(read as ebook)
Some parts of this book were good, but overall pretty disappointed especially when compared to David Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything". Fukuyama is pretty Euro/Western centered, but it was the chapters of China, the Mamluks and the Ottomans' that i found the most interesting because I didn't know much. While I appreciate that Fukuyama is not a proponent of the "one damned thing after another" school of history, I found his efforts to relate everything back to the development of the state to be tiresome.

Fukuyama tends to downplay the role of non-state actors and pay insufficient attention to cultural factors, in contract to Graeber who excels at this. It also seems like Fukuyama is cherry picking. For example, he dismisses the hierarchical, non-agrarian, society of the Pacific-Northwest Americans as an "outlier", yet Graeber's book does a good job of revealing how common these "outliers" really were. Fukuyama also says that the development of the Prussian state was an outlier, in contrast to France which he spends a fair amount of time describing. It's not like we're dealing with a large set of observations here, so it seems unwise to dismiss so many as "outliers".