Optimism in looking to history
Humans: The 300,000-Year Struggle for Equality
by Alvin Finkel
Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 2025
$25.95 / 9781459419544
Reviewed by Robin Fisher
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Surely in our world of anger and conflict we could do with a dose of optimism and hope? The prolific Canadian historian, Alvin Finkel, certainly thinks so and explains why in his book Humans: The 300,000 – Year Struggle for Equality. There have been more calamitous times than ours, but one of the consequences of the decline of history is that we lose the reassurance of precedent. Those who forget the past… As we lose our collective memory everything is happening for the first time. Alvin Finkel wants us to remember the past, think more positively about our current predicament and be more optimistic about the future.
History, it has been said, is a conversation between past and present. In our time there is a spate of books that look at human history and what it tells us about prospects for the future. Some emphasise the loss of the cooperative, egalitarian societies of our early history. They blame either the development of agriculture or the rise of industrial capitalism for the establishment, and then prevalence, of hierarchy and oppression.1 By emphasising the constant resistance to power by the downtrodden, Finkel has a more positive view of the past and therefore of the present.
In Humans, Finkel leads us through a breathtaking sweep of 300,000 years of human history. He starts with early hunter and gatherer societies that, being egalitarian, co-operative, and peaceful, reflected intrinsic human nature. Those societies, he continues, have much to teach us. And he states that these foraging societies operated for 97% of the time span of human history. Finkel disagrees with Harari who, in his book Sapiens, argues that it was the rise of agriculture that began to diminish our better selves. Finkel believes that human nature is flexible and we can respond to change in different ways. Rather than agriculture replacing foraging, it was the later development of cities that led to elites who wanted to control the people. That aspect of human nature became even more apparent with the development of industrial capitalism and imperialism. Both led to the oppression of the relatively powerless at home and subjugated indigenous people abroad. The account of late twentieth century neoliberalism is particularly depressing with the recent history of the United States depicted as a litany of disaster.
In spite of all this, Finkel’s hope for humanity arises from his focus on the down trodden rather than the controlling elites: on listening to the “voices and agency of the oppressed.” It is bottom up rather than top down history. With that perspective Finkel finds hope for humanity by showing that wherever there was oppression there was also resistance. He develops this argument in great detail and with many examples starting with slave revolts in Sparta and the Roman empire, through peasant revolts against feudalism and indigenous uprisings against imperial power right up to recent protests on environmental issues and measures to control pandemics.
Throughout human history there were uprisings and movements that shone a beacon of light on the future even though, as often as not, they were consumed by the darkness. Sometimes they met with some success, such as worker action in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century that brought gradual improvements for the working class. To be optimistic about our future one has to accept that the many defeats did not end the aspiration for equality. And Finkel draws our attention to places where the better part of human nature endures. Karala, a state in southern India created a post-colonial society of both “economic equality and popular participation” that “can properly feed, house and educate” all its people.
It is an added bonus for Canadian readers that this book is written by a Canadian historian. Canadian examples are more frequent than they might otherwise be. Métis and other Indigenous uprisings are mentioned along with the rebellions of 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada and the Winnipeg General Strike. So Canada is a part of this rich tapestry of human history.
Some aspects of this book are a consequence of its scope. Generalisations are supported by loads of detail and examples. At the same time, when you cover so much time and space examples will be selective and countervailing evidence will be ignored. Finkel does provide exceptions that help to prove his rules. For example, Northwest Coast indigenous societies were less egalitarian, perhaps because of the seasonally abundant environment, than many other foraging communities. I do not wish to push this point about selective evidence too far because general histories, particularly of this scope, are much easier to criticize than to write. It is important for the reader to keep track of the overall argument of the book through all the detail. The old graduate student trick of reading both the introduction and the conclusion before reading the rest of the book may help. The remarkable thing about Humans is that Finkel has the courage to sustain his argument through the limitations that arise from the sheer scope of the book.
Finkel’s Humans is a welcome antidote in a world where the better part of human nature seems hard to find. A world in which optimism is now more needed.
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Robin Fisher taught and wrote history as a faculty member at Simon Fraser University before he moved into university administration and contributed to the establishment of two new universities: the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George and Mount Royal University in Calgary. His books include Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (UBC Press, 1977; second edition, 1992) and Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (University of Toronto Press, 1991). He was the recipient of the 2022 Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing for Wilson Duff: Coming Back, A Life. [Editor’s note: Robin Fisher has reviewed books by Carol E. Mayer, Ted Binnema, Jim Reynolds, Daniel Marshall, Margaret Horsfield & Ian Kennedy, and Gordon Miller for The British Columbia Review, and contributed two popular essays, The Way We Were: Two Friends, Two Historians and “The Noise of Time” and the Removal of History? ]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster
- Two examples of such books are Harari, Yuval Noah, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Toronto: Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2016) and Graeber, David and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Toronto: Signal/McClelland & Stewart, 2021) ↩︎