We think of ancient civilisations as operating very differently from the way our economy works today. Yet the Bronze Age Assyrians living in Mesopotamia, around 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, began the basis of modern capitalism, in a region spanning most of modern-day Iraq, eastern Syria and southeastern Turkey. The Assyrian empire was the root of what many scholars would now call “the West”.

Cuneiform writing, the oldest in the world, records evidence of credit, loans and debits as “virtual money” and the rise of elite merchants holding monopolies on trade. They traded Afghanistan tin from the city of Kanesh (in modern Turkey) throughout their empire, working as multinational corporations do today.

The Assyrian business community also had the first businesswomen and female investors. Generous tax breaks were given to merchants who promoted good business. The famous Code of Hammurabi reads like the fine print of a business deal, stating rules for granting credit and imposing taxes and tariffs on trade.

Review: Goliath’s Curse – Luke Kemp (Penguin)

Such claims loom large in Australian existential risk researcher Luke Kemp’s highly provocative, page-turning new book Goliath’s Curse, named after the biblical story (Book of Samuel 1, 17) of the Philistine warrior giant Goliath, killed by young David with his slingshot. Goliath states are ruled by violence or impending threat of it.

This book will reset everything you thought you knew about the rise and fall of ancient to modern civilisations (states) – with seriously worrying implications for understanding our current world political landscape.

Kemp is a senior research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University. His book gives a probing, well-researched account of how states evolved from Paleolithic times into the giant global goliaths of today.

To do this, he draws on new databases, one called MOROS, (Mortality of States), another named Seshat Global History Databank. The latter is the world’s largest resource on global history (named after the Egyptian goddess of knowledge).

In the Guardian this week, Peter Lewis, director of research company Essential, used the book to contextualise new poll results showing “when it comes to Goliath-induced catastrophes, we are on high alert”. For example, 67% of us are concerned about the development of self-aware AI, 62% about social upheaval through rising inequality, and 59% about the catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Goliath states are centralised institutions that impose rules and extract resources from a population within a closed territory. All states in history, on average, last around 326 years, Kemp writes.

The Later Han Dynasty of China lasted only four years. The longest-lasting states, such as the Byzantine Empire of the Mediterranean, extended for a millennium – and the Ghana Empire in Africa lasted 900 years.

The largest states that ever........

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