War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires
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Last annotated on August 4, 2016
Introduction “So Peace Brings Warre and Warre Brings Peace”Read more at location 77
Note: INTRO@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@MALTHUS REDIVIVO. I CICLI DELLA STORIA. IMHO: MA MALTHUS RICHIEDEREBBE UN ADATTAMENTO X INTERAGIRE CON LA MODERNITÀ Edit
The empire has unified all the civilizations at last. After generations of battles, the last enemies have been defeated. Citizens of the empire can, it seems, look forward to permanent peace and prosperity.Read more at location 78
When the equations are run forward, they foretell the decay and eventual collapse of the central power, rebellions by regional barons and rogue generals, and finally a bitter civil warRead more at location 81
The decline and fall of the empire over the ensuing centuries unfolds precisely as the humble mathematician said it would.Read more at location 84
additional variables introduced would become greater than our psychology could handle.”Read more at location 92
Small causes might produce large effects. For example, a butterfly fluttering its wings in Australia might cause a hurricane in the Atlantic.Read more at location 93
For centuries, philosophers have mulled over the prospects of a scientific study of history.Read more at location 98
Despite some dissenting voices, the consensus has been that scientific study of human societies is impossibleRead more at location 99
They consist not of simple identical particles, such as atoms and molecules, but of human individuals, each unique, endowed with free will, and capable of purposeful action.Read more at location 100
The verdict has been that any sort of scientific history must remain science fiction rather than a real science.Read more at location 101
War and Peace and War addresses the question raised by Asimov (and many other people before him, including Marx and Tolstoy): Is a science of history possible?Read more at location 109
Can we design a theory for the collapse of mighty empires that would be no worse than, say, our understanding of why earthquakes happen?Read more at location 110
An empire is a large, multiethnic territorial state with a complex power structure. The key variable is the size.Read more at location 116
large states had to come up with a variety of ad hoc ways to bind far-flung territories to the center. One of the typical expedients was to incorporate smaller neighbors as self-contained units, imposing tribute on them and taking over their foreign relations, but otherwise leaving their internal functioning alone.Read more at location 118
Unlike such entities as civilizations, territorial states are easier to define and demarcateRead more at location 125
we should not conclude that they are the norm in human history. Prior to the nineteenth century most (and until six thousand years ago all) of the habitable space on Earth was divided among small-scale, stateless societies, not empires.Read more at location 130
Many historical processes are dynamic—empires rise and fall, populations and economies boom and bust, world religions spread or wither. The field of historical dynamics investigates such dynamicRead more at location 140
Ultimately, the behavior of a group is determined by the actions of its individual members. However, social groups are not simple collections of identical particles,Read more at location 144
A small number of members of an agrarian society (typically around 1 or 2 percent) concentrates in its hands most of the power and wealth; this group consists of the elites or aristocracy.Read more at location 147
Another important aspect of social structure is ethnicity. Ethnicity is the group use of any aspect of cultureRead more at location 149
For example, Greeks drew a boundary between themselves and barbarians, non-Greek speakers.Read more at location 151
The broadest groupings of people that unite many nations are usually called civilizations, but I prefer to call such entities metaethnic communitiesRead more at location 155
sometimes this gap is so extreme that people deny the very humanity of those who are on the other side of the metaethnic fault line.Read more at location 159
Historical dynamics can be understood as a result of competition and conflict between groups, some of which dominate others.Read more at location 160
Within-group cooperation is the basis of inter-group conflict, including its extreme versions such as war and even genocide.Read more at location 162
Asabiya refers to the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action.Read more at location 165
The ability of an empire to expand territory and to defend itself against external and internal enemies is determined largely by the characteristics of its imperial nation,Read more at location 169
poorly integrated groups crumble and disappear, whereas groups based on strong cooperation thrive and expand.Read more at location 176
On a metaethnic frontier, integration of ethnically similar groups on the same side of the fault line is made easier by the presence of a very different “other”—the metaethnic community on the other side.Read more at location 178
The critical assumption in my argument is that cooperation provides the basis for imperial power. This assumption is at odds with the fundamental postulates of the dominant theories in social and biological sciences: the rational choice in economics and the selfish gene in evolutionary biology.Read more at location 185
Two key adaptations enabled the evolution of ultrasociality. The first one was the moralist strategy: cooperate when enough members in the group are also cooperating and punish those who do not cooperate. A band that had enough moralists to tip its collective behavior to the cooperative equilibrium outcompeted,Read more at location 190
The second adaptation, the human ability to use symbolic markers to define cooperating groups, allowed evolution of sociality to break through the limits of face-to-face interaction.Read more at location 193
Stability and internal peace bring prosperity, and prosperity causes population increase. Demographic growth leads to overpopulation, overpopulation causes lower wages, higher land rents, and falling per capita incomes for the commoners.Read more at location 199
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.Read more at location 202
strife among the elites escalates into civil war, while the discontent among the poor explodes into popular rebellions.Read more at location 204
Intra-elite competition subsides, allowing the restoration of order. Stability and internal peace bring prosperity, and another cycle begins.Read more at location 209
As a sixteenth-century commentator put it, “So peace brings warre and warre brings peace.”Read more at location 210
The typical period of a complete cycle, which consists of a benign integrative phase and the troubled disintegrative phase, is around two or three centuries.Read more at location 211
Incipient imperial nations are relatively egalitarian. Great differences in wealth among group members undermine cooperation, and such groups succumb to rivals with higher levels of asabiya.Read more at location 215
As the poor grow poorer, the rich grow richer—this process is called the Matthew principle. The growing disparity between the rich and the poor puts the social consensus under strain.Read more at location 220
Intra-elite competition for diminishing resources results in faction and undermines national solidarity.Read more at location 222
regional and sectarian identities acquire greater saliency than the national or empire-wide identity,Read more at location 223
A life cycle of a typical imperial nation extends over the course of two, three, or even four secular cycles. Every time the empire enters a disintegrative secular phase, the asabiya of its core nation is significantly degraded.Read more at location 229
Both the survivors of the civil war and their children, who had direct experience of conflict, are reluctant to allow the hostilities to escalate again. They are, thus, “immunized” against internecine violence.Read more at location 233
If the social conditions leading to conflict (the main one being elite overproduction) are still operational, the grandchildren will fight another civil war.Read more at location 235
I discuss three central concepts: the metaethnic frontier theory, which explains asabiya cycles; the demographic-structural theory, which explains secular cycles; and the social-psychology theory, which explains the fathers-and-sons cycles.Read more at location 240
Humans also possess free will. I discuss the implications of these complicating factors for the study of human societies in Chapter 12.Read more at location 246
Interactions between the asabiya, secular, and fathers-and-sons cycles can lead to such complex, chaotic dynamics.Read more at location 256
External sources also play a role—for example, variations in climate leading to crop failure, random mutations giving rise to new frightful epidemics, and cataclysmic volcano eruptions.Read more at location 257
