Life Cycles of Imperial Nations

* Book: War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations. By Peter Turchin. Pearson/Pi

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Description

Publisher's Weekly:

"Ranging freely from the founding of Rome to 17th-century North America, this provocative essay in "cliodynamics" ("the study of processes that change with time") searches for scientific regularities that underlie history. Ecologist and mathematician Turchin grounds his theory of preindustrial empires in the Arabic concept of asabiya, meaning a society's capacity for collective action. Empires germinate, he contends, along "meta-ethnic frontiers" where conflict between starkly alien peoples—Roman farmers vs. Celtic tribesmen in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., say—fosters the social solidarity and discipline that empire building requires. Success, he continues, leads inexorably to decline: stability and prosperity produce overpopulation and a Malthusian crisis in which the struggle for scarce resources undermines social solidarity and triggers imperial collapse. Turchin's straining for scientific exactitude occasionally overreaches, yielding a proliferation of historical "cycles" of fuzzy periodicity, riddled with fudge factors like "mathematical chaos." Still, Turchin's focus on social cooperation as the key to history is a fruitful one, and his ideas generate many fascinating discussions of a wide variety of historical episodes, rendered in lucid, vigorous prose. The result, much in the vein of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel , is a stimulating revisionist overview of world history."

(https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780131499966)

Review

Mark Buchanan:

"Empires rise and fall, he suggests, because of "competition and conflict between groups, some of which dominate others". On the world stage, ethnic groups - identified by race, language and other markers - compete with one another for resources, land and so on. Plausibly enough, those able to muster and sustain a higher level of internal cooperation should tend to prevail, doing a better job of providing a collective defence or in coordinating attacks against others. In this sense, Turchin sees history as an evolutionary competition between more or less cooperative groups, and this raises two natural questions. First, how do new highly cooperative groups emerge, and so become candidates for expansion and the founding of new empires? Second, what happens to these cooperative groups that eventually undermines their success? A fundamental idea of biology is that new adaptive traits emerge most readily where evolutionary pressure selects for them. Birds evolve longer beaks only under conditions in which longer beaks make a real difference to a bird's fitness. Following this idea, Turchin argues that particular geographical zones should act as incubators for highly cooperative groups, because they impose conditions under which cooperation really matters. In particular, he suggests, peoples that live at the boundaries of existing empires face serious threats as those empires attempt to expand. On the other hand, such peoples may also have opportunities for beneficial trade with the empire. "In the pressure cooker" of such a zone, Turchin suggests, "poorly integrated groups crumble or disappear whereas groups based on strong cooperation thrive and expand". "It is the very success of an empire that sets up the conditions for its demise" So, the idea goes, the frontiers of existing empires offer fertile territory for seeding highly cooperative groups that might then grow into new empires. Turchin argues that a number of historical examples fit this pattern. Russia rose up out of a three-century battle to survive in the face of murderous raids by Tatar bands from the steppe to the south. America grew strong and cohesive during a similarly murderous three-century battle to survive and expand against indigenous people. Curiously, this part of Turchin's argument finds support in modern experimental economics and anthropology. Experiments over the past decade or so have established that most individuals aren't the greedy, rational machines of neo-classical economics, but are often willing to cooperate with others even when they clearly have nothing to gain by doing so. Some of the most convincing efforts to explain such "irrational" tendencies point to a process of cultural group selection that looks surprisingly like Turchin's historical dynamics - competition between groups of greater or lesser cooperative skills, with the more cooperative tending to win out. But if high levels of internal cooperation lead to the rise of great empires, what leads to their ultimate demise? Here Turchin suggests that another natural process comes into play. As an empire grows rich, inequalities in wealth and power naturally emerge among its people. Consequently, the very success of an empire sets up the conditions for its demise, through the "corrosive effect that glaring inequality has on the willingness of people to cooperate". Turchin also illustrates this point with several historical examples, including the abrupt decay of France in the 14th century, following glory in the 13th, and the fall of Rome. It would be interesting to know what he makes of today's America, and the fallout after the disaster and debacle of New Orleans. But Turchin goes beyond mere examples. He also argues - rightly, I think - that the emergence of such inequality ultimately has less to do with people than with simple mathematics. A key discovery of so-called "complexity science", and the physics of systems that are out of equilibrium, is that growth often leads to a "rich get richer" phenomenon, which naturally generates dramatic differences between distinct parts of a system. This is true in systems ranging from the web - where a small fraction of sites account for a large fraction of all hypertext links - to crystals growing in solution. In the context of economics, rich-get-richer phenomena have been shown to cause a few business firms to become far larger than all the others, and a few people to become incredibly wealthy. Inequalities emerge inexorably, and for fundamental reasons. "

(http://peterturchin.com/PDF/New%20Scientist%20Buchanan.pdf)