Peter Turchin
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 150080 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Peter Turchin |
| NOMBRES | Peter |
| APELLIDO | Turchin |
| FIRMA | TURCHIN P |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Connecticut |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1292-8100 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 58 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 170 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 58 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1989 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
The Polaris2025 Seshat Data Release
This report describes the current canonical dataset named Polaris2025, a subset of Seshat: Global History Databank data. This dataset focuses on a well curated list of polities and variables that have been already used in publications or will be used in forthcoming ones. The report provides an introduction to the methods and procedures of the Seshat project relating to the curation and release of the Polaris2025 dataset. The Polaris2025 dataset b…
CRISES Averted. How A Few Past Societies Found Adaptive Reforms in the Face of Structural-Demographic Crises
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 …
All Crises are Unhappy in Their Own Way
Societal “crises” are periods of turmoil and destabilization in sociocultural, political, economic, and other systems, often accompanied by violent power struggles, and sometimes significant changes in social structure. The extensive literature analyzing societal crises has concentrated on a relatively small sample of well-known cases (such as the fall of the Roman Empire), emphasizing separate aspects of these events as potential causes or consi…
Moralizing Supernatural Punishment and Reward
In this article we respond to three critiques of our 2019 article ‘Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History.’ We clarify that our research does not, as our critics suppose, support the claim that moralizing gods played a decisive role in the development of complex societies. Indeed our goal was to test this claim and we found it wanting. Our methods ‘reduce’ neither religion or social complexity in the ways claimed, whil…
Soil Fertility Depletion is not a Credible Mechanism for Population Boom/Bust Cycles in Early Agricultural Societies
Explaining the rise of moralizing religions
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information d…
Big Gods and big science
Our target article empirically tested the Big Gods Hypothesis which proposes that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment (MSP) contributed to the evolution of socio-political complexity (SPC) in world history. We tested this hypothesis using a suite of measures of MSP, SPC, and other potential evolutionary drivers coded in Seshat: Global History Databank. Our analyses indicate that intensity of warfare and productivity of agriculture were …
Introducing a special issue on the role of moralizing gods in the evolution of socio-political complexity
Testing the Big Gods hypothesis with global historical data
This Retake article presents a corrected and extended version of a Letter published in Nature (Whitehouse et al., 2019) which set out to test the Big Gods hypothesis proposing that beliefs in moralizing punitive deities drove the evolution of sociopolitical complexity in world history. The Letter was retracted by the authors in response to a critique by Beheim et al. (2021). Correction of errors in the coding and analysis of missing data to addre…
A Textbook of Heterodox Economics
Imagine yourself dictator of a low-income state.Your goal is to grow the gross domestic product (GDP) of your country.This will accomplish two goals: increase economic well-being of your subjects and, thus, their support for your regime; and increase the tax revenues that you can extract, giving you more resources to reward followers and buy off potential rivals.You invite an international crew of economists to advise you on the best way to accom…
An integrative approach to estimating productivity in past societies using Seshat
This article reports the results of a collaborative effort to estimate agricultural productivities in past societies using Seshat: Global History Databank. We focus on 30 Natural Geographic Areas (NGAs) distributed over 10 major world regions (Europe, Africa, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Eurasia, North America, South America, and Oceania). The conceptual framework that we use to obtain these estimates combines th…
Duration of agriculture and distance from the steppe predict the evolution of large-scale human societies in Afro-Eurasia
Understanding why large, complex human societies have emerged and persisted more readily in certain regions of the world than others is an issue of long-standing debate. Here, we systematically test different hypotheses involving the social and ecological factors that may ultimately promote or inhibit the formation of large, complex human societies. We employ spatially explicit statistical analyses using data on the geographical and temporal dist…
An Introduction to Seshat
This article introduces the Seshat: Global History Databank, its potential, and its methodology. Seshat is a databank containing vast amounts of quantitative data buttressed by qualitative nuance for a large sample of historical and archaeological polities. The sample is global in scope and covers the period from the Neolithic Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. Seshat allows scholars to capture dynamic processes and to test theories about t…
New Era in the Study of Global History Is Born but It Needs to Be Nurtured
This article is a response to Slingerland et al. who criticize the quality of the data from Seshat: Global History Databank utilized in our Nature paper entitled “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History”. Their critique centres around the roles played by research assistants and experts in procuring and curating data, periodization structure, and so-called “data pasting” and “data filling”. We show that these criticisms …
The Equinox2020 Seshat Data Release
This report describes the current canonical time-series dataset named “Equinox2020,” a subset of Seshat: Global History Databank data for a well-curated list of polities and variables available on the Seshat Data Browser. The report provides an introduction to the methods and procedures of the Seshat project relating to the curation and release of the Equinox2020 dataset
Retracted Article
Explaining the Rise of Moralizing Religions
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information d…
Fitting Dynamic Regression Models to Seshat Data
This article presents a general statistical approach suitable for the analysis of time-resolved (time-series) cross-cultural data. The goal is to test theories about the evolutionary processes that generate cultural change. This approach allows us to investigate the effects of predictor variables (proxying for theory-suggested mechanisms), while controlling for spatial diffusion and autocorrelations due to shared cultural history (known as Galton…
Response to Lempert
Author(s): Turchin, Peter | Abstract: Response to Lempert: A Response to Multipath Forecasting
Dacura
New advances in computer science address problems historical scientists face in gathering and evaluating the now vast data sources available through the Internet. As an example we introduce Dacura, a dataset curation platform designed to assist historical researchers in harvesting, evaluating, and curating high-quality information sets from the Internet and other sources. Dacura uses semantic knowledge graph technology to represent data as comple…
Translating Knowledge about Past Societies into Seshat Data
The Seshat: Global History Databank was founded in 2011 with the goal of systematically collecting data about social, political, and economic organization of human societies and how they have evolved over time. From the beginning the first guiding principle of the Seshat project was to reflect the current state of knowledge about past societies as accurately as possible within practical constraints (I’ll discuss practical limitations later on). S…
A Systematic Assessment of "Axial Age" Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept's major global contentions. As a result, the…
Historical Dynamics
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…
Henrich, Joseph. 2015. The Secret of Our Success
Article Henrich, Joseph. 2015. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. was published on April 1, 2017 in the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture (volume 1, issue 1)
What Economics Models Really Say. A Review of Economics Rules
A theory for formation of large empires
Between 3000 BCE and 1800 CE there were more than sixty ‘mega-empires’ that, at the peak, controlled an area of at least one million square kilometres. What were the forces that kept together such huge pre-industrial states? I propose a model for one route to mega-empire, motivated by imperial dynamics in eastern Asia, the world region with the highest concentration of mega-empires. This ‘mirror-empires’ model proposes that antagonistic interacti…
Dynamical Feedbacks between Population Growth and Sociopolitical Instability in Agrarian States
Most preindustrial states experienced recurrent waves of political collapse and internal warfare. One possible explanation of this pattern, the demographic-structural theory, suggests that population growth leads to state instability and breakdown, which in turn causes population decline. Mathematical models incorporating this mechanism predict sustained oscillations in demographic and political dynamics. Here I test these theoretical predictions…
Warfare and the Evolution of Social Complexity
Multilevel selection is a powerful theoretical framework for understanding how complex hierarchical systems evolve by iteratively adding control levels. Here I apply this framework to a major transition in human social evolution, from small-scale egalitarian groups to large-scale hierarchical societies such as states and empires. A major mathematical result in multilevel selection, the Price equation, specifies the conditions concerning the struc…
A Systematic Assessment of "Axial Age" Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept's major global contentions. As a result, the…
Seshat
The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great dif…
Spatial Synchrony Among and Within World-Systems
This paper reports on research in population ecology and suggests ways it might be useful in explaining spatial dynamics of states, groups, and world-systems. In particular it focuses on how and why populations at opposite of ends of Afroeurasia come to rise and fall simultaneously over long periods of time. We call for exploration of research in population ecology for understanding world-system evolution and suggest directions for possible futur…
Linking “Micro” to “Macro” Models of State Breakdown to Improve Methods for Political Forecasting
Three predictive problems bedevil our ability to foresee political crises and state breakdown: (1) how to tell when a previously stable state falls into a situation of hidden but dangerous instability; (2) how to tell, once a certain level of instability has appeared in the form of protests, riots, or regional rebellions, whether chaos will grow and accelerate into revolution or civil war, or if the protests are likely to be contained and dampen …
A Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution
The origin of human ultrasociality—the ability to cooperate in huge groups of genetically unrelated individuals—has long interested evolutionary and social theorists, but there has been little systematic empirical research on the topic. The Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution, which we introduce in this article, brings the available historical and archaeological data together in a way that will allow hypotheses concerning the origin of…
Historical Dynamics
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…
Agricultural productivity in past societies
Agricultural productivity, and its variation in space and time, plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social evolution. However, we often lack systematic information about the productivity of past agricultural systems on a large enough scale in order to be able to test these theories properly. The effect of climate on crop yields has received a great deal of attention resulting in a range of empirical and process-based models, yet th…
East-West Orientation of Historical Empires and Modern States
Jared Diamond (1997) hypothesized that if environment is important in limiting the spread of cultures, cultural units would also tend to extend more broadly along lines of latitude than along lines of longitude. We test this hypothesis by studying the range shapes of (a) historical empires and (b) modern states. Our analysis of the 62 largest empires in history supports this conjecture: there is a statistically significant tendency to expand more…
Fitting Dynamic Regression Models to Seshat Data
This article presents a general statistical approach suitable for the analysis of time-resolved (time-series) cross-cultural data. The goal is to test theories about the evolutionary processes that generate cultural change. This approach allows us to investigate the effects of predictor variables (proxying for theory-suggested mechanisms), while controlling for spatial diffusion and autocorrelations due to shared cultural history (known as Galton…
Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780-2010
This article describes and analyses a database on the dynamics of sociopolitical instability in the United States between 1780 and 2010. The database was constructed by digitizing data collected by previous researchers, supplemented by systematic searches of electronic media archives. It includes 1,590 political violence events such as riots, lynchings, and terrorism. Incidence of political violence fluctuated dramatically over the 230 years cove…
Strange Parallels
Most professional historians have abandoned the search for general patterns and laws of history, but not Victor Lieberman. Strange Parallels II (SP II), following on SP I, proposes that similar mechanisms governed state building in such different, and distant, regions as Southeast Asia, China, Western Europe, and Russia. During the period covered by Lieberman (c.800 1830) the general trend within these regions of Eurasia was towards increasing po…
Historical Dynamics
Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability
Structural-demographic theory is a conceptual tool for understanding and explaining long-term social pressures that can lead to revolutions, civil wars, and other major outbreaks of sociopolitical instability. This article develops a general modeling framework for quantifying such structural pressures toward instability. Following the basic premises of the structuraldemographic theory, the approach adopted here decomposes pressures toward instabi…
Religion and empire in the Axial Age
Mapping the Spread of Mounted Warfare
Military technology is one of the most important factors affecting the evolution of complex societies. In particular, mounted warfare, the use of horse-riders in military operations, revolutionized war as it spread to different parts of Eurasia and Africa during the Ancient and Medieval eras, and to the Americas during the Early Modern period. Here we use a variety of sources to map this spread
A systematic assessment of 'Axial Age' proposals using global comparative historical evidence
Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point towards modernity. While the Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the Axial Age concept's major global contentions. As …
A Primer on Statistical Analysis of Dynamical Systems in Historical Social Sciences (with a Particular Emphasis on Secular Cycles)
This primer explicates the conceptual foundations of the statistical approach to detecting dynamical feedbacks. It is assumed that we have time-series data on several aspects of the studied system. The basic idea of the approach is to regress discrete rates of change of measured variables on variables themselves. I discuss several issues involved in the analysis, such as how to select the appropriate time step, or the delay parameter. The goal of…
Explaining the Rise of Moralizing Religions
The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information d…
Translating Knowledge about Past Societies into Seshat Data
The Seshat: Global History Databank was founded in 2011 with the goal of systematically collecting data about social, political, and economic organization of human societies and how they have evolved over time. From the beginning the first guiding principle of the Seshat project was to reflect the current state of knowledge about past societies as accurately as possible within practical constraints (I’ll discuss practical limitations later on). S…
Cultural Evolution and Cliodynamics
Author(s): Turchin, Peter | Abstract: The column by the Editor-in-Chief explaining the background of the new journal subtitle
The Seshat Databank Project
This article contains a report on research activities taking place under the SESHAT Database Project during 2014
Toward Cliodynamics – an Analytical, Predictive Science of History
This article responds to those who think that a science of history is in principle impossible. First, I tackle the issue of prediction and point out that it is not limited to forecasting the future. Scientific prediction is also (an much more usefully) employed in empirical tests of scientific theories. Next, I switch from conceptual to empirical issues, and review evidence for general empirical regularities. I also discuss some recent examples o…
Population Consequences of Aggregative Movement
Spatial Synchrony Among and Within World-Systems
This paper reports on research in population ecology and suggests ways it might be useful in explaining spatial dynamics of states, groups, and world-systems. In particular it focuses on how and why populations at opposite of ends of Afroeurasia come to rise and fall simultaneously over long periods of time. We call for exploration of research in population ecology for understanding world-system evolution and suggest directions for possible futur…
Historical Dynamics
Response to Oscillations in Population Sizes – From Ecology to History
dynamical phenomena-what mathematical framework to use.Komarova argues that a delayed logistic model provides a better framework for modeling historical dynamics than the ordinary differential equations used in my paper
A Primer on Statistical Analysis of Dynamical Systems in Historical Social Sciences (with a Particular Emphasis on Secular Cycles)
This primer explicates the conceptual foundations of the statistical approach to detecting dynamical feedbacks. It is assumed that we have time-series data on several aspects of the studied system. The basic idea of the approach is to regress discrete rates of change of measured variables on variables themselves. I discuss several issues involved in the analysis, such as how to select the appropriate time step, or the delay parameter. The goal of…
Dynamical Feedbacks between Population Growth and Sociopolitical Instability in Agrarian States
Most preindustrial states experienced recurrent waves of political collapse and internal warfare. One possible explanation of this pattern, the demographic-structural theory, suggests that population growth leads to state instability and breakdown, which in turn causes population decline. Mathematical models incorporating this mechanism predict sustained oscillations in demographic and political dynamics. Here I test these theoretical predictions…
East-West Orientation of Historical Empires and Modern States
Jared Diamond (1997) hypothesized that if environment is important in limiting the spread of cultures, cultural units would also tend to extend more broadly along lines of latitude than along lines of longitude. We test this hypothesis by studying the range shapes of (a) historical empires and (b) modern states. Our analysis of the 62 largest empires in history supports this conjecture: there is a statistically significant tendency to expand more…
Secular Cycles
Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change. Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial loss. Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov explore the dynamics and causal connections between such…
A theory for formation of large empires
Between 3000 BCE and 1800 CE there were more than sixty ‘mega-empires’ that, at the peak, controlled an area of at least one million square kilometres. What were the forces that kept together such huge pre-industrial states? I propose a model for one route to mega-empire, motivated by imperial dynamics in eastern Asia, the world region with the highest concentration of mega-empires. This ‘mirror-empires’ model proposes that antagonistic interacti…
Cycling in the Complexity of Early Societies
Warfare is commonly viewed as a driving force of the process of aggregation of initially independent villages into larger and more complex political units that started several thousand years ago and quickly lead to the appearance of chiefdoms, states, and empires. Here we build on extensions and generalizations of Carneiro’s (1970) argument to develop a spatially explicit agent-based model of the emergence of early complex societies via warfare. …
Launching the Journal
Welcome to the inaugural issue of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History
Warfare and the Evolution of Social Complexity
Multilevel selection is a powerful theoretical framework for understanding how complex hierarchical systems evolve by iteratively adding control levels. Here I apply this framework to a major transition in human social evolution, from small-scale egalitarian groups to large-scale hierarchical societies such as states and empires. A major mathematical result in multilevel selection, the Price equation, specifies the conditions concerning the struc…
Toward Cliodynamics – an Analytical, Predictive Science of History
This article responds to those who think that a science of history is in principle impossible. First, I tackle the issue of prediction and point out that it is not limited to forecasting the future. Scientific prediction is also (an much more usefully) employed in empirical tests of scientific theories. Next, I switch from conceptual to empirical issues, and review evidence for general empirical regularities. I also discuss some recent examples o…
Introducing the Social Evolution Forum
Cliodynamics: the Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History Editor’s Column: Introducing the Social Evolution Forum Peter Turchin University of Connecticut Michael E. Hochberg Universite Montpellier II A central question of social evolution is elucidating the mechanisms and dynamics that resulted in the rise of large-scale complex human societies. How did ultrasociality (the ability of humans to cooperate in huge groups of unrelated individ…
Strange Parallels
Most professional historians have abandoned the search for general patterns and laws of history, but not Victor Lieberman. Strange Parallels II (SP II), following on SP I, proposes that similar mechanisms governed state building in such different, and distant, regions as Southeast Asia, China, Western Europe, and Russia. During the period covered by Lieberman (c.800 1830) the general trend within these regions of Eurasia was towards increasing po…
The Special Issue on Failed States and Nation-Building
Author(s): Turchin, Peter; Coon, Carleton; Wilson, David Sloan | Abstract: This is Editors' Column introducing the SPecial Issue
Failed States and Nation-Building
This concluding article of the Special Issue on Failed States and Nation-Building argues that the science of social and cultural evolution can make valuable contributions to our collective capacity for peace- and state-building. It also reviews other papers in the Special Issue, and discusses how the different themes raised by the authors are tied together within the unifying theoretical framework of cultural evolution
Introducing a New Section—Databases
A Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution
The origin of human ultrasociality—the ability to cooperate in huge groups of genetically unrelated individuals—has long interested evolutionary and social theorists, but there has been little systematic empirical research on the topic. The Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution, which we introduce in this article, brings the available historical and archaeological data together in a way that will allow hypotheses concerning the origin of…
Religion and empire in the Axial Age
Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780-2010
This article describes and analyses a database on the dynamics of sociopolitical instability in the United States between 1780 and 2010. The database was constructed by digitizing data collected by previous researchers, supplemented by systematic searches of electronic media archives. It includes 1,590 political violence events such as riots, lynchings, and terrorism. Incidence of political violence fluctuated dramatically over the 230 years cove…
Modeling Social Pressures Toward Political Instability
Structural-demographic theory is a conceptual tool for understanding and explaining long-term social pressures that can lead to revolutions, civil wars, and other major outbreaks of sociopolitical instability. This article develops a general modeling framework for quantifying such structural pressures toward instability. Following the basic premises of the structuraldemographic theory, the approach adopted here decomposes pressures toward instabi…
An Issue Devoted to Dialogue
Science is not only about building models, conducting experiments, collecting data, and testing theories. A very important part of science is a continuing dialogue, not only among scientists themselves, but also involving the general public. Transdisciplinary research areas, such as Cliodynamics, are in particular need of vigorous discussion because researchers with backgrounds in different disciplines use very different theoretical and methodolo…
The West and the Rest
There is now a huge literature attempting to explain the ‘Great Divergence’ between Europe and the rest of the world during the early modern period. The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne follows a distinct route in both framing the question and proposing an answer to it. I see two serious problems with Duchesne’s work. The first one is how he resolves the intrinsic tension between his ideological goals and the requirements of…
Cultural Evolution and Cliodynamics
Author(s): Turchin, Peter | Abstract: The column by the Editor-in-Chief explaining the background of the new journal subtitle
Sociology (27 obras) · Computer Science (22 obras) · Geography (20 obras) · History (20 obras) · Political science (20 obras) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (19 obras) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (18 obras) · Epistemology (18 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Economics (12 obras)