Work

A History of How We Spend Our Time

Hardcover | 3 September 2020

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A revolutionary new history of humankind through the prism of work, from the origins of life on Earth to our ever-more automated present, that challenges some of our deepest assumptions about who we are.

The work we do brings us meaning, moulds our values, determines our social status and dictates how we spend most of our time. But this wasn't always the case: for 95% of our species' history, work held a radically different importance.

How, then, did work become the central organisational principle of our societies? How did it transform our bodies, our environments, our views on equality and our sense of time? And why, in a time of material abundance, are we working more than ever before?

About the Author

James Suzman is an anthropologist specialising in the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa. A recipient of the Smuts Commonwealth Fellowship in African Studies at Cambridge University, he is now the director of Anthropos Ltd, a think tank that applies anthropological methods to solving contemporary social and economic problems. He has written for publications including the New York Times, the Observer, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Independent, and has advised organisations including the Foreign Office, the World Bank and the European Commission.

He lives in Cambridge.

Industry Reviews

For too long, our notions of work have been dominated by economists obsessed with scarcity and productivity. As an anthropologist, James Suzman is here to change that. He reveals that for much of human history, hunter-gathers worked far less than we do today and led lives of abundance and leisure. I've been studying work for two decades, and I can't remember the last time I learned so much about it in one sitting. This book is a tour de force -- Adam Grant, bestselling author of 'Give and Take' and 'Originals'
A groundbreaking history of work, which exposes the productivity-at-all-costs mindset to strike a blow at the myth of the economic problem. I learned something new on every page -- Grace Blakeley
Brilliant ... I thought I had read enough by now to know what work is and why we so often feel compelled to work - but I was wrong -- Danny Dorling
Automation of all kinds looms on the horizon. Luckily, James Suzman is here with a revelatory new history that makes a persuasive case: that human industry can light a path forward, even in a future where we're put out of work by our own inventions -- Charles Duhigg
Chronicles how much humankind can still learn from the disappearing way of life of the most marginalised communities on earth -- Yuval Noah Harari on 'Affluence without Abundance'
Elegant and absorbing ... Rich with ethnographic detail, stylish, perceptive, compassionate and, ultimately, tragic -- Financial Times on 'Affluence without Abundance'

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