Pieter François
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 97862 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Pieter François |
| NOMBRES | Pieter |
| APELLIDO | François |
| FIRMA | FRANÇOIS P |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1590-0509 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2005 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
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…
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…
The Benefits and Challenges of Linked Datasets for Cliodynamics and Comparative Anthropology
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 w…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Afterword
Social scientists have long argued that collective rituals produce social cohesion and this has something to do with their emotionality. The fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun argued that emotionally intense rituals constituted a fundamental driving force in political history. In the medieval Muslim world, powerful dynasties commonly traced their ancestry from peripheral tribal groups, and urban elites were periodically overthrown and replace…
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 …
The Role of Ritual in the Evolution of Social Complexity
Copyright © 2015, The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Enquiries
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…
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…
'The Best Way to See Waterloo Is with Your Eyes Shut'
This article analyses how nineteenth-century British visitors of Waterloo anticipated, experienced and explained their visit of 'the field'. The article shows how British visitors attempted to claim ownership over Waterloo and to legitimise their own commemorative practices by simultaneously searching for authenticity and longing for the familiarity (and commercialisation) of the 'beaten track'. By doing so this article calls for a shift in our u…
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…
Selling Beauty. Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750-1830
Journal Article Selling Beauty. Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750-1830 Get access Selling Beauty. Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750-1830. By Morag Martin. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, viii + 228 pp. £28.50 ISBN: 978 0 8018 9309 4. Pieter François Pieter François Ghent University/Warwick University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, Volume 25, Issue 2…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
De convergentie tussen de Angelsaksische ideeëngeschiedenis en de Duitse/continentale begripsgeschiedenis - een status quaestionis
Intellectual history' wijzigde ingrijpend tijdens de voorbije decennia. De doelstellingen, de methodologie en de verhouding met de andere takken van de geschiedschrijving werden meermaals kritisch doorgelicht. Hierin speelde de 'linguistic turn' een belangrijke rol. Een tweede factor was de groeiende interactie tussen de verschillende 'nationale' tradities. Dit overzichtsartikel wil precies de wisselwerking belichten tussen twee aanverwante tradi…
The construction of a Whig interpretation of the Belgium past
This article analyses the views of British travellers of the Belgian past for the period 1830–70. The article explores how the Belgian Revolution of 1830 and the closely intertwined rise of contemporary British sympathy for Belgium led to a reinterpretation of the ‘Belgian’ past. After 1830, the British interpretation of the Belgian past was increasingly centred on the sixteenth century and the ‘true’ Belgian national identity was believed to hav…
Belgium ? country of liberals, Protestants and the free
This article analyses the different British views of, and attitudes towards, Belgium during the period 1830–70. The rise and fall of the myth of Belgium as ‘a little Britain on the Continent’ is central in this analysis. This myth originated during the first years after the Belgian Revolution of 1830 and represented a major U-turn in British sympathies. It was built around Belgium's supposed gratitude towards Britain, its liberalism, constitution…
France after Revolution. Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order
Journal Article France after Revolution. Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order Get access France after Revolution. Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order. By Denise Z. Davidson. Cambridge (Mass.), London: Harvard University Press. 2007. vii + 257 pp. £32.95. ISBN 978 0 674 02459 5. Pieter Francois Pieter Francois Royal Holloway/Ghent University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, V…
La France et l’Angleterre au XIXe siècle
Selling Beauty. Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750-1830
Journal Article Selling Beauty. Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750-1830 Get access Selling Beauty. Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society, 1750-1830. By Morag Martin. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, viii + 228 pp. £28.50 ISBN: 978 0 8018 9309 4. Pieter François Pieter François Ghent University/Warwick University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French History, Volume 25, Issue 2…
Internationalism, National Identities, and Study Abroad. France and the United States, 1890-1970
The experiences of French students in the United States and American students in France throughout the period 1890–1970 and their use of stereotypes to understand their hosts’ culture, to introduce their own culture to their hosts and, ultimately, to understand their own identity, are at the heart of Internationalism, National Idenities, and Study Abroad. France and the United States, 1890–1970. Refreshingly, Whitney Walton not only focuses on st…
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…
'The Best Way to See Waterloo Is with Your Eyes Shut'
This article analyses how nineteenth-century British visitors of Waterloo anticipated, experienced and explained their visit of 'the field'. The article shows how British visitors attempted to claim ownership over Waterloo and to legitimise their own commemorative practices by simultaneously searching for authenticity and longing for the familiarity (and commercialisation) of the 'beaten track'. By doing so this article calls for a shift in our u…
The Role of Ritual in the Evolution of Social Complexity
Copyright © 2015, The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Enquiries
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…
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…
Afterword
Social scientists have long argued that collective rituals produce social cohesion and this has something to do with their emotionality. The fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun argued that emotionally intense rituals constituted a fundamental driving force in political history. In the medieval Muslim world, powerful dynasties commonly traced their ancestry from peripheral tribal groups, and urban elites were periodically overthrown and replace…
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 …
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…
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…
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…
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
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…
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
Sociology (19 obras) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (12 obras) · Political science (12 obras) · Law (11 obras) · Epistemology (10 obras) · History (10 obras) · Computer Science (9 obras) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (9 obras) · Data science (8 obras) · Art (7 obras)