First age of nations

The first of four ages Marsh uses to periodize the history and future of nations. Three features define it. The societies were autonomous, meaning each governed itself rather than answering upward. They were complete, meaning each contained what its people needed rather than depending on a wider structure. And they were various, with networking, sharing and trade between them occurring occasionally rather than constituting them. The duration in the definition is doing argumentative work, since hundreds of thousands of years is most of human existence, which makes this arrangement the norm and everything since a departure from it. What follows is the second age, hierarchical trade empires including a powerful extranational merchant class, in which trade stops being occasional and becomes the organizing principle and a class arises that is not answerable to any of the societies it moves between. The third age is a supranational empire in which trade has fully abstracted the relationship between oligarchs and the people they exploit. The fourth is the one Marsh proposes, a potential society more diverse, flexible and mutually supportive than the first tribal one and more rewarding and universally beneficial than the third parasitical supranational one, which makes the first age a reference point rather than a destination. The nation in all four senses is not a state, being layered and overlapping societies gathered for community, cooperation and sharing across borders and generations.

Periodizing human social organization is a crowded field. The band, tribe, chiefdom and state sequence from Elman Service dominated mid-century anthropology and has been heavily criticized for implying inevitability. Graeber and Wengrow argued at length that early societies were far more various and more politically self-conscious than the sequence allows, which converges with Marsh's emphasis on variety and autonomy. James C. Scott described populations avoiding state formation rather than progressing towards it. Marsh's scheme differs by including a fourth age that has not happened, which makes it a proposal as much as a history and distinguishes it from accounts that end at the present.