Recent cliodynamics items

Growth of human capital in the regions of the Russian Empire in 1897-1913: the role of local self-government bodies (zemstva) financing

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The previous research with incomplete data revealed that zemstva expenditure on education per capita were higher in regions with low level of education, but these spending did not make much of a difference – human capital in these regions remained relatively low (Popov, Konchakov, Didenko, 2024). The results reported in this paper provide additional and more rigorous proof that zemstva activities and the increase in their spending for education in 1897-1913 contributed to the spread of primary education and to the decline in the inequality of the distribution of human capital not only between the regions< but also within the regions (ratio of secondary to primary education enrollment).

But we also show that there were more powerful forces at play – education for tuition fees, central government and city/town administration financing – that were pushing the development in an opposite direction, increasing the secondary education enrollment in most regions faster...

Quantifying History Across Eras: Benchmarking the Battle of Granicus from Troy to WWII through DEA Analysis

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The paper aims to suggest Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), as a preliminary tool of military efficiency. This approach examines battles as a decision-making unit (DMU) characterized by multiple inputs and outputs. Data: Data are measurable indicators such as battles won, territorial expansion, casualties, and historical impact. By assigning quantitative values, the study facilitates cross-temporal comparisons of military effectiveness. Analysis: The strategic performance of Alexander the Great at the Battle of Granicus River (334 BCE) serves as a primary case study of DEA employment. The scope of analysis extends to a range of historically significant conflicts, from the Trojan War to World War II to compare with and be used as benchmarks. Results: The study demonstrates the practical utility of quantifying historical events into a single comparable metric, facilitating clearer comparisons across diverse battles ranked from highest to lowest values.

On the Life Cycle of Empires

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We provide empirical evidence that the distribution of empires' lifetime is exponential with a typical time-scale of 300 years. After introducing and computing a proxy measure for the dimension of a large polity we interpret the data by means of a simple dynamical model for the empires' evolution. The resulting theory suggests that the behavior of a long-lived empire is qualitatively different from a short-lived one. They all experience an initial expansion phase but while the former goes through a contraction period over the last $20\%$ of its life, the latter stays essentially unchanged after reaching its maximum size. In both cases, a sudden collapse occurs when the empire's size is still close to its own historical average.

A Mathematical Model of Civilizational Dynamics: Quantifying Toynbee’s Challenge–Response Theory with Newtonian Mechanics

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study presents a civilizational dynamics model that applies Newtonian mechanics to Toynbee's challenge-response theory. By defining quantifiable indicators of societal response (α) and challenge (β), the model constructs a civilizational sustainability index S(t)=lnα(t)−lnβ(t). The first, second, and third differences of S(t) are interpreted as civilizational velocity, acceleration, and jerk, respectively, offering dynamic insights into the non-linear changes of civilizational states. Simulations applied to Roman civilization (BC 100 – AD 100) identify critical transitions within this historical period, providing empirical support for Toynbee’s hypothesis that civilizations collapse when challenges are either too weak or overwhelming. The model offers a novel quantitative method to analyze civilizational resilience and decay by capturing structural transformations through mathematical dynamics. While acknowledging the limitations of quantitative modeling in the humanities,...

The Integration Of Two Disparate Processes: Punctuated Equilibria Characterize Urbanization Over Time, While Kondratieff Long Waves Characterize Long Term Economic Change

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In 1972 Eldridge and Gould proposed a model of episodic change characterizing the process of speciation. Since that initial publication, significant evidence has accumulated in support of their proposal. It is the position of this paper that a similar pattern, although with very different underlying mechanisms, exists for the process of world system urbanization, and it will be shown that periods of rapid change in the rates of world-system urbanization punctuate periods of stasis. Further, it will be inferred that these periods of punctuation are the result of tipping points being exceeded during the previous periods of stasis. A preliminary math model of this process is presented which shows that the interaction of world system population, carrying capacity, and level of technology are capable of producing such punctuated patterns. These results suggest that this macropattern of urbanization in which stasis alternates with punctuation provides a...

CRISES AVERTED. How A Few Past Societies Found Adaptive Reforms in the Face of Structural-Demographic Crises

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Historians and social scientists have long been preoccupied with understanding and documenting periods of crisis. Such emphasis is only growing, and becoming more pressing, as the world continues to face a number of interrelated stressors in the form of irreversible climate change, major ecological shocks and disease outbreaks, eruptions of military violence, economic disruptions and deepening inequalities, political polarization and unrest, the rise of authoritarian and nationalist regimes. Crises in these domains are not new, but have been recurrent features of past societies. Although these periods have typically led to massive loss of life, the failure of critical institutions, and even complete societal collapse, there are instances in the historical record of societies managing to turn the tide of crisis even as violence and social turmoil grow. Here, we focus on four such cases of crises mitigated with structural reforms revealed from our previous historical analyses:...

The State as a Socio-Evolutionary Response to the Challenges of the Scale of Control and the Continuity Gap

Sun, 1 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article is an experience of theoretical reconstruction of the origin of the state as a natural phenomenon of evolution in general and social evolution in particular, under the formation of necessary and sufficient conditions. The analysis of R. Carneiro's criticism of M. Weber's classical definition, as well as the discussion of M. Berent's original concept of the non-state status of the ancient Greek polis, allow to formulate a new synthetic definition of the state. We add a new feature to the known characteristics: a formal structure of managerial positions reproduced across generations and independent of kinship relations. The conceptual scheme of the general evolutionary mechanism of the emergence of new structures combines classical ideas (from C. Darwin to A. Toynbee), as well as models of such anthropologists and sociologists (R. Carneiro, A. Stinchcombe, R. Collins, etc.). The scheme includes the following concepts: concerns, challenges-threats and challenges-opportunities,...

Grain Yields and the Causes of the Russian Revolution

Sun, 1 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the study of the causes of the Russian Revolution, the problem of the standard of living of the population plays an important role. This problem, in turn, is linked to the question of agricultural productivity. In modern historiography, both domestic and foreign, the thesis of the growing productivity of Russian agriculture in the post-reform period is considered proven - and in particular the increase in grain yields. This thesis is based on the well-known works of V.G. Mikhailovsky, V.M. Obukhov and A.S. Nifontov, in which time series of grain yields in European Russia were constructed on the basis of official statistics. Meanwhile, the opinion of the experts of the 1901 Commission is well known, who believed that the increase in yields recorded in official statistics was explained by the improvement in the system of collecting harvest data. Reforms to improve the survey system were carried out in 1870, 1883 and 1893. The author examines the dynamics of 4-year averages...

The Computational Power of a Human Society: a New Model of Social Evolution

Sun, 1 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Social evolutionary theory seeks to explain increases in the scale and complexity of human societies, from origins to present. Over the course of the twentieth century, social evolutionary theory largely fell out of favor as a way of investigating human history, just when advances in complex systems science and computer science saw the emergence of powerful new conceptions of complex systems, and in particular new methods of measuring complexity. We propose that these advances in our understanding of complex systems and computer science should be brought to bear on our investigations into human history. To that end, we present a new framework for modeling how human societies co-evolve with their biotic environments, recognizing that both a society and its environment are computers. This leads us to model the dynamics of each of those two systems using the same, new kind of computational machine, which we define here. For simplicity, we construe a society as a set of interacting...

Quantifying Trade from Renaissance Merchant Letters

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Medieval and Early-Modern business correspondence between European companies constitutes a rich source of economic, business, and trade information in that the writ- ing of letters was the very instrument through which merchants ordered and organized the shipments of goods, and performed financial operations. While a comprehensive analysis of such material enables scholars to re-construct the supply chains and sales of various goods, as well as identify the trading networks in the Europe, much of the archival sources have not undergone any systematic and quantitative analysis. In this paper we develop a new holistic and quantitative approach for analysing the entire outgoing, and so far unexploited, correspondence of a major Renaissance merchant- bank - the Saminiati & Guasconi company of Florence - for the first years of its activity. After digitization of the letters, we employ an AI-based HTR model on the Transkribus platform and perform an automated-text analysis over...

Political Stress Index of Poland

Sat, 31 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We apply the political stress index as introduced by Boldstone (1991) and implemented by Turchin (2013), to the case study of Poland. The approach quantifies political and social unrest as a single quantity based on a multitude of economic and demographic variables. The present-day data allow us to directly apply index without the need of simulating the elite component, as was done previously. Neither model version shows appreciable unrest levels for the present, while the simulated model applied to partial historical data yields the index in remarkable agreement with the fall of communism in Poland.We next analyze the model's sensitive dependence on its parameters (the hallmark of chaos), which limits its utility and application to other countries. The original equations cannot, by construction, describe the elite fraction for longer time-periods; and we propose a modification to remedy this problem. The model still holds some predictive power, but we argue that some...

Never Ending Revolutions

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This essay will review two books that describe and explain modern revolutions. First one is Handbook of Revolutions in the 21st Century. The New Waves of Revolutions, and the Causes and Effects of Disruptive Political Change edited by Jack A. Goldstone, Leonid Grinin and Andrey Korotayev. The book is a massive collection of 41 diverse chapters from numerous contributors. The book takes on almost every aspect of revolutionary theory and addresses quite a few of very recent revolutionary events, as well as many older ones. Second book is New Wave of Revolutions in the MENA Region. A Comparative Perspective edited by Leonid Issaev and Andrey Korotayev. The book contains 12 chapters from various contributors, each dedicated to a revolutionary episode in a country from the Middle East and Northern Africa region. The book provides an overview of the revolutionary processes in the region that shook the world several years ago with its rapid and unexpected domino-like revolutions. The...

A Bayesian Approach to Survivorship Bias in Historical Data Analysis

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Datasets such as Seshat have allowed researchers to quantitatively test hypotheses about premodern societies and states with great success. Nevertheless, one has to take into account potential sources of bias in the data such as a survivorship bias favouring the inclusion of long-lived over short-lived states. Bayesian methods can be used to complement standard modelling procedures to take this issue into account as is demonstrated by analysing the longevity distribution of premodern states.

State Crisis Theory: A Unification of Institutional, Socio-ecological, Demographic-structural, World-systems, and Revolutions Research

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Increasing ecological and political instability has stimulated interest in how similar problems have arisen in the past – and how they have been resolved. But this research has long been divided along different research traditions. This paper draws together five broad research strands: institutionalism, socio-ecological systems, demographic-structural theories, world-systems approaches, and revolutions research. It begins by establishing that each of these five traditions proposes to explain state crisis, in the sense of a decisive turning point from which the state might not emerge in its current form. But each of the five strands proposes a slightly different set of central hypotheses, and draws on a slightly different set of cases in support. Systematizing these hypotheses draws attention to a neglected distinction between crises that take place in different ecological-economic conditions. This is because crises that occur in conditions of worsening scarcity are hypothesized...

Ritual Theories, the Sacred, and Social Control. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ritual Theories, the Sacred, and Social Control. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

More On Social Glue: A Response to Commentaries

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

More On Social Glue: A Response to Commentaries

Modes of Interaction and Social Glue. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Modes of Interaction and Social Glue. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

On the Application Methods for Various Types of Social Glue. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

On the Application Methods for Various Types of Social Glue. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

Identity (con)fusion: Social Groups and the Stickiness of Social Glue. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Identity (con)fusion: Social Groups and the Stickiness of Social Glue. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

Two Stars and a (Fourth) Wish: Ritual Theory and the Challenges of Fusing Humanity. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Two Stars and a (Fourth) Wish: Ritual Theory and the Challenges of Fusing Humanity. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

The Notion of “Identity Fusion” Raises More Questions Than It Answers. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Notion of “Identity Fusion” Raises More Questions Than It Answers. A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

How Can Social Glue Foster Cooperation Rather than Competition? A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

How Can Social Glue Foster Cooperation Rather than Competition? A commentary on Three Wishes for the World by Harvey Whitehouse

International Systems and Cognitive Dissonances: beyond rational agents

Mon, 1 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Understanding decision-making and strategy in international relations is enriched by an approach that takes into account different historical scales. Big History, which delves into the interplay of cultural, evolutionary, and cosmological processes, serves as a valuable tool in elucidating the strategic behavior of political actors. In a systemic setting where anticipatory capability stands as a paramount asset, this approach aids in pinpointing potential sources of disorder within the international arena. When policymakers seek to understand an interconnected web of actors, make informed decisions, and anticipate the actions of others, they draw on a complex set of mental tools. These tools combine cultural information with ethological cognitive archetypes, shaped by millions of years of natural selection in primate species and hardwired into the human collective unconscious. Cultural information, stemming from these archetypes, has the capacity to either augment...

A review essay on End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin (Penguin Random House 2023)

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In End Times, Peter Turchin takes us on three journeys: One is his personal history of the discovery of patterns in history, which form the basis for his development of cliodyamics; a second is his tracing of the primary pattern, namely how elite overproduction and popular immiseration have repeatedly led to state breakdowns across history; and third is the history of the United States, reprising and updating his findings in Age of Discord (Turchin 2017). The journeys converge on a rather distressing endpoint, however: Turchin has found that the pattern of state breakdown that recurs across history is now unfolding in the United States; and in 75% of the times this pattern has been seen in past societies, it led to some form of convulsive state breakdown, including revolution or civil war.

Editors’ Note: New Publication Policies at Cliodynamics

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Editors’ Note: New Publication Policies at Cliodynamics

Exploring Phenomenological Models for Societal and Technological Transitions of the Neolithic Revolution and Early Civilization Formation.

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Several qualitative models have been proposed to explain significant historical shifts in both societal and technological domains. Despite advancements in modeling, certain transitions remain enigmatic, such as the early shift from hunter-gatherer to agriculture-dependent societies, marked by a substantial increase in effort. Another perplexity involves the coordination of agricultural activities into cities and civilizations, despite the larger overhead effort and loss of independence. The exploration of simplified models featuring aggregate, dynamic, and nonlinear processes holds the potential to uncover distinctive facets of each transition. The transitions under consideration span from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies and then to early civilizations. Other analogies are suggested for further exploration for transitions to market systems, capitalism, industrialization, and sustainable societies, incorporating factors like land pressures, economies...

The Benefits and Challenges of Linked Datasets for Cliodynamics and Comparative Anthropology

Mon, 6 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of large comparative cultural databases, primarily consisting of contemporary data (e.g., ethnographic writings), but increasingly historical data as well (including archaeological materials). Individually, these databases already serve as valuable resources as evidenced by the growing number of papers utilizing them. However, further benefits could result from merging or linking these data in ways that surpass their original intentions and ambitions. One avenue is the integration of ethnographic and historical data to help remedy the weaknesses of each (e.g., by addressing lacunae, imprecision, bias, subjectivity, and unreliability) and draw on their reciprocal strengths (e.g., by combining longitudinal depth and primary source material) of these different forms of evidence. The work presented here is a further step in that direction. This article shows how efforts to quantitatively examine historical variation in features...

A Textbook of Heterodox Economics

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a review of Foundations of Real-World Economics, 3rd edition, by John Komlos (Routledge, 2023)

Jewish Networks in the Spread of Early Christianity: A Mathematical Model of Marcionite and Lukan Christianities

Sun, 1 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The authors reconsider the dynamics of Jewish and non-Jewish networks in the spread of early Christianity. For mathematical modeling of complex processes like these, they apply Lukan and Marcionite Christianities as strictly coded test cases. Despite weak historical evidence, it is obvious that these two movements, which are newly assumed to be contemporaneous, maintained different attitudes to the Jewish background of Christianity and so they probably used Jewish and non-Jewish networks in a different way. While Lukan Christianity, which remained open to the Jewish tradition, may still have utilized Jewish Mediterranean networks, Marcionite Christianity, which rejected the Jewish heritage, probably ignored them. On this reduced historical basis, the authors constructed a mathematical model of temporal spreading on the network which was common for both of the hypothesized types of Christianity. The nodes of this network, representing big cities of the ancient Mediterranean,...

Evolutionary radiation of mid-Holocene lanceolate points from the highlands of the South Central Andes

Sun, 1 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Through phylogenetic reconstruction this work analyzes the diversification of lanceolate points of the South Central Andes which began in the early Holocene and spanned the entire mid- Holocene. Based on a regional-scale data, we discuss the links between the increasing mid-Holocene risk conditions, the patterns of diversification of point lineages, demographic change and animal resources consumption. We distinguish a first instance of greater diversity of points, a higher rate of innovation and less class longevity. These trends progressively stabilized, giving rise to a pattern of less innovation, decreasing taxa diversity and greater class longevity as well as an age-related extinction pattern. We show that as projectile points diversified,hunting efficiency increased along the mid-Holocene by the increased representation of high-return fauna in the regional zooarchaeological record. We suggest that this diversification...

Resetting History’s Dial? A Critique of David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity