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“demographic-structural theory” of revolutions (which provides the foundations of the cliodynamic approach to understanding why societies experience recurrent crises).
Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World was finally published in 1991,
macroscope.
Terrans.
Americans ate well and grew tall, becoming the tallest people on earth at that time.
By the mid-nineteenth century, overpopulation in Europe had become much worse than in America, and many “surplus” Europeans chose to migrate across the Atlantic, ending up in the same cities that were absorbing the American rural population surplus. Immigration to America, which was a mere trickle before 1830, became a mighty current during the 1840s, driven by such disasters as the Irish Potato Famine and the wave of revolutions in 1848 and 1849. The immigrants competed with citizens for a finite pool of jobs. As a result, the supply of labor overwhelmed the demand, even though demand was
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The growing immiseration, in turn, translated into increasing social instability and conflict.
research had identified several general principles that explained why these periodic social breakdowns occurred: popular immiseration, elite overproduction, state weakness, and geopolitical environment.
Woql
Woql saw that between 1855 and 1859, there were three Know-Nothing riots (hitting Baltimore, Washington, DC, and New Orleans); a citywide gang war in New York (also known as the Dead Rabbits riot); election riots (Bloody Monday in Louisville, Kentucky); and the culmination of the Mormon War (the Mountain Meadows Massacre).
Seshat: Global History Databank.[3]
The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction, thus extending our knowledge of the demographic dynamics in England (and Wales) back in time for nearly three centuries before the first modern census.
As data collection needed to answer this particular Big Question wound down, we gradually switched to a new Big Question: Why do complex societies periodically get into trouble? What are the factors explaining recurrent waves of high internal instability, state breakdown, and outright civil war? This question is usually formulated as: Why do complex societies collapse? In the last decade, a whole new scientific discipline, appropriately called collapsology,[14] has arisen to answer this question.
lessons of possible relevance to us today? This is why we decided to name the Seshat offshoot CrisisDB (“DB” stands for “database”). We have identified about three hundred cases of crisis, spanning from the Neolithic period to the present and located in all major continents of the world.
All social action is a result of summing together the acts of individual people. And impersonal forces shape the lives and attitudes of individuals. We want to understand both societies and people. So what to do?
shift the focus of the narrative between the individual point of view and what happens at the aggregate, societal level. This is
The first question we need to ask about a system is: What is its structure—its internal composition? Societies are not like containers with ideal gas beloved by statistical physicists. Unlike molecules, each human being is unique. Furthermore, all people belong to various kinds of groups, and those can belong to other, larger-scale groups. A society can be thought of as a group of groups of groups.
Understanding how a society is structured—what the various interest groups are and how much relative power they have—is the first step in this kind of analysis. The second question concerns dynamics. How does an interplay of contending or cooperating interest groups affect the change at the system level over time? How do interests and relative capacities of groups evolve? This is where history matters.
