Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall (Princeton Studies in Complexity) - Softcover

Turchin, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691180776 ISBN 13: 9780691180779

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematical modeling with statistical analyses. Taking up the problem of territorial dynamics--why some polities at certain times expand and at other times contract--this book shows that a similar research program can advance our understanding of dynamical processes in history. Peter Turchin develops hypotheses from a wide range of social, political, economic, and demographic factors: geopolitics, factors affecting collective solidarity, dynamics of ethnic assimilation/religious conversion, and the interaction between population dynamics and sociopolitical stability. He then translates these into a spectrum of mathematical models, investigates the dynamics predicted by the models, and contrasts model predictions with empirical patterns. Turchin's highly instructive empirical tests demonstrate that certain models predict empirical patterns with a very high degree of accuracy. For instance, one model accounts for the recurrent waves of state breakdown in medieval and early modern Europe. And historical data confirm that ethno-nationalist solidarity produces an aggressively expansive state under certain conditions (such as in locations where imperial frontiers coincide with religious divides). The strength of Turchin's results suggests that the synthetic approach he advocates can significantly improve our understanding of historical dynamics.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Turchin is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Quantitative Analysis of Movement and Complex Population Dynamics (Princeton).

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"An important, original, and timely book--richly detailed and beautifully thought out."--Jack A. Goldstone, University of California, Davis

"This book is clearly the state of the art in formal modeling and computer simulation of long-term historical changes in territorial states. Elegantly formulated and clearly written, it takes an important topic to a new level of formal sophistication."--Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania

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Historical Dynamics

Why States Rise and Fall

By Peter Turchin

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2003 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-18077-9

Contents

List of Figures, viii, 
List of Tables, x, 
Preface, xi, 
Chapter 1. Statement of the Problem, 1, 
Chapter 2. Geopolitics, 9, 
Chapter 3. Collective Solidarity, 29, 
Chapter 4. The Metaethnic Frontier Theory, 50, 
Chapter 5. An Empirical Test of the Metaethnic Frontier Theory, 78, 
Chapter 6. Ethnokinetics, 94, 
Chapter 7. The Demographic-Structural Theory, 118, 
Chapter 8. Secular Cycles in Population Numbers, 150, 
Chapter 9. Case Studies, 170, 
Chapter 10. Conclusion, 197, 
Appendix A. Mathematical Appendix, 205, 
Appendix B. Data Summaries for the Test of the Metaethnic Frontier Theory, 214, 
Bibliography, 226, 
Index, 243, 

CHAPTER 1

Statement of the Problem

1.1 WHY DO WE NEED A MATHEMATICAL THEORY IN HISTORY?

Why do some polities — chiefdoms and states of various kinds — embark on a successful program of territorial expansion and become empires? Why do empires sooner or later collapse? Historians and sociologists offer a great variety of answers to these and related questions. These answers range from very specific explanations focusing on unique characteristics of one particular polity to quite general theories of social dynamics. There has always been much interest in understanding history, but recently the theoretical activity in this area has intensified (Rozov 1997). Historical sociology is attempting to become a theoretical, mature science.

But why do historical sociologists use such a limited set of theoretical tools? Theory in social sciences usually means careful thinking about concepts and definitions. It is verbal, conceptual, and discursive. The theoretical propositions that are derived are qualitative in nature. Nobody denies the immense value of such theoretical activity, but it is not enough. There are also formal, mathematical approaches to building theory that have been applied with such spectacular success in physics and biology. Yet formalized theory employing mathematical models is rarely encountered in historical sociology (we will be reviewing some of the exceptions in later chapters).

The history of science is emphatic: a discipline usually matures only after it has developed mathematical theory. The requirement for mathematical theory is particularly important if the discipline deals with dynamic quantities (see the next section). Everybody is familiar with the paradigmatic example of classical mechanics. But two more recent examples from biology are the synthetic theory of evolution that emerged during the second quarter of the twentieth century (Ruse 1999), and the ongoing synthesis in population ecology (for example, Turchin 2003). In all these cases, the impetus for synthesis was provided by the development of mathematical theory.

Can something similar be done in historical sociology? Several attempts have been made in the past (e.g., Bagehot 1895; Rashevsky 1968), but they clearly failed to make an impact on how history is studied today. I think there are two major reasons explaining this failure. First, these attempts were inspired directly by successes in physical sciences. Yet physicists traditionally choose to deal with systems and phenomena that are very different from those in history. Physicists tend to choose very simple systems with few interacting components (such as the solar system, the hydrogen atom, etc.) or systems consisting of a huge number of identical components (as in thermodynamics). As a result, very precise quantitative predictions can be made and empirically tested. But even in physical applications such systems are rare, and in social sciences only very trivial questions can be reduced to such simplicity. Real societies always consist of many qualitatively and quantitatively different agents interacting in very complex ways. Furthermore, societies are not closed systems: they are strongly affected by exogenous forces, such as other human societies, and by the physical world. Thus, it is not surprising that traditional physical approaches honed on simple systems should fail in historical applications.

The second reason is that the quantitative approaches typically employed by physicists require huge amounts of precisely measured data. For example, a physicist studying nonlinear laser dynamics would without further ado construct a highly controlled lab apparatus and proceed to collect hundreds of thousands of extremely accurate measurements. These data would then be analyzed using sophisticated methods on a high-powered computer. Nothing could be further from the reality encountered by a historical sociologist, who typically lacks data about many aspects of the historical system under study, while possessing fragmentary and approximate information about others. For example, one of the most important aspects of any society is just how many members it has. But even this kind of information usually must be reconstructed by historians on the basis of much guesswork.

If these two problems are the real reason why previous attempts failed, then some recent developments in natural sciences provide a basis for hope. First, during the last 20–30 years, physicists and biologists have mounted a concerted attack on complex systems. A number of approaches can be cited here: nonlinear dynamics, synergetics, complexity, and so on. The use of powerful computers has been a key element in making these approaches work. Second, biologists, and ecologists in particular, have learned how to deal with short and noisy data sets. Again, plentiful computing power was a key enabler, allowing such computer-intensive approaches as nonlinear model fitting, bootstrapping, and cross-validation.

There is another hopeful development, this time in social sciences. I am referring to the rise of quantitative approaches in history, or cliometrics (Williamson 1991). Currently, there are many investigators who collect quantitative data on various aspects of historical processes, and large amounts of data are already available in electronic form.

These observations suggest that another attempt at building and testing quantitative theories in historical sociology may be timely. If we achieve even partial success, the potential payoff is so high that it warrants making the attempt. And there are several recent developments in which application of modeling and quantitative approaches to history have already yielded interesting insights.

1.2 HISTORICAL DYNAMICS AS A RESEARCH PROGRAM

Many historical processes are dynamic. Generally speaking, dynamics is the scientific study of any entities that change with time. One aspect of dynamics deals with a phenomenological description of temporal behaviors — trajectories (this is sometimes known as kinematics). But the heart of dynamics is the study of mechanisms that bring about temporal change and explain the observed trajectories. A very common approach, which has proved its worth in innumerable applications, consists of taking a holistic phenomenon and mentally splitting it up into separate parts that are assumed to interact with each other. This is the dynamical systems approach, because the whole phenomenon is represented as a system consisting of several interacting elements (or subsystems, since each element can also be represented as a lower-level...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691180776
• ISBN 13: 9780691180779
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 260
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Princeton University Press; https://press.princeton.edu/books; ; 7th Floor, New South Building; PRINCETON; NJ; 8544; USA
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