War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

by Peter Turchin

From the author of End Times

In War and Peace and War, Peter Turchin uses his expertise in evolutionary biology to offer a bold new theory about the course of world history. 

Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society’s capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off a common enemy, and that this kind of cooperation led to the formation of the Roman and Russian empires, and the United States. But as empires grow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, conflict replaces cooperation, and dissolution inevitably follows. Eloquently argued and rich with historical examples, War and Peace and War offers a bold new theory about the course of world history with implications for nations today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, War, Sociology, World History, Science

416 pages, Paperback

First published August 25, 2005

Reviews

[Murtaza · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a bit skeptical of Big History books, primarily because the world we live in today is so radically different from the cyclical political orders that existed in the past. Humans are the same, but modern technology is a social variable that we are still desperately trying to wrap our heads around. This is a book that tries to apply predictive logic to the rise and collapse of imperial systems: reviving Ibn Khaldun's concept of asabiyya, or group cohesion, and applying it to the contemporary world. Although the world we live in today is very different from the past, I do think there is some truth to the fact that the strength of societies is tied to levels of inter-group trust and cooperation. When those things fray, collective action becomes impossible and decay of some sort inevitable.

To put it another way the things that drive down social trust and reduce cohesion end up weakening society as a whole. Ethnic diversity is the popular one people like to accuse today, but in fact the most successful empires in history have had no problem integrating new ethnicities into the fold and often took great pride in this, for example the Roman, Islamic and in a more limited sense American empires. Some things that do reduce cohesion are exploding wealth inequality that sets different classes against one another and the over-production of elites who become heavily invested in waging bitter political conflicts with one another over the necessarily limited number of elite positions in society. The poor and lower middle-classes inevitably become pawns and victims of these status seekers.

One of the things that increases social cohesion is the presence of outsider threats that galvanize society, usually on some kind of threatening physical frontier. Empires have often emerged along civilization borderlines, where people marked by some type of significant divide come face-to-face with one another and come to understand both their shared identities and the need for inter-group cooperation more vividly. The effectiveness of a country like Israel is less due to some sort of mystical characteristics of its people than the Darwinian social cohesion effect of living on a borderline and being under constant threat. The same goes with Palestinians, who, despite being the weaker party due to their lack of a superpower patron, have coalesced into one people rather than a disparate group of tribes living under Ottoman rule. Throughout history imperial peoples have been formed in crucibles of threat and external pressure. Religion also plays an important role as a metaphysical "social cement" that leads people to trust, cooperate and sacrifice for one another as a collective.

Can we predict the rise and fall of societies based on quantitative inputs? This is the contention of the nascent field of cliodynamics that the book makes an argument for. I'm not saying its impossible but we are some ways off from that. To his credit Turchin acknowledges that such a prospect is not immediately on the horizon, although this book sort of tests the waters for some future such analysis. He is an interesting thinker and has given something to contemplate here. The United States is one society that seems to be fraying under many of the fissiparous pressures that this book identifies: with declining social trust, huge wealth gaps and the decaying appeal of the core metaphysical ideology of the nation making the prospect of cohesion for any common purpose look more and more remote. I expect that if the real fraying comes people will ignore all these structural factors and point the fingers at whoever looks different from them.

[Sense of History]

Very interesting, but as frustrating as it is challenging!
The title of this book is a bit misleading: it does indeed regularly deal with war and peace and with the rise and fall of imperia, but actually Turchin covers a much larger field and presents two theories on the entire world history.

His first theory states that large empires or states have always developed in places that where near a border with another group or a state that was perceived as fundamentally different and threatening. Turchin makes no secret that this view is very similar to that of Samuel Huntington and his Clash of civilizations. He prefers to use the term of 'metaethic frontier'. It is always close to such a border that new states emerge that gradually develop into large empires; it never starts in a center far away from such a border (and thus less challenged and threatened).

His second theory is inspired by the 13th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldoen, namely that the power of a society, a state, or an empire, rests primarily on its internal cohesion, its ‘asabiya’ as Khaldoen describes it. Turchin illustrates this with numerous examples and is reasonably convincing on this, finding support with other social scientist, like Robert Putnam and his ‘Social Capital’-concept.

The emergence of empires (imperiogenesis) and their fall (imperiopathosis) are connected with those two concepts of metaetnic frontier and asabiya: a realm arises when it is at such a boundary and can develop an intense form of internal cohesion (in response to the threat by a fundamentally different enemy), and it goes under if that border shifts (and the threat thus falls away) and / or if the cohesion crumbles (mostly due to growing inequality as a result of Malthusian cycles). In most cases, according to Turchin, this process takes about a millennium.

On top of that Turchin distinguishes other cycles within that very large time frame: secular cycles, covering 2 to 4 centuries, much shorter cycles of 60 to 80 years and finally ultra-short cycles of several generations. He himself uses the image of "wheels in wheels in wheels", with which he wants to indicate that the historical reality is never simple, and there are lot of feedback loops that interfere with each other. Most of these cycles are related to the equal or unequal distribution of wealth and the fierceness of wars, be it external or civil wars.

This all sounds very interesting, and Turchin illustrates it with many examples from world history, that – in general – sound rather convincing. But as you might suspect, there are some comments to make. In the first place, it is striking that almost all of his examples and models relate to agrarian, premodern societies and hardly, if at all, to more recent, industrial ones. Turchin is also aware of this himself, and tries to counter that in his final chapter by quickly bringing up some reflections on the empire of the United States, the European Union (very strange to define this as an imperium), China and Russia. His arguments in this section are not convincing: the modern world is quite different from the premodern one, and it seems that the elements of metaethnic frontier and asabiya play a much less important role in our globalized world, where boundaries are much less defined. Turchin in this section focuses rather strongly on the meta-ethnic frontier that Islam has created in recent decades, but with that he simply repeats the weaknesses of Samuel Huntington's arguments, because up until now there’s no asabiya to discern in the Islamic world.

He also often illustrates his theories with extensive quotations from primary sources, and especially chronicles, of Roman, European-Medieval, Arab or early-Russian origin, from which he deduces all sorts of things that have to prove his theories. Of course, tthis is tricky, because these chronicles are very place-, time- and person-related and offer only perspective. For this use of chronicles, Turchin was heavily attacked by classical historians.

In this book, Turchin also repeatedly pleads for the use of theoretical models in history, and specifically of Cliodynamics (his own pet child), which deals with history mainly through quantitative, statistical approaches. I must concede that his arguments for this are nuanced: he offers a nonlinear and nondeterministic approach to reality, in the sense that he also allows deviations and exceptions, and a certain role of individuals with free will, and that is to his benefit. And he is aware that these quantitative approaches are tricky. Turchin is modest enough to indicate that Cliodynamics is still in its infancy ("A lot more work needs to be done in the history of scientific maturity that was enjoyed by classical mechanics in the 18th and 19th centuries"). But at the same time he maintains that with the enormous influx of quantitative data in recent decades, much larger steps can be taken. And that may be true to some extent, but I think we better remain critical. The fact that in his closing chapter, for example, he alludes to the possible resurrection of a great Cossack empire in southern Russia, leaves one to think.

Turchin in this book builds up his theories step by step, and takes a lot of effort to illustrate, elaborate and nuance his points of view, but at times it gives a rather inconsistent impression, and it doesn't have the compelling logic that you can find, for instance, with Jared Diamond (which for him is partly a model, but which he also renounces). In that context one more striking thing: Turchin is zoologist by training and with that he is the umpteenth non-historian who approaches history with the rough brush (Jared Diamond, Samuel Huntington, Steven Pinker are other examples). Now, I'm not saying this can't be illuminating (on the contrary, I was wowed by Diamond and Pinker), but it's high time that also trained historians take their stand in this matter, because they are better than anyone else equipped with knowledge of the past and a sense for nuance and contingency of the human agency. There are some promising developments of this in the field of World/Global/Interconnected... History, but there's still a long way to go.

All this does not detract from the fact that the central concepts of Turchin, the metaethnic frontier and the asabiya factor, are absolutely relevant and valuable keys to dealing with history. They should be given serious thought, but they are certainly not the only ones, and it remains important to be very careful with them, because reality, even that of the past, remains a chaotic and slippery thing.

[Rossdavidh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subtitle: The Rise and Fall of Empires

So, as you may have heard me say before, the books I read can mostly be divided into two types: Big Idea books, and Many Small Ideas books. This one is a Big Idea book. One might say, ridiculously big.

The author, born in Russia, moved to the U.S. at age 20 (his father, a dissident, was exiled), and eventually got his Ph.D. in zoology. He studied population dynamics for a time, the kind of ecology-based biology that looks at a species' role vis-a-vis its prey and predators and competitors in its niche. This involved finding mathematical models and descriptions of the cycles of boom and bust which happen in populations in the natural world. Far from the "delicate balance" of popular belief, the natural worlds' populations have cycles, not quite regular usually but far from random, and in the last few decades a robust field of scientific inquiry has grown up around efforts to better understand how this works.

Then, Turchin took an abrupt turn, and moved into the study of history. Well, almost; he actually moved into a field of mathematical sociobiology that he helped name as well as create: "cliodynamics". Clio, the muse of history, combined with dynamics, the study of changing systems. Turchin's objective is nothing less than an updated real-life Hari Seldon, of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. But, given what we know now of nonlinear systems, the objective is to find the "strange attractors" of historical dynamics. Given that absolute prediction of precise events far into the future is made impossible by the nonlinearity ("chaos") of the actions of humans in large groups, what CAN we say, and test empirically?

This book is Turchin's first public swipe at the task, and he has gone further with it in his blog and new science journal, Cliodynamics, since the book was published. This book is a beginning, albeit an audacious one, and it begins with a theory on where empires come from, and why they decline and fall.

Essentially, Turchin holds that empires rise due to "asabiya", the ability to take action cooperatively, in a coordinated fashion. As an example, he cites records from the early days of the Mongols in which armies of 100,000 could execute complex military manuevers just based on flag signals, without the many horns, drums, pipes, and bellowing sergeants necessary to get western Europeans to do the same at that time. Facing invasion, some cities (Italians in the face of Hannibal, for example) were able to act together to repel the invaders, while others (Italians in the face of late Roman Empire Germanic invasions, for example) were not. Why and how could the same genetic stock, the same culture (broadly speaking) sometimes have "asabiya", and sometimes not? The same issue of acting collectively, in a less dramatic sense, can be seen in whether or not to work together to make canals, long-distance roads, or other public infrastructure.

Turchin identifies (and provides copious historical examples and counter examples for) several factors:
1) threats from "the other". For slavic Russians, this was Turkic and central Asian nomadic peoples; for colonial Americans, this was Native Americans (and as Tecumseh demonstrated, this worked both ways); for early Romans, this was the "barbarians" of Gaul, who were far more alien to them than the Etruscans or other Italian or Greek "civilized" peoples. Turchin shows evidence that empires tend to begin on the edges between peoples (nomads and farmers, for example) who have enough differences in culture and way of life that the differences between separate villages or tribes on one side of the divide seem small by comparison.
2) modest levels of inequality. Whereas his stress on the importance of defining one's identity in opposition to another culture may alienate the conventional Left, here Turchin alienates the conventional Right, by showing copious examples (ancient Rome vs. Imperial Rome, different centuries of medieval France) wherein an accumulation of wealth at the top is corrosive to the society's asabiya. The 99%, in any society, will know that the 1% is better off than they are. How great the disparity, however, will impact how much they are willing to support that society. In a clash between two armies, one of which fights for the good of the society, and the other of which fights if it cannot safely evade fighting, the former will win.
3) the ratio of elite to non-elite. In any society, some portion of the population is part of the most favored class (this includes Communist and modern American societies no less than any other). The growth rate of the elite, however, is not necessarily well correlated to the growth rate of the overall society. If the food supply in an agricultural society is running out, the elite will not starve, but the general populace may well (or at least may have fewer children). This can make an already strained society even more top-heavy, and eventually this will result in internal division (in many historical cases, resulting in intra-elite civil war such as the English War of the Roses).
4) "war begets peace begets war". People who lived through war as children, are less enamored of it as a solution to their problems as adults, especially if it was a civil war rather than a war fought on another nation's territory. This leads to a frequent alternation of war and peace generations through many periods and cultures; Turchin uses the term "fathers-and-sons cycles" for these.

Whenever we look at attempts to find patterns in the chaos of history, it is equally easy to be either more easily impressed by the new theory than is warranted, or to be more skeptical. There have been many attempts before. In some sense, there is a "fathers and sons" pattern here, as well, where about every half-century scientists look again at whether they can bring order to the riot of human history, only to throw up their hands in despair after a decade or two and abjure the attempt for another generation. Perhaps this will be the latest failed attempt.

There is no question, however, that we have more data available to historians (not only the written chronicles of old but also archaeological, climatalogical, etc.). We also have vastly more computing power to see if we can find patterns amidst the data. Perhaps, like predicting the weather past a one or two week window, we will not yet be able to find the way to wrap our minds around our own social selves. But then, even meteorologists have made progress in recent decades, and if we are changeable as the weather, perhaps we are also not wholly beyond the reach of human understanding. It is good to know that minds as innovative, and simultaneously disciplined, as Turchin are squaring their shoulders and charging once more unto the breach.

[Marc Lamot · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a compelling read on world history, with some interesting views. Turchin develops his own theories on the rise and fall of empires, especially in the pre-modern period: empires always developed in places near a border with another group or a state that was perceived as fundamentally different and threatening, and their strength corresponded with their internal social cohesion.
This are not completely original views, as he concedes, but he intertwines them and elaborates on them in his own way. Finally, he also very much pleads for the use of theoretical models in the study of history, along his own 'Cliodynamic'-approach, that is founded on quantitative data. Very interesting, and very worthwile, but also tricky, if you ask me. See my more elaborate review on this book in my Sense-of-History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another Big History book, this one really pulled out in front of the pack for me and I think it's the best one I've read so far.

First, there's no better way to make me smile than with a reference to psychohistory, from my favorite sci-fi series of all time - Turchin compares his goal of scientifying history to Asimov's famous literary conceit right there at the very beginning of the Introduction. Turchin is serious about it though, offering a semi-mathematical framework for historical analysis he calls cliodynamics, which borrows methodologically from statistical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics. In English, that means he models the rise and fall of empires using equations that treat people as groups, and also account for chaotic behavior as well. This means that there's some population genetics lurking in the background as well. There is not actually any math in this book, however; this was a prose exposition of the equations that are all in his earlier Historical Dynamics, which I haven't read. There's still plenty of rigor, though, as he subscribes fully to Paul Krugman's sentiment that "The equations and diagrams of formal economics are, more often than not, no more than the scaffolding used to help construct an intellectual edifice. Once that edifice has been built to a certain point, the scaffolding can be stripped away, leaving only plain English behind."

He starts out by asking how empires form, which he calls "imperiogenesis". The list of empires/countries/peoples discussed extensively include Russia, America, Germans, Arabs, England, France, Austria-Hungary, and of course the good old Roman Empire. He doesn't include exhaustive histories of each one, just enough to make his points and tie them back to the larger argument. I would have liked more detail on the non-European empires like Persia, China, the various Indian empires, or anything in the Western Hemisphere, but I think those would only bolster his thesis. He finds that empires typically arise on what he calls a "metaethnic frontier", in other words a boundary between two relatively different cultures (cf. the "us vs them" struggles in Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations). Thus the medieval Rus, ancestors of today's Russians, found themselves assimilating other nearby tribes in a desperate effort to fend off endless raids from the Mongols, and this gradual accretion of similar proto-Russian co-ethnics gradually built the kind of egalitarian, tightly-knit society that was capable of conquering the vast steppes of Siberia. In essence the Rus as a society unconsciously "learned" the social traits - trust, intra-group fairness, self-sacrifice for the group - that it took to be a successful empire, and other groups that didn't or couldn't develop those traits got swallowed up or annihilated. This is similar to how the Romans fought off the Gauls, Phoenicians, etc by gradually assimilating similar tribes like that Samnites and so on. He calls this level of collective solidarity "asabiya" after Ibn Khaldun's usage of the term in his Muqaddimah, his own attempt at a universal history, and ties it into Alexis de Tocqueville's and Robert Putnam's ideas of social capital.

Every good theory of how empires rise should also be able to explain how empires fall, and his asabiya concept seems to do a decent job of explaining "imperiopathosis" as well. Asabiya is the glue of peoples, both a measure of general social capital and trust, and the thing that makes your average dude (it's mostly guys) willing to die in some wasteland hundreds or thousands of miles away from home in order to promote the greater good. He backs this up by bringing in some game theoretic/group selectionist discussion of how societies need a critical mass of moralists and institutions to discourage free-riders and cheaters, which encourages solidarity. Something that Turchin finds over and over again in history is that incredibly successful civilizations, after having built their empires, seem to be inherently unstable and prone to decay through loss of asabiya. While this sounds as unscientific as élan vital, it can actually be quantified in some ways. Basically, in a mature empire that no longer feels compelled to expand, the number of elites starts to slowly increase, both due to lower chances of dying in wars and due to the higher reproductive rate that being rich in an agricultural society allows for. Slowly, they shift from being leaders in society to being rent-seekers, and eventually they take so much of the pie that people aren't willing to trust in the civic institutions previous generations built. Eventually, a more vigorous society on the border gets its act together (in the case of the Romans, the Germans; for the Byzantines, the Arabs), and displaces the decadence that might still be numerically and technologically superior, but can't muster the will to resist. "Paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee, great empires die not by murder, but by suicide."

So asabiya can be generated through struggles and trials that bind people to each other, and it can be lost through the lack of the same unifying pressures. The differing fates of north and south Italy are discussed towards the end of the book, why north Italy, while fairly rich, still has a social capital deficit compared to countries like France or Germany, while low-trust south Italy is an "asabiya black hole", as demonstrated by the presence of groups like the Mafia. This is reflected in the very interesting fact that Italy doesn't have large public companies like other first-world nations: "The largest Italian company, Fiat, is still family owned. The typical successful Italian company is a family-owned business with perhaps a hundred employees in Milan or Bologna. They occupy a variety of niches from fashion to high-precision machinery, and they are extremely successful at what they do. But they cannot break into certain international markets because they lack the advantage of size. And they cannot grow to a large size, because the Italians, even northern ones, can cooperate only in medium-sized groups. Is this why northern Italians historically could not get beyond medium-sized states?" Religion has an interesting place in Turchin's book; while religious disputes are not necessarily meaningful in and of themselves, they're another way that groups of people use to mark "us" from "them". After reading Diarmaid MacCullough's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, with its endless tales of violent disputes over completely arbitrary doctrinal issues like the filioque clause or if icons are kosher or whether to make the sign of the cross with two fingers or three, this seems very true to me.

Turchin's ideas also interact pleasingly with a number of other Big History books I've read semi-recently. In no particular order/rhyme/reason:
- He's a little dismissive of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel, saying that while the geographical determinism line of argument can explain trans-hemispherical imperial triumphs, it doesn't do a good job in the vastly more common cases where neighboring tribes with similar resources attack each other, like the Rus vs the Tatars or the French vs the English. This is true - Diamond might be able to explain the ultimate outcome, but how would that explain, for example, the asabiya-induced paralysis and chaos of the Incans after Atahualpa was captured?
- He doesn't engage much with Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, which is a shame, because I still think that Tainter's (admittedly somewhat simplistic) ideas about the decreasing marginal returns on civilizational complexity are un-ignorable. Tainter is more resource-deterministic than Turchin, who allows more for human initiative in the way that societies can "choose" to lose internal cohesion by becoming more inward-focused, but I would bet that there's still something to Tainter's idea that there's a certain optimal size for societies given the resources available to them.
- I think Acemoglu and Robinson should have cited this book in their Why Nations Fail, because there's a lot of overlap between A&R's ideas about extractive vs inclusive institutions and what Turchin has to say about how institutions can shift between the two poles due to external pressures or the lack of them. Republican Rome was much more inclusive for the average pleb during the parts of its history where it was under threat, lost inclusion for a long period during things like the Gracchi brothers' reform attempts, and then became more inclusive again after enough elites killed each other during the Julius Caesar drama to stabilize the empire. A&R don't have a good account for how dynamic movement along the inclusive/extractive scale can be, and Turchin's asabiya measure seems to include that.
- Brian Fagan's The Long Summer talked about how the migrations of primitive humans (and therefore possible tribal conflicts) were driven in part by climate shifts that alternately opened up new lands and closed off old ones. Turchin showed that climate shifts didn't have much to do with the medieval French-English wars specifically, but it would be neat to see more quantification, and if there's a climate shift threshold over which a tribe could ascend to a higher (or maybe lower) level of asabiya in its need to find new lands and resources. Given that, per Tainter, the Mayans might have succumbed to environmental changes, it's reasonable to think that climate might be an input into asabiya. Climate change in our own day might have significant effects on political stability as well.
- Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature talked a lot about changes in violence. I wonder if you could correlate intra-society violence to asabiya shifts. For example, the US right after WW2 was infamously homogenous and group-centered, with low levels of crime. This changed after the Sixties, and I don't think anyone would argue that there hasn't been a relative drop in the nebulous feeling that we're one big society of Americans. Is crime a good proxy for asabiya (e.g. the Northeast is rich and low-crime relative to the South, does that mean anything?), and does the recent relative drop in violent crime rates mean the US is getting stronger asabiya-wise?
- Relatedly, I've read a lot of good books on inequality recently, like Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence. The parallels between pre-Revolutionary France or ancient Rome to the modern US in terms of the power of the wealthy are numerous and disturbing, although of course only valid up to a point. Still, how would a conservative (or a liberal, for that matter) apply the implications of this book to our current economic condition? Is rising inequality destroying Americans' ability to cooperate with each other?

Overall this is a really interesting book, a definite Big History champion, and is also full of great factoids. I'll close with a fascinating quote from where he talks about how medieval societies like England tried to control elite overpopulation: "Lorcin found that in commoner families males outnumbered females by 13 percent. This pattern is just what we expect in a pre-industrial society where a substantial proportion of women died in childbirth. In noble families, however, the pattern was reversed—there were only 85 males per 100 females. In other words, there were 28 percent fewer noble males than we would expect if their mortality patterns were the same as commoners... The wills studied by Lorcin allowed her to calculate that during the second half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, the proportions of noble girls becoming nuns were 40 and 30 percent, respectively. Only in the second half of the fifteenth century did this proportion decline to 14 percent."

Okay, one more: "Destruction of the great fortunes continued under the Tudors, who had it in for their over-rich and over-mighty subjects. The first two Tudors, Henry VII and Henry VIII, employed judicial murder with great effect, systematically exterminating all potential claimants to the English throne, who also happened to be among the richest landowners. Elizabeth I crafted a gentler method—a kind of “progressive taxation” scheme. When one of her subjects became too wealthy, she invited herself to his castle along with her whole court. After some weeks of dining and wining the queen and hundreds of her followers, the unfortunate host was financially ruined for many years to come, and was too busy paying off his debts to contemplate rebellion."

[Neill Goltz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book I need to re-read to better digest its full import.

It is outside of my previous academic comfort zone - “straight history” - because scholar/author Turchin has broken new ground by integrating the research of historical forces and developments more directly with the methodologies and mathematics previously associated with social science analysis.

(It seems he is credited with invention of the term “Clio-dynamics” to describe this approach, the usage of which I hadn’t been previously exposed. “Clio” is the Ancient Greek Muse of History, and the name of the undergraduate-published history journal at my Alma Mater).

If it sounds awful, it isn’t, even as I acknowledge that as a non-scholar I first put the book down this past November - my Goodreads mandated "start date" - after reading his Introduction to what seemed was going to be a textbook on Sociology (which is not my strong suit).

Having registered the book at that time in my Goodreads account as “reading,” - “did he really take 6 months to start and finish a book?” - I somehow, recently, brought myself back to go forward and now I will tell you that this is both an entertaining and important book, as we in the United States face up to what happened on One-Six in Washington with the insurrectionist invasion of The Capitol, and how we begin to reunify our society going forward.

For the traditional historian-reader like me, Turchin provides plenty of extremely interesting and (at least to me) novel historical incidents and outcomes.

However, it is the prescience of Turchin’s ruminations - the book was published in 2006 - with respect to the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and the fracturing of American political cohesion that is startling. (I assure you - you will learn the meaning of the word Asibiyyah.....)

The discussion in the last chapter of heterarchical* structures of information distribution systems - I.e., the Blogosphere - as opposed to the traditional hierarchical, is fascinating, as the introduction and acceptance of widespread and instantaneous communications allows the creation of a “smart-mob.”

Which is exactly what we witnessed 15 years after publication, on One-Six 2021.

Turchin knows how to stray from a purely academic style to a layman perspective of understanding - an interesting synthesis - which I, for one, truly appreciate.

Highly recommend.

*NOT heretical !

[Gavin]

Ambitious, clever, risky. Much less naive than you think it is.

Can we design a theory for the collapse of mighty empires that would be no worse than, say, our understanding of why earthquakes happen? Seismologists have made great strides in understanding earthquakes. They can even make some limited predictions as to which areas of the earth are likely to be hit next by an earthquake. However, forecasting the precise timing and magnitude of an earthquake... Can a science of history, similarly, explain why states crumble, and perhaps predict which societies are in the danger of collapse?

He pre-empts the two serious criticisms I came in with:

Is understanding the life cycle of imperial nations any real use to us now? I have developed the theory of cliodynamics explicitly for agrarian societies and tested it with historical data—but can the theory be extended to modern times we live in? One cannot assume that the social and economic forces that operated in agrarian societies to produce secular cycles would continue behaving in the same way today. One cannot disregard the seismic changes that have occurred during the last century or two...

At least in theory, democracy should channel intra-elite competition into less-violent forms. By allowing orderly and peaceful transfer of power, modern democratic societies should prove to be more resistant to state collapse. However, because true liberal democracies have been around only for a century or so (it is only in the early twentieth century that the suffrage began encompassing more than 50 percent of the adult population), they have not yet been around long enough to experience a secular cycle

It is megahistory, but leagues ahead of Diamond and Harari and that ilk. He knows what a model is for a start. He limits himself to exactly one latent variable (though it is a flexible doozy): asabiya (cohesion, social trust, state capacity, imagined community). (Within-group) Cooperation as a precondition of empire.

Asabiya is a dynamic quantity; it can increase or decrease with time. Like many theoretical constructs, such as force in Newtonian physics, the capacity for collective action cannot be observed directly, but it can be measured from observable consequences

You can still feel the tension between it being a good general explanation and it being vacuous and unfalsifiable.

What makes an empire? A nearby threat + a nearby Other + nearby wealth -> Asabiya -> Empire

He comes up with a strongly cyclical view of history with a period of ~3 centuries between peaks.

He often sounds quite innocent, apollonian: he is comfortable with multilevel selection and breezily rejecting Rational Choice theory. He only has about 20 datapoints for civs. He uses only empires.

The whole model in a paragraph:

Empire -> “Stability and internal peace bring prosperity, and prosperity causes population increase to overpopulation to lower wages, higher land rents, and falling per capita incomes for the commoners -> unparalleled wealth to the upper classes -> elite overproduction -> falling incomes. Declining standards of life breed discontent and strife. The elites turn to the state for employment and additional income, and drive up its expenditures at the same time that the tax revenues decline because of the growing misery of the population. When the state’s finances collapse, it loses the control of the army and police. Freed from all restraints, strife among the elites escalates into civil war, while the discontent among the poor explodes into popular rebellions -> famine, war, pestilence -> Population declines -> wages increase, while rents decrease ->
collapse in elite income -> feuds, coups, declasse, more war -> elites thin -> Intra-elite competition subsides -> allowing the restoration of order -> prosperity

[The Indian Wars covered] 268 years of conflict... an average of more than one atrocity a week

[corporations'] internal workings rely not on market forces, but on group solidarity! This is one of the best-kept secrets in the economic sciences

I loved his description of southern Italy's so-called "amoral familism", "an asabiya black hole". ("[Italian corporations] cannot grow to a large size, because the Italians, even northern ones, can cooperate only in medium-sized groups") The generalisation is strong with this one. To be fair Italians say this kind of shit about themselves all the time. (Just ask a southerner about the food in the north. They accept the divide but console themselves with their superior aesthetics.)



The political significance of inflation, cartels, and people not understanding market-clearing prices:

every previous secular wave, without exceptions, saw a “price revolution” that ended up in crisis

A great tonic against the standard mode of historiography, the fucking list of facts and empty nuance. one fucking thing after another. What theory can compress that well? Maybe not this one.

[Kym Robinson]

I stopped reading this book.
There are better books on history written that do not seek to arrogantly push a flawed grand theory of history.

I will not bother rating this book as I stopped 125 pages in.

on to better books.

[Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book, War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, by Peter Turchin. He's a most unusual historian, who spent the early part of his career as a biologist -- a tenured professor of biology, no less, with a focus on population ecology -- before switching about 20 years ago to history. His father was a Soviet dissident, and the whole family was kicked out of the country when Turchin (the son) was 20, and they all moved to the US.

Turchin's approach to history is unique, in that he tries to bring a scientific approach, including the use of mathematical modelling, to the field. You don't find a whole lot of historians if any publishing in Nature and Science, but he does. The resulting historical discipline he founded is called cliodynamics -- which is not a catchy enough term to ever go viral. He really needed an Isaac Asimov to come up with a term like "psychohistory", whose core ideas in fact bear a family relationship to cliodynamics.

The book above, however, is not in a mathematical vein and is apparently considered to be the most approachable of his writings. It is, however, history on a grand scale, and exceptionally well done. You'll learn more in a single paragraph of his about, say, the dynamics of the Middle East than you will in a year's worth of following news stories about the region.

[Jenna · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book really did not sit well with me. Turchin's argument is that history can be boiled down to the collective motivations of people as a society and that individuals do not matter. Everything that has ever happened and will ever happen has to do with our strong ties to a social unit (or social cohesion, a term he refers to as "asabiya," which is our collective social action based on our metaethnic identities which are formed when our society faces a devastating defeat.) This book was filled with jargon, half-baked arguments using evidence from very specific sources that were obviously chosen to further his hypothesis. He doesn't just discard anything that disproves his theory - he completely ignores it.

I'm sorry; I just hated this book. The reason I decided to major in history is because I believe that individuals DO matter. Without people, we wouldn't have history. Turchin's theories are definitely interesting, but his rigid presentation leaves me unconvinced. Instead of leaving me with much to discuss, he just leaves me with anger.

[burak · Rating 3 out of 5]

very difficult to describe this book in more commendatory terms than mediocre— it contains interesting ideas but could have been easily boiled down to a single chapter of 50 pages at most.

[Øivind Schøyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very interesting dive into a very well executed attempt at turning the study historical dynamics, the dynamics of empires to be exact, scientific. I like to call this genre intellectual big wave surfing. Highly enjoyable to watch and more dangerous and tricky than it looks. Turchins 2006 book has aged well. His background in population dynamics of animals make the study extra interesting. I will read the companion book historical dynamics on the actual quantitative analysis, which I guess is necessary to make a full assessment. Reading the book alone it is a very well written grand narrative account of the history of empires focusing on the ability of societies to cooperate. I am convinced about the relevance of this dimension after reading the book. More studies should be done in this direction to further understand what drives cooperation. The author points to inequalities as a main detrimental force for cooperation and to dynamic factors increasing or decreasing cooperation. This is an excellent starting point. I could think of some additional complications, whether an empire provides moral authority accsepted by its citizens the first one. Of course this will be related inequality. I really like Turchins take on making the study of history scientific. The book is written in 2006, and I am reading it in 2021. Thus Turchins project might have matured further since the time of writing. His predictions chapter, by the way is quite excellent and has aged impressivly well. All in all very much recommended reading for anyone wanting to structure their understanding of large lines in history. If you enjoy big lines in history, I am guessing that you will enjoy this book.

[Denis Vasilev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Фундаментальная книга по объяснению исторических процессов, попытка создания «психоистории» из «Основания» Азимова. Автор описывает с потрясающими подробностями развитие истории Российской империи, Римской империи, Византии и прочих, доходя и до Американской империи. Удивительно интересная и актуальная книга, как для того чт��бы просто вспомнить историю, так и для пониманию ее движущих сил

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally decided to award 5 stars. Really intriguing book. First, he references so many books I love e.g. Asimov's Foundation, Plagues and Peoples, A Distant Mirror as well as other intriguing books e.g. Guns Germs and Steel, Robert Putnam's books and D.G Fischer's Long Wave. He references many leaders of complexity science also e.g. S Strogatz and others. So, I am predisposed to Turchin's conjectures as we are on a very similar wavelength.

I find it interesting that we in the West typically view time as a linear progression (and as Americans we have historically (maybe not today, however!) view the progression as ascending while so many Russians view time as a cycle that never really progresses (Kondratieff waves, Tim Snyder's work and one of my favorite books - the strange life of Ivan Osokin. Appropriately, Turchin's major thesis proposes that the rise and fall of empires is largely determined by three interlocking cycles. While there are many variables that make precise predictions impossible, the cycles follow somewhat predictable timelines: a rise and fall of Asabiya (ie similar to Putnam's concept of social capital) of 1000 years, a secular cycle of 200 to 300 years and a 2 to 3 generation cycle of 40 to 60 years.

The longest cycle of 1000 years is a result of the rise and fall of Asabiya, an Arab concept denoting 'ability to engage in collective action'. This rises from society coming together to fight some existential risk - typically war with an enemy. Over time, as the risk decreases, there is less social cohesion, internal tension and a rise in the production of 'elites' who increasing are unable to find employment. These under or unemployed disaffected elites sow dissent among the hoi polloi, making the empire vulnerable to attack ... and the cycle repeats.

His evidence is a fascinating analysis of Europe (including Russia) from Rome through the enlightenment.

A problem with his thesis for me, however, is that much of it seems a "just so" story that is untestable. His timeline and explanatory variables are so flexible they can fit almost any historical arc.

Still, it is a very fun read and feels truthy. Turchin has recently gained popularity. This book was written in 2006 and now seems quite prescient. It is easy to use his theory as an explanation of the rise of Trump, populism, partisanship and anti-democratic furvor. So, recommended.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-reading this 15 years after I last did. Most of my opinions I had then I still have now, with some refinements. Though I am extremely suspicious still of applying mathematical models to the humanities (if this worked we would be able to abolish the humanities entirely and replace them with hard science and that aint happening), cliodynamics, an attempt to modernize Ibn Khaldun, is a worthy project.

The limited geographic scope of most of the models is, however, a problem. When Turchin repeats the politically Beijing friendly line that China's natural state is unity, he seems not to realize that half of Chinese history is in a multi-state system. He has also subsumed so many things into the social unity thesis that he forgets that enforced unity often produces backlashes, undermining what it set out to do in the first place (and why I cant be so flippant as he is about the effect of Christian conversion in the Roman Empire). He also disregards the material core of Ibn Khaldun's critique of luxury, mistaking it for a moral judgement when it is in fact describing something amenable to cliodynamics: the wealth divide undermining functional statecraft.

All this being said, I believe more people should work with cliodynamics and cyclic and material models of history. Certain political factions get that history is more cyclic than progressive, but end up designating the causes of decline in superstition and moral judgement. Certain others understand that these are material and often class based processes, but tend to believe that history is a linear and progressive enterprise which undermines their ability to see the larger patterns. The importance now is to bring the the best of both views together and leave behind the rest. A philosophically anti-progressive but yet economically progressive explanation for the rise and fall of nations. This is as good a place for a normie to start as any.

[W · Rating 3 out of 5]

The primary argument of the book is that powerful states arise on frontiers between different cultures or civilisations because frontiers are environments with pressures that force and select for communities that cooperate strongly in self-defence and expansion. One chapter seeks to bolster this theory by reviewing group-selection theory from evolutionary biology. This group-selection argument fails: Turchin actually skips over without explaining how a pro-social mentality can out-compete an egoistic mentality within a group. Steven Pinker lays out in this article what is wrong with group-selectionism: https://www.edge.org/conversation/the.... Even more relevant to this book, Pinker in that article attacks the idea that powerful societies are more cooperative, suggesting that they are usually in fact just more able to control and indoctrinate people into fighting on behalf of the ruling elite. Turchin may be right about frontiers producing powerful states, but he does not really delve as deeply as he might into the historical processes that promote state formation, relying on very general, mostly primary source histories. For this, readers will have to get stuck into the history of particular states.

His secondary theory, essentially a Malthusian model of the oscillation of economic prosperity and collapse, is very interesting especially in the way he shows the opposite trends among the lower and upper classes. Again, however, the evidence adduced for the political impact of these trends is very general and under-analysed. History is complex and more argument is needed to clearly link these trends with political events. Perhaps though these weaknesses are inherent to the project of detecting deep causal trends below the multitudinous personalities and events of history.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Turchin attempts a familiar task--trying to discern laws of history. In this particular case, Turchin generalizes about the formation, rise and fall of empires.

Alisdair MacIntyre, it seems to me, proved that social science in the sense of prediction, is impossible in principle.

That doesn't mean we can't discern cycles and causative factors in human history, but only that we must be very cautious about how complete and accurate our conclusions are. Turchin supplies some disclaimers.

His basic notions are that empires arise on one side or the other of a "metaethnic frontier," say, that between the Romans and first the Celts and then the German and Hunnish barbarians to their northeast. The need to resist contributes to an increase in "asabiya," a concept gleaned from the Maghrebi scholar Ibn Khaldun--social solidarity, more or less.

As inequality increases and élites become too bloated, asabiya declines and crime and civil war increase, leading to war, epidemic, and anarchy.

The élite's size shrinks, and the reduced population of peons and proles improves their market position and standard of living, thus increasing asabiya.

Turchin supports this theory with examples from history.

The book is quite readable, and the hypotheses plausible, if not entirely new--see, e.g. the work of Spengler, Pitirim Sorokin, etc.

[Fearless Leader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent! The hypothesis’ in this work are compelling, although I will say they side step the deeper biological aspects of historical population dynamics. Thankfully that has been partially rectified by recent works by other authors.

[John Wylie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating group selectionist take on the dynamics of the rise and fall of empires in history.

[Thomas Devlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Turchin is a hugely underrated intellect. And of all his books, this is probably the easiest one to digest. Definitely recommend for anyone interested in the underlying patterns of history.

[Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am the kind of person who is always seeking a set of abstract principles within which to contextualize my experience of events and information. This characteristic has often dampened my enthusiasm for the study of history, since my encounters with history books usually amount to poring over lists of occurrences with only the occasional idea or theme that ties everything together. I’m also aware that my predilection for abstraction is a potential handicap when applied to history; it can be intellectually dangerous to reduce the past to a mere set of rules or lessons, and this activity usually steamrolls the complexity of real life in favor of easy explanations.

My ideal historian, therefore, should represent the best of both worlds––a mind steeped in the rich diversity of historical events that is also capable of distilling those events into evidence-based concepts that withstand serious scrutiny and hold up across time. I am aware of no author who accomplishes this with greater success than Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War. I consider this the single best history book I’ve read to date.

Turchin is the creator of a new field of study called "Cliodynamics,” which he defines as “a new science of historical dynamics” (10). Cliodynamics is a cyclical interpretation of history that focuses on the relationship between three core types of historical cycles: asabiya cycles (this wonderful term originates from 14th-century thinker Ibn Khaldoun), secular cycles, and fathers-and-sons cycles. Out of respect for the richness of Turchin’s theory, I will quote him at length in order to demonstrate how these cycles are distinct from as well as interactive with one another:

"A general theory for the rise and decline of empires we have. The crucial variable in it is the collective capacity for action, the society’s asabiya. Competition between societies leads to asabiya increase, whereas competition within a society causes its asabiya to decline. As we have seen in Part I of this book, metaethnic frontiers, where groups and civilizations clash, are the crucibles within which high-asabiya societies are forged. The almost inevitable consequence of high capacity for collective action, however, is territorial expansion that pushes the frontiers away from the center and removes the very forces that fostered high asabiya in the first place. Thus, success breeds eventual failure; the rise carries within it the seeds of the fall––peace brings war, and war brings peace. In the language of nonlinear dynamics, rise-and-fall phenomena are explained by negative feedback loops.

"Decline of asabiya is not a linear process. As we now know, empires go through long––secular––cycles of alternating integrative-disintegrative phases. Within-society competition wanes during the integrative phase and waxes during the disintegrative phase. It is during disintegrative phases when the asabiya of the society takes a big hit. Furthermore, one disintegrative phase is usually not enough to completely degrade the cohesion of a high-asabiya society. It typically takes two or three secular cycles for an imperial nation to lose its capacity for concerted action.

"However, even this portrayal is an oversimplification. Disintegrative phases are also not uniformly bad. Because people get fed up with constant instability and insecurity, civil warfare during an instability phase tends to skip a generation––the children of revolutionaries want to avoid disorder at any cost, but the grandchildren of revolutionaries are ready to repeat the mistakes of their grandparents all over again. As a result, disintegration phases tend to go through two or three 'fathers-and-sons' cycles before a renaissance can take hold and the society can enter a secular integrative phase.

"The dynamics of imperial rise and decline, therefore, are like a mechanism with wheels within wheels within wheels. The waxing and waning of asabiya is the slowest process, taking many centuries––often a millennium––for a complete cycle. Secular cycles occur on a faster time scale. A typical imperial nation goes through two or three, and sometimes even four secular cycles during the course of its life. Finally, the disintegrative phase of each secular cycle will see two or three waves of political instability and civil warfare, separated by periods of fragile peace. The characteristic time scales, therefore, are a millennium for the asabiya cycle, 2 to 3 centuries for a secular cycle, and 40 to 60 years (two generations) for fathers-and-sons cycles. These are just orders of magnitude; there is no exact periodicity in any of these processes." (285-6)

While Cliodynamics has significant implications for many areas of historical study, Turchin restricts War and Peace and War to an examination of empires, which he defines as “large, multiethnic territorial state[s] with…complex power structure[s]” (3). The vision is grand, but Turchin is careful to repeatedly point out the limitations of his arguments, and also considers alternative explanations even when he finds them unsatisfactory.

Turchin’s distinct ability to lay out an ambitious and expansive theory while remaining appropriately humble is most likely a result of his interdisciplinary approach. It’s up to each reader to decide if this methodology confers special legitimacy or reveals a lack of sufficient commitment to the traditions of academic historians, but I found myself squarely in the former camp. In a daring feat of intellectual synthesis, Turchin shores up his historical research with evidence from myriad areas of science, including but not limited to evolutionary theory, economics, statistical mechanics, nonlinear dynamics, geopolitics, social psychology, demographics, chaos theory, and physics. His numerous applications of modern discoveries to historical documents and datasets is engrossing and unique compared to other historians I’ve read. As he notes more than a few times, “History is too complex for single-factor explanations” (29). War and Peace and War bears out this creed, proving itself a true marriage of modern and ancient wisdom.

The basics of Cliodynamics are enough to make this book a worthwhile read for anyone, but there are many additional insights that Turchin manages to cram into this dense but digestible text. The resurrection of Khaldoun’s concept of asabiya is invaluable. Turchin acknowledges that a group’s asabiya is a “dynamic quantity” that “cannot be observed directly, but it can be measured from observable consequences” (6). This is unlikely to mollify hard-nosed evolutionary biologists seeking an ironclad mathematical model to verify or deny asabiya’s existence, but it does represent a beautiful articulation of a missing link in our evolutionary thinking that has only recently been revitalized by proponents of multilevel selection.

The application of asabiya to our understanding of identity and citizenship holds tremendous potential for community building on every level of human organization. Turchin observes that “A nation with high collective solidarity can lose many battles and still prevail in the end,” but this clearly seems to hold for human groups across the board (103). This profoundly humanist idea reminds us that, while the differences between individuals and groups should never be ignored, they should also never be allowed to blot out the deeper truth that all human undertakings are inherently collective, with the best societies achieving solidarity over time by harnessing diversity’s upsides and declawing its downsides. Getting along with others isn’t just nice––it’s essential for survival.

One critical aspect of asabiya that Turchin examines is how “symbolic markers––language and dialect, religion and ritualistic behaviors, race, clothing, behavioral mannerisms, hairstyles, ornaments, and tattoos” can either bring people together or keep them apart (5, emphasis his). All symbolic markers play a dual role of (1) providing a space in which solidarity can be discovered or embellished, and (2) signaling indifference or outright hostility to members of out-groups. Over time, and given sufficient survival pressures, certain markers can leap the chasm between us and them, often acquiring new powers of influence in the resolution or incitement of disputes.

Another of Turchin’s fascinating findings involves the characteristics of “metaethnic frontiers”––tense borderlands that serve as make-or-break points for rising or declining empires. Turchin shows how borderlands provide a dramatic stage on which one of two basic dynamics will prevail: (1) the empire’s centralized government will bolster its most vulnerable citizens by helping them absorb or dispel “barbarians”––thereby reinforcing or expanding its capacity for asabiya––or (2) those same “barbarians” will successfully challenge the empire’s claim to fringe territory––thereby diminishing the empire’s asabiya. If this latter dynamic persists long enough, new bonds of identification and mutual understanding can arise between the empire’s disenchanted subjects and the “barbarians,” generating a new locus of asabiya that may ultimately subvert and/or rise up to destroy the empire and give birth to a new one. Turchin’s granular focus on Roman history is the main arena where he illustrates this dynamic, but he also pulls effective examples from the histories of the United States, Russia, China, the Middle East, and others.

Turchin is keenly aware that empires do not rise and fall purely because of external factors. In fact, Cliodynamics argues that internal factors are often more important when an empire’s fate is decided. Central to this view are the tensions that arise between as well as within classes in any given empire. The integrative phases of secular cycles tend to be more egalitarian, with relatively equal wealth distribution and higher rates of social mobility. Disintegrative phases, by contrast, are marked by increasing inequality and intense inter- as well as intra-class competition. Turchin explains:

"When rich get richer and poor get poorer, cooperation between social classes is undermined. But the same process is operating within each class. When some nobles are growing conspicuously more wealthy, while the majority of nobility is increasingly impoverished, the elites become riven by factional conflicts. Within the secular cycle, as the disintegrative phase follows the integrative one, inequality rises and falls. A life cycle of an imperial nation usually extends over the course of two, or three, or even four secular cycles. Every time the empire enters a disintegrative secular phase the asabiya of its core nation is significantly degraded. Eventually, this process of imperiopathosis reaches its terminal phase––the imperial nation loses its ability to cooperate, and the empire collapses. Most empires, therefore, fall for internal reasons." (281)

Fluctuations in population and economic markets, the development of new technologies, political revolutions, and forces of nature such as climate and disease can slow down or speed up these processes, but the general trends of the secular cycle tend to reliably recur over time.

While I consider War and Peace and War to be a superb book, there are a few areas where I think Turchin’s perspective is incorrect or needs augmentation. Turchin fumbles badly when it comes to the matter of physical determinism and free will, falling prey to the all-too-common conflation of randomness and freedom:

"Particles at the subatomic level behave in a stochastic––completely erratic and unpredictable––manner, and modern physics has been unable to reduce their behavior to the action of deterministic laws. It is quite possible that the universe, at some very basic level, is not deterministic at all…At a lower level, quantum physics tells us that the behavior of subatomic particles cannot be predicted; that is, they have a kind of 'free will.'" (311, 317)

In my view, randomness denotes the limit of humanity’s ability to make precise observational predictions, and not a fundamental breakdown of deterministic physical laws. The randomness of quantum activity is, therefore, completely compatible with determinism, even if it thwarts our predictive efforts. Randomness is not compatible, however, with free will. The fact that an outcome can’t be predicted from an external perspective does not mean any kind of “choice” or rupture in causality is happening––either at the subatomic level or any other. So, while I disagree with Turchin’s contention that people have free will, I heartily agree with him that “free will in this context is a red herring. Whether people have free will or not…has nothing to do with our ability to understand and predict historical dynamics” (317). This makes one wonder why Turchin bothered to include any discussion of free will in the first place.

Turchin’s fortifications are also lacking on two other fronts, but both are errors of omission rather than misinterpretation of facts. In his final chapters, Turchin invites us to consider the implications of Cliodynamics for modern empires. It is an enlightening and generally well-framed discussion, but Turchin ignores two game-changing modern developments: artificial intelligence/automation and anthropogenic climate change. It is possible he sidesteps these topics because they represent unprecedented challenges that preclude credible prediction based on past events, or perhaps AI/automation and climate change weren’t as front and center in the mid-2000s as they are now.

All of these faults are easily forgiven in the greater context of Turchin’s laudable contribution to the discipline of historical analysis. It follows that his assessment of modernity deserves our careful consideration. He claims that the era of empires is certainly not over, and makes a strong case that the United States, the European Union, and China all qualify as contemporary empires (Russia is a borderline case). Turchin is forthright regarding the possible flaws in his theories that will need correction by others, and eschews fatalism by remaining open to the possibility that humanity may one day escape the historical cycles that have dominated our story thus far. To that end, he gestures toward a host of recent developments––our move away from agrarian economies, the development of the Internet and mobile phones, and the invention of heterarchical (nonhierarchical) power structures, amongst others––that may compound or subvert the patterns of Cliodynamics.

Like any great thinker, Turchin knows he is but one tiny incarnation of humanity’s intellectual potential, seeking merely to make a worthy contribution. This he has certainly achieved, and in doing so he has also illuminated each person’s mysterious but undeniable potential to do the same:

"Micro actions, by most people most of the time, have no effect whatsoever on the behavior of the system as a whole––they are completely dampened out at the macro level. But sometimes an individual acts in a place and at a time where the macrosystem is extremely sensitive to small perturbations. Then a little act of a little individual can trigger an avalanche of consequences, and result in a complete change of the course of events. The childhood rhyme “For want of a nail” illustrates this idea perfectly.

"This is an optimistic conclusion, because it suggests that not all individual action is doomed to be futile at the macro level of social systems. There is no excuse in not trying to be good, because even if most of such actions would probably dissipate without any lasting effect, once in a while a small action will have a large effect." (319-20)

This review was originally published on my blog, words&dirt.

[Pedro Nobre · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an engaging book.

At first, I was taken aback by the author’s loud claims. In the very first chapter, he bashes Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, and purports to found a whole new field of historiography, while giving it a pretentious name, “Cliodynamics” (From “Clio”, the Greek muse of history), which is supposed to achieve insights so far never reached by historians, by applying the same principles of the hard sciences.

So much ambition, paired with Turchin’s informal language (See, from the text: “although St. Louis was no great shakes as a political thinker”, “[experts] finally cracked the puzzle of human ultrasociality. Not all of the loose ends have been tidied up yet…”, “Moralistic individuals may bitch and moan about not getting the ‘fair price’”…”), had me suspecting his arguments at first. He is, after all, boasting that we are “in the process of a major scientific revolution, which will ensure that the social science of the twenty-first century will differ significantly from that of the last century.” So why the casual language? What sort of reader did Turchin have in mind when writing?

The book is clearly meant for general readership, although his claims could benefit from additional footnotes and references. For example, one should expect to find a graph side by side with his assertion that “Napoleon as commander acted as a multiplier, estimated as 1.3. In other words, the presence of Napoleon was equivalent to the French having an extra 30 percent of troops”.

He does, however, point the reader to a more scholarly book he published in 2003, which supposedly brings “lots of equations, data graphs, and statistical analyses” to ground his arguments. I decided to take his word for it, and at length became engrossed in his contention, built from sociological data: basically, that Empires arise in cultural fault-lines – i.e., the limits between different civilisations –, which can count on larger reserves of “Asabiya”, both the glue that keeps human groups together and the fuel that pushes them forward to act as a block, in coordination. Asabiya ebbs and flows with time, as generations struggle for status and either engage with or refrain from war.

Lifting the idea of asabiya from a premodern thinker, Ibn Khaldun, I was glad to see Turchin avoiding common naive readings of history, such as that luxury somehow brings down hardened tribes and groups that manage to conquer and build Empires. Designating immaterial or spiritual qualities such as asabiya is commonly followed by moralistic non sequiturs, like Oswald Spengler’s generalisations. We even have a meme phrase for it, coined by a novelist: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” Turchin does not engage in such nonsense and instead reviews in detail mostly European history – even giving a fair, albeit short, overview of the Spanish Empire, and referencing Mongolian and Russian history. I was not too surprised at finding that Turchin is American-educated, but Russian-born, which explains why he dodges some pitfalls indulged in common Anglo-American historiography.

But there are some blindspots. He is clearly a Roman history buff (a label he would certainly impugn, as he argues: “My interest is not in Rome per se, but rather in using it as a case study to test the theory outlined in the previous chapters—that imperial nations arise on metaethnic frontiers”), and analysing Rome takes more than a hundred pages. He rightly theories theorises that Byzantium wasn’t a continuation of Rome but instead a new nation separate from Roman legacy. He also follows closely French dynastic and sociological history and deduces interesting principles from the elite overproduction of aristocrats resulting in constant civil wars. But, in that, he writes as an American would, as Americans are unduly fascinated by Rome and see the Germanic peoples as a sideshow to France, the other continental power so closely tied with English history.

He does not reference China. This is the most glaring blindspot in the book. Rome is mentioned roughly 200 times, but China roughly 30; it gets two pages explaining the steppe-China divide, even though he does recognise that China built the longest standing Empires in history. Given that no other people was so proficient at Empire building, why not study it at length? The book comes out as seriously biased towards European history, even though cliodynamics is supposed to be applicable everywhere.

Here is most of what Turchin has to say about China:

No other region in the world has had such a long history of imperial rule. Perversely enough, the reason, ultimately, is geographic or, more precisely, ecological. The distribution of rainfall within eastern Asia creates a sharp ecological boundary between the drier steppe and wetter agricultural regions. Ever since humans learned predatory nomadism, this ecological boundary coincided with a metaethnic frontier between nomadic pastoralists and settled agriculturalists. Under pressure from the steppe, Chinese agriculturalists built one empire after another. On the steppe side, the nomads united in one imperial confederation after another. The Chinese made forays into the nomad territory, but never could make it their own, because they could not grow crops there. Nomads repeatedly conquered China, but in the process assimilated and merged into the Chinese. The fault line between the Chinese and nomadic civilizations was anchored by the geography of eastern Asia. That is why one universal empire repeatedly followed another in China. A universal empire is a state that unifies all, or virtually all, of a civilization.

Not nearly enough.

I am interested in how Turchin would react to more recent findings in the anthropology of religion. It could clear up some apparent contradictions. When he notes that “Czech and Polish chieftains who decided to adopt Christianity made a wise decision, because it allowed these nations to preserve their identity and language”, how does he explain that the Ottomans derived asabiya from the exact opposite, i.e. by wholesale rejecting their enemies’ religion and preserving a sense of identity from religious separatedness? Or that Slavs “developed their own militant and organized form of paganism”, which later came in handy?

We now know, also, that inequality can boost empire-building: more hierarchical societies are more complex societies, in many ways militarily more nimble and resourceful; Turchin holds that unequal societies have lower asabiya, which does not seem to hold well as rule. If inequality, for instance, favours some men monopolising women, wouldn’t the resulting “male surplus” be useful for intergroup aggression? We know that is the case, from primatology evidence.

My reservations should not detract anyone from reading the book. Even the weaknesses in Turchin’s arguments are interesting and worthwhile. Writing in 2006, he also was clearly able to derive a useful reading of history in order to forecast, for instance, an attempt to build a Caliphate in the Middle East. The Islamic State was founded in 1999, but not many people could see, as Turchin could, that the “metaethnic frontier theory, however, predicts that the Western intrusion will eventually generate a counter-response, possibly in the form of a new theocratic caliphate”.

Highly recommended. Five stars.

[Kyle Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is much to be said about this compelling theory. The author admits its faults...that humans are individually difficult to predict and societies easier to discern, that asabiya (the potential for collective action) is present but only indirectly and abstractly measured. But he also, perhaps rightly, champions the theory's potential. After all, being wrong in science, as Turchin himself writes, is still a useful enterprise.

Empires and states are about the capacity for collective action, Turchin says. The history of each empire passes through cycles of integrative and disintegrative phases, called Secular Cycles, that erode that asabiya down, mostly through the Matthew Principle. Frontiers between enemy cultures birth new empires and states. Asabiya memory seems to have a long half life. Overall, Turchin's theory is like describing how a fire expands, with a gradually cooling core and a red hot edge eating anything in it's path, expanding away from the center.

I enjoyed reading this, even though I have written in the margins, correcting this and disagreeing with that, more than I have with any other book in the last several years. More data is needed. More modeling is needed. More thinking is needed. But Turchin is on to something. This whole idea is an educated hunch...with data to back it up. However, it's not a full-fledged theory. Not yet.

Turchin needs to read up in Moffet, author of "The Human Swarm," who connects the individual to the larger group in behavior and psychology. Humans are biological creatures which surely had an effect on the subject! He needs to read E. O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest Of Earth" to understand humans as eusocial creatures and maybe connect these secular cycles to other species (Turchin does have a biology background). He needs to study up on the new phases of empire described by Immerwahr in "How To Hide An Empire." The US has, through technological innovations, changed what imperialism can look like.

Should you read this book, yourself? Yes. It is compelling stuff. You'll look at history and your own nation-state in a new light. One cannot help but to think very long term about our modern world.

The book can be a difficult read, but the subject is worth thinking about.

[Carl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turchin begins by referring to Hari Selden, the mastermind of psychohistory in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy in describing his project, a logical cause & effect analysis of how, where, when & why great empires are born, their life cycle, and finally, their decline & fall! In a nutshell, he finds it's all about social cohesiveness. Turchin's style becomes somewhat turgid & tedious but his thesis has merit. This is worth plowing thru.

[Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstandingly written and coherently argued. The ideas contained in this book, which seek to apply non-linear scientific principles to history and human societies, are profound. I think Turchin is really onto something here.

[Dany Vicente · Rating 4 out of 5]

History is a spiral it always repeat itself but each time the loop is a bit different from the previous

[Soham Chakraborty · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book marks the glorious beginnings of a novel new discipline- Cliodynamics. Social Scientists might finally live up to their categorial name.

[Connor Oswald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Conceptually, I like cliodynamics but I don't think this book does enough to sell you on it.

[Dan Contreras · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un libro de historia escrito por un bíologo especializado en el estudio de poblaciones ecólogicas que cita mucho a "Foundation" de Isaac Asimov - este defintivamente no es tu libro de historia tradicional.

La teoría fundamental del libro es fascinante - los pueblos ubicados en alguna frontera étnica con un alto nivel de asabinya (un término musulman que se puede resumir como cohesión social) son los principales candidatos a convertirse en grandes imperios exitosos.

El nivel de exposición del pueblo a la frontera propicia avances sociales, culturales y tecnólogicos al punto de que acaban con la frontera, destruyen a sus enemigos... y se quedan sin razón de ser. Tras lo cual viene un periodo de paz y prosperidad, que, inevitablemente, termina en sobrepoblación, desigualdad y desintegración social.

El autor es famoso por usar sus modelos matemáticos de ecología para poder predecir los periodos de desintegración social en diferentes imperios a la década que corresponden, asi que sus teorías deben de tener algo de validez. También - cuadran muy bien con investigaciones de otros autores como Scheidel y Acemogliu.

Pero al mismo tiempo no pude evitar sentir que TODO lo quiere explicar bajo el prisma de su teoría máscota, y no se molesta en encontrar contraejemplos.

Dicho eso - la parte de la teoría que lidia con sistemas de gobierno basados en castas, esclavitud y sin frontera étnica que defenter explica muuuuuy bien por que México siempre ha sido un caso pal traste y siempre lo será.

[Keith Akers · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like history, you'll eat this book up. Here is a book on the theory of history that actually adds to our knowledge of history — not this or that historical event, but a theory of how history works. Roughly, societies fail or succeed based on their degree of internal cohesion and cooperation. Author Peter Turchin calls this quality "asabiya," following the 14th century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun. It refers, roughly, to the capacity for collective action.

Even though a lot of history is very violent, it is the ability of social groups to survive and endure by cooperating with each other that determines whether they succeed, which I found to be a somewhat comforting take on the violence of history. In the end, it is cooperation that wins out, at least cooperation in dealing with a common enemy.

Empires arise, according to Turchin, on a meta-ethnic frontier. The frontier is where a new empire might arise, because it cannot be swallowed up by one or the other side of the frontier, sort of like a small fish surviving by swimming right in between two large sharks, who both fear the other shark enough so that they don't gobble up the smaller fish. On the other hand, on the meta-ethnic frontier, social cohesion is at a premium; you have to have it, or your group won't survive. Empires fall when they gradually erode their "asabiya," or internal cohesion, with infighting, and growing too fat and lazy after their initial success. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, inequality arises, civil war ensues, and there goes your mighty empire. OK, this is a bit of a simplification, but that's the general idea.

Especially interesting is his treatment of the Roman Empire, where he shows how this theory accounts for both the rise of Rome and its fall. He convincingly argues that the Roman Empire really fell in the third century, during the devastating civil wars, rather than later in 476 CE, which is when most historians date the fall of the Western empire. Turchin says that the Byzantine Empire is really a separate phenomenon, and that when the Empire was split in the early 4th century into East and West, it was really the creation of a new empire altogether, not the continuation of the Roman Empire.

I read this book after I read Secular Cycles, co-authored also by Peter Turchin, which is much more daunting but also much more complete and thorough. I would suggest reading "War and Peace and War" first. If you read "Secular Cycles" first, you will really have to love the topic or you'll never finish the book. "War and Peace and War" is much less "academic," and that is generally good news. He explains things well; he tells stories, gives illustration from history, and so forth. Some of the historical stuff was things I had read quite a bit about during my life, like the Roman Empire. Other stuff, like the conflict between the Cossacks and the Mongols, was completely new. "Secular Cycles," though, is much more thorough but totally academic, and hard to get through. It would have been a lot easier if I had read "War and Peace and War" first. But fortunately for me, I loved the topic.