Bratich’s [Bratich, J.Z. (2008) Conspiracy panics: political rationality and popular culture, Albany: State University of New York Press] line of argument, implies that conspiracy theories, if they exist at all, only do so from the moment at which the term has emerged to designate them as such. This position represents one extreme in a range of answers to the question about when conspiracy theories themselves first emerge in the historical record. The uncertainty that besets scholars in trying to formulate definitions of conspiracy theories thus finds its pendant among historians in the diverging opinions about the specific time and place at which the historical record unambiguously bears witness to their presence in social and political discourse. Located at the opposite end of the spectrum from Bratich are those scholars who regard conspiracy theorising as an anthropological constant. Thus, in an early article that aimed to sketch a first map of the phenomenon, the historian Dieter Groh [Groh, D. (1987) ‘The temptation of conspiracy theory: or why do bad things happen to good people?’, in C.F. Graumann and S. Moscovici (eds.) Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, New York: Springer] characterized conspiracy theorising as a universal activity not specific to any time and place. An essentially equivalent position with regard to the temporal range of this phenomenon has been put forward in the recent volume Am Anfang war die Verschwörungstheorie [In the Beginning was the Conspiracy Theory] [Raab, M., Carbon, C.-C. and Muth, C. (2017) Am Anfang war die Verschwörungstheorie, Berlin: Springer Verlag]. In this book’s first chapter, the authors claim that a proclivity for conspiracy theorising emerged as humans transited from nomadic forms of existence to sedentary lives; settlements that humans began to inhabit engendered a more acute spatial awareness of boundaries drawn between those on the inside and those on the outside, and this development fostered the earliest forms of conspiracy theorising.
– ‘Conceptual history and conspiracy theory’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), p. 17