For fans of Yuval Noah Harari and David Graeber comes a sweeping history of destruction, exploring how our urge to burn it all down has shaped human progress across the centuries.

Smashing idols, defacing monuments, burning books, breaking windows, toppling statues… for as long as humans have created things, we have also willfully destroyed them: for revenge, for profit, for propaganda, sometimes just for fun.

But what is vandalism exactly? Who does it, and why?

Weaving together history, psychology, literature, sociology, and art, Vandals sets off on a jaunty quest through four millennia of human history in pursuit of the shifting role that vandalism has played in societies around the globe and throughout the ages: from Ancient Mesopotamia, where rulers warned off vandals with curses, to our own day, where states and corporations decry the petty crimes of teens and protestors while destroying far more of our world themselves.

In a witty and dazzlingly researched romp peopled with pharaohs and prophets, conquistadors and revolutionaries, vandals of art and artists as vandals, Nick Mount puts forth a dramatic new theory of civilization in which destruction is the constant—and necessary—companion of creation.