Goliath’s Curse

The History and Future of Societal Collapse

De: Luke Kemp

Narrado por: Luke Kemp

Brought to you by Penguin.

A radical retelling of human history through collapse – from the dawn of our species to the urgent existential threats of the twenty-first century and beyond.

‘A brilliant, utterly convincing account of the evolution of human society and why we are probably reaching humanity's end days’ HENRY MARSH

'Absolutely essential reading for understanding why past civilisations collapsed, and how to protect our own from the same fate' LEWIS DARTNELL

For the first 200,000 years of human history, hunter-gathering Homo sapiens lived in fluid, egalitarian civilizations that thwarted any individual or group from ruling permanently. Then, around 12,000 years ago, that began to change.

As we reluctantly congregated in the first farms and cities, people began to rely on novel lootable resources like grain and fish for their daily sustenance. And when more powerful weapons became available, small groups began to seize control of these valuable commodities. This inequality in resources soon tipped over into inequality in power, and we started to adopt more primal, hierarchical forms of organization. Power was concentrated in masters, kings, pharaohs and emperors (and ideologies were born to justify their rule). Goliath-like states and empires – with vast bureaucracies and militaries – carved up and dominated the globe.

What brought them down? Whether in the early cities of Cahokia in North America or Tiwanaku in South America, or the sprawling empires of Egypt, Rome and China, it was increasing inequality and concentrations of power that hollowed these Goliaths out before an external shock brought them crashing down. These collapses were written up as apocalyptic, but in truth they were usually a blessing for most of the population.

Now we live in a single global Goliath. Growth obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war. Our systems are now so fast, complex and interconnected that a future collapse will likely be global, swift and irreversible. All of us now face a choice: we must learn to democratically control Goliath, or the next collapse may be our last.

'An excellent survey of human history through the collapses of Goliath-like kings, states and empires' OBSERVER

'A comprehensive overview of societal collapse, based on the analysis of dozens of cases spanning thousands of years from the Paleolithic to today. Highly recommended' PETER TURCHIN

'A deeply sobering and strangely inspiring history of how societies collapse - and how we can still save ours. Read it now, or your descendants will find it in the ruins' JOHANN HARI

© Luke Kemp 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Reseñas de la Crítica

An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation . . . The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens . . . scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct (Damian Carrington)

Unlike Jared Diamond’s formative 1997 bestseller Guns, Germs and Steel, which focuses on a handful of examples (and is increasingly contested by scholars), Goliath’s Curse analyzes a massive data set through digital analysis . . . In the modern tradition of Big Books of human history like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, Goliath’s Curse provides a novel theory of civilizational development . . . feels something like reading Thomas Piketty filtered through Mad Max . . . a strangely hopeful book (Ed Simon)

An excellent survey of human history through the collapses of Goliath-like kings, states and empires . . . Kemp sees a solution in the flashing warning lights; the collective means to rise up and slay the Goliaths of climate change, big tech and authoritarianism through true, progressive democracy (Ben East)

A brilliant, utterly convincing account of the evolution of human society and why we are probably reaching humanity's end days (Henry Marsh, author of DO NO HARM)

A comprehensive overview of societal collapse, based on the analysis of dozens of cases spanning thousands of years from the Paleolithic to today. Highly recommended (Peter Turchin, author of END TIMES)

Absolutely essential reading for understanding why past civilisations collapsed, and how to protect our own from the same fate (Lewis Dartnell, author of THE KNOWLEDGE: How to Rebuild Our World After An Apocalypse)

Learned, provocative and deeply unsettling . . . exceptionally powerful, undeniably impressive (Andrew Lynch)

A deeply sobering and strangely inspiring history of how societies collapse - and how we can still save ours. Read it now, or your descendants will find it in the ruins (Johann Hari, author of STOLEN FOCUS)

Exceptional . . . This is not a book for the anxious. It tells of the collapse of empires and the potential for the implosion of human society. In his marshalling of existential risks the author Luke Kemp deploys apocalyptic prose (Mark Urban)

Erudite, detailed and urgent. A masterpiece of data-driven collapsology (Paul Cooper, author of FALL OF CIVILIZATIONS)

Epic deep history and potential futures

If you liked books like Collapse, Better Angels of Our Nature, Sapiens, and Superintelligence, you'll enjoy this brilliant new history of humankind and global catastrophic risk. Read by the author, who has an interestingly different style... I played at 1.2x which I don't usually do but was ideal here.

A necessary questioning of the necessity of status hierarchy

The reinterpretation of historical states as mobster gangs is convincing and well built up with historical evidence.
The connection between historical extractive states and modern social welfare states + companies are less clear