraction of resources from people, which are used to maintain the dominance of a few “status seekers” through violence and ceremony.
Rising inequality in Goliaths is documented in emerging differences in the sizes of houses, in the level of wealth found in graves and in general in indications of extravagant ceremonial life that are associated with the existence of higher-status individuals. Status seeking reflects the instinct of apes to preserve the genome of dominant males. For Kemp it is a behavioural regression; a move away from the core evolutionary advantage of homo sapiens. Status seekers “score high in “psychopathy (callousness, and a lack of empathy and remorse), narcissism (an inflated sense of entitlement and self-importance) and Machiavellianism (manipulating others for personal gain)” (pp. 48–49).
Violence in history is associated with the establishment and growth of Goliaths; not with their collapse. Violence is not a natural human instinct. It is difficult for most of us to hurt or kill people. It takes a lot of physical and psychological training to make soldiers ready to be violent on command.
Once trained, soldiers can extract resources from, and impose behaviours on people by threatening violence. Hierarchical structures of people trained in violence have been effective war machines, only defeated by other such structures. This, Kemp argues, was why in neolithic times there was a propagation of dominance hierarchies. Violence in palaeolothic times was used against specific, power-hungry individuals. In neolithic times is becomes used against groups of people, for their subjugation or extermination. War is about growing Goliaths, be they companies, cities or states. At the heart of every Goliath, dominance hierarchies marked by status competition, corruption by power, and bureaucracies, reward status seekers, produce ever higher levels of inequality, and are conducive to arms races and conflict.
Kemp reviews a wealth of archaeology and history about the rise and fall of such structures, from prehistorical cities in Asia and America and later empires, all the way to the decolonisation process after WWII.
The second part of the book discusses in detail ever larger Goliaths. When early Goliaths collapsed, they left very little behind, rummaged buildings, tools, ornaments, and statues. Languages and scriptures were abandoned and cultures were entirely forgotten. Over time more was left behind, material but also language, culture and stories. As people learned from past experiments and became better at organising central control structures, Goliaths became more frequent, larger, and more complex.
The end of colonial empires was a collapse of old imperial orders. It did produce more equal societies in the West, but its benefits did not last long. Different Goliaths moved into the space with different forms of extractive institutions. A system of hierarchical ruling of colonies was replaced by a global system of unequal exchange through trade and military interventions.
Wars and violent conflicts, characteristics of Goliath construction, have been steadily rising during the 21st century. Arms races, environmental destruction and rising inequality characterise the current global Goliath – the global system. Having spread across the globe through powerful control technologies – some of which are ironically set to escape human control – and given status to psychopathic “status seeking” entities such as corporations, the current global system faces an impossible dilemma. Its growth accumulates existential risk for life on Earth – through environmental destruction, while its collapse carries a direct threat on life on Earth through nuclear weapons. This is the dynamic that drives “the end-game”, the third and final part of the book.
For many, the question is not if the current system collapses, but rather when. Doomsday Preppers try to shield themselves from “the event” by relying on engineering and accumulating technology. Kemp believes that the best protection against destruction are the natural human qualities of empathy, care, compassion and altruism – qualities that underpinned the improvement of human condition in all previous systemic collapses.
Will this time be different? We live in the Anthropocene, when human activity is a dominant planet-shaping force. Everything we do affects others, and we are all exposed to the accumulated systemic risks.
The collapse of Goliath is not only an inbuilt tendency. There is a duty to slay the Goliath, and to ensure that we avoid the potential horrors of a future collapse. Kemp has four policy suggestions: staying within the planetary boundaries, controlling technology in general and AI in particular, freeing the world from nuclear weapons and democratising political power.
“There are a few factors in the modern world that could help us to kill Goliath and create a more equal and less exploitative global system. (...) The first is making resources less lootable. Imagine if the data of today could be gathered only with the full and informed consent of citizens and was fairly remunerated (…) The second is increasing the exit options. Creating more open borders and, importantly, more ways for people to escape mass surveillance, would mean that states would have to negotiate more with their citizens. A third is using technology to enable both larger-scale democracy and greater oversight of the powerful. (…) The fourth and final possibility is knowledge. (….) No society in history understood the darker angels of our nature, or Goliath fuel. (…) Understanding (this) can help us to create interventions and institutions able to stop history from repeating” (pp 448-449).
The history we learn at school is the history of the winners amongst Goliath builders and dominators. Whether this is because of “sources” (Goliaths rely on symbolism and leave material behind, in contrast to environmentally benign foraging communities of equals who do not seek status in symbolic artefacts and thus leave very little legacy) or because Goliaths impose such readings of history in order to generate ideologies that support them, does not really matter. Recognising this bias is a first important step towards democratising history (Carter et al. 2025), ending the idealising of psychopathy and developing ethics for the Anthropocene that are expressive of human nature – rather than the nature of other apes.
Kemp ends his book with four prescriptions for individual behaviour:
- Avoid investing resources and time in activities that may cause harm to other people and the environment.
- Be a democrat and an active participant in policy and politics.
- Use the important issues – climate change, nuclear weapons, and the concentration of power - as guidance for your voting preferences.
- Oppose domination in all your relationships. “Whenever you come across a hierarchy (…) ask whether it is legitimate and whether it justifies domination. If it doesn’t, then try to overturn it.” (p. 492).
It is difficult to disagree with such good moral sense. This is a history of humanity that is worth reading and spreading.
References
Carter, L., Foks, F., Harling, P., / eds (2025). “Democratising History: Modern British History Inside and Out”, University of London Publisher, London, https://uolpress.co.uk/book/democratising-history/.
Diamond, J. (1998). Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years, W.W.Norton and Company, New York.
Diamond, J. (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Viking Press, New York.
Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harvill Secker, London, 2014.
Harari, Y. N. (2015). Homo deus: a brief history of tomorrow, Harper Collins, New York.
Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan or The Matter, Form and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, Andrew Crooke, at the Green Dragon in St. Paul's Churchyard, London.
Wells, H. G. (1920). The Outline of History, Barnes & Noble, New York (2004 edition).