Goliath’s Curse is a creditable effort to explain the political history of the world and diagnose its future. In Luke Kemp’s account, a Goliath is a constellation of hierarchies in which some individuals dominate others so as to control energy and labor—what most would recognize as a state, empire, or civilization. The curse of Goliaths is that they eventually and inevitably collapse.
In Kemp’s view, Goliaths first emerged some 5,000 years ago. Inspecting instances from the Calusa (Florida) to Cahokia (Illinois), the Indus Valley to the Inka, Teotihuacan to Tiwanaku, and the Old Kingdom in Egypt to the Xin state in China, Kemp proposes that they were powered by three principal sources. The first was the emergence of lootable materials—“those easily seen, stolen, and stored” (p. 63), which provide the basis of wealth and power. Securing these resources required privileged access to superior weaponry and a caged terrain (circumscribed conditions and/or landesque investments that prevented people from escaping domination). Driven by this “Goliath fuel,” a positive feedback loop then generated wealth inequality, which in turn spawned increasing power differentials, with ascribed intergenerational transmission deepening these disparities over time.
The key agents driving this feedback process were individuals who ranked high in a “dark triad” of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism—“strong dominance status seekers” (p. 167) predisposed to aggression and largely unrestrained by empathy. In a kind of elite “gang warfare,” these agents seized power by force and “negotiated with other elites to create a stable new order” (p. 151). History, in this telling, was “a story of organized crime” (p. 152).
What could possibly go wrong? The seeds of Goliath’s curse lie in the very extractive processes that fuel its ascent. The “wealth pump” that “increasingly benefit[s] elites at the expense of the poor” (p. 138) eventually triggers a Goliath’s demise. Some have collapsed under their own politically top-heavy weight, undone by elite infighting, impoverished masses, and/or rising counterdominance impulses. Others, similarly hollowed out from within, crumbled under external shocks: floods, droughts, climate change, disease.
Later chapters in the book follow this rise-and-collapse template through cases as varied as the Lowland Maya, ancient Rome, early Chinese states, colonial Europe, and contemporary failed states. Drawing on this broad historical record, Kemp advances several instructive themes, chief among them that human progress has followed a U-curve. In the beginning, we enjoyed relatively high levels of happiness, health, peace, and prosperity. These conditions then deteriorated with the emergence of Goliaths, stagnating for about 5,000 years before improving markedly in the past two centuries or so, driven by massive increases in energy capture and collective action.
It is an illusion, nevertheless, to think that Goliath’s curse has been defeated. In his final section, Kemp offers a measured yet unsettling account of the scarily plausible ways in which extraction in our current Global Goliath—states and empires entwined with corporate behemoths and embedded in transnational economic, political, and surveillance-capitalist institutions—could lead to collapse, taking large swathes of humanity with it. As with the Death Star in the original Star Wars film, Kemp writes, thermonuclear exchange, artificial intelligence, climate change, a genetically engineered H5N1 virus or other bioweapon, combined with global interdependence, leave the planet vulnerable to a single well-placed strike. “The curse,” he states, “is now global and more dangerous than ever” (p. 299).
Many will agree. But what is to be done? Kemp finds that the more resilient Goliaths were large, diverse groups in which information and decision-making was shared; the weakest were small homogenous oligarchies in which elites were cushioned from external shocks. Pursuing this theme in an epilogue, he suggests that we can escape the curse by democratizing political power, restoring global equality, and defanging AI by “simply addressing the economic exploitation that underpins increasingly powerful machines” (p. 321). These are noble sentiments, but the economic and political forces ranged against success seem daunting in the extreme.
“Big Picture” theories of human history are mammoth intellectual undertakings that perforce cast broad nets, privilege sweeping themes over fine detail, and are therefore easy targets for expert critique. Goliath’s Curse is no exception. Kemp’s erudition and cross-disciplinary synthesis are truly impressive, but he is not trained in either archaeology or evolutionary anthropology, and he tends to cut a wide swath through complex literatures and debates to reach his grim conclusion. As a result, he leaves many nits to be picked. To support his vision of primordial human happiness, health, peace, and prosperity, for instance, he portrays Paleolithic lethal violence as muted and personal rather than organized; he adopts a contentious definition of warfare; and he leans heavily toward one side of a deeply polarized literature. His claim that Paleolithic egalitarianism was an active choice presupposes that, should they have wished, leaders in these exceptionally mobile, low-density communities could have accumulated power in the first place. Nonetheless, as a vision of where current thinking about human political history stands, Goliath’s Curse offers a useful placeholder. If the book gains public traction, it may also provide useful hooks—or foils—for archaeological research on particular historical cases. In addition to being well written, accessible, and potentially valuable to graduate courses in social archaeology, it merits attention as a warning of humanity’s possible collapse and extinction.
