Plurk paste

Notes
INTRODUCTION: A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF COLLAPSE 1. The forms of political power are an extension and refinement of Michael Mann’s sources of social power. See Mann, The Sources of Social Power I: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2012). I’ve added in ‘demographic power’ and expanded ‘ideological power’ to ‘information power’, and ‘military power’ into ‘violent power’. The overall framework is elaborated on in Luke Kemp et al., ‘Societal Collapse as a Powershift’ (forthcoming, 2025). A note about the endnotes in this book. In general, I’ll be aiming to both provide scholarly references where necessary and supply broad overviews of the archaeological case studies through more accessible, popular (yet reliable) books and pieces. I’ve often opted for the latter since many readers won’t have the university affiliations or money to buy access to expensive journal articles or academic books (which is a shame).
I’ve aimed to provide page numbers for references except when either these are taken from an e-reader (in which case I’ve provided a chapter), or it is a key point made repeatedly throughout the source.↩ 2. My definition of collapse is a refinement of the many that have come before.
One of the first suggested was by the famed Cambridge archaeologist Colin Renfrew in his ‘Systems Collapse as Social Transformation: Catastrophe and Anastrophe in Early State Societies’, in Transformations (Academic Press, 1979), 482–4, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-586050-5.50035-X. Renfrew focuses on four general features of collapse: the collapse of the centralized administrative state, the loss of an elite, the collapse of a centralized economy, and a population decline and settlement shift. In other words, he’s referring to the large-scale fragmentation and contraction of political, economic, information, and demographic power networks. My definition is also an evolution of Tainter’s canonical definition of collapse as a rapid and enduring reduction in a pre-established level of ‘complexity’ (a term later reused by Jared Diamond). See Joseph A.
Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail (Penguin, 2011). As we’ll see later, the term ‘complexity’ refers mainly to hierarchy, centralization, and inequality. ‘Complexity’ is a misnomer as both complexity scientists and common sense usually see it as the diversity and interconnectivity of parts. Hierarchy and centralization often act to reduce diversity and reduce the interconnectivity of certain groups, such as between peasants (or, as we see later, Rome preventing citystates from communicating). Similarly, administration is an art of simplification. The point is most eloquently expressed in James C.
Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 2008); Norman Yoffee, The Evolution of Simplicity (University of Chicago Press, 2001). States and hierarchies simplify as much as they increase complexity. Hence, their collapse can often increase certain kinds of ‘complexity’. The diversity of political forms, economic relations, languages, and cultural practices can often increase after a collapse.
While long-distance trade and communication are often reduced, connectivity at a local and regional level can also increase during the breakdown of a state. The only genuine commonalities across all case studies are losses in hierarchy, energy capture, and population density.
What Tainter and others are really talking about here are centralized power structures, hence the emphasis. The other aspects of more diverse and stratified roles and goods are by and large a by-product of the few trying to organize and control the labour and resources of the many. Even the most basic definitions of societal complexity frame it in this way. For instance, Brian Hayden, ‘Social Complexity’, The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of HunterGatherers, ed.
Vicki Cummings (Oxford University Press, 2014), 644, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199551224.013.047. There have been numerous other definitions. Scholars in the field of existential risk have defined collapse as the loss of the ability to create industrial and post-industrial technologies, or the complete loss of agriculture and the other clichéd trappings of civilization, such as writing and the rule of law.
See Will MacAskill, What We Owe the Future (Basic Books, 2022); Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (Hachette, 2020). The fathers of the popular French collapsology movement, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, see it as a loss of the services provided by the state (How Everything Can Collapse, Polity, 2020). In these views collapse is the sudden theft of any virtues that the modern, globalized world offers. They are more reminiscent of post-apocalyptic films like The Road and Mad Max and not applicable to pre-modern cases, or even precise enough to be useful. Perhaps the best recent attempt to define collapse comes from the ecologists Garry Peterson and Graeme Cumming in 2017. They frame collapse as a quick, enduring loss of a system’s identity and a large amount of ‘socio-ecological capital’ (‘Unifying Research on Social–Ecological Resilience and Collapse’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution 32, no. 9 (2017): 698–9). The problem is that identity is difficult to define, and many cases of collapse see the recuperation and expansion of ecosystems. The vast reforestation of central Mexico and the Andes after the collapse of the Aztec and Incan empires are just two examples.
The definition presented here tries to cut to the heart of collapse, focus on only the most common consequences, and avoid arbitrary and value-laden terms like ‘complexity’. It still has some issues, most notably that ‘rapid’ and ‘enduring’ will always be subjective terms. It’s not a fatal flaw as even the best definitions of complex phenomena rely on some expert judgement. As noted later, we should see collapse as a spectrum, ranging from the shallow (less severe, rapid, and enduring) to the deep (more severe, rapid, and enduring). Thank you for reading this short essay of an endnote.↩ 3. Timothy R. Pauketat, ed., Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi (Penguin, 2010), chap. 1.↩ 4.
The image is from Flickr and the original artist has the excellent name of ‘Thank You (25 Millions) views’. See www.flickr.com/photos/prayitnophotography/32434956237/. The image is published under the Creative Commons Licence. For further information on the Creative Commons Licence, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/.↩ 5. I’ll be using the abbreviations of BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era), derived from the old Gregorian calendar of BC (before the estimated birth of Christ) and AD (after the birth of Christ, or Anno Domini, medieval Latin for ‘in the year of Our Lord’).↩ 6. Pauketat, Cahokia, chap. 6. The burials occurred over the space of a century, including numerous elite burials. This was likely one lineage of rulers accompanied by retinues of sacrificial victims.↩ 7. On Cahokia’s collapse, see Larry V. Benson, Timothy R. Pauketat, and Edward R.
Cook, ‘Cahokia’s Boom and Bust in the Context of Climate Change’, American Antiquity 74, no. 3 (2009): 467–83, https://doi.org/10.1017/S000273160004871X; Joseph A. Tainter, ‘Cahokia: Urbanization, Metabolism, and Collapse’, Frontiers in Sustainable Cities 1 (2019): 11–14, https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2019.00006. Interestingly, and surprisingly, the initial emigration occurred while Cahokia was still at its zenith in terms of construction and power.↩ 8. This definition covers the most commonly accepted features of statehood. See Walter Scheidel, ‘Studying the State’, in The Oxford Handbook of the State in the Ancient Near East and Mediterranean, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2013), 5–9, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195188318.013.0002. I have not used the popular definition from Weber of the state as a legitimate monopoly on lethal force. That’s because it was always a bit of a silly and circular definition. Most pre-modern states never had a monopoly on the means of violence and who decides whether it is legitimate other than the state itself. Relying on government records and writing is a little mistaken given that rulers had a vested interest in making themselves seem more powerful and their control over violence legitimate.↩ 9.
Calculations were made using the Mortality of States (MOROS) database.↩ 10. Eric Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press, 2015; 2nd revised and updated edn, 2021); Eric Cline, ‘“Mind the Gap”: The 1177 BCE Late Bronze Age Collapse and Some Preliminary Thoughts on Its Immediate Aftermath’, in How Worlds Collapse: What History, Systems, and Complexity Can Teach Us About Our Modern World and Fragile Future, ed. Miguel A.
Centeno et al. (Routledge, 2023), 98–107, provides a useful overview of the Late Bronze Age collapse. For the estimates of ‘peak empire’, see Walter Scheidel, ‘The End of “Peak Empire”: The Collapse of the Roman, Han and Jin Empires’, in the same volume, and ‘The Scale of Empire: Territory, Population, Distribution’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, vol. I: The Imperial Experience, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A.
Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2021), 91–110, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0003.↩ 11. Patrick Wyman, ‘How Do You Know If You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire?’, Mother Jones, 2020, www.motherjones.com/media/2020/03/how-do-you-know-if-youreliving-th rough-the-death-of-an-empire/.↩ 12. Even the Vacant Quarter was eventually reoccupied by Native Americans. See A. J. White et al., ‘After Cahokia: Indigenous Repopulation and Depopulation of the Horseshoe Lake Watershed AD 1400–1900’, American Antiquity 85, no. 2 (2020): 263–78, https://doi.org/10.1017/aaq.2019.103.↩ 13. For an accessible timeline of nuclear near misses, see Future of Life Institute, ‘Accidental Nuclear War: A Timeline of Close Calls’, Future of Life Institute, 23 February 2016, https://futureoflife.org/resource/nuclear-close-calls-a-timeline/. The current carbon pulse is an order of magnitude faster than the release during the Great Permian Dying, although it remains to be seen whether we will reach the 6–8°C of temperature rise that it saw. For an easy overview, see Mark Lynas, Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency (HarperCollins, 2020).↩ 14. Ord, The Precipice; Michael Lawrence et al., ‘Global Polycrisis: The Causal Mechanisms of Crisis Entanglement’, Global Sustainability 7 (2024): e6, https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.1.↩ 15. Tyler Ausin Harper, ‘The 100-Year Extinction Panic is Back, Right on Schedule’, New York Times, 26 January 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/opinion/polycrisis-doom-extinctionhumanit y.html.↩ 16. Luke Kemp, ‘Agents of Doom: Who Is Creating the Apocalypse and Why’, BBC Future, 2021, www.bbc.com/future/article/20211014- agents-of-doom-who-is-hastening-the-apocalypse-and-why.↩ 17. For prominent examples of this hazard-centric framing, see Ord, The Precipice; MacAskill, What We Owe the Future; Martin J. Rees, Our Final Century: Will Civilisation Survive the Twenty-First Century?
(Arrow, 2004).↩ 18. Peter T. Leeson, ‘Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse’, Journal of Comparative Economics 35, no. 4 (2007): 699–701, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2007.10.001; Benjamin Powell, Ryan Ford, and Alex Nowrasteh, ‘Somalia After State Collapse: Chaos or Improvement?’, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 67, nos 3–4 (2008): 657–70, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2008.04.008.↩ 19.
There is also the case of the 1975 Lebanese civil war. It was a tragic event which led to the deaths of over 100,000 and the displacement of at least a million people. Yet, the welfare of the survivors appears to have improved post-collapse relative to their pre-civil-war condition.
Ersun N. Kurtuluş, ‘Exploring the Paradoxical Consequences of State Collapse: The Cases of Somalia 1991–2006 and Lebanon 1975–82’, Third World Quarterly 33, no. 7 (2012): 1285–1303, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2012.691831. Whether this is due to remittances from abroad, improved governance, or other factors, is debated. It is also not to say that this was a net benefit. The civil war also led to the emergence of armed groups which persist through to today, such as Hezbollah.↩ 20. Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity (Princeton University Press, 2019), 89.↩ 21. See footnote 1 of Walter Scheidel, ‘Slavery in the Roman Economy’, Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics (Stanford University, 2010): 2, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1663556.↩ 22.
These massive relocations appear to have been done to enhance political control: rebellious groups were moved to more fortified areas while loyal ones were shifted to more hostile, peripheral terrains. In Quechua the rulers were usually referred to as ‘Inka’, a term which is still used today. However, I’ve opted to use the more commonly known ‘Inca’ spelling to avoid confusion.↩ 23. Owen Lattimore, ‘The Frontier in History’, in Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers 1929–58 (Oxford University Press, 1962), 476–81.↩ 24. These kinds of periodizations, which celebrate empire and treat times of decentralization as temporary intervals of chaos or nothingness, are common throughout historiography. Even attempts by archaeologists to push against common misconceptions and the language of imperial periodization have failed and backfired. In 1978, the British Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen railed against using the term ‘Third Intermediate Period’. He stated that the period was not chaotic and that we should use an alternative: the ‘Post-Imperial Epoch’.
Unfortunately, he chose to call his book on the subject The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt (1100–650 BCE). His poor choice of title may have helped with sales, but simply added to the popularity of imperial periodization.↩ 25. Ellen Morris, ‘“Lo, Nobles Lament, the Poor Rejoice”: State Formation in the Wake of Social Flux’, in After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, ed. Glenn M. Schwartz and John Jackson Nichols (University of Arizona Press, 2006).↩ 26. Ibid.↩ 27. In academia, such groups, which are excluded or marginalized from power structures, are usually referred to as ‘the subaltern’. ↩ 28. The 90–95 per cent estimate comes from Rebecca Storey and Glenn Reed Storey, Rome and the Classic Maya: Comparing the Slow Collapse of Civilizations (Routledge, 2017).↩ 29. On the difficulties of distinguishing population dispersal from depopulation, see Storey and Storey, Rome and the Classic Maya. For the case of the Bronze Age collapse, see Luke Kemp and Eric Cline, ‘Systemic Risk and Resilience: The Bronze Age Collapse and Recovery’, in Perspectives on Public Policy in Societal-Environmental Crises, ed. Adam Izdebski, John Haldon, and Piotr Filipkowski (Springer, 2022).↩ 30. Most early languages, including Classical Greek and Latin, were a scriptio continua, where there is no punctuation or spaces between words or sentences, making it particularly difficult to parse without extensive training. The slow abandonment of the scriptio continua was one factor that favoured education and literacy becoming more widespread in the pre-modern era. Some modern languages such as Thai maintain the scriptio continua. ↩ 31. Documentary evidence has several other biases. It favours the temperate west. Paper in tropical climates tends to become dust in one or two centuries, unless it is stored in protective conditions.
And western countries tend to be excavated by archaeologists more frequently. See Peter Crooks and Timothy H. Parsons, ‘Empires, Bureaucracy and the Paradox of Power’, in Empires and Bureaucracy in World History, ed. Peter Crooks and Timothy Parsons (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 3–28, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316694312.002. ↩ 32. This is a necessarily crude simplification. However, the general rule of elites being those with disproportionate power in a society holds true across different definitions. The problem is that what forms of power were most ascendant varied across societies. Some valued warriors, some preferred traders, and others prioritized wisdom. For an entertaining discussion and overview, see David Priestland, Merchant, Soldier, Sage: A New History of Power (Penguin, 2013).↩ 33. In 2023 global energy consumption was 183,230 terawatt hours (TWh = 1 trillion watts per hour). For perspective, the average LED lightbulb uses 10 watts per hour. Energy consumption has risen by more than an order of magnitude (ten-fold) since 1800, when it was just 5,653 TWh. For energy consumption, see Hannah Ritchie, ‘Energy Production and Consumption’, Our World in Data, 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption.↩ 34.
Estimates of long-term per capita energy capture come from Ian Morris, The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2013).↩ 35. The FAO provides the estimate of two-thirds of global food energy intake coming from three staples: FAO, ‘Staple Foods: What Do People Eat?’ (Food and Agricultural Organization), accessed 30 May 2023, www.fao.org/3/u8480e/u8480e07.htm. The contribution of wheat to global caloric intake was calculated by Bekele Shiferaw et al., ‘Crops That Feed the World 10. Past Successes and Future Challenges to the Role Played by Wheat in Global Food Security’, Food Security 5, no. 3 (2013): 291–317, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-013-0263- y.↩ 36.
Urbanization figures come from Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, ‘Urbanization’, Our World in Data, February 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization.↩ 37. Unsurprisingly, achieving this ambition in under 500 pages will mean a sacrifice of depth for breadth.↩ CHAPTER 1: HOBBES’S DELUSION 1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Christopher Brooke (Penguin, 2017).↩ 2. Frans De Waal, ‘Part I: Morally Evolved: Primate Social Instincts, Human Morality, and the Rise and Fall of “Veneer Theory”’, in Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober (Princeton University Press, 2016), 1–58.↩ 3. For evidence on the Mahabharata and Dīgha Nikāya, see Upinder Singh, Political Violence in Ancient India (Harvard University Press, 2017), 34, 60. A broader overview is provided in Monica L. Smith, ‘The Fundamentals of the State’, Annual Review of Anthropology 51, no. 1 (2022): 496, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-041320- 013018.↩ 4. Charles Edward Merriam, ‘Hobbes’s Doctrine of the State of Nature’, Proceedings of the American Political Science Association 3 (1906): 152–3, https://doi.org/10.2307/3038543.↩ 5. Lee Clarke, ‘Panic: Myth or Reality?’, Contexts 1, no. 3 (2002): 21–6, https://doi.org/10.1525/ctx.2002.1.3.21.↩ 6. John Drury, David Novelli, and Clifford Stott, ‘Representing Crowd Behaviour in Emergency Planning Guidance: “Mass Panic” or Collective Resilience?’, Resilience 1, no. 1 (2013): 18–37, https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2013.765740.
This survey of 448 UK citizens, including 120 sport events stewards, 115 police officers, 89 members of the public, 78 students, and 46 civilian safety professionals, found that most had fears around mass panic and civil disorder.↩ 7. Technically, the Palaeolithic included multiple glacial (ice age) and interglacial (significantly warmer) periods. However, these interglacial periods were brief during the Palaeolithic and for the ease of the lay reader I’ll be sticking to the casual term of the ‘ice age’.↩ 8.
Eleanor M. L. Scerri, ‘The North African Middle Stone Age and Its Place in Recent Human Evolution’, Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews 26, no. 3 (2017): 119–35, https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.21527; Doron Shultziner et al., ‘The Causes and Scope of Political Egalitarianism During the Last Glacial: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective’, Biology & Philosophy 25, no. 3 (2010): 319–46, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-010-9196-4.↩ 9. The classic texts here are: Peter J. Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Robert L. Bettinger, ‘Was Agriculture Impossible During the Pleistocene But Mandatory During the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis’, American Antiquity 66, no. 3 (2001): 387–411, https://doi.org/10.2307/2694241; Robert Bettinger, Peter Richerson, and Robert Boyd, ‘Constraints on the Development of Agriculture’, Current Anthropology 50, no. 5 (2009): 627–31, https://doi.org/10.1086/605359.↩ 10. Smithsonian Institute, ‘Pleistocene Volcano List’, Smithsonian Institute, 2024, https://volcano.si.edu/volcanolist_pleistocene.cfm.↩ 11. Shultziner et al., ‘The Causes and Scope of Political Egalitarianism during the Last Glacial’.↩ 12. Kim R. Hill et al., ‘Co-Residence Patterns in Hunter-Gatherer Societies Show Unique Human Social Structure’, Science 331, no.
6022 (2011): 1286–9, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199071.↩ 13.
While often called ‘immediate return’ hunter-gatherers, this is something of a misnomer. They planned game hunts months in advance and spent lifetimes cultivating relationships that they could rely on during times of need.↩ 14. A. B. Migliano et al., ‘Characterization of Hunter-Gatherer Networks and Implications for Cumulative Culture’, Nature Human Behaviour 1 (2017): 0043, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-016-0043.
Many groups begin to refer to friends who become close enough as family, such as brother, sister, and cousin. It’s a tradition that many cultures continue today. Anthropologists call it ‘fictive kinship’.↩ 15. R. I.
M. Dunbar, ‘Do Online Social Media Cut Through the Constraints that Limit the Size of Offline Social Networks?’, Royal Society Open Science 3, no. 1 (2016): 1, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150292; R. Bretherton and R. I. M.
Dunbar, ‘Dunbar’s Number Goes to Church: The Social Brain Hypothesis as a Third Strand in the Study of Church Growth’, Archive for the Psychology of Religion 42, no. 1 (2020): 63, https://doi.org/10.1177/0084672420906215.↩ 16. Numerous studies of group size, as well as neocortex size relative to group size, have found a far wider variety of numbers. See Patrik Lindenfors, Andreas Wartel, and Johan Lind, ‘“Dunbar’s Number” Deconstructed’, Biology Letters 17, no.
5 (2021): 20210158, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2021.0158.↩ 17.
Douglas W. Bird et al., ‘Variability in the Organization and Size of Hunter-Gatherer Groups: Foragers Do Not Live in Small-Scale Societies’, Journal of Human Evolution 131 (2019): 96–108, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2019.03.005.↩ 18. The ostrich egg social network is discussed in Jennifer M. Miller and Yiming V. Wang, ‘Ostrich Eggshell Beads Reveal 50,000-Year-Old Social Network in Africa’, Nature 601, no. 7892 (2022): 234–9, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04227-2. The obsidian network is covered in Nick Blegen, ‘The Earliest Long-Distance Obsidian Transport: Evidence from the ∼200ka Middle Stone Age Sibilo School Road Site, Baringo, Kenya’, Journal of Human Evolution 103 (2017): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2016.11.002.↩ 19. These are hunter-gatherer groups who now reside in central Africa, but previously had a larger range. See Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias et al., ‘Cultural Evolution of Central African Hunter-Gatherers Reflects a Deep History of Interconnectivity’, preprint, 26 October 2022, https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-2205369/v1; Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias et al., ‘Deep History of Cultural and Linguistic Evolution among Central African Hunter-Gatherers’, Nature Human Behaviour 8 (2024): 1263– 75, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01891-y.↩ 20. Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, ‘Did Humanity Really All Arise in One Place?’, Sapiens, 2 January 2023.↩ 21. See Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, ‘Societies of Perpetual Movement’, Aeon, 5 March 2024, https://aeon.co/essays/the-hunter-gatherers-of-the-21stcentury-who-live-on-the-move.↩ 22. The map of the Clovis Culture is adapted from Michael R. Waters, Thomas W. Stafford, and David L. Carlson, ‘The Age of Clovis – 13,050 to 12,750 Cal Yr B.P.’, Science Advances 6, no. 43 (2020): fig.
1, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz0455. The image of the Aurignacian is adapted from Carolyn C. Szmidt, Laurent Brou, and Luc Jaccottey, ‘Direct Radiocarbon (AMS) Dating of Split-Based Points from the (Proto)Aurignacian of Trou de La Mère Clochette, Northeastern France.
Implications for the Characterization of the Aurignacian and the Timing of Technical Innovations in Europe’, Journal of Archaeological Science 37, no. 12 (2010): fig. 1, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2010.08.001.↩ 23.
J. Colette Berbesque et al., ‘Hunter-Gatherers Have Less Famine Than Agriculturalists’, Biology Letters 10, no. 1 (2014): 20130853, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2013.0853.↩ 24. Andrei Irimia et al., ‘The Indigenous South American Tsimané Exhibit Relatively Modest Decrease in Brain Volume With Age Despite High Systemic Inflammation’, Journals of Gerontology: Series A 76, no. 12 (2021): 2147–55, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerona/glab138.↩ 25. H. Pontzer, B. M.
Wood, and D. A. Raichlen, ‘Hunter-Gatherers as Models in Public Health: Hunter-Gatherer Health and Lifestyle’, Obesity Reviews 19 (2018): 24–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.12785.
A wider review of the literature can be found in Herman Pontzer and Brian M. Wood, ‘Effects of Evolution, Ecology, and Economy on Human Diet: Insights from Hunter-Gatherers and Other Small-Scale Societies’, Annual Review of Nutrition 41, no. 1 (2021): 363–85, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-nutr-111120-105520. Full details on atherosclerosis and the Tsimané can be found in Hillard Kaplan et al., ‘Coronary Atherosclerosis in Indigenous South American Tsimané: A Cross-Sectional Cohort Study’, The Lancet 389, no. 10080 (2017): 1730–39, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)30752-3. The diets of our ancestors would of course have varied enormously, depending on what environments they lived in. While there is the modern fad of the ‘paleo’ diet, there would have been no single diet for the Palaeolithic.
Today, the Inuit subsist on a largely carnivorous diet of fish, seal and caribou. In contrast, 70–95 per cent of the calories for foragers in the Andes of South America from thousands of years ago came from plants. Despite this diversity, they all have ample exercise, social connections and varied diets with no highly processed foods.
↩ 26. Their guts, not just their brains, also seem to be healthier. Studies of the foraging Hadza in northern Tanzania have found that they have far more diverse gut microbiomes (collections of bacteria, fungi and genes found in the gut) than do people from Nepal, Italy, or California. The average Hadza has 730 species of gut microbe while the average Californian has just 277, many of which showed signs of chronic stress and inflammation. See Hannah C. Wastyk et al., ‘Gut-MicrobiotaTargeted Diets Modulate Human Immune Status’, Cell 184, no. 16 (2021): 4137–53.e14, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.06.019; Stephanie L.
Schnorr et al., ‘Gut Microbiome of the Hadza HunterGatherers’, Nature Communications 5, no. 1 (2014): 3654, https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms4654; Matthew M. Carter et al., ‘UltraDeep Sequencing of Hadza Hunter-Gatherers Recovers Vanishing Gut Microbes’, Cell 186, no. 14 (2023): 3111–24.e13, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2023.05.046. The Hadza microbiome also contained numerous, previously undocumented microbes that appear to have vanished from other populations. This is no insignificant finding.
Microbiome health affects not only gastrointestinal health, but also mental health, with poor biomes linked to higher rates of anxiety and depression. Notably, modern studies on mental and physical health are awash with advice that simply reflects a hunter-gatherer lifestyle: frequent exercise, copious social contact, diets low in processed foods, lots of time outdoors in nature, and a regular sleep schedule of 7–8 hours.↩ 27. For an overview, see Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). For the Agta case study, see Mark Dyble et al., ‘Engagement in Agricultural Work Is Associated With Reduced Leisure Time Among Agta Hunter-Gatherers’, Nature Human Behaviour 3 (2019): 792–6, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0614-6. The estimate of seventyseven hours is derived from US Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘American Time Use Survey – 2023 Results’, www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf. They estimate that the average American parent who travels to work spends forty hours working, as well as around 2.4 hours per day on housework, and 1–2.3 hours per day on childcare. I’ve added these together, alongside a conservative estimate of one hour per weekday travelling to and from work.↩ 28. There are far more nuanced definitions of violence that can incorporate indirect effects. For a summary, see Siniša Malešević, The Rise of Organised Brutality: A Historical Sociology of Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2017), chap. 2. Since this is a book for a popular audience, I’ve constrained the discussion to the most simple and common-sense definition. ↩ 29. Philip Thomson and John Halstead, ‘How Violent Was the PreAgricultural World?’, SSRN Electronic Journal, 2023, 46–53, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4466809.↩ 30. Douglas P. Fry and Patrik Söderberg, ‘Myths About Hunter-Gatherers Redux: Nomadic Forager War and Peace’, ed. Kirk Endicott, Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Research 6, no. 4 (2014): 259–60, https://doi.org/10.1108/JACPR-06-2014-0127.↩ 31. Widerquist and McCall, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy.↩ 32. Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli, ‘The Prehistory of Warfare: Misled by Ethnography’, in War, Peace, and Human Nature, ed.
Douglas P. Fry (Oxford University Press, 2013), 168–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199858996.003.0010. On Jebel Sahaba, see R. Brian Ferguson, ‘Archaeology, Cultural Anthropology, and the Origins and Intensifications of War’, in The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of Raiding and Conquest, ed. Elizabeth Arkush and Mark W. Allen (University Press of Florida, 2006), 482–3.↩ 33.
Thomson and Halstead, ‘How Violent Was the Pre-Agricultural World?’ Thomson and Halstead do adjust their figures upwards to 3.2 per cent for the Palaeolithic and 9.7 per cent for the End-Palaeolithic.
Their adjustment is based on both some such deaths not leaving skeletal traces and others possibly not being preserved. Hence, this suggests that we could be undercounting, a problem they have tried to correct for.
However, they also note that the skeletal remains are a small percentage of the overall population, meaning we could be overcounting or undercounting substantially (p. 76). There is the far larger issue that any adjustments rely on and reflect the pre-existing biases of the authors.
This is critical, given how sensitive and political the issue of violence is.
Despite the shortcomings, it is safer and more reliable to rely on the unadjusted figures. Statistics for the modern world come from Max Roser, ‘Causes of Death Globally: What Do People Die From?’, Our World in Data, 2021, https://ourworldindata.org/causes-of-death-treemap. One could say that the Palaeolithic appears to be more peaceful than the modern world.
That wouldn’t be warranted. The data is too sparse and Palaeolithic deaths from suicide may have involved poison or other means that didn’t leave marks on bones.↩ 34. For pessimistic estimates of prehistoric violence, see Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Viking, 2011); Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford University Press, 2008); Ian Morris, War! What Is It Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). A critique of Pinker’s analysis of prehistoric warfare is provided in R. Brian Ferguson, ‘Pinker’s List: Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality’, in War, Peace, and Human Nature, ed.
Douglas P. Fry (Oxford University Press, 2013), 112–31, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199858996.003.0007. There have also been several detailed critiques of Pinker’s contention that war has been declining in the modern world. The political scientist Bear Braumoeller has published a scathing statistical critique showing that the rate of conflict increased in the two centuries prior to the Cold War, and the rate of civil wars has increased thereafter. Full details can be found in Bear F. Braumoeller, Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age (Oxford University Press, 2019). See also Tanisha M. Fazal, ‘Dead Wrong? Battle Deaths, Military Medicine, and Exaggerated Reports of War’s Demise’, International Security 39, no. 1 (2014): 95–125. Last but not least, an entire cadre of scholars of violence covering areas from Native America to Soviet Russia have put forward an extensive critique of The Better Angels of Our Nature in the appropriately titled Philip G. Dwyer and Mark S. Micale, eds., The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).↩ 35. Haas and Piscitelli, ‘The Prehistory of Warfare:’, figs 10.2 and 10.3.
Credit to Jill Seagard, The Field Museum. Redrawn from Jean Clottes and Jean Courtin, The Cave Beneath the Sea: Paleolithic Images at Cosquer (Abrams, 1996).↩ 36. José Maria Gómez et al., ‘The Phylogenetic Roots of Human Lethal Violence’, Nature 538, no. 7624 (2016): 233–7, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature19758. Note that this is a limited study and essentially just a best guess based on genetic correlations.↩ 37. Kevin D. Hunt, Chimpanzee: Lessons from Our Sister Species (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 233–8.↩ 38. R. Brian Ferguson, Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill?
(Oxford University Press, 2023).↩ 39. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Open Road Media, 2014): 23–6. For useful and accessible overviews, see Randall Collins, Violence: A MicroSociological Theory (Princeton University Press, 2009), chap. 2; Rutger Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History (Bloomsbury, 2021), chap. 4. While the initial work of S. L. A. Marshall (who estimated in the Second World War that 25 per cent of soldiers never fired their guns, but was found to have shoddy methods afterwards) has been debunked, most of the subsequent work in the field of ‘killology’ has reaffirmed the basic insight that soldiers are often deeply reluctant to engage in violence.↩ 40. Grossman, On Killing, 35.↩ 41. For the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the literature covering the Palaeolithic, read Tibor Rutar, ‘The Prehistory of Violence and War: Moving beyond the Hobbes–Rousseau Quagmire’, Journal of Peace Research, 18 October 2022, 002234332210901, https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221090112. In it, Rutar provides a more detailed critique of the methods of different studies, an approach that I don’t have the space for here (and the average reader likely doesn’t have the appetite for). He comes to the same conclusion: violence was low in the Palaeolithic, war was not likely to have occurred, and violence follows an inverted U-pattern rising from hunter-gatherers to the medieval ages before decreasing in the modern world.↩ 42. Douglas P.
Fry and Patrik Söderberg, ‘Lethal Aggression in Mobile Forager Bands and Implications for the Origins of War’, Science 341, no. 6143 (2013): 270–73, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1235675. For a useful overview of the wider literature, see Thomson and Halstead, ‘How Violent Was the Pre-Agricultural World?’, 31–3.↩ 43. Clarke, ‘Panic’.↩ 44. For an overview of the relevant literature, see John Drury, David Novelli, and Clifford Stott, ‘Psychological Disaster Myths in the Perception and Management of Mass Emergencies’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 43, no. 11 (2013): 2259–70, https://doi.org/10.1111/jasp.12176. Bregman, Humankind, and Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell (Viking, 2009), provide entertaining accounts of the best-known case studies.↩ 45. Yes, people do occasionally respond poorly. There are cases of pricegouging, panic-buying, and unruly behaviour during disasters. But the reason that Australian shoppers fighting over toilet rolls during Covid19 became a newsworthy meme is because it is exceptional (as well as admittedly funny). ↩ 46. Variants of the myth of mass panic also prove to be wrong.
The conventional wisdom was once that pandemics ignited division, hatred, and blaming of ‘the other’. Yet this isn’t true either, historically.
For instance, bouts of the Black Death in the late medieval and Renaissance periods did not lead to violence against or persecution of Jews, despite evidence linking its spread to Jewish traders who transmitted the plague by breaking quarantine to trade infected goods.
In general, most outbursts of disease, from the Plague of Athens to influenza in the modern world, have brought people together rather than driving them apart. See Samuel K. Cohn, ‘Pandemics: Waves of Disease, Waves of Hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S.’, Historical Research 85, no. 230 (2012): 535–55, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2281.2012.00603.x.↩ 47. For an overview, see Bas van Bavel et al., Disasters and History: The Vulnerability and Resilience of Past Societies (Cambridge University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108569743.↩ 48. On food sharing in modern egalitarian hunter-gatherers, see James Woodburn, ‘Egalitarian Societies’, Man 17, no. 3 (1982): 437–42, https://doi.org/10.2307/2801707. Deer remains from 400,000–100,000 years ago suggest that butchering was initially done collectively. Over time this evolved into a more systematic practice with a few skilled individuals butchering and allocating the meat, as we see in modern hunter-gatherers. See Mary C. Stiner, Ran Barkai, and Avi Gopher, ‘Cooperative Hunting and Meat Sharing 400–200 Kya at Qesem Cave, Israel’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 32 (2009): 13207–12, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0900564106. Others have used mathematical and conceptual models to help explain how food sharing between pair-bonded couples helped us spread into a wider range of environments: Ingela Alger et al., ‘The Evolution of Early Hominin Food Production and Sharing’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 25 (2023): e2218096120, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218096120. This also resulted in cultures of extreme charity. Early European explorers were stunned by the generosity of indigenous Americans, even during times of famine. See David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, 2011), 100–101.↩ 49. Graeber, Debt, 99.↩ 50. For a fuller discussion, see Hélène Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2017); Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2020).↩ 51. On the origins of parliamentary democracy, see John Keane, The Shortest History of Democracy: 4,000 Years of Self-Government – A Retelling for Our Times (The Experiment, 2022), 87–9. On examples of early democracy across the world, read David Stasavage, The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (Princeton University Press, 2021), chaps. 1 and 2.↩ 52. Our ancestors would still have had a dizzying array of cultures. We see that in foragers today. The Hiwi of Venezuela dance almost daily and rarely divorce while the Ache of Paraguay rarely dance and divorce frequently, and there are many differences in their humour, food, beliefs, and language. Despite this variety in lifestyles, they all seemed to keep a level playing field. One can have diversity while maintaining a common democratic thread.↩ 53.
Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2017).↩ 54. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). For an accessible overview, see Camilla Power, ‘Gender Egalitarianism Made Us Human: Patriarchy Was Too Little, Too Late’, Open Democracy, 2018, www.opendemocracy.net/en/genderegalitarianism-made-us-human-patri archy-was-too-little-too-late/. It’s also why our grandmothers so often help with childrearing and passing on generations of accumulated wisdom.↩ 55. Ethan G. Harrod, Christopher L. Coe, and Paula M.
Niedenthal, ‘Social Structure Predicts Eye Contact Tolerance in Nonhuman Primates: Evidence from a Crowd-Sourcing Approach’, Scientific Reports 10, no. 1 (2020): 6971, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020- 63884-x.↩ 56. For the evolutionary case, see Power, ‘Gender Egalitarianism Made Us Human’. On settlement patterns and genetic diversity, consult M. Dyble et al., ‘Sex Equality Can Explain the Unique Social Structure of Hunter-Gatherer Bands’, Science 348, no. 6236 (2015): 796–8, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa5139.↩ 57. On the division of labour, see Robert L. Kelly, The Lifeways of HunterGatherers: The Foraging Spectrum, 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 2013), chap. 9. On the evidence for women hunting: Abigail Anderson et al., ‘The Myth of Man the Hunter: Women’s Contribution to the Hunt across Ethnographic Contexts’, ed. Raven Garvey, PLOS ONE 18, no. 6 (2023): e0287101, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0287101; Randall Haas et al., ‘Female Hunters of the Early Americas’, Science Advances 6, no. 45 (2020): eabd0310, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd0310; Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock, ‘Woman the Hunter: The Archaeological Evidence’, American Anthropologist 126, no. 1 (2024): 19–31, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13914. The evidence for women hunting has been used to suggest that there was no division of labour between the sexes. That is an overstated position which has been heavily criticized for a lack of data (Vivek V. Venkataraman et al., ‘Female Foragers Sometimes Hunt, Yet Gendered Divisions of Labor Are Real: A Comment on Anderson et al. (2023) The Myth of Man the Hunter’, Evolution and Human Behavior 45, no. 4 (2024), S1090513824000497, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2024.04.014.)↩ 58. Tatiana Zerjal et al., ‘The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols’, American Journal of Human Genetics 72, no. 3 (2003): 717–21. Others have found similar results for Chinese emperors: see Patricia Balaresque et al., ‘Y-Chromosome Descent Clusters and Male Differential Reproductive Success: Young Lineage Expansions Dominate Asian Pastoral Nomadic Populations’, European Journal of Human Genetics 23, no. 10 (2015): 1413–22, https://doi.org/10.1038/ejhg.2014.285.
One recent study suggests that the widely spread genes today may not come from Chinggis Khan himself, but rather the Niru’un clan of the Mongols. See Lan-Hai Wei et al., ‘Whole-Sequence Analysis Indicates that the Y Chromosome C2*-Star Cluster Traces Back to Ordinary Mongols, Rather Than Genghis Khan’, European Journal of Human Genetics 26, no. 2 (2018): 230–37, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41431- 017-0012-3.↩ 59. Walter Scheidel, ‘Fitness and Power: The Contribution of Genetics to the History of Differential Reproduction’, Evolutionary Psychology 19, no. 4 (2021): 14747049211066599, https://doi.org/10.1177/14747049211066599 provides a nuanced overview of how conquest and status differences seem to have impacted reproductive differences across history. His conclusion is that often conquest resulted in the male lineage of the conquerors replacing the genetic lineage of the vanquished, but this varies across cases.↩ 60.
Monika Karmin et al., ‘A Recent Bottleneck of Y Chromosome Diversity Coincides With a Global Change in Culture’, Genome Research 25, no.
4 (2015): 461–2, https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.186684.114.↩ 61. Michael Westaway, David Lambert, and Monika Karmin, ‘There Was a Decline of Male Diversity When Humans Took to Agriculture’, The Conversation, 20 April 2015, https://theconversation.com/there-was-adecline-of-male-diversity-when-h umans-took-to-agriculture-38725.↩ 62. Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them (Crown, 2022).↩ 63. Brian Gallagher, ‘How Can We Discourage Mass Shootings?’, Nautilus, 15 May 2023, https://nautil.us/how-can-we-discourage-massshootings-304104/. For an overview between the frustrated longing for status and mass shooters, read Will Storr, The Status Game (William Collins, 2021), chap. 8.↩ 64.
Jason Manning, Suicide: The Social Causes of Self-Destruction (University of Virginia Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv103xf27.↩ 65. Most of his kids did well for themselves, with two (Nelson and William) becoming billionaires who tried and failed to corner the world market in silver. ↩ 66. Joey T. Cheng, Jessica L. Tracy, and Cameron D. Anderson, eds., The Psychology of Social Status (Springer, 2016), 19.↩ 67. Francesco Margoni, Renée Baillargeon, and Luca Surian, ‘Infants Distinguish Between Leaders and Bullies’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 38 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1801677115.↩ 68. Justin Jennings, Finding Fairness: From Pleistocene Foragers to Contemporary Capitalists (University Press of Florida, 2021), 3; Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (Basic Books, 2012).↩ 69. For an overview, see Tian Chen Zeng, Joey T.
Cheng, and Joseph Henrich, ‘Dominance in Humans’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377, no. 1845 (2022): 20200451, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0451; Joey T.
Cheng, ‘Dominance, Prestige, and the Role of Leveling in Human Social Hierarchy and Equality’, Current Opinion in Psychology 33 (2020): 238–44, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2019.10.004.↩ 70. Cameron Anderson, John Angus D. Hildreth, and Laura Howland, ‘Is the Desire for Status a Fundamental Human Motive? A Review of the Empirical Literature’, Psychological Bulletin 141, no. 3 (2015): 574– 601, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038781.↩ 71. Christopher Boehm et al., ‘Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy [and Comments and Reply]’, Current Anthropology 34, no. 3 (1993): 227–54.
Also see Boehm’s personal correspondence with Brian Klaas in Dr Brian Klaas, Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us (John Murray, 2022), 29. There is also evidence that testosterone tends to increase the desire for status, but only in unstable hierarchies. See A. B.
Losecaat Vermeer et al., ‘Exogenous Testosterone Increases Status-Seeking Motivation in Men With Unstable Low Social Status’, Psychoneuroendocrinology 113 (2020): 104552, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2019.104552.
Women still engage in status competition as well, especially with other women. This trait can be especially intense in some female primates.
However, when it comes to dominance-based status-seeking in humans, men are far more likely to do so. ↩ 72. For the most recent definitions of the dark triad, read Stephane A. De Brito et al., ‘Psychopathy’, Nature Reviews Disease Primers 7, no. 1 (2021): 1, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41572-021-00282-1; Zlatan Krizan and Anne D.
Herlache, ‘The Narcissism Spectrum Model: A Synthetic View of Narcissistic Personality’, Personality and Social Psychology Review 22, no. 1 (2018): 6, https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868316685018; David Sloan Wilson, David Near, and Ralph R. Miller, ‘Machiavellianism: A Synthesis of the Evolutionary and Psychological Literatures’, Psychological Bulletin 119, no. 2 (1996): 285. On the link between the dark triad and dominance-based status seeking, read Adam C. Davis and Tracy Vaillancourt, ‘Predicting Dominance and Prestige Status-Striving from the Dark Tetrad: The Mediating Role of Indirect Aggression’, Current Psychology 42, no. 16 (2023): 13680–92, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02492-y; Peter K. Jonason and Virgil Zeigler-Hill, ‘The Fundamental Social Motives that Characterize Dark Personality Traits’, Personality and Individual Differences 132 (2018): 98–107, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2018.05.031. Note that I’m referring here to people’s scores on the dark triad, not necessarily full-blown personality disorders, such as narcissist personality disorder (NPD).↩ 73. Although chimps also engage in social behaviour such as grooming babies to gain prestige, much like campaigning politicians kissing babies for a photo.↩ 74. Christopher R. von Rueden and Adrian V. Jaeggi, ‘Men’s Status and Reproductive Success in 33 Nonindustrial Societies: Effects of Subsistence, Marriage System, and Reproductive Strategy’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 39 (2016): 10824–9, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1606800113; Dan P.
McAdams, ‘The Appeal of the Primal Leader: Human Evolution and Donald J.
Trump’, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 1, no. 2 (2017): 5, https://doi.org/10.26613/esic.1.2.45.↩ 75. Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias et al., ‘Population Interconnectivity Over the Past 120,000 Years Explains Distribution and Diversity of Central African Hunter-Gatherers’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 21 (2022): e2113936119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2113936119.↩ 76. Carina M.
Schlebusch et al., ‘Khoe-San Genomes Reveal Unique Variation and Confirm the Deepest Population Divergence in Homo sapiens’, Molecular Biology and Evolution 37, no. 10 (2020): 2944– 54, https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaa140.↩ CHAPTER 2: COLLAPSE FOR 99 PER CENT OF HUMAN HISTORY 1. The most common estimate is that by the beginning of the Common Era three-quarters of the human population was held in just four empires: the Roman Empire, the Kushan Empire, the Parthian Empire, and the Han Dynasty of China. See Walter Scheidel, ‘From Plains to Chains: How the State Was Born’, Financial Times, 5 October 2017, www.ft.com/content/aa39bc10-a836-11e7-ab66-21cc87a2edde.
However, this is based on a fairly unreliable source: the 1978 Atlas of World Population History. The estimates are largely based on old guesswork, especially for non-state peoples. Today, light detection and ranging (LIDAR) scans of non-state areas such as in the Amazonian basin, regularly suggest larger population estimates than were once assumed. For a full discussion, see David Wengrow, ‘Beyond Kingdoms and Empires’, Aeon, 5 July 2024, https://aeon.co/essays/anarcheological-revolution-transforms-our-imageof-humanfreedoms.↩ 2. The 1–3 per cent figure is from Benjamin Vernot and Joshua M. Akey, ‘Resurrecting Surviving Neandertal Lineages from Modern Human Genomes’, Science 343, no. 6174 (2014): 1017–21, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1245938.↩ 3. It’s worth stating a few caveats and clarifications here. Collapse is something that affects people and power structures, namely Goliaths.
In contrast, extinction occurs in other biological life forms while collapse does not. That doesn’t change the basic fact that extinction of a human population will result in a complete permanent collapse: a destruction of all its power structures. Nonetheless, the more sceptical reader can simply see this discussion as a precursor to collapse (like the coverage of early fission-fusion cycles) if they prefer.↩ 4. Benedict R. O’G.
Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1990); Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, trans. John Purcell and Haim Watzman (Vintage, 2015). On the importance of storytelling, see Daniel Smith et al., ‘Cooperation and the Evolution of HunterGatherer Storytelling’, Nature Communications 8, no. 1 (2017): 1, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02036-8. Note that their study is only for the Agta; however, there are powerful reasons to believe that this holds true for other groups, especially given its evolutionary advantages in promoting cooperation. While stories and symbols are vital, we must also be careful not to overemphasize the power of imagined communities. We are incredibly cooperative even without them. Infants of 12–24 months can start cooperating, giving help to adults (such as through pointing), and playing social games (and even reversing their roles in those games), all before they can even speak.
See Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (MIT Press, 2009).↩ 5.
Joseph Patrick Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton University Press, 2016).↩ 6. Andrea Bamberg Migliano and Lucio Vinicius, ‘The Origins of Human Cumulative Culture: From the Foraging Niche to Collective Intelligence’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 377, no. 1843 (2022): 5–6, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0317.↩ 7. The estimate for cumulative cultural learning beginning around 600,000 years ago was calculated in Jonathan Paige and Charles Perreault, ‘3.3 Million Years of Stone Tool Complexity Suggests That Cumulative Culture Began During the Middle Pleistocene’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121, no. 26 (2024): e2319175121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2319175121. On ochre, see Rimtautas Dapschauskas et al., ‘The Emergence of Habitual Ochre Use in Africa and Its Significance for the Development of Ritual Behavior During the Middle Stone Age’, Journal of World Prehistory 35, nos 3–4 (2022): 233–319, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10963-022- 09170-2. The oldest forms of artwork could be patterns and sculptures carved on rocks at South Africa’s beaches: Charles Helm, ‘Ancient Humans May Have Made Patterns and Sculptures on Africa’s Beaches’, The Conversation, 22 September 2019, https://theconversation.com/ancient-humans-may-have-made-patternsan d-sculptures-on-south-africas-beaches-123546. There is still some dispute as to whether this is cumulative, but the evidence is pointing that way.↩ 8. For an overview of recent evidence, see Rebecca Wragg, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020); Emma Pomeroy et al., ‘New Neanderthal Remains With the “Flower Burial” at Shanidar Cave’, Antiquity 94, no. 373 (2020): 11–26, https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.207; Julia Galway-Witham, James Cole, and Chris Stringer, ‘Aspects of Human Physical and Behavioural Evolution During the Last 1 Million Years’, Journal of Quaternary Science 34, no. 6 (2019): 355–78, https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.3137.↩ 9. D. L.
Hoffmann et al., ‘U-Th Dating of Carbonate Crusts Reveals Neandertal Origin of Iberian Cave Art’, Science 359, no. 6378 (2018): 912–15, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap7778; Adhi Agus Oktaviana et al., ‘Narrative Cave Art in Indonesia by 51,200 Years Ago’, Nature 631, no.
8022 (2024): 814–18, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07541-7.↩ 10.
The image is taken from the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany.↩ 11. It left them vulnerable, with problems in finding genetically viable mates and a predicament where small changes in fertility or the ratio of births to deaths led to large population swings, a phenomenon called ‘stochastic fluctuations’.↩ 12. Krist Vaesen, Gerrit L.
Dusseldorp, and Mark J. Brandt, ‘An Emerging Consensus in Palaeoanthropology: Demography Was the Main Factor Responsible for the Disappearance of Neanderthals’, Scientific Reports 11, no. 1 (2021): 4925, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-84410-7. Experts included only those who had published on Neanderthal extinction over the period 2014–20. The outcome is surprising since demographic explanations are recent, with most relevant articles having been published only five years or so before 2020.↩ 13. Laurits Skov et al., ‘Genetic Insights into the Social Organization of Neanderthals’, Nature 610, no. 7932 (2022): 519, 523–4, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05283-y.↩ 14. Calculated by the palaeoanthropologist April Nowell using data from Erik Trinkaus, ‘Neanderthal Mortality Patterns’, Journal of Archaeological Science 22, no. 1 (1995): 121–42, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-4403(95)80170-7.
See Kristina Killgrove, ‘Did We Kill the Neanderthals? New Research May Finally Answer an Age-Old Question’, Live Science, 10 April 2024, www.livescience.com/archaeology/did-we-kill-the-neanderthals-newrese arch-may-finally-answer-an-age-old-question.↩ 15. Ali R. Vahdati et al., ‘Exploring Late Pleistocene Hominin Dispersals, Coexistence and Extinction With Agent-Based Multi-Factor Models’, Quaternary Science Reviews 279 (2022): 107391, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2022.107391.↩ 16. See Nicholas P.
Simpson et al., ‘A Framework for Complex Climate Change Risk Assessment’, One Earth 4, no. 4 (2021): 489–501, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.03.005; Luke Kemp et al., ‘Climate Endgame: Exploring Catastrophic Climate Change Scenarios’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no.
34 (2022): e2108146119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2108146119.
This is also echoed in the way that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses risk in its Sixth Assessment Report. See IPCC, ‘The Concept of Risk in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report: A Summary of Cross-Working Group Discussions’ (IPCC, 2020), www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2021/02/Risk-guidanceFINAL_15Feb20 21.pdf. The one difference is that the IPCC separates risk and its three determinants (threat, exposure, and vulnerability) from response risks.↩ 17. Steven E. Churchill et al., ‘Shanidar 3 Neandertal Rib Puncture Wound and Paleolithic Weaponry’, Journal of Human Evolution 57, no. 2 (2009): 163–78, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2009.05.010; Christoph P. E. Zollikofer et al., ‘Evidence for Interpersonal Violence in the St.
Césaire Neanderthal’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99, no. 9 (2002): 6444–8, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.082111899.↩ 18. Katerina Harvati et al., ‘Apidima Cave Fossils Provide Earliest Evidence of Homo sapiens in Eurasia’, Nature 571, no. 7766 (2019): 500–504, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1376-z.↩ 19. Ryan J. Rabett, ‘The Success of Failed Homo sapiens Dispersals out of Africa and into Asia’, Nature Ecology & Evolution 2, no. 2 (2018): 212–19, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0436-8.↩ 20. Andrew Bevan et al., ‘Holocene Fluctuations in Human Population Demonstrate Repeated Links to Food Production and Climate’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 49 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1709190114.↩ 21. Martin A. J. Williams et al., ‘Environmental Impact of the 73ka Toba Super-Eruption in South Asia’, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 284, nos 3–4 (2009): 295–314, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2009.10.009.↩ 22.
Chris Clarkson et al., ‘Human Occupation of Northern India Spans the Toba Super-Eruption ~74,000 Years Ago’, Nature Communications 11, no. 1 (2020): 961, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14668-4; Michael Haslam et al., ‘The 74ka Toba Super-Eruption and Southern Indian Hominins: Archaeology, Lithic Technology and Environments at Jwalapuram Locality 3’, Journal of Archaeological Science 37, no.
12 (2010): 3370–84, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2010.07.034.↩ 23.
Benjamin A. Black et al., ‘Global Climate Disruption and Regional Climate Shelters after the Toba Supereruption’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 29 (2021): e2013046118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2013046118.↩ 24. Felix Riede, Gerald Oetelaar, and Richard VanderHoek, ‘From Crisis to Collapse in Hunter-Gatherer Societies. A Comparative Investigation of the Cultural Impacts of Three Large Volcanic Eruptions on Past Hunter-Gatherers’, in Crisis to Collapse: The Archaeology of Social Breakdown, ed. Tim Cunningham and Jan Driessen (UCL Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2017). All of these examples are technically during the Holocene, but since they occurred to hyper-egalitarian foragers, they can provide some insight into how prehistoric huntergatherers may have responded to volcanic disruptions.↩ 25. For a lively discussion of the role of mobility in human evolution, read Padilla-Iglesias, ‘Societies of Perpetual Movement’.↩ 26. Jennings, Finding Fairness, 46–7; Matt Grove, Eiluned Pearce, and R. I. M. Dunbar, ‘Fission-Fusion and the Evolution of Hominin Social Systems’, Journal of Human Evolution 62, no. 2 (2012): 191–200, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2011.10.012; Robert Foley and Clive Gamble, ‘The Ecology of Social Transitions in Human Evolution’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 364, no. 1533 (2009): 3267–79, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2009.0136.↩ 27. Iain D. Couzin and Mark E. Laidre, ‘Fission-Fusion Populations’, Current Biology 19, no. 15 (2009): R633–5, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.05.034. The two-thirds estimate comes from analyses of human conversations, in which around twothirds is devoted to social topics (grouped under the term ‘gossip’).
See R. I. M. Dunbar, ‘Gossip in Evolutionary Perspective’, Review of General Psychology 8, no. 2 (2004): 100–110, https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.8.2.100.↩ 28. I. Crevecoeur et al., ‘Late Stone Age Human Remains from Ishango (Democratic Republic of Congo): New Insights on Late Pleistocene Modern Human Diversity in Africa’, Journal of Human Evolution 96 (2016): 35–57, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2016.04.003.↩ 29. For an entertaining overview, see Padilla-Iglesias, ‘Did Humanity Really All Arise in One Place?’. Some even see these adaptations in bipedalism and bigger brains enabling fission-fusion practices as two of five major transitions in hominid evolution. See Foley and Gamble, ‘The Ecology of Social Transitions in Human Evolution’, 3276.↩ 30. This extended beyond the buffalo hunt into organizing migrations, preventing warriors from going on unauthorized raids, and overseeing crowds at festivals. The composition of the police force was regularly cycled between seasons.
This was likely an effective accountability mechanism: you’d have far less incentive to abuse your coercive power if you knew you’d be on the receiving end next summer. See David Wengrow and David Graeber, ‘Farewell to the “Childhood of Man”: Ritual, Seasonality, and the Origins of Inequality’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no. 3 (2015): 597–619, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12247.↩ 31. On the Shoshone, see Robert H. Lowie, ‘Some Aspects of Political Organization Among the American Aborigines’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 78, no. 1/2 (1948): 11, https://doi.org/10.2307/2844522. On the Wik-Mungkan, see Donald F.
Thomson, ‘The Seasonal Factor in Human Culture Illustrated from the Life of a Contemporary Nomadic Group’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 5, no. 2 (1939): 209–21, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0079497X00020545.↩ 32. Marcel Mauss, Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo: A Study in Social Morphology (Routledge, 2004). The anthropologist Marcel Mauss called this behaviour a ‘twofold morphology’.↩ 33. Chris J. Stevens and Dorian Q.
Fuller, ‘Did Neolithic Farming Fail?
The Case for a Bronze Age Agricultural Revolution in the British Isles’, Antiquity 86, no. 333 (2012): 707–22, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00047864; Bruce Bower, ‘Herders, Not Farmers, Built Stonehenge’, Science News, 9 June 2012, www.sciencenews.org/article/herders-not-farmers-built-stonehenge; Caroline Lang et al., ‘Gazelle Behaviour and Human Presence at Early Neolithic Göbekli Tepe, South-East Anatolia’, World Archaeology 45, no.
3 (2013): 410–29, https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2013.820648.↩ 34.
Rather than houses, these mammoth-bone structures seem to have been celebrations of successful hunts and ancient trading hubs for the exchange of amber, animal pelts, and marine shells. There are other sites of grand burials. In Dolní Věstonice, in the south of the Czech Republic, a triple burial dating back 27,000 years involved two males with elaborate headdresses placed alongside a female on ochre-stained soil. For summaries of the relevant literature, see Hayden, ‘Social Complexity’; Wengrow and Graeber, ‘Farewell to the “Childhood of Man”’.↩ 35. Hayden, ‘Social Complexity’; David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Allen Lane, 2021).↩ 36. Bennett Bacon et al., ‘An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-Writing System and Phenological Calendar’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 33, no. 3 (2023): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774322000415.↩ 37. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, chap. 3.↩ 38. Some cultures periodically shift their societies with the moon rather than with the seasons. They do so not because they worship the moon, but rather to align with menstruation. This is based on Chris Knight’s ‘sex-strike’ theory of human origins, and Camilla Power’s ‘Female Cosmetic Coalitions’. They propose that gender and political equality was maintained through coalitions of women banding together with males to prohibit and punish any philandering or domineering men. They did so by doing monthly rituals where they would paint themselves in red ochre to disguise women who were menstruating.
Menstruation is one of the few visible signs that women give for their impending fertility. The ochre ritual was intended to scramble that information and thwart the efforts of any man or group to monopolize reproduction. See Chris Knight, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Yale University Press, 1991); Power, ‘Gender Egalitarianism Made Us Human’. Modelling and genetics suggest that ice-age hunters did have some kinds of fission-fusion dynamics, but these can take many forms, and there is no evidence that this involved any changes in social structure.↩ 39. Mauss, Seasonal Variations of the Eskimo, 33. Note that this is in direct contradiction to Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. In it, they claim that Mauss recorded that 40 per cent or less of the variance in the seasonal structure of the Inuit was due to environmental changes, even though that number appears nowhere in Mauss’s original text.↩ 40. That’s possibly why we see signs of seasonal cycles during the Upper Palaeolithic near choke points of migrating herds.↩ 41. Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything; Wengrow and Graeber, ‘Farewell to the “Childhood of Man”’.↩ CHAPTER 3: FROM HUNTING AND GATHERING TO BEING HUNTED AND GATHERED 1. For an overview of the Calusa, see Fernando Santos-Granero, Vital Enemies: Slavery, Predation, and the Amerindian Political Economy of Life (University of Texas Press, 2009), chap. 4.↩ 2. For an accessible overview of the north-west coast foragers, see David Wengrow and David Graeber, ‘“Many Seasons Ago”: Slavery and Its Rejection Among Foragers on the Pacific Coast of North America’, American Anthropologist 120, no. 2 (2018): 237–49, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12969. Notably, Wengrow and Graeber differ from other experts in seeing the origins of hierarchy across the north-west coast peoples as being due to conscious political choice, rather than to material circumstances. As we’ll see, while this is a liberating perspective, it’s not convincing. For a summary of the Calusa and the latest evidence on their watercourts, see Victor D.
Thompson et al., ‘Ancient Engineering of Fish Capture and Storage in Southwest Florida’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 15 (2020): 8374–81, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1921708117.↩ 3. Brian Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity (Cambridge University Press, 2018), chap.
2; Wengrow and Graeber, ‘“Many Seasons Ago”’. This is also a recurring theme in Flannery and Marcus’s theory of how inequality and states first arose (Kent V. Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Harvard University Press, 2012)).↩ 4. Manvir Singh and Luke Glowacki, ‘Human Social Organization During the Late Pleistocene: Beyond the Nomadic-Egalitarian Model’, Evolution and Human Behavior 43 (2022): 418–31, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2022.07.003.
There may have been many more whose traces are buried beneath the concrete and roads of current agricultural societies.↩ 5. For the classic overview of hunter-gatherer diversity, see Kelly, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers.↩ 6. T. Douglas Price and Ofer Bar-Yosef, ‘Traces of Inequality at the Origins of Agriculture in the Ancient Near East’, in Pathways to Power, ed. T. Douglas Price and Gary M. Feinman (Springer, 2010), 147–68, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6300-0_6; Heather Pringle, ‘The Ancient Roots of the 1%’, Science 344, no. 6186 (2014): 823, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.344.6186.822. These signs of inequality, as well as earlier examples during the Palaeolithic, do appear to be temporary and ephemeral, as explored in Samuel Bowles and Mattia Fochesato, ‘The Origins of Enduring Economic Inequality’, Santa Fe Institute, 31 April 2024, https://sites.santafe.edu/~bowles/wpcontent/uploads/Text-JEL-31-Jan-se nt-.pdf. There is an intense debate on whether we can accurately measure and compare inequality across societies. Many of the most common criticisms are summarized in David Wengrow, ‘The Mismeasure of Human History?’, Stone Econ, 29 June 2024, www.stone-econ.org/news-and-blogs/the-mismeasureof-human-history.
Many of these are also addressed in Timothy A.
Kohler and Michael Ernest Smith, eds., Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences (University of Arizona Press, 2018), chap. 1. The critics largely fall into the camp of ‘post-processual’ archaeologists who emphasize the subjectivity of interpreting any historical artefacts. The processual camp, while noting and accounting for cultural subjectivities, tries to find material, scientific ways to account for these and still do comparative analysis.
Processualists are comfortable in trying to quantify inequalities, while post-processual archaeologists tend to lament such attempts.
Throughout the book, I’ll be firmly sitting in the processual camp and using, where valid, quantified estimates of things like inequality. The problem is that most of the critiques raised by post-processual archaeologists were already known and being addressed by processual experts (Earle et al., ‘Processual Archaeology and the Radical Critique [and Comments and Reply])’. Importantly, post-processual critics rarely have any explicit methodology or effective way of trying to compare cases. This tends to result in the far worse vices of wild speculation and a total inability to answer questions about the bigger patterns seen across history (The Dawn of Everything by Wengrow and Graeber is the most well-known, entertaining, and bewildering example).↩ 7. For Figure 7, war is defined as large-scale, organized lethal violence between different politically autonomous groups. Estimates for the beginning of war are taken from Douglas P. Fry, Charles A. Keith, and Patrik Söderberg, ‘Social Complexity, Inequality and War Before Farming: Congruence of Comparative Forager and Archaeological Data’, in Social Inequality Before Farming? Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Social Organization in Prehistoric and Ethnographic Hunter-Gatherer-Fisher Societies, ed. L. Moreau (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2020), 314–15, https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.60639; Claudio Cioffi-Revilla and David Lai, ‘War and Politics in Ancient China, 2700 B.C. to 722 B.C.: Measurement and Comparative Analysis’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 39, no. 3 (1995): 467–94; Elizabeth Arkush and Tiffiny A.
Tung, ‘Patterns of War in the Andes from the Archaic to the Late Horizon: Insights from Settlement Patterns and Cranial Trauma’, Journal of Archaeological Research 21, no. 4 (2013): 307–69, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-013-9065-1; R. Brian Ferguson, ‘The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East’, in War, Peace, and Human Nature, ed. Douglas P. Fry (Oxford University Press, 2013), 210–22, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199858996.003.0011; Kent V.
Flannery and Joyce Marcus, ‘The Origin of War: New 14C Dates from Ancient Mexico’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100, no. 20 (2003): 11801–5, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1934526100.
Estimates of state formation are taken from MOROS.↩ 8. Also known as the ‘new stone age’. Note that this is an archaeological or cultural period, while the Holocene is a geological one. Technically, at least in Mesopotamia, the time before the first states is usually divided into the Neolithic and the ‘Chalcolithic’ (a time marked by the increased use of smelted copper). My simplification here is done for clarity.↩ 9. Peter J.
Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Robert L. Bettinger, ‘Was Agriculture Impossible During the Pleistocene But Mandatory During the Holocene?
A Climate Change Hypothesis’, American Antiquity 66, no. 3 (2001): 387–411, https://doi.org/10.2307/2694241. Some have argued that we also saw hierarchical hunter-gatherers and Goliaths during the Palaeolithic since some lootable resources were available.
There are a few signs that people harvested whale meat and shellfish as early as 160,000–130,000 years ago. For an overview of the earliest signs of lootable resources, see Singh and Glowacki, ‘Human Social Organization During the Late Pleistocene’, 424–6. This is unlikely to have resulted in hierarchical hunter-gatherers for a few reasons. First, we have no signs of such communities. There are the seasonal burials and monuments in Upper Palaeolithic Europe we have already dealt with: these appear to be more outbursts of social activity rather than any prolonged dominance hierarchy. Second, exit options were also abundant, meaning if people felt threatened then they could easily move to new food sources. Even if a Palaeolithic upstart had tried to lay claim to a coastal source of shellfish, it would have been exceedingly easy to move away. Third, military technology was underdeveloped: there were no monopolizable weapons. Once we think in terms of Goliath fuel it is abundantly clear why the Palaeolithic was marked by nomadic-egalitarian foragers and not hierarchical ones.↩ 10. Eric Alden Smith and Brian F. Codding, ‘Ecological Variation and Institutionalized Inequality in Hunter-Gatherer Societies’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 13 (2021): e2016134118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016134118. See also Singh and Glowacki, ‘Human Social Organization During the Late Pleistocene’.
This is the ‘behavioural ecology’ perspective on hunter-gatherer variation which is dominant in the field. The key idea is that dense, reliable resources tend to lead to more hierarchical social arrangements. There are dissenters, including those who believe that a reliance on salmon was not the main contributor to the hierarchical structure of many of the north-west coast Native Americans; see Kenneth E. Sassaman, ‘Complex Hunter-Gatherers in Evolution and History: A North American Perspective’, Journal of Archaeological Research 12, no. 3 (2004): 227–80, https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JARE.0000040231.67149.a8; Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything; Wengrow and Graeber, ‘“Many Seasons Ago”’. However, these other accounts which believe that cultural changes are the more important driver suffer from one key problem: they can’t explain the wider patterns in the variation of hierarchical hunter-gatherers, while the behavioural ecology view can.
Similarly, the behavioural ecology view can help explain why farming societies ended up being brutally unequal and stratified in the long term.
The idea of grain as a lootable resource, and that some crops are more lootable than others, was best explored by James C. Scott in a series of influential books, including The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009), esp.
chap. 6, and Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017), esp. chap. 4.↩ 11. James C. Scott, ‘Response’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 29, no. 4 (2019): 718, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774319000441. More speculatively, the flourishes of what could be inequality during the Upper Palaeolithic could also be due to foragers capitalizing on choke points of slightly lootable resources, since large surpluses of meat can be salted or smoked and stored.↩ 12. Monique Borgerhoff Mulder et al., ‘Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies’, Science 326, no. 5953 (2009): 682–8, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1178336. Notably, hunter-gatherers do have some degree of transmissible wealth, but it is comparatively tiny.↩ 13. The power framework here is a modified version of Mann’s sources of social power.↩ 14. Lynn H. Gamble, The Chumash World at European Contact: Power, Trade, and Feasting Among Complex Hunter-Gatherers (University of California Press, 2011).↩ 15. This is a recent overturning of the old idea that horses were directly introduced by Europeans to North America. See William Timothy Treal Taylor et al., ‘Early Dispersal of Domestic Horses into the Great Plains and Northern Rockies’, Science 379, no. 6639 (2023): 1316–23, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adc9691.↩ 16. Some have even called them the ‘Comanche Empire’. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press, 2008).
This is part of a larger literature on ‘kinetic’ or ‘horseback’ empires.↩ 17.
Although most modern horses are derived from a later equine strain originating around 2000 BCE; see Pablo Librado et al., ‘The Origins and Spread of Domestic Horses from the Western Eurasian Steppes’, Nature 598, no. 7882 (2021): 634–40, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586- 021-04018-9.↩ 18. Sandra L. Vehrencamp, ‘A Model for the Evolution of Despotic Versus Egalitarian Societies’, Animal Behaviour 31, no. 3 (1983): 667–82, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0003-3472(83)80222-X.↩ 19.
This is a slight amendment to Robert Carneiro’s original ‘circumscription theory’. See Robert L. Carneiro, ‘The Circumscription Theory: Challenge and Response’, American Behavioral Scientist 31, no. 4 (1988): 497–511. Carneiro’s original theory has come under significant critique (Terry Stocker and Jianyi Xi’ao, ‘Early State Formation: A Complete Rejection of the Circumscription Theory’, Social Evolution & History 18, no. 2 (2019), https://doi.org/10.30884/seh/2019.02.09; Julia Zinkina, Andrey Korotayev, and Alexey Andreev, ‘Circumscription Theory of the Origins of the State: A Cross-Cultural Re-Analysis’, Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution 7, no. 2 (2017), https://doi.org/10.21237/C7CLIO7232817.) My theory of state formation avoids most of the problems by seeing circumscription as just one variable that edged a community towards hierarchy, alongside lootable resources, and military technology. One important criticism is that circumscription theory can’t account for the fact that many early autonomous communities were not conquest orientated. My theory accounts for this by noting that just one warring polity would have likely turned its neighbours more authoritarian (see the ‘authoritarian impulse’) in Chapter 8.↩ 20. Partly inspired by Eric Alden Smith, Jennifer E. Smith, and Brian F.
Codding, ‘Toward an Evolutionary Ecology of (in)Equality’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 378, no. 1883 (2023): fig. 1, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0287.↩ 21. It is what physicists call ‘an attractor state’: a state that the system will tend to evolve towards given initial conditions. We can all make choices, but they are bound and influenced by our past and current material circumstances.↩ 22. Rupert Neate, ‘All Billionaires under 30 Have Inherited Their Wealth, Research Finds’, Guardians, 3 April 2024, www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/03/all-billionaires-under-30- have-inherited-their-wealth-research-finds.↩ 23. A deep dive into violence and the Oaxaca Valley is provided by Flannery and Marcus, The Creation of Inequality.↩ 24. For Japan, see Hisashi Nakao et al., ‘Violence in the Prehistoric Period of Japan: The Spatio-Temporal Pattern of Skeletal Evidence for Violence in the Jomon Period’, Biology Letters 12, no. 3 (2016): 20160028, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2016.0028; Tomomi Nakagawa et al., ‘Violence and Warfare in Prehistoric Japan’, Letters on Evolutionary Behavioral Science 8, no. 1 (2017): 8–11, https://doi.org/10.5178/lebs.2017.55.↩ 25. The data for conflict in Native north-eastern America can be found in David H. Dye, ‘Trends in Cooperation and Conflict in Native Eastern North America’, in War, Peace, and Human Nature, ed. Douglas P. Fry (Oxford University Press, 2013), 132–50, https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199858996.003.0008.↩ 26.
Ferguson, ‘The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East’. One could even think of this as a kind of evolutionary backsliding.↩ 27. Ibid.↩ 28. The overarching argument on the archaeological sequence of violence is in Douglas P. Fry, Charles A.
Keith, and Patrik Söderberg, ‘Social Complexity, Inequality and War before Farming: Congruence of Comparative Forager and Archaeological Data’, in Social Inequality Before Farming?, ed. Luc Moreau (McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2020), https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.60639. For Figure 9, see R. Risch and H.
Meller, ‘The Representation of Violence in the Rock Art of the Sahara and the Spanish Levant’, in Archéologie Européenne: Identités et Migrations –Hommages au Professeur Jean-Paul Demoule (Sidestone Press, 2017), 374.↩ 29. Fry, Keith, and Söderberg, ‘Social Complexity, Inequality and War Before Farming’, 305–10.↩ 30. Christopher Knüsel and Martin J. Smith, eds., The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Human Conflict (Taylor & Francis, 2019).↩ 31. Linda Fibiger et al., ‘Conflict Violence, and Warfare Among Early Farmers in Northwestern Europe’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 4 (2023): e2209481119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2209481119.↩ 32. The ability to replace one victim with anyone else from the same group is usually referred to as ‘social substitutability’.↩ 33. Malešević, The Rise of Organised Brutality.↩ 34. The main proponents of the raiding-for-sex theory of war (a tale in which women are only objects to be fought over) are Gat, War in Human Civilization, and Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature.↩ 35. Fry and Söderberg, ‘Lethal Aggression in Mobile Forager Bands’, 272; Fry and Söderberg, ‘Myths about Hunter-Gatherers Redux’, table 1.↩ 36. We should exercise some caution here, as there are weaknesses to the evidence. The archaeological record contains only a small number of skeletons relative to the number of people who lived and died in the Palaeolithic. There are also some perplexing cases. For instance, according to observations from first-contact Europeans (an admittedly unreliable source), Australian Aboriginal people appear to have had high rates of intergroup conflict. This is also reflected in cave art suggestive of armed confrontations. Yet we see no evidence of group violence in the archaeological record. See Christophe Darmangeat, ‘Vanished Wars of Australia: The Archeological Invisibility of Aboriginal Collective Conflicts’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 26, no. 4 (2019): 1556–90, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816- 019-09418-w.↩ 37. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Societies, ed. Leslie A. White, 2nd edn (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000). Morgan’s work was partly inspired by his time among the Haudenosaunee (previously known as the Iroquois), an alliance of six Native American groups across north-eastern America.
He was adopted as part of the Hawk Clan of the Seneca nation and given the name Tayadawahkugh, meaning ‘the one lying across’. While they saw him as a bridge between them and their colonial oppressors, Morgan’s ideas instead dug a deeper cleft between them. They were now seen as the defunct relics of humanity’s immature past. In Morgan’s schema, both barbarism and savagery were split into the ascending categories of ‘lower’, ‘middle’, and ‘upper’, while civilization was divided into ‘ancient’, ‘medieval’, and ‘modern’. Morgan was undoubtedly influenced by evolutionary theory, but never actually referenced evolution in any of his major works. Sir John Lubbock (1834–1913), a contemporary and friend of Morgan, as well as a fellow pioneer of social evolutionism, had a similar schema of savages, barbarians, and the civilized. Unlike Morgan, he did draw a direct connection between evolutionary theory and the progress of humanity. This was a convenient misreading of evolutionary theory. In biological evolution, the species best-adapted to its environment reproduces and lives on. In social evolutionism, evolution has a purpose and a direction.↩ 38. We lack detailed comparative studies of the energy capture of egalitarian and hierarchical hunter-gatherers. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable that the latter captured significantly more energy than the former. Egalitarian hunter-gatherers live at a subsistence level and capture little to no energy beyond what they need on a given day to survive. By contrast, hierarchical hunter-gatherers capture enough surplus energy to throw extravagant feasts, to decorate and bury elites with luxury items often requiring hundreds of hours of labour and longer-distance trade, and more frequently construct large-scale monuments.↩ 39. Brian Hayden, The Power of Feasts: From Prehistory to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2014), chap. 4. There are numerous problems with the idea of chiefdoms, including when it’s seen as an evolutionary stepping stone towards the state. These critiques are summarized in Norman Yoffee, ‘Too Many Chiefs? (Or, Safe Texts for the ’90s)’, in Archaeological Theory, ed. Norman Yoffee and Andrew Sherratt (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 60–78, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511720277.007. Nonetheless, it’s a helpful term for the diverse space of centralized, hierarchical groups which haven’t quite reached statehood, but are also clearly not leaderless. ↩ 40. For a good summary of common criticisms of the stepladder approach (although applied to the more advanced approach of ‘band’, ‘tribe’, ‘chiefdom’, ‘state’ of the 1960s), see Yoffee, ‘Too Many Chiefs?’.↩ 41. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 4; Diamond, Collapse, 3.↩ 42. Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 46.↩ 43. This definition of complexity largely dates back to the cultural evolution literature of the 1950s and 1960s. It still remains the predominant way of talking about complexity in archaeology. When most archaeologists talk about ‘complex societies’ they are referring to more unequal, centralized, and hierarchical ones. There are, of course, exceptions. Tim Kohler provides a useful summary of how archaeologists can approach the topic from the lens of complex systems and reviews some relevant books and articles in Timothy A. Kohler, ‘Complex Systems and Archaeology’, in Archaeological Theory Today, ed. Ian Hodder (Polity Press, 2012), 93–123. ↩ 44. For similar points on how states and administrations simplify their citizens and landscapes, see Yoffee, The Evolution of Simplicity; Scott, Seeing Like a State. For a general elaboration of this argument, see Luke Kemp, ‘Diminishing Returns on Extraction: How Inequality and Extractive Hierarchy Create Fragility’, in What History, Systems, and Complexity Can Teach Us About Our Modern World and Fragile Future, ed. Miguel A. Centeno, Thayer S. Patterson, and Peter W.
Callah (Routledge, 2023), www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003331384- 5/diminishing-returns-extraction-luke-kemp?
context=ubx&refId=9e978dc6-db65-4abe-b79a-a6b38531c307. Some archaeologists and anthropologists, such as Joseph Tainter, do use a definition of complexity which speaks of the number of different moving parts in a system (although this is still tied up with inequality, centralization, and hierarchy). Even here they seem to be thinking only about complexity in areas such as military, capital, and bureaucracy.↩ 45. In contrast, a non-hierarchical arrangement means that everyone is unranked, or at least that there are no permanent, overarching positions of authority. A merchant may have greater bartering skills than a soldier, but neither has direct authority over the other. This is usually referred to as ‘heterarchy’: see Carole L. Crumley, ‘Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies’, Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 6, no. 1 (1995): 3, https://doi.org/10.1525/ap3a.1995.6.1.1. However, the term is a little confusing.↩ 46. David Wengrow, ‘A History of True Civilisation Is Not One of Monuments’, Aeon, 2 October 2018, https://aeon.co/ideas/a-history-oftrue-civilisation-is-not-one-of-monument s. There was of course still some coercion: counter-dominance strategies. But such lethal violence was shared across the community, not commonly deployed, and rarely needed to enforce rules. ↩ 47. What Is Politics? 10.3 The Ingredients of Hierarchy: Graeber & Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, Chapter 3, 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsIxMzLjEfs.↩ 48. There is a prolific literature on ‘heterarchy’, but this isn’t easily understood (or even very helpful) for a general audience. Similarly, corporate vs despotic power in archaeology is both incredibly vague and confusing to most people who associate ‘corporate’ with private companies. A simple, back-to-basics approach is warranted here.↩ 49. Paul Cartledge, ‘Ancient Greeks Would Not Recognise Our “Democracy” – They’d See an “Oligarchy”’, The Conversation, 3 June 2016, https://theconversation.com/ancient-greeks-would-notrecognise-our-dem ocracy-theyd-see-an-oligarchy-60277; Martin Gilens and Benjamin I.
Page, ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens’, Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (2014): 564–81, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595.↩
CHAPTER 4: ABANDONED EXPERIMENTS I: FAILED FARMERS 1. Ferguson, ‘The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East’; Douglas P. Fry and Geneviève Souillac, ‘Prehistoric Warfare’, in Oxford Bibliographies in Military History (2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199791279-0224.↩ 2. Fry and Souillac, ‘Prehistoric Warfare’; Augusta McMahon, ‘From Sedentism to States, 10,000–3000 BCE’, in A Companion to the Ancient Near East, ed. Daniel C. Snell (Wiley, 2020), 27–43, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119362500, chap. 2.↩ 3. Oana Borcan, Ola Olsson, and Louis Putterman, ‘Transition to Agriculture and First State Presence: A Global Analysis’, Explorations in Economic History 82 (2021): 1, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2021.101404.↩ 4. Unintentional domestication of crops dates back at least to 25,000 years ago as hunter-gatherers developed new tools and killed off large mammals. In a lighter sense it began 780,000 years ago with the first use of fire to shape landscapes, selecting for more fire-tolerant plants (especially pyrophytes and pyrophiles) while killing off others. Robin G. Allaby et al., ‘Emerging Evidence of Plant Domestication as a Landscape-Level Process’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution 37, no. 3 (2022): 268–79, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2021.11.002; ↩ 5. Amaia Arranz-Otaegui and Joe Roe, ‘Revisiting the Concept of the “Neolithic Founder Crops” in Southwest Asia’, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 32, no. 5 (2023): 482, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334- 023-00917-1.↩ 6. Gary M.
Feinman and Jill E. Neitzel, ‘The Social Dynamics of Settling Down’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 69 (2023): 101468, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2022.101468.↩ 7. Stephen Shennan, The First Farmers of Europe: An Evolutionary Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108386029. The most recent evidence suggests that around 3.6 per cent of the migrating farmers interbred with the local hunter-gatherers: Joaquim Fort and Joaquim Pérez-Losada, ‘Interbreeding Between Farmers and Hunter-Gatherers Along the Inland and Mediterranean Routes of Neolithic Spread in Europe’, Nature Communications 15, no. 1 (2024): 7032, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51335-4.↩ 8. Some put it down to a combination of population growth, technological innovation, and climate change: Gregory K. Dow and Clyde G. Reed, ‘The Origins of Sedentism: Climate, Population, and Technology’, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 119 (2015): 56–71, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2015.07.007.↩ 9. There are some important caveats: some regions strangely started getting smaller before picking up agriculture, while others experienced increases as they became lactose tolerant and more reliant on animal products (what’s known as the ‘lactase growth hypothesis’).
Nonetheless, the general picture between ancient foragers and post-iceage farmers is one of reducing height. The most recent and nuanced study of 3,507 skeletons from 366 sites can be found in Jay T.
Stock et al., ‘Long-Term Trends in Human Body Size Track Regional Variation in Subsistence Transitions and Growth Acceleration Linked to Dairying’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 4 (2023): 1, 3–7, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2209482119. For a useful overview of the literature, consult Amanda Mummert et al., ‘Stature and Robusticity during the Agricultural Transition: Evidence from the Bioarchaeological Record’, Economics & Human Biology 9, no. 3 (2011): 284–301, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2011.03.004. If you’re looking for a concrete number, then one of the most robust is that early European farmers were 3.82cm shorter than expected (given their genetics) relative to Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers. See Stephanie Marciniak et al., ‘An Integrative Skeletal and Paleogenomic Analysis of Stature Variation Suggests Relatively Reduced Health for Early European Farmers’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 15 (2022): 1, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2106743119.↩ 10. Theya Ivitsky Molleson, ‘The People of Abu Hureyra’, in Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureyra, ed. M. T.
Moore, G. C. Hillman, and A. J. Legge (Oxford University Press, 2000), 301–24. The earliest Neolithic villages display evidence of substantial oral infections and ubiquitous enamel defects – Clark Spencer Larsen et al., ‘Bioarchaeology of Neolithic Çatalhöyük Reveals Fundamental Transitions in Health, Mobility, and Lifestyle in Early Farmers’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 26 (2019): 12621, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1904345116. The association between ill health and agriculture was not lost on our ancestors. The meaning of the Greek root for the word parasite is ‘beside the grain’.↩ 11. Happiness is, in many ways, ensuring that your desires are met. You can do so by either producing a lot or desiring little. Egalitarian huntergatherers take the second path, wanting mainly friendship and leisure time over the endless pursuit of more material luxuries. These tendencies have earned egalitarian foragers the mantle of ‘the original affluent society’. See Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Routledge Classics, 2017), chap. 1.↩ 12. On peasants rarely producing a surplus, see Scott, Against the Grain, 152, 270; A. V. Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
When a peasant family has more working than non-working members they will also reduce their activity once subsistence is reached. They aren’t particularly interested in producing surplus food. Richard B. Lee, Irven DeVore, and WennerGren Foundation for Anthropological Research, eds., Man the Hunter (Aldine Transaction, 1968); Ronald M.
Berndt and Catherine Berndt, Man, Land and Myth in North Australia: The Gunwinggu People (Michigan State University Press, 1970); Hayden, The Power of Feasts.↩ 13. For a review and nuanced discussion of the principle of least effort, see B. G. Trigger, ‘Monumental Architecture: A Thermodynamic Explanation of Symbolic Behaviour’, World Archaeology 22, no. 2 (1990): 122–4, https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1990.9980135. The principle of least effort doesn’t govern all human activities. Foragers will still spend a fair bit of time acquiring foods that are renowned for their flavour or prestige.
But it’s accurate as a rule of thumb when it comes to the daily business of feeding a group.↩ 14. For an overview, see Chris J. Stevens, Enrico R. Crema, and Shinya Shoda, ‘The Importance of Wild Resources as a Reflection of the Resilience and Changing Nature of Early Agricultural Systems in East Asia and Europe’, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 10 (2022): 10, https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.1017909.↩ 15. For the floodplain hypothesis, see Scott, Against the Grain, 63–7. For a broader discussion, especially on the importance of wider demography, see Shennan, The First Farmers of Europe.↩ 16. At the individual level, modern analyses suggest that higher reliance on farming correlates strongly with higher fertility. However, context and culture matter significantly. See Abigail E. Page et al., ‘Women’s Subsistence Strategies Predict Fertility Across Cultures, But Context Matters’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121, no. 9 (2024): e2318181121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2318181121.↩ 17. Scott, Against the Grain, 47–56; Hayden, The Power of Feasts, chap.
5.↩ 18. Hayden, The Power of Feasts, chap. 4.↩ 19. Ibid., chap. 5; Brian Hayden and Suzanne Villeneuve, ‘A Century of Feasting Studies’, Annual Review of Anthropology 40, no. 1 (2011): 433–49, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145740.
Feasting can also offer other benefits, including creating social alliances: see Brian Hayden, ‘The Proof Is in the Pudding: Feasting and the Origins of Domestication’, Current Anthropology 50, no. 5 (2009): 597–601, https://doi.org/10.1086/605110.↩ 20. Trigger, ‘Monumental Architecture’. ↩ 21. Zuzana Hofmanová et al., ‘Early Farmers from across Europe Directly Descended from Neolithic Aegeans’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 25 (2016): 6886–91, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1523951113.↩ 22. Shennan, The First Farmers of Europe.↩ 23. Detlef Gronenborn and Barbara Horejs, ‘Expansion of Farming in Western Eurasia, 9600 – 4000 Cal BC (Update Vers. 2023.1)’, Zenodo (2023), https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.10047818.↩ 24. Stephen Shennan et al., ‘Regional Population Collapse Followed Initial Agriculture Booms in Mid-Holocene Europe’, Nature Communications 4, no. 1 (2013): 2486, https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms3486.↩ 25. Shennan, The First Farmers of Europe.↩ 26. Fibiger et al., ‘Conflict, Violence, and Warfare Among Early Farmers in Northwestern Europe’, 8.↩ 27. Shennan, The First Farmers of Europe; Bevan et al., ‘Holocene Fluctuations in Human Population’.↩ 28. Shennan, The First Farmers of Europe.↩ 29. Fibiger et al., ‘Conflict, Violence, and Warfare Among Early Farmers in Northwestern Europe’.↩ 30. The Navajo term ‘Anasazi’, which means ‘ancient enemy’, was previously used and understandably discarded.↩ 31. Timothy A. Kohler, R. Kyle Bocinsky, and Darcy Bird, ‘Fluctuat Nec Mergitur’, in How Worlds Collapse, ed. Miguel Centeno et al.
(Routledge, 2023), 159–60, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003331384- 11.↩ 32. Ibid., 160. On the declining rate of violence, see Timothy A.
Kohler et al., ‘The Better Angels of Their Nature: Declining Violence Through Time Among Prehispanic Farmers of the Pueblo Southwest’, American Antiquity 79, no. 3 (2014): 444–64, https://doi.org/10.7183/0002- 7316.79.3.444.↩ 33. Bevan et al., ‘Holocene Fluctuations in Human Population’.↩ 34. Scott, Against the Grain, 73, 124. Scott refers to this unprecedented concentration of grain, animals, and humans, as ‘Neolithic resettlement camps’.↩ 35. Ibid., chap. 3.↩ 36. Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations: A Millennium in North America (Random House, 2024), chap. 3; Scott, Against the Grain, chaps. 3 and 5. This is especially true for those that had yet to develop practices of quarantine and containment (although there are references to separating the sick from the healthy dating back to Leviticus in the Bible).↩ 37. Frederik Valeur Seersholm et al., ‘Repeated Plague Infections Across Six Generations of Neolithic Farmers’, Nature 632, no.
8023 (2024): 114–21, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07651-2.↩ 38.
Scott, Against the Grain, 97. Most acute infections don’t leave a trace on bones, and ancient DNA studies are still relatively new.↩ 39. Gregory Johnson, ‘Organizational Structure and Scalar Stress’, in Theory and Explanation in Archaeology, ed. Colin Renfrew, Michael Rowlands, and Barbara A. Segraves-Whallon (Academic Press, 1982), 389–421. On the super-linear scaling of some crimes, see Marcos Oliveira, ‘More Crime in Cities? On the Scaling Laws of Crime and the Inadequacy of Per Capita Rankings – A Cross-Country Study’, Crime Science 10, no. 1 (2021): 27, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40163- 021-00155-8.↩ 40. Dániel Kondor et al., ‘Explaining Population Booms and Busts in MidHolocene Europe’, preprint, SocArXiv, 11 May 2022, https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/c32up.↩ CHAPTER 5: ABANDONED EXPERIMENTS II: VOTING WITH FEET AND FIRE 1. Louis Wirth, ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, American Journal of Sociology 44, no. 1 (1938): 1. This is usually known as the sociological definition of a city and is widely used in archaeology alongside the functional definitions which stress how the activities in a settlement’s centre impact the surrounding rural areas. There is no clear quantitative definition for a city; however, under these definitions many of the cases covered here would be cities, including Taosi, Cahokia, Moundville, Tiwanaku, Monte Albán, and San Lorenzo.
Others, such as Jenne-Jeno, are more disputable. It’s worth noting that cities aren’t always permanent, but that is a realm of scholarly contestation which is beyond the scope of this book.↩ 2. For an overview of the archaeology of Çatalhöyük, see Ian Hodder, Çatalhöyük, the Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Turkey’s Ancient Town (Thames & Hudson, 2011); Ian Hodder, ‘Çatalhöyük: The Leopard Changes Its Spots. A Summary of Recent Work’, Anatolian Studies 64 (2014): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0066154614000027; Justin Jennings, Killing Civilization: A Reassessment of Early Urbanism and Its Consequences (University of New Mexico Press, 2016), chap. 4. Note that there were signs of interpersonal violence. More recent evidence suggests that the population of the city could have been as low as 600–800: Ian Kuijt and Arkadiusz Marciniak, ‘How Many People Lived in the World’s Earliest Villages? Reconsidering Community Size and Population Pressure at Neolithic Çatalhöyük’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 74 (2024): 101573, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101573. If this is true, Çatalhöyük suddenly looks much less exceptional. It is just another Neolithic village, albeit one with a fascinating culture. Such a low population would also undermine the idea that the abandonment of Çatalhöyük was due to scalar stress, and lend more weight to the idea of this being a slow, intentional move away from inequality.↩ 3. Hodder, Çatalhöyük, the Leopard’s Tale, 98.↩ 4. Jennings, Killing Civilization, chap. 4; Samuel Bowles and Mattia Fochesato, ‘The Origins of Enduring Economic Inequality’, Santa Fe Institute, 31 January 2024, 29–33, https://sites.santafe.edu/~bowles/wp-content/uploads/Text-JEL-31-Janse nt-.pdf.↩ 5. Larsen et al., ‘Bioarchaeology of Neolithic Çatalhöyük’.↩ 6.
Jennings, Killing Civilization, chap. 4; Lech Czerniak and Arkadiusz Marciniak, ‘Abandoning Çatalhöyük: Re-Shuffling, Re-Location and Migration as the Means of Mitigating Social Unease in the Late Neolithic’, in 6000 BC, ed. Peter F. Biehl and Eva Rosenstock (Cambridge University Press, 2022), 136–57, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107337640.011.↩ 7. Justin Jennings et al., ‘Cities, Surplus, and the State: A Re-Evaluation’, Journal of Urban Archaeology, 2021, 19–21, https://doi.org/10.1484/J.JUA.5.126592; Jennings, Killing Civilization, chap. 7.↩ 8. Jennings et al., ‘Cities, Surplus, and the State’, 19–21; Jennings, Killing Civilization, chap. 7.↩ 9.
Jennings et al., ‘Cities, Surplus, and the State’, 20–21.↩ 10. For an overview, see David Wengrow, ‘The Origins of Civic Life – A Global Perspective’, Origini: Preistoria e Protostoria Delle Civiltà Antiche – Prehistory and Protohistory of Ancient Civilizations 42, no.
2 (2018): 25–44.↩ 11. He Nu, ‘Taosi: An Archaeological Example of Urbanization as a Political Center in Prehistoric China’, Archaeological Research in Asia 14 (2018): 21, 26, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ara.2017.03.001.↩ 12. Ibid., 24; He Nu, ‘The Longshan Period Site of Taosi in Southern Shanxi Province’, in A Companion to Chinese Archaeology, ed. Anne P. Underhill (Wiley, 2013), 269.↩ 13. Jennings et al., ‘Cities, Surplus, and the State’, 22.↩ 14. David Cheetham and Jeffrey P. Blomster, ‘Materializing the San Lorenzo Olmecs’, in The Early Olmec and Mesoamerica, ed. Jeffrey P.
Blomster and David Cheetham (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 9–36, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316228098.002; Jennings et al., ‘Cities, Surplus, and the State’, 21–3.↩ 15. Some contend it may have allowed the use of forearms and even paddles.↩ 16. Linda M. Nicholas and Gary M. Feinman, ‘The Foundation of Monte Albán, Intensification, and Growth: Coactive Processes and Joint Production’, Frontiers in Political Science 4 (2022): 4–6, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2022.805047.↩ 17. There was also a temporary disruption to its collective rule in 200 CE as Monte Albán expanded. This was reversed within decades, for what exact reason we do not know.↩ 18. Gary M. Feinman and Linda M. Nicholas, ‘After Monte Albán in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca: A Reassessment’, in Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies, ed. Ronald K. Faulseit (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), 59. For an accessible overview of the Monte Albán site, see Jennings, Killing Civilization, chap. 9.↩ 19. It may have been the seat of an empire, or just an oversized city. For an overview of the debates about whether Teotihuacan was centralized or decentralized, see Tom Froese, Carlos Gershenson, and Linda R. Manzanilla, ‘Can Government Be Self-Organized? A Mathematical Model of the Collective Social Organization of Ancient Teotihuacan, Central Mexico’, PLOS ONE 9, no. 10 (2014): e109966, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0109966.↩ 20. George L. Cowgill, Ancient Teotihuacan: Early Urbanism in Central Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Kenn Hirth, David M.
Carballo, and Bárbara Arroyo, eds., Teotihuacan: The World Beyond the City (Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2020).
Smith et al. estimate the Gini coefficient of Teotihuacan to be 0.12 (Michael E. Smith et al., ‘Quantitative Measures of Wealth Inequality in Ancient Central Mexican Communities’, Advances in Archaeological Practice 2, no. 4 (2014): 311–23, https://doi.org/10.7183/2326-3768.2.4.XX, 321). In contrast, the Gini of Denmark is around 0.35.↩ 21. For good overviews, see Guy Middleton, Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 222–43; Deborah L. Nichols and Ryan H.
Collins, ‘Episodes of the Feathered Serpent: Aztec Imperialism and Collapse’, in How Worlds Collapse, ed. Miguel Centeno et al.
(Routledge, 2023), https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003331384-12, 174–6.
The elite revolt theory is best advocated for by Linda R. Manzanilla, ‘Cooperation and Tensions in Multiethnic Corporate Societies Using Teotihuacan, Central Mexico, as a Case Study’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 30 (2015): 9210–15, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1419881112. On climate change, see Jungjae Park, Roger Byrne, and Harald Böhnel, ‘Late Holocene Climate Change in Central Mexico and the Decline of Teotihuacan’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109, no. 1 (2019): 104–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1488577.↩ 22. For an overview, see Middleton, Understanding Collapse.↩ 23. Justin Jennings and Timothy K. Earle, ‘Urbanization, State Formation, and Cooperation: A Reappraisal’, Current Anthropology 57, no. 4 (2016): 474–93, https://doi.org/10.1086/687510.↩ 24. John Wayne Janusek, Ancient Tiwanaku (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 191.↩ 25. Kenny Sims, ‘After State Collapse: How Tumilaca Communities Developed in the Upper Moquegua Valley, Peru’, in After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, ed. Glenn M. Schwartz and John Jackson Nichols (University of Arizona Press, 2006), 114–37; Nicola Sharratt, ‘Collapse and Cohesion: Building Community in the Aftermath of Tiwanaku State Breakdown’, World Archaeology 48, no.
1 (2016): 144–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2015.1110043; Janusek, Ancient Tiwanaku. For decent overviews of recent archaeology on collapse in the site, see Middleton, Understanding Collapse, 276–98; Guy D. Middleton, ‘Collapse Studies in Archaeology from 2012 to 2023’, Journal of Archaeological Research, 9 (2024): 33–5, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-024-09196-4.↩ 26. See Jason Nesbitt’s coverage of Tiwanaku in Kemp et al., ‘Societal Collapse as a Powershift’.↩ 27. For an overview, see Middleton, Understanding Collapse, 276–98.
Pukura was built around a thirty-two-metre-high terraced platform that was used for rituals. It was a publicly accessible monument. The first signs of inequality emerge with some trying to restrict access to the platform and control the production of obsidian, polychrome pottery, and stone sculptures. The site was rapidly abandoned as people returned to autonomous villages. See Jennings and Earle, ‘Urbanization, State Formation, and Cooperation’, 478; Janusek, Ancient Tiwanaku, 88–95.↩ 28. I’ve left Taosi and Çatalhöyük out of this graph, as they are far older and extend the timeline too far.↩ 29. There were differences: Çatalhöyük was not a city and its abandonment took centuries, while Tiwanaku was a state that fell apart in decades.↩ 30. Pauketat, Cahokia, 131–4; DuVal, Native Nations, chap. 1. It also may have helped decrease conflict. Like most later empires, the borders around Cahokia’s territory became hotter with conflict, while its own territory was cooled with less violence. Some have even compared it to the peace that the Roman Empire provided to conquered peoples: the Pax Romana. However, the idea of Pax Cahokia is currently disputed.↩ 31. For an overview of the timeline of Cahokia and key contributors to its collapse, see Benson, Pauketat, and Cook, ‘Cahokia’s Boom and Bust in the Context of Climate Change’; Tainter, ‘Cahokia’; DuVal, Native Nations, chap. 2.↩ 32. Note that, as covered earlier, ‘Goliath’ does not mean ‘state’. Few would argue that Cahokia, the Huhugam, the Puebloans, or the multiple mound-based Mississippi mini-kingdom ever became fully fledged states. That doesn’t change the fact that they were becoming unequal dominance hierarchies in which rules were imposed through force.↩ 33. Pauketat, Cahokia, chap. 10.↩ 34. Moundville looks much like Cahokia but with some important differences. The most noticeable is the absence of any sign of slavery, coerced labour, or human sacrifice. ↩ 35. Vernon James Knight Jr and Vincas P. Steponaitis, ‘A New History of Moundville’, in Archaeology of the Moundville Chiefdom (University of Alabama Press, 1998), 1–25.↩ 36. For an overview, see DuVal, Native Nations, chaps. 1, 2.↩ 37. In the final stages of the collapse the most populous areas were having to hunt more and different kinds of animals, suggesting they were running low on food.↩ 38. On the collapse period, consult Rebecca M. Dean, ‘Hunting Intensification and the Hohokam “Collapse”’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26, no. 1 (2007): 109–32, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2006.03.010; J. Brett Hill et al., ‘The “Collapse” of Cooperative Hohokam Irrigation in the Lower Salt River Valley’, Journal of the Southwest 57, no. 4 (2015): 609–74; DuVal, Native Nations, chap. 2.↩ 39. David J. Hally, ‘The Settlement Patterns of Mississippian Chiefdoms in Northern Georgia’, in Settlement Pattern Studies in the Americas: Fifty Years Since Virú, ed. Brian R. Billman and Gary M. Feinman (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 1999), chap.
8; John H. Blitz, ‘Mississippian Chiefdoms and the Fission-Fusion Process’, American Antiquity 64, no. 4 (1999): 577–92, https://doi.org/10.2307/2694206.
For the model of prestige and status being central to both individual and group warfare in the Mississippian kingdoms, see Karl T. Steinen, ‘Ambushes, Raids, and Palisades: Mississippian Warfare in the Interior Southeast’, Southeastern Archaeology 11, no. 2 (1992): 132–7. On a lack of control mechanisms, see Jaeweon Shin et al., ‘Scale and Information-Processing Thresholds in Holocene Social Evolution’, Nature Communications 11, no. 1 (2020): 2394, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16035-9. Control mechanisms in the original research are framed as ‘information processing’ mechanisms, such as text, money, writing, and an administrative hierarchy.↩ 40.
Hayden, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory; Hayden, The Power of Feasts.↩ 41. Benson, Pauketat, and Cook, ‘Cahokia’s Boom and Bust in the Context of Climate Change’; David P. Pompeani et al., ‘Severe Little Ice Age Drought in the Midcontinental United States During the Mississippian Abandonment of Cahokia’, Scientific Reports 11, no. 1 (2021): 13829, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-92900-x. For an overview of temperature change in the US south-west and the predominance of cooler, more drought-prone conditions, see Andrew Gillreath-Brown, R. Kyle Bocinsky, and Timothy A. Kohler, ‘A Low-Frequency Summer Temperature Reconstruction for the United States Southwest, 3000 BC–AD 2000’, The Holocene 34, no. 4 (2024): 451–66, https://doi.org/10.1177/09596836231219482.↩ 42. Washington Matthews, ‘Noqoìlpi, the Gambler: A Navajo Myth’, Journal of American Folklore 2, no. 5 (1889): 89, https://doi.org/10.2307/533316. Much like modern investors he turned gambling into enormous wealth. See also Stephen H. Lekson and Catherine M. Cameron, ‘The Abandonment of Chaco Canyon, the Mesa Verde Migrations, and the Reorganization of the Pueblo World’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 14, no. 2 (1995): 184–202, https://doi.org/10.1006/jaar.1995.1010. There are many well-known problems with oral traditions, including their lack of precision in chronology (e.g. a lack of precise dates), often wide variation in tales, and problems with non-locals interpreting highly contextual stories.
Despite this, there is an emerging acknowledgement that oral traditions can be as reliable and valuable as written texts if used wisely. For some accessible discussions, see Stephen E. Nash, ‘The Underestimated Reliability of Oral Histories’, The Atlantic, 22 September 2018, www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/09/deadsea-scrolls-oral-writte n-history/571039/; Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, chap. 6.5. Oral traditions are now regularly used across the historical sciences. ↩ 43.
Joshua B. Nelson, Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 132– 3.↩ 44. Lynn S. Teague, ‘Prehistory and the Traditions of the O’Odham and Hopi’, KIVA 58, no. 4 (1993): 438–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/00231940.1993.11758220.↩ 45. For a summary of the egalitarian power-sharing arrangements postcollapse, see DuVal, Native Nations, chap. 2.↩ 46. I’m indebted to Tim Kohler for raising this hypothesis with me during an initial round of reviews for this book.↩ 47.
Blitz, ‘Mississippian Chiefdoms and the Fission-Fusion Process’.↩ 48.
Jennings et al., ‘Cities, Surplus, and the State’; Jennings, Killing Civilization; Jennings and Earle, ‘Urbanization, State Formation, and Cooperation’.↩ 49. Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2011).↩ 50. Gary M. Feinman and Linda M. Nicholas, ‘Framing Inequality in Ancient Civilizations’, in Poverty and Inequality in Early Civilizations, ed. Richard Bussman and Tobias Helms (Verlag Dr.
Rudolf Habelt GmbH, 2020), 107–17, 113.↩ 51. Dan Lawrence et al., ‘Long-Term Trends in Settlement Persistence in Southwest Asia: Implications for Sustainable Urbanism, Past, Present and Future’, Urban Studies 62, no. 3 (2023): 543–59, https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231161245. One caveat here is that their measurement of centralization and hierarchy (what they call ‘complexity’) is time. That is, in general, settlements tend to become more unequal, hierarchical, stratified, and war-like as centuries pass.
Compare Çatalhöyük to the Assyrian Empire. While imperfect, this is a decent proxy, and one of the few we can use, given the available evidence. It could also highlight an additional cause for declining longevity: conquest. As the first Goliaths arose, they razed and sacked many nearby settlements. For many that remained, the incentive to flee from these targets must have been strong. We can then expect that, over time, unequal settlements would start to become more longlasting while egalitarian ones would lose their longevity. While this is the best evidence we have for now, we should stay sceptical. The analysis is based on the sparse remains of ceramics, which can easily overlook a hiatus in occupation of one or two centuries (personal communication from Tim Kohler).↩ 52. There is an interesting preliminary analysis of hundreds of sites covering 20,000 years (using the GINI Database) which suggests that inequality is slightly correlated with greater longevity. This correlation increases over time as settlements get bigger.
Larger settlements in larger systems also tend to last longer. See Dan Lawrence et al., ‘Two Sides of Sustainability: Comparing Trends in Wealth Inequality and Settlement Persistence in Preindustrial Societies’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (forthcoming). At first blush, this may seem to be in tension with the argument. That’s not the case. First, it can’t tell as much about the first Goliaths per se since it is covering a far larger span of time, including after Goliaths become established and spread. Second, the authors themselves highlight that this is not a case of inequality leading to more persistent settlements over time.
Instead, to me, the most likely explanation here is that the long-lasting settlements are the centres of larger systems of extraction (Goliaths). As time goes on and Goliaths become more established, these settlements become less likely to be abandoned. They eat and destroy smaller, more egalitarian settlements (hence decreasing their persistence) and become more embedded in the culture and landscape.
As we’ll see in Part II, Goliaths both tend to be resurrected (meaning big sites are rarely completely abandoned) and to spread at the expense of other societies.↩ 53. Stéphen Rostain et al., ‘Two Thousand Years of Garden Urbanism in the Upper Amazon’, Science 383, no. 6679 (2024): 183–9, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi6317; Heiko Prümers et al., ‘Lidar Reveals Pre-Hispanic Low-Density Urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon’, Nature 606, no. 7913 (2022): 325–8, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04780-4.↩ CHAPTER 6: GOLIATH RISES 1. Pauline Wilson Wiessner, Akii Tumu, and Nitze Pupu, Historical Vines: Enga Networks of Exchange, Ritual, and Warfare in Papua New Guinea (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998).↩ 2. Adapted from Fuller et al., ‘Convergent Evolution and Parallelism in Plant Domestication Revealed by an Expanding Archaeological Record’, fig. 1. Note, this only includes archaeologically documented cases, not biogeographically inferred.
These don’t change the underlying conclusions. Eastern Tibet domesticated buckwheat and yak. While it did eventually develop a state – the Tibetan Empire in 618 CE – this was after interaction with the Chinese. Hence it usually isn’t considered an original state. Amazonia cultivated peanuts and manioc, neither of which are effective Goliath fuel. The western Savannah had cowpea, fonio, and African rice. It is in the direct vicinity of the western Sahel, and African rice was a staple of the Ghana Empire. The eastern Savannah domesticated cattle and sorghum. Notably, domesticated cattle did lead to hierarchical pastoralist groups, and eventually confederations of raiders known as the Ṣanhājah.↩ 3. In most of the literature these are usually referred to as ‘pristine states’.
I’ve used the term ‘original’ here instead since it is more intuitive and avoids unnecessary positive connotations.↩ 4. The original version of ‘Circumscription Theory’ proposed by Carneiro emphasized that such conditions created a pressure for war.
However, this has been recently challenged. See Zinkina, Korotayev, and Andreev, ‘Circumscription Theory of the Origins of the State’. Most initial states did not have neighbours to conquer. Instead, the stronger version of this is that people simply had less ability to flee from a centralized elite. See Scott, Against the Grain, 150–52.↩ 5. People could and did still, of course, travel across and on rivers. The point here is that both geography and population density generally constrained (although never entirely prevented) movement.↩ 6. Peter Turchin et al., ‘Disentangling the Evolutionary Drivers of Social Complexity: A Comprehensive Test of Hypotheses’, Science Advances 8, no. 25 (2022): 7–8, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abn3517.↩ 7. Domestication refers to a co-evolutionary process in which one species shapes the fitness of another to gain more resources or services. For plants, this meant a human-managed environment selected for plants, especially specific cereals and grains. The domestication process did not start with the Holocene. The use of fire to prepare food dates to around 780,000 years ago, several hundred thousand years before Homo sapiens. It is thought that around 25,000 years ago both the killoff of large mammals and new tools used for foraging changed both the environment and which crops had a competitive advantage. Plant domestication was not an intentional or rapid process, at least not to begin with. The initial changes to cereals, such as larger, nonshattering seeds, would have been largely imperceptible to the eyes of early farmers; see M. D.
Purugganan, ‘What Is Domestication?’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution 37, no. 8 (2022): 663–71, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2022.04.006; Allaby et al., ‘Genetic Revelations of a New Paradigm of Plant Domestication as a Landscape Level Process’, 324–8; Zohar et al., ‘Evidence for the Cooking of Fish 780,000 Years Ago at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel’.↩ 8. Joram Mayshar, Omer Moav, and Luigi Pascali, ‘The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability?’, Journal of Political Economy 130, no. 4 (2022): 1091, https://doi.org/10.1086/718372.↩ 9. Thilo R. Huning and Fabian Wahl, ‘You Reap What You Know: Appropriability and the Origin of European States’, European Journal of Political Economy 79 (2023): 102432, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2023.102432.↩ 10. Scott, Against the Grain, 128.↩ 11. Timothy A. Kohler et al., ‘Greater Post-Neolithic Wealth Disparities in Eurasia Than in North America and Mesoamerica’, Nature 551, no. 7682 (2017): 619–22, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24646. The domestication of animals appears to have been much more of a revolution. It was speedy and most likely intentional. ↩ 12. Jared Diamond, ‘Evolution, Consequences and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication’, Nature 418, no. 6898 (2002): 700–707, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01019; Thomas Cucchi and Benjamin Arbuckle, ‘Animal Domestication: From Distant Past to Current Development and Issues’, Animal Frontiers 11, no. 3 (2021): 6, https://doi.org/10.1093/af/vfab013. The extinction of megafauna – such as the dire wolf, mammoth, and diprotodon (essentially a 3.5- tonne, 1.8-metre-tall wombat) – driven by both climate change and, to a lesser extent, human pressure, also influenced the spread of domesticates.↩ 13. Adapted from Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, table 3. I’ve used Scott’s estimates for labour intensity, added in a subjective judgement of visibility, and specified his estimates of storability (refining these to month and year estimates, rather than low/medium/high judgements).↩ 14. It may have even been a pristine state, although this is disputed. See H.
J. M. Claessen, ‘The Emergence of Pristine States’, Social Evolution & History 15, no. 1 (2016): 25.↩ 15. C. Leipe et al., ‘Discontinuous Spread of Millet Agriculture in Eastern Asia and Prehistoric Population Dynamics’, Science Advances 5, no. 9 (2019): 9, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aax6225.↩ 16. Adam S. Green makes the strongest case for the egalitarian order of the Indus in ‘Killing the Priest-King: Addressing Egalitarianism in the Indus Civilization’, Journal of Archaeological Research 29, no. 2 (2021): 153–202, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-020-09147-9.↩ 17. Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023), 93. ↩ 18.
Leo von Geusau, Akha Internal History: Marginalization and the Ethnic Alliance System (Curzon, 2011), 134.↩ 19. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed. It’s a perspective that isn’t without controversy. For critiques, see Victor Lieberman, ‘A Zone of Refuge in Southeast Asia?
Reconceptualizing Interior Spaces’, Journal of Global History 5, no. 2 (2010): 333–46, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022810000112; Jean Michaud, ‘Editorial – Zomia and Beyond’, Journal of Global History 5, no.
2 (2010): 187– 214, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022810000057.
However, even these critiques still usually praise the work and simply suggest that it is more complex than Scott often proposes. For instance, people fled to Zomia to escape not just states but also popular conflict.
These are important nuances to Scott’s argument, not refutations. ↩ 20.
On the Great Dismal Swamp and maroonage in the antebellum, see Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles (New York University Press, 2014).
It’s worth noting that some even grew lootable resources such as rice. A key point here is that each source of Goliath fuel will push a society towards a Goliath structure, but it doesn’t automatically create a Goliath.
A group with lootable resources but many exit options, few monopolizable weapons, and strong egalitarian ethics may never develop a Goliath.↩ 21. Angela M. Chira, Russell D. Gray, and Carlos A.
Botero, ‘Geography Is Not Destiny: A Quantitative Test of Diamond’s Axis of Orientation Hypothesis’, Evolutionary Human Sciences 6 (2024): e5, https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2023.34.↩ 22. Mayshar, Moav, and Pascali, ‘The Origin of the State’, 1097, 1138.↩ 23. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, chap. 6.↩ 24. This art of not being governed looks similar to the nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers of today. This has led some to claim that most huntergatherers, including the egalitarian Ju’/hoansi and central African foragers, are simply like the peoples of Zomia: their egalitarian, nomadic way of life is a way of avoiding state capture, rather than a window onto life in the Palaeolithic. For instance, many have claimed that central African hunter-gatherers live in hostile lands because they were pushed there by Bantu farmers who forcibly took all the arable land. This view is mistaken. Comparisons of genetic and archaeological data against reconstructions of the climate show that central African foragers have inhabited their current areas of residence since 120,000 years ago. Their genes, instruments, and languages all seem to have ancient origins rather than having been influenced by or adopted from Bantu farmers. And, as covered earlier, many of the nomadic-egalitarian foragers of Africa seem to have genetically diverged from most of humanity over a hundred thousand years ago.
The people of Zomia are simply adopting an old way of life which prevented rulers and inequalities from emerging within a society. It just so happened to have the added benefit of preventing being captured by rulers from outside of a society. This scepticism is best expressed by James C. Scott in his review of Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday (Scott, ‘Crops, Towns, Government’, London Review of Books, 21 November 2013, www.lrb.co.uk/thepaper/v35/n22/james-c.-scott/crops-towns-government ). He finishes his critique with the line ‘We have virtually no credible evidence about the world until yesterday and, until we do, the only defensible intellectual position is to shut up.’ While Scott may be my favourite intellectual, he is simply, profoundly wrong on this one. For the evidence on central African hunter-gatherers, see Padilla-Iglesias et al., ‘Population Interconnectivity over the Past 120,000 Years Explains Distribution and Diversity of Central African Hunter-Gatherers’; Padilla-Iglesias et al., ‘Cultural Evolution of Central African HunterGatherers Reflects a Deep History of Interconnectivity’.
Essentially, anything from Camilla Padilla-Iglesias on human origins is excellent.↩ 25. Echoed by the archaeologist Bruce Trigger in his Understanding Early Civilizations. He analysed seven early societies (Egypt, Mesopotamia, North China, the Maya, the Inka/Inca, the Aztecs, and the Yoruba in Benin), noting the close similarities in basic social structure. The evolution I’m talking about here is usually referred to as ‘macrocultural evolution’ or ‘cultural macroevolution’: that is, the evolution of culture not just at a small scale, but at the largest level of states and societies. This is usually driven by competition between groups, or ‘multi-level selection’ (a process whereby natural selection operates on the level not just of genes or individuals, but of groups at the highest level). For a general discussion, see Russell D. Gray and Joseph Watts, ‘Cultural Macroevolution Matters’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 30 (2017): 7846–52. To avoid the jargon I’ll be using ‘Goliath evolution’, or occasionally ‘cultural evolution’, rather than cultural macroevolution.↩ 26. What counted as a day trip depended on the land you had to traverse and how you could move your troops through it. Roads and horses, or ships upon easily navigable rivers helped; forests, marshes, swamps, hills, and mountains hindered. A lack of technology or unwelcoming terrain could all create further ‘distance’ between rulers and their potential subjects. See Charles S. Spencer, ‘Territorial Expansion and Primary State Formation’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 16 (2010): 7119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1002470107. I’ve excluded Spencer’s cases of the Moche in Peru and the Indus Valley. There is too much debate over whether the Moche were formally a state, and too little evidence that the Indus Valley Civilization was even hierarchical, let alone a state. On the role of geography, see Mann, The Sources of Social Power I, chap. 4; Scott, Against the Grain, chap. 1; Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, chap. 5.↩ 27. On how cultural evolution operates at the level of intergroup competition, see Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, chap. 10. The strongest critique of the idea of larger populations driving cultural evolution comes from K. Vaesen et al., ‘Population Size Does Not Explain Past Changes in Cultural Complexity’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, 16 (2016): E2241–7, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1520288113. Others have even suggested that population size can inhibit cultural evolution (N. Fay et al., ‘Increasing Population Size Can Inhibit Cumulative Cultural Evolution’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, 14 (2019): 6726–31, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1811413116). Yet, that is based on a single, small experiment just using the task of paperplane construction. ↩ 28. Hopefully it’s clear by now that these rarely came as one single package and there were exceptions. As we’ve already covered, the Inca had a large-scale empire but no writing. We’re dealing with strong, general trends here.↩ 29. Christina Cheung et al., ‘Diets, Social Roles, and Geographical Origins of Sacrificial Victims at the Royal Cemetery at Yinxu, Shang China: New Evidence from Stable Carbon, Nitrogen, and Sulfur Isotope Analysis’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 48 (2017): 28–9, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2017.05.006.↩ 30. Michael Winkelman, ‘Political and Demographic-Ecological Determinants of Institutionalised Human Sacrifice’, Anthropological Forum 24, no. 1 (2014): 47, https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2014.860888. Another factor is political organization through alliances, although this is tricky since many alliances are created through coercion.↩ 31. Joseph Watts et al., ‘Ritual Human Sacrifice Promoted and Sustained the Evolution of Stratified Societies’, Nature 532, no. 7598 (2016): 228–31, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17159.↩ 32. Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth (Beresta Books, 2016).↩ 33. David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings (Hau Books, 2017), 181–2.↩ 34. M. Fiskesjö, ‘On the “Raw” and the “Cooked” Barbarians of Imperial China’, Inner Asia, 1, no. 2 (1999): 139–68, https://doi.org/10.1163/146481799793648004; Emma Dench, ‘Barbarian’, in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Thomas Wiedermann (Oxford University Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.1051. For a broader discussion, see Jennings, Killing Civilization. ↩ 35. On the importance of ideological integration being used to create lasting states and empires, see Jack A. Goldstone and John F. Haldon, ‘Ancient States, Empires, and Exploitation: Problems and Perspectives’, in The Dynamics of Ancient Empires, ed. Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2009), 10–15, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195371581.003.0001. We don’t know what beliefs the Natufians adopted to justify their rising inequalities, nor what the priests of Cahokia claimed to be.
Not everyone believed the stories. Across cultures we have regular signs that slaves didn’t think their masters were superior, peasants didn’t think highly of their lords, and citizens didn’t believe their emperor was actually a god. In the antebellum South one curse uttered by slaves was ‘I pray that death and disease shall be forever with them and that their crops shall not multiply’. Nor were states all-powerful.
Early kings often went to great lengths to showcase their strength, yet in reality they frequently had little impact on the day-to-day affairs of most people. Their boasts were a sign more of weakness than strength.
In Southeast Asia, kingdoms and empires were often just seasonal.
During the heavy rains of the monsoon they had little influence beyond the palace walls. Despite this, their influence, and their power over the belief of their citizens, grew over generations and centuries. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (Yale University Press, 1990), 34. The curse is recounted by the black novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.↩ 36. Ian Morris et al., Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve (Princeton University Press, 2015). For an overly detailed exploration of how ideologies throughout history have justified inequality, read Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).↩ 37. Jonathan J. B. Mijs, ‘The Paradox of Inequality: Income Inequality and Belief in Meritocracy Go Hand in Hand’, Socio-Economic Review 19, no. 1 (2021): 7–35, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwy051.↩ 38.
The transition from animism to monotheistic religion is covered in Hervey C. Peoples, Pavel Duda, and Frank W. Marlowe, ‘HunterGatherers and the Origins of Religion’, Human Nature 27, no. 3 (2016): 261–82, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-016-9260-0. Granted, this is an understudied area, but this is by far the best evidence we have. For the analysis of big kings preceding big gods, see Harvey Whitehouse et al., ‘Testing the Big Gods Hypothesis With Global Historical Data: A Review and “Retake”’, Religion, Brain & Behavior 13, no. 2 (2023): 124–66, https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2022.2074085.↩ 39. A similar point is made by Michael Mann in The Sources of Social Power I, chap. 3.↩ 40.
A. E. J. Miller et al., ‘Gender Differences in Strength and Muscle Fiber Characteristics’, European Journal of Applied Physiology and Occupational Physiology 66, no. 3 (1993): 254–62, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00235103. For an indication of what this means, just look at the differences in world records for strength-based sports. The male deadlift and bench-press world records are 501kg and 355kg. For females it is 325kg and 207.5kg. There are similar gaps for Olympic weightlifting as well as javelin, shot-put, and a range of other strength-based sports.↩ 41. A similar point is made in Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale, Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality (Hurst, 2023), chap. 9. Initial physical differences could compound into large social difference in societies where violence was key.↩ 42. Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen, The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide (Columbia University Press, 2020), chap. 2.
For a similar account of the importance of patrilocality, but with less emphasis on violence, see Anil Ananthaswamy and Kate Douglas, ‘The Origins of the Patriarchy’, New Scientist 238, no. 3174 (2018): 34–5, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0262-4079(18)30707-3.↩ 43. Angela Saini, The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality (Beacon Press, 2023), 112.↩ 44.
Eric Berkowitz, Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (Westbourne Press, 2013), 19–21.↩ 45. A similar case for the origins of patriarchy is made by Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at King’s College London and a leading expert on the global history of patriarchy.
She points to inheritable wealth (such as land, domesticated animals, and grain), conquest by male-dominated cultures, and religion as three key factors (among others) that drove the emergence of patriarchy. See Alice Evans, ‘Ten Thousand Years of Patriarchy!’, 3 June 2022, https://www.ggd.world/p/ten-thousandyears-of-patriarchy-1.↩ 46. Monika Karmin et al., ‘A Recent Bottleneck of Y Chromosome Diversity Coincides with a Global Change in Culture’, Genome Research 25, no. 4 (2015): 461–2, https://doi.org/10.1101/gr.186684.114.↩ 47. Shin et al., ‘Scale and Information-Processing Thresholds in Holocene Social Evolution’.↩ 48. Flannery and Marcus, The Creation of Inequality, chap.
10.↩ 49. Timothy Earle, ‘The Evolution of Chiefdoms’, Current Anthropology 30, no. 1 (1989): 87, https://doi.org/10.1086/203717. Earle was technically referring to ‘chiefdoms’.↩ 50. Shin et al., ‘Scale and Information-Processing Thresholds in Holocene Social Evolution’. This echoes the thesis of the Stanford historian and archaeologist Ian Morris.
In Why the West Rules – For Now he argues that when states grew too large without the right measures they often stagnated and collapsed, and he tracks imperial power over time (by their energy capture, information processing (such as written materials), urbanism, and military strength).
Morris spotted a pattern: states in both the east (China) and west (Europe and the Near East) repeatedly hit a ‘ceiling’ to their power before collapsing. Morris also suggests that Rome and the later Song Dynasty hit a ‘hard ceiling’ of what was possible for an agrarian empire.
See Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future (Profile Books, 2011). Goliath evolution and Goliath’s Curse provide one way of explaining this pattern.↩ CHAPTER 7: GOLIATH’S CURSE 1. We used a technique called ‘survival analysis’. For more details, read Marten Scheffer et al., ‘The Vulnerability of Aging States: A Survival Analysis Across Premodern Societies’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 48 (2023), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218834120. There are numerous caveats to keep in mind. First, these terminations range from relatively bloodless coups to deep collapses. Second, the numbers are based on broadly accepted start and end dates in historical and archaeological accounts.
These are often disputed. For instance, did the Eastern Roman Empire (the Byzantine) end in 1453 with the fall of its capital, Constantinople, with the sack of Constantinople and partitioning of its territories by crusaders in 1204, or with a large-scale loss of territory to the Islamic caliphates during the seventh century? To help address this, we used both upper and lower estimates for both the beginning and end of a state. On the Crisis Database study, see Daniel Hoyer et al., ‘All Crises Are Unhappy in Their Own Way: The Role of Societal Instability in Shaping the Past’, preprint, SocArXiv, 15 February 2024, https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/rk4gd. One previous study of forty-two empires found a different ‘ageless’ pattern of mortality: that is an empire was as likely to collapse in its first year as its 100th. See S.
Arbesman, ‘The Life-Spans of Empires’, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History, 44, no. 3 (2011): 127–9, https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2011.577733. Notably, that database is almost eight times smaller than the MOROS database and covers far less time, although this ageless pattern of mortality is what we see in businesses and the extinction of past species in the fossil record. On companies, see M. I. G. Daepp et al., ‘The Mortality of Companies’, Journal of the Royal Society Interface 12, no. 106 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2015.0120. The pattern in fossils was first discovered by the biologist Leigh Van Valen and is usually attributed to the ‘Red Queen Effect’: the constant race to adapt to a changing environment and competition means that a species (or company) can die as a result of one mistake. ↩ 2. Marten Scheffer et al., ‘Loss of Resilience Preceded Transformations of Pre-Hispanic Pueblo Societies’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 18 (2021): e2024397118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2024397118; Sean S.
Downey, W. Randall Haas Jr, and Stephen J. Shennan, ‘European Neolithic Societies Showed Early Warning Signals of Population Collapse’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 35 (2016): 9751–6, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1602504113.↩ 3. For an overview, see Scheidel, The Great Leveler. Scheidel covers a series of collapses from different periods and regions: the Tang Dynasty, the Western Roman Empire, the Lowland Maya, the Bronze Age Mediterranean, Pre-Columbian Americas, the first post-imperial period in ancient Egypt, and, most recently, Somalia. Analysts of inequality disagree over the peaceful mechanisms of wealth redistribution, but largely agree on the more sinister ones. See Pim de Zwart, ‘The Global History of Inequality’, International Review of Social History 64, no. 2 (2019): 309–23. Similarly, former World Bank economist Branko Milanović referred to the ‘malignant mechanisms’ of equalization, such as civil strife, war, and epidemics. See Milanović, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2016). For instance, the role of the two world wars in reversing the wealth imbalances in the earlier twentieth century is well documented; see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017); Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, ‘Inequality in the Long Run’, Science, 344, no. 6186 (2014): 838–43, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1251936. Others have more recently contended that for natural disasters, such as pandemics, levelling is not an automatic outcome. Many shocks since the medieval period have exacerbated rather than alleviated wealth inequality. The result depends on pre-existing institutions. If economic and political power is skewed, then elites can capitalize on a shock to further their advantages. See Bas van Bavel and Marten Scheffer, ‘Historical Effects of Shocks on Inequality: The Great Leveler Revisited’, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8, no. 1 (2021): Article 76, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00763-4. However, this analysis is for more moderate external blows.↩ 4. Stasavage, The Decline and Rise of Democracy, chap. 1; Kohler and Smith, Ten Thousand Years of Inequality, chap. 11.↩ 5. This is often known as the ‘Matthew Principle’, from Matthew 25:29: ‘For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.’↩ 6. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century; Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (Penguin, 2023).↩ 7. Branko Milanović, Peter H. Lindert, and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘PreIndustrial Inequality’, Economic Journal 121, no. 551 (2011): fig. 2, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0297.2010.02403.x. For an accessible summary, see Max Roser, ‘How Unequal Were Pre-Industrial Societies?’, Our World in Data, 2 December 2013, https://ourworldindata.org/how-unequal-were-pre-industrialsocieties.↩ 8.
Branko Milanović, ‘How Rich Were the Rich? An Empirically Based Taxonomy of Pre-Industrial Bases of Wealth’, Explorations in Economic History 93 (2024): 101592, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2024.101592.
The estimate that the 1 per cent had an even bigger share of wealth is my own. It’s a robust trend across countries today and historically that wealth inequality is larger than income inequality. That is for the simple reason that wealth, whether it be in land, gold, or stocks, tends to be more concentrated than income. For modern billionaires such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the majority of their riches come from what they own, not their salaries.↩ 9. In the institutional economics literature, this is usually referred to as a difference between ‘inclusive institutions’ and ‘exclusive institutions’, most notably used in Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Profile Books, 2013). However, this is usually reserved for formal structures such as the rule of law, not the broader set of relations that organize how a society runs. I’ve tried to refine the definition by specifying it as the inequality in each form of power. There are clear metrics for measuring some inequalities in power, such as for wealth (the Gini coefficient, Palma ratio, and others) and decision-making (the V-Dem index, although this notably doesn’t include companies). For others, such as the control of information and violence, there are fewer wellrefined measurements. Ideally, we would have measurements for each of these. Developing them is outside the scope of this book and I’ll be analysing the cases in a broader manner looking at, for instance, how privatized the military is and how autocratic or captured by private interests the government is. Note that the underlying assumption here is that large differences in power tend to result in more extraction (unfair transfers of value) in the long run. It’s a fairly safe assumption when we look across the long arc of history: whether it be patriarchy, wealth inequality in the earliest states, or large differences between groups in military technology, the end result was usually an extractive arrangement.↩ 10. The exact outcome will depend on culture and particularities, of course.↩ 11. Alf Hornborg, ‘Imperial Metabolism: Empire as a Process of Ecologically Unequal Exchange’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, vol. I: The Imperial Experience, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A.
Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0014.↩ 12. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better for Everyone (Penguin, 2010), and The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-being (Allen Lane, 2018).↩ 13. Turchin, End Times; Turchin, Ages of Discord: A StructuralDemographic Analysis of American History (Beresta Books, 2016). We technically don’t know how much of a role popular immiseration played in the case of these early Goliaths.
However, we can see it in a plethora of later collapses (see structural-demographic theory in chapter 11 of this book). ↩ 14. DuVal, Native Nations, chap. 2.↩ 15. Daniel Hoyer et al., ‘Navigating Polycrisis: Long-Run Socio-Cultural Factors Shape Response to Changing Climate’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 378, no. 1889 (2023): 11, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0402; Dániel Kondor et al., ‘Explaining Population Booms and Busts in Mid-Holocene Europe’, preprint, SocArXiv, 11 May 2022, https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/c32up; Bevan et al., ‘Holocene Fluctuations in Human Population’.↩ 16. An initial analysis using the Crisis Database suggests that crises unfold in a range of ways and there is no one paradigmatic pattern to crises (Hoyer et al., ‘All Crises Are Unhappy in Their Own Way’).↩ 17. Timothy M. Lenton, ‘Climate Change and Tipping Points in Historical Collapse’, in How Worlds Collapse, ed. Miguel Centeno et al.
(Routledge, 2023), 261–81, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003331384- 17.
↩ 18. This roughly echoes my colleague Tilman Hartley, who frames this as a crisis being more likely to lead to breakdown or collapse when it involves more ‘scarcity’ (growing vulnerabilities due to diminishing returns, as we’ll cover later), more shocks, and more closed institutions.
See Tilman Hartley, ‘State Crisis Theory: A Systematization of Institutional, Socio-Ecological, DemographicStructural, World-Systems, and Revolutions Research’, preprint, 18 April 2023, https://doi.org/10.32388/G2GNJR.↩ 19. It’s tempting to see collapse as just a matter of bad luck. One review of nineteen cases of collapse found, along with sixty-four different explanations, that 44 per cent were bolts from the blue, such as a changing climate or invaders. But growing vulnerability was just as important as the threats which triggered a collapse. See Joseph A.
Tainter, ‘How Scholars Explain Collapse’, in How Worlds Collapse, ed.
Miguel Centeno et al. (Routledge, 2023), 32–3, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003331384-4/scholars-explain-collapsejosep h-tainter.↩ 20. See U. Büntgen et al., ‘Cooling and Societal Change During the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to Around 660 AD’, Nature Geoscience 9 (2016): 231–6, https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2652; P. N. Peregrine, ‘Climate and Social Change at the Start of the Late Antique Little Ice Age’, The Holocene 30, no. 11 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683620941079.↩ 21. Peregrine, ‘Climate and Social Change at the Start of the Late Antique Little Ice Age’.↩ 22.
Groups have significant differences in whether there are leaders, what privileges and powers those leaders have, how much authority they have and how widely shared that authority is. The difference could be stark: leaderless polities like early Monte Albán or Teotihuacan had no depictions of elites and numerous public buildings; whereas the Maya had boastful leaders glorified on painted murals and rampant inequality.↩ 23. Peregrine, ‘Social Resilience to Climate Change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age’. There are a few caveats to be aware of.
First, the proxies for determining how much different regions cooled during this time are uncertain. Second, measuring social change, let alone the inclusivity of institutions, is always going to be a difficult and imperfect exercise. P. N. Peregrine, ‘Social Resilience to ClimateRelated Disasters in Ancient Societies: A Test of Two Hypotheses’, Weather, Climate, and Society 10, no. 1 (2018): 145–61, https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-17-0052.1.↩ 24. On social capital, see Robert D. Putnam, ‘Social Capital: Measurement and Consequences’, Isuma: Canadian Journal of Policy Research 2 (Spring 2001): 41–51.
Inclusive institutions in particular are what Putnam would call ‘bridging capital’.↩ 25. D. K. Yoon, Jung Eun Kang, and Samuel D. Brody, ‘A Measurement of Community Disaster Resilience in Korea’, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 59, no. 3 (2016): 436–60, https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2015.1016142; Katherine Hore et al., ‘People’s Participation in Disaster-Risk Reduction: Recentering Power’, Natural Hazards Review 21, no. 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1061/(ASCE)NH.1527-6996.0000353; D. O.
Kasdan, ‘Considering Socio-Cultural Factors of Disaster Risk Management’, Disaster Prevention and Management 25, no. 4 (2016): 464–77, https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-03-2016-0055; Ilan Kelman, Jessica Mercer, and J. C. Gaillard, The Routledge Handbook of Disaster Risk Reduction Including Climate Change Adaptation (Routledge, 2017).↩ 26. Hore et al., ‘People’s Participation in Disaster-Risk Reduction’, 1.↩ 27. There is also growing evidence that they promote more economic growth. The main proponents of the theory that political inclusion drives economic growth are Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson: see Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail; Acemoglu et al., ‘Democracy Does Cause Growth’, Journal of Political Economy 127, no. 1 (2019): 47–100, https://doi.org/10.1086/700936. A recent metaanalysis of 2,000 different studies supports this basic idea, with the caveat that the democracy–growth link varies across context: Marco Colagrossi, Domenico Rossignoli, and Mario A. Maggioni, ‘Does Democracy Cause Growth? A Meta-Analysis (of 2000 Regressions)’, European Journal of Political Economy 61 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2019.101824.↩ 28. On collective intelligence, see Lu Hong and Scott E. Page, ‘Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, no. 46 (2004): 16385–9, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0403723101, and ‘Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents’ Journal of Economic Theory 97, no. 1 (2001): 123–63, https://doi.org/10.1006/jeth.2000.2709; Vicky Chuqiao Yang and Anders Sandberg, ‘Collective Intelligence as Infrastructure for Reducing Broad Global Catastrophic Risks’, Proceedings of the Stanford Existential Risks Conference 2023: 194–206, https://doi.org/10.25740/mf606ht6373. On prediction markets, consult Arrow et al., ‘The Promise of Prediction Markets’, Science 320, no.
5878 (2008): 877–8, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1157679. For a general overview of the wisdom of the crowds, see James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds (Abacus, 2005); C. Simoiu et al., ‘Studying the “Wisdom of Crowds” at Scale’, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing 7 (2019): 171–9, https://doi.org/10.1609/hcomp.v7i1.5271.↩ 29. On superforecasters, see Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting (Random House, 2016). On the benefits of deliberative democracy, consult John S.
Dryzek et al., ‘The Crisis of Democracy and the Science of Deliberation’, Science 363, no. 6432 (2019): 1144–6, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw2694; Landemore, Democratic Reason; Landemore, Open Democracy. On post-conflict reconciliation, see E. Ugarriza and D. Caluwaerts, Democratic Deliberation in Deeply Divided Societies: From Conflict to Common Ground (Macmillan, 2014). For an overview of recent experiments in deliberative democracy, read OECD, ‘Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave’, www.oecd.org/en/publications/innovative-citizen-participation-andnew-de mocratic-institutions_339306da-en.html. On horizon scanning, see Luke Kemp, ‘Foreseeing Extreme Technological Risk’, in Managing Extreme Technological Risk, ed. Catherine Rhodes (Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, 2024).↩ 30. A. Izdebski, L. Mordechai, and S. White, ‘The Social Burden of Resilience: A Historical Perspective’, Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Journal 46, no. 3 (2018): 291–303, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-018-0002-2.↩ CHAPTER 8: GANG WARFARE 1. We don’t know who exactly Narmer was. He may have been the same person as other early pharaohs, such as ‘Menes’ or ‘King Scorpion’.
The sketch of the Palette of Narmer is available through Wikimedia and uploaded by Maker166. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Narmer-Palette.jpg.
Available through Creative Commons License Version 4.0.↩ 2. Pauketat, Cahokia, chap. 12.↩ 3. Christian T. Miller and Jonathan Jones, ‘Firestone and the Warlord: The Untold Story of Firestone, Charles Taylor and the Tragedy of Liberia’, ProPublica, 18 November 2014, www.propublica.org/article/firestone-and-the-warlord-intro.↩ 4. Ferguson, ‘The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East’, 223.↩ 5. Katherine Hirschfeld, Gangster States (Macmillan, 2015), 3, https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490292.↩ 6. Christopher Blattman, Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace (Viking, 2022), chap. 9.↩ 7. Raúl Sánchez de la Sierra, ‘On the Origins of the State: Stationary Bandits and Taxation in Eastern Congo’, Journal of Political Economy 128, no. 1 (2020): 32, 34–7, https://doi.org/10.1086/703989.↩ 8. Katherine Hirschfeld, ‘Failing States as Epidemiologic Risk Zones: Implications for Global Health Security’, Health Security 15, no. 3 (2017): 291–2, https://doi.org/10.1089/hs.2016.0077.↩ 9. Robert I. Rotberg, State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror (World Peace Foundation/Brookings Institution Press, 2003).↩ 10. Pun intended.
Hirschfeld, Gangster States.↩ 11. Ferguson, ‘The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East’, 223.↩ 12. Hirschfeld, Gangster States.↩ 13. Joerg Baten, Giacomo Benati, and Arkadiusz Sołtysiak, ‘Violence Trends in the Ancient Middle East between 12,000 and 400 BCE’, Nature Human Behaviour 7 (2023): 2064–73, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01700-y. Redesigned from Figure 2 in the article. Data points that were disconnected from trend lines have been deleted and the two trend lines for Turkey have been blended (a previous line was discarded owing to a small sample size of nine). While sparse in parts, this is the best dataset we have access to.
Moreover, it supports a far wider body of evidence suggesting that increased violence accompanies state creation and collapse.↩ 14.
Thanks to Tim Kohler for raising the idea of ‘score-settling’ based on his previous work on violence in the Pueblo societies.↩ 15. This is likely to be a historical high-point. Women’s political empowerment surged during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and during this time the US was undertaking the largest historical integration of women into the military.
See Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 10.↩ 16. Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, Jared F. Edgerton, and Laura C. Frizzell, ‘Analyzing Participation in the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’, Journal of Peace Research 60, no. 2 (2023): 291–306, https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221075211.↩ 17. Marvin E. Wolfgang, Robert M. Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin, Delinquency in a Birth Cohort (University of Chicago Press, 1987); Nyseth Nzitatira, Edgerton, and Frizzell, ‘Analyzing Participation in the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’.↩ 18.
Lizzie Wade, ‘The Wari’s Grisly End – the Fall of a South American Empire’, Science, 17 August 2016, www.science.org/content/article/waris-grisly-end-fall-south-americanemp ire; Arkush and Tung, ‘Patterns of War in the Andes from the Archaic to the Late Horizon’.↩ 19. This sample covers four continents and two millennia, and includes islands (the Rapa Nui), large state-systems (the Late Bronze Age (LBA)), vast empires (the Western Roman Empire), and collections of city-states (the Lowland Maya).↩ 20. Kemp et al., ‘Societal Collapse as a Powershift’. The Maya estimates come from B. L.
Turner, ‘The Rise and Fall of Maya Population and Agriculture, 1000 BC to Present: The Malthusian Perspective Reconsidered’, in Hunger in History: Food Shortage, Poverty, and Deprivation, ed. L. Newman (Blackwell, 1990), 178–211; R. L. Wilkinson, ‘Yellow Fever: Ecology, Epidemiology, and Role in the Collapse of the Classic Lowland Maya Civilization’, Medical Anthropology 16, no. 3 (1995): 269–94, https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.1994.9966118, 270–84. The Rapa Nui estimate is compiled using the figures from Chapter 15.↩ 21. On the reliability of state census data, see J. Haldon, ‘Comparative State Formation: The Later Roman Empire in the Wider World’, in The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, ed. S. F. Johnson (Oxford University Press, 2012), 1111–47; Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, 194; Matthew White, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things (W. W. Norton, 2012).↩ 22. Turchin, End Times, 223.↩ 23. Kemp et al., ‘Societal Collapse as a Powershift’. While these statistics give a general picture, bear in mind that they are averages, and the effects of a societal breakdown varied dramatically by region. During the fall of Rome’s empire, the city itself may have lost up to 95 per cent of its people, yet many other areas had stable populations.↩ 24. Flannery and Marcus, ‘The Origin of War’, 11803–5.↩ 25. In Mesopotamia, the very creation of the universe was the result of an act of violence. The god Marduk kills the chaotic, primordial sea goddess Tiamat (often depicted as a sea dragon), allowing for the creation of humankind (and in some versions resulting in Marduk becoming the supreme god). An act of sacred violence tames the chaos and creates order. It’s a basic myth that reappears in numerous faiths including the Hittite religion. It has obvious echoes of the Hobbesian myth: there once was chaos and now there is peace due to the shadow of an iron fist. Although tellingly, Tiamat was peaceful until Marduk declared war.↩ 26. Steven Garfinkel, ‘Violence and State Power in Early Mesopotamia’, in The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed.
Garrett G. Fagan et al. (Cambridge, 2020), 219–37, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316341247.012, 219–21; Davide Nadali et al., ‘Representations of Violence in Ancient Mesopotamia and Syria’, ibid., 629–53, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316341247.033, 633–4.↩ 27.
The most disputed is the case of Tiwanaku. Although even here the prolific creation of serrated and barbed arrows (which are poor for hunting but ideal for penetrating flesh and causing an infection) suggests that warfare, or at least coercion, also played a role. See D.
Hu, ‘War or Peace? Assessing the Rise of the Tiwanaku State through Projectile Point Analysis’, Lithics 37 (2017): 83–5.↩ 28. On the specific case studies, see Flannery and Marcus, The Creation of Inequality, chap. 17.↩ 29. Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European State-Making’, in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton University Press, 1975), 3–83, 42.↩ 30. L. E.
Cederman et al., ‘War Did Make States: Revisiting the Bellicist Paradigm in Early Modern Europe’, International Organization 77, no. 2 (2023): 324–62, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818322000352, 324.↩ 31. Turchin et al., ‘Disentangling the Evolutionary Drivers of Social Complexity’; Thomas E. Currie et al., ‘Duration of Agriculture and Distance from the Steppe Predict the Evolution of Large-Scale Human Societies in Afro-Eurasia’, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 7, no. 1 (2020): 34, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599- 020-0516-2; Turchin, Ultrasociety. Note that initially some military technologies, particularly iron weapons, resulted in greater wealth equality. In the case of iron, it was simply because it was more widely available. Yet eventually a small elite was still able to monopolize these and use them as the foundation for new Goliaths.↩ 32. For a useful summary of statistics and sources, read Yuval Noah Harari, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (Vintage, 2024), chap. 11.↩ 33. Scott, Against the Grain, 179. In On Kings, 5, the anthropologists David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins claim that these ‘stranger-kings’ were the dominant and even original form of polity, although they also claim that these were mainly indigenous inventions and provide surprisingly little evidence to support this. For the original theory of stranger-kings, see Marshall Sahlins, ‘The Stranger-King, or, Elementary Forms of the Politics of Life’, Indonesia and the Malay World 36, no. 105 (2008): 177–99, https://doi.org/10.1080/13639810802267918.↩ 34. Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery (Pan, 2012), 2.↩ 35. Seth Richardson, ‘Mesopotamian Slavery’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery Throughout History, ed. Damian A. Pargas and Juliane Schiel (Springer International, 2023), 17–39, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13260-5_2; J. N. Reid, ‘Slavery in Early Mesopotamia from Late Uruk Until the Fall of Babylon in the Longue Durée’ (2014), https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:a693cd93- 092e-4118-ae02- b9775bc2285e/files/md69d238573b3389b44745f39cc219dac.↩ 36.
Scott, Against the Grain; Scott, ‘Response’, 719.↩ 37. Saini, The Patriarchs, 112.↩ 38. Robert D. Drennan, ‘Pathways from Farmers to States around the Globe’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 29, no. 4 (2019): 699–702, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774319000374.↩ 39.
This is often framed as the ‘cooperative’ account of state formation.
The most influential work here is Richard E. Blanton and Lane F.
Fargher, ‘Collective Action in the Evolution of Pre-Modern States’, Social Evolution & History 8, no. 2 (2009): 133–66. The authors significantly overstate their case by claiming that this shows that many states were cooperative endeavours. Providing collective goods (including the presence of things like a bureaucracy) is an extraordinarily low bar for considering a state to be created for collective purposes. Especially when these primarily tended to benefit elites. The roads of Rome were built by legionaries for legionaries.
They were (at least initially) mainly a conduit for information and shuttling troops, not trade and public transport. ↩ 40. We should think of this as ‘coordinated action’ rather than ‘collective action’, as it is usually called.
It’s only when this is paired with clear signs of more inclusive, democratic governance that we can talk of more collective action.↩ 41.
Archaeologists of South and Mesoamerica have often been the biggest proponents of the collective action account of state formation. A lack of Goliath fuel can help explain why early states in the Americas often had more coordinated action and rebellion.↩ 42. For an overview of some more inclusive polities which provided public goods but eventually drifted towards oligarchy, see Richard E.
Blanton et al., ‘Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past’, Frontiers in Political Science 2 (2020), https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2020.568704. Thanks to Dan Hoyer for the ‘rapacious pirate-kings’ term.↩ 43. The phenomenon of there being more democracy when states had less information about their subjects is well articulated in Stasavage, The Decline and Rise of Democracy, chap. 1.
Similarly, Richard E. Blanton et al., ‘The Fiscal Economy of Good Government’, Current Anthropology 62, no. 1 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1086/713286, find that the provision of public goods and greater coordination of labour (‘good government’) is usually correlated with (and probably caused by) more reliance on the income of subjects/citizens.↩ 44. Jacob G. Hariri, ‘The Autocratic Legacy of Early Statehood’, American Political Science Review 106, no. 3 (2012): 471–94, 471, 489.↩ 45. That is the hidden benefit of the dominance hierarchy: it’s not only those at the top who benefit, but those on the lower rungs still have others they can lord it over: such as women in Rome owning slaves or the city dwellers of China being fed by rural peasants.↩ 46. Even the very long-lasting egalitarian settlements we came across earlier – such as Jenne-Jeno – would usually either grow extractive or be conquered by a neighbour.↩ 47. Bauer et al., ‘Can War Foster Cooperation?’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 30, no. 3 (2016): 249–74, https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.30.3.249, 270–72.↩ 48.
Julian E. Barnes, ‘A Nation Challenged: Proud Spirits; As Demand Soars, Flag Makers Help Bolster Nation’s Morale’, New York Times, 23 September 2001, www.nytimes.com/2001/09/23/business/nationchallenged-proud-spirits-d emand-soars-flag-makers-help-bolsternation-s.html.↩ 49. J. C. Jackson et al., ‘Ecological and Cultural Factors Underlying the Global Distribution of Prejudice’, PLOS ONE 14, no. 9 (2019): e0221953, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0221953. Note that this isn’t one study per se: it examines fifty US states, forty-seven preindustrial historical societies, and twenty-five modern countries. ↩ 50. Y. Mu, S.
Han, and M. J. Gelfand, ‘The Role of Gamma Interbrain Synchrony in Social Coordination When Humans Face Territorial Threats’, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12, no. 10 (2017): 1614–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx093.↩ 51. Malešević, The Rise of Organised Brutality, chap. 2.↩ 52. Cameron Easley, ‘U.S. Conservatives Are Uniquely Inclined Toward Right-Wing Authoritarianism Compared to Western Peers’, Morning Consult, 28 June 2021, https://pro.morningconsult.com/trendsetters/global-right-wing-authoritaria n-test.↩ 53. The seminal works here are Bob Altemeyer, Right-Wing Authoritarianism (University of Manitoba Press, 1981), and Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Stenner stresses that these are latent traits that are activated only by certain conditions, such as external threats. In general, the literature here refers to ‘right-wing authoritarianism’, but there are growing studies on left-wing authoritarianism.↩ 54. Danny Osborne et al., ‘The Psychological Causes and Societal Consequences of Authoritarianism’, Nature Reviews Psychology 2 (2023): 220–32, https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-023-00161-4, is the most authoritative and up-to-date review of the authoritarianism literature, including on its genetic basis.↩ 55. Hannah S. Ferguson et al., ‘Context-Specific Effects of Facial Dominance and Trustworthiness on Hypothetical Leadership Decisions’, PLOS ONE 14, no. 7 (2019): e0214261, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214261; Daniel E. Re et al., ‘Facial Cues to Perceived Height Influence Leadership Choices in Simulated War and Peace Contexts’, Evolutionary Psychology 11, no.
1 (2013): 147470491301100, https://doi.org/10.1177/147470491301100109.↩ 56. For a broader discussion of how violent groups build these ‘microsolidarities’, see Malešević, The Rise of Organised Brutality, chap.
2.↩ 57. Ferguson, ‘The Prehistory of War and Peace in Europe and the Near East’, 224–5.↩ 58. For a similar point, see Turchin, Ultrasociety, chap. 8. Turchin also highlights how the Germans went from being egalitarian to borrowing state-style hierarchies from the Romans, although he attributes the spread of dominance hierarchies more to their innate success in battle than to an authoritarian impulse. There might be something to this, although military historians are split on what is the ideal level of decentralization in a fighting force. ↩ 59. Kent A. Kiehl and Morris B. Hoffman, ‘The Criminal Psychopath: History, Neuroscience, Treatment, and Economics’, Jurimetrics 51 (Summer 2011): 355–97, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24944437/.↩ 60. On the base rate of 1 per cent, see James E. Freeman, Freya Samson, and Gavan R. Palk, ‘Identifying the Presence of Psychopathy in the Community’, APS Forensic Psychology National Conference, 2011- 08-04 to 2011-08-06 (unpublished), https://eprints.qut.edu.au/37263/.
On the current level among CEOs, see Simon Croom, Katarina Fritzon, and Nathan Brooks, ‘Personality Differences and BuyerSupplier Relationships: Psychopathy in Executives, Gender Differences and Implications for Future Research’, Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management 27, no. 4 (2021): 100721, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pursup.2021.100721. P. Babiak, C. S.
Neumann, and R. D. Hare, ‘Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk’, Behavioral Sciences & the Law 28, no. 2 (2010): 174–93, https://doi.org/10.1002/bsl.925, 183, find a prevalence rate of 3.9 per cent among high-profile corporate professionals. Karen Landay, Peter Harms, and Marcus Credé, ‘Shall We Serve the Dark Lords? A MetaAnalytic Review of Psychopathy and Leadership’, Journal of Applied Psychology 104 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000357, suggest that this could be lower, finding a positive but weak relationship between psychopathy and leadership positions in a meta-analysis of ninety-two existing studies. An accessible overview of some of the literature can be found in Gardner Selby, ‘1 in 100 People Are Sociopaths’, Politifact, 30 March 2018, www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/mar/30/michael-mccaul/michaelmcc aul-says-1-100-people-sociopath/. These figures are ultimately best guesses. Désiré G. C. Palmen, Emile W. Kolthoff, and Jan J. L.
Derksen, ‘The Need for Domination in Psychopathic Leadership: A Clarification for the Estimated High Prevalence of Psychopathic Leaders’, Aggression and Violent Behavior 61 (November–December 2021): 101650, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2021.101650, suggest that the connection is largely due to a psychopathic need to dominate, which is best achieved through leadership positions. One of the problems across the literature is that psychopathy – like all the dark triad – is on a spectrum.↩ 61. B. N. Persson and S. O. Lilienfeld, ‘Social Status as One Key Indicator of Successful Psychopathy: An Initial Empirical Investigation’, Personality and Individual Differences 141 (2019): 209–17, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.01.020. ↩ 62. Thomson and Halstead, ‘How Violent Was the Pre-Agricultural World?’, 107.↩ 63.
Those high on the dark triad also tend to score significantly higher on ‘social dominance orientation’: a measurement of how much one craves power over others.↩ 64. Jeremy Hogeveen, Michael Inzlicht, and Sukhvinder Obhi, ‘Power Changes How the Brain Responds to Others’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143, no. 2 (2014): 755–62, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0033477.↩ 65. For an overview, see T. O.
Tobore, ‘On Power and Its Corrupting Effects: The Effects of Power on Human Behavior and the Limits of Accountability Systems’, Communicative & Integrative Biology 16, no. 1 (2023): 2246793, https://doi.org/10.1080/19420889.2023.2246793.↩ 66. Klaas, Corruptible, 102.↩ 67. This also holds true for scholars who claim that states and hierarchies were a way to deal with ‘scalar stress’. Even if that were the case, it does little to explain the inequality and authoritarian arrangements. ↩ 68. Others call these Goliath traps ‘multipolar traps’: situations in which competition forces self-interested, rational agents to resort to actions which are to their short-term benefit but to the long-term detriment of the group. ↩
CHAPTER 9: BROKEN BRONZE 1. Nadali et al., ‘Representations of Violence in Ancient Mesopotamia and Syria’, 636.↩ 2. Known as the Stele of the Vultures. See ibid., 634.↩ 3. There are other problems with territorial estimates. Often the land was not arable, the areas exaggerated by written sources to flatter rulers, and many of the borders were often porous and constantly raided. They are still ultimately the best estimates we have. For a full discussion of the problems with territorial estimates, see Scheidel, ‘The Scale of Empire: Territory, Population, Distribution’; Peter Fibiger Bang, ‘Empire – A World History: Anatomy and Concept, Theory and Synthesis’, in The Oxford World History of Empire vol. I: The Imperial Experience, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0002.↩ 4. This was described by Michael Mann as the move from ‘despotic power’ to ‘infrastructural power’. See Mann, The Sources of Social Power I. This doesn’t mean that intimidation was phased out in favour of administration. Rather administration was relied on more but was still always underpinned by the threat of violence.↩ 5. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400–2000 (Penguin, 2008).↩ 6. Similarly, the historian Niall Ferguson once quipped ‘much of what we call history consists of the deeds of 50 to 70 empires’. See Niall Ferguson, ‘Empires with Expiration Dates’, Foreign Policy 156 (2009): 46.↩ 7. Michael W. Doyle, Empires (Cornell University Press, 1986), 19; Rein Taagepera, ‘Size and Duration of Empires Growth-Decline Curves, 3000 to 600 B.C.’, Social Science Research 7, no. 2 (June 1978): 181, https://doi.org/10.1016/0049-089X(78)90010-8. Definitions vary but usually focus on the control of ‘sovereignty’. Taagepera focuses on ‘large sovereign political entities’ while Doyle looks at ‘political societies’, which are never clearly defined. See also Darwin’s definition of imperialism (p.
416) as ‘the attempt to impose one state’s predominance over other societies by assimilating them to its political and cultural and economic system’. Although his definition of empire differs slightly as ‘systems of influence or rule in which ethnic, cultural or ecological boundaries were overlapped or ignored’. I’ve opted for the simpler and broader ‘political groups’ over the use of sovereign polity, societies, or systems. The basic idea of a core exploiting a periphery is also central to the idea of a ‘galactic polity’ (Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, 9.), as well as a world-system (Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Duke University Press, 2004). For a useful overview of this idea of core–periphery relationships in world-systems theory, read Christopher Chase-Dunn and Dmytro Khutkyy, ‘The Evolution of Geopolitics and Imperialism in Interpolity Systems’, in The Oxford World History of Empire vol. I: The Imperial Experience, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0004.↩ 8. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2005), 1; Darwin, After Tamerlane. The idea of empire simply being one group trying to control another can be found in Bang, ‘Empire – A World History’.↩ 9. Some call this process ‘internal colonization’: a nonsensical idea since every empire begins by conquering its neighbours.↩ 10. For some of these definitional debates, see Krishan Kumar, Empires: A Historical and Political Sociology (Polity Press, 2021), chaps. 1 and 4.
There are a few potential exceptions, such as more democratic confederations. ↩ 11. John F. Haldon, ‘The Political Economy of Empire: “Imperial Capital” and the Formation of Central and Regional Elites’, in The Oxford World History of Empire vol. I: The Imperial Experience, ed.
Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0006, 179.↩ 12. Territory estimates come from Taagepera, ‘Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 3000 to 600 B.C.’, 187.↩ 13. Harvey Weiss, ed., Megadrought and Collapse: From Early Agriculture to Angkor (Oxford University Press, 2017). This megadrought (known as the 4.2ka Megadrought, since it happened around 4.2 thousand years ago) marks the beginning of the current geologic age known as the ‘Meghalayan Age’.↩ 14. Dan Lawrence, Alessio Palmisano, and Michelle W. de Gruchy, ‘Collapse and Continuity: A Multi-Proxy Reconstruction of Settlement Organization and Population Trajectories in the Northern Fertile Crescent during the 4.2kya Rapid Climate Change Event’, PLOS ONE 16, no. 1 (2021): e0244871, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244871.↩ 15. Z. B. Ön et al., ‘A Bayesian Test for the 4.2 ka BP Abrupt Climatic Change Event in Southeast Europe and Southwest Asia Using Structural Time Series Analysis of Paleoclimate Data’, Climatic Change 165, nos 1–2 (March 2021): 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584- 021-03010-6.↩ 16. Lisa Cooper, ‘The Demise and Regeneration of Bronze Age Urban Centres in the Euphrates Valley of Syria’, in After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, ed. Glenn M. Schwartz and John Jackson Nichols (University of Arizona Press, 2006).↩ 17. Morris, ‘“Lo, Nobles Lament”; Ellen Morris, ‘Ancient Egyptian Exceptionalism: Fragility, Flexibility and the Art of Not Collapsing’, in The Evolution of Fragility: Setting the Terms, ed. Norman Yoffee (Cambridge University Press, 2019).↩ 18.
Norman Yoffee and George L. Cowgill, eds., The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations (University of Arizona Press, 1991).↩ 19. Alena Giesche et al., ‘Recurring Summer and Winter Droughts from 4.2–3.97 Thousand Years Ago in North India’, Communications Earth & Environment 4, no. 1 (2023): 103, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247- 023-00763-z. This shift from cities and trade to self-reliant villages was not a completely easy one. In Harappa, one of the largest settlements of the Indus Valley, there are signs of heightened violence and more infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and leprosy among those who remained. For an overview, see Cameron A. Petrie, ‘Diversity, Variability, Adaptation and “Fragility” in the Indus Civilization’, in The Evolution of Fragility: Setting the Terms, ed.
Norman Yoffee (Cambridge University Press, 2019), chap. 7, 123.↩ 20.
Larry Neal, ‘Introduction’, in The Cambridge History of Capitalism, ed.
Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 2, https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139095099.001; Branko Milanović, Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021).↩ 21.
Michael Jursa, ‘Babylonia in the First Millennium BCE – Economic Growth in Times of Empire’, in The Cambridge History of Capitalism, ed.
Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 28–33, https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139095099.002.↩ 22.
Karl Moore and David Lewis, ‘The First Multinationals: Assyria circa 2000 BC’, MIR: Management International Review 38, no. 2 (1998): 95–107, www.researchgate.net/publication/233925545; Sophie Hardach, ‘The Secret Letters of History’s First-Known Businesswomen’, BBC News, 14 January 2021, www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20210111-the-secret-letters-of-historysfirstbusinesswomen.↩ 23. Even Babylonian temples and palaces were dependent on the market: selling up to half of their agricultural income for silver.↩ 24. Cline, ‘“Mind the Gap”’, 101.↩ 25. Carol Bell, ‘The Merchants of Ugarit: Oligarchs of the Late Bronze Age Trade in Metals?’, in Eastern Mediterranean Metallurgy and Metalwork in the Second Millennium BC: A Conference in Honour of James D. Muhly; Nicosia, 10th–11th October 2009 (Oxbow Books, 2012), 180–87.↩ 26. For the most compelling case for the centrality of wood, see Roland Ennos, The Wood Age: How One Material Shaped the Whole of Human History (William Collins, 2021).↩ 27. Eric H. Cline and Diane Cline, ‘Text Messages, Tablets, and Social Networks: The “Small World” of the Amarna Letters’, in There and Back Again – the Crossroads II: Proceedings of an International Conference Held in Prague, September 15–18, 2014, ed. Jana Mynářová et al. (Charles University [Prague], Faculty of Arts, 2015), 17–44.↩ 28. These gifts were transported by merchants, traders, and sailors who no doubt also exchanged staple goods such as grain. The banal practice of haggling and trading was below rulers, who instead relied on the more regal tradition of gift-giving.
We see this pattern of commercial trade occurring under the cover of gift-giving across the world. Trobriand Islander chiefs in the South Pacific would come together to exchange shell armbands and necklaces, while the crew who transported them busied themselves trading practical staples with the locals.↩ 29. Cline, 1177, 2nd edn, 75.↩ 30. Pertev Basri and Dan Lawrence, ‘Wealth Inequality in the Ancient Near East: A Preliminary Assessment Using Gini Coefficients and Household Size’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 30, no. 4 (2020): 701, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774320000177. Kohler and Smith, Ten Thousand Years of Inequality, chap. 1, and Christian E. Peterson and Robert D. Drennan, ‘Letting the Gini out of the Bottle’, in Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences, ed. Timothy A. Kohler and Michael Ernest Smith (University of Arizona Press, 2018), 39–66, discuss and address the problems with measuring inequality using household sizes.↩ 31. As the Oxford archaeologist Josephine Quinn observed, ‘The whole Bronze Age system produces a lot of discontent’ (quoted in Annalee Newitz, ‘The Elites Were Living High.
Then Came the Fall’, New York Times, 5 November 2020). On the height of pharaohs, see Michael E.
Habicht et al., ‘Body Height of Mummified Pharaohs Supports Historical Suggestions of Sibling Marriages’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 157, no. 3 (2015): 519–25, https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.22728. For evidence on the Mycenaeans, as well as height and inequality more broadly, see Carles Boix and Frances Rosenbluth, ‘Bones of Contention: The Political Economy of Height Inequality’, American Political Science Review 108, no. 1 (2014): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055413000555.↩ 32. Cline, 1177, 2nd edn, 155–8.↩ 33. David Kaniewski and Elise Van Campo, ‘3.2 Ka BP Megadrought and the Late Bronze Age Collapse’, in Megadrought and Collapse, ed. Harvey Weiss (Oxford University Press, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199329199.003.0005.↩ 34. For an overview of the evidence, see Cline, 1177, 2nd edn.↩ 35. Martin Finné et al., ‘Late Bronze Age Climate Change and the Destruction of the Mycenaean Palace of Nestor at Pylos’, PLOS ONE 12, no. 12 (2017): e0189447, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189447.↩ 36. Amos Nur and Eric H. Cline, ‘Poseidon’s Horses: Plate Tectonics and Earthquake Storms in the Late Bronze Age Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean’, Journal of Archaeological Science 27, no. 1 (2000): 43–63, https://doi.org/10.1006/jasc.1999.0431.↩ 37. Ibid. It can be difficult to distinguish an earthquake from another force that destroyed a city, whether it be a revolt or invasion. Archaeologists tended to rely on telltale signs, such as skeletons pinned under fallen walls and pillars knocked askew. See Cline, ‘“Mind the Gap”’, 100.↩ 38. Kemp and Cline, ‘Systemic Risk and Resilience in the Bronze Age’, 214.↩ 39. A. Bernard Knapp, Migration Myths and the End of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Guy D. Middleton, ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go? Mycenaeans, Migration, and Mobility in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Eastern Mediterranean’, Journal of Greek Archaeology 3 (2018): 115–45, https://doi.org/10.32028/jga.v3i.525, provides a useful overview of the problems with the Sea Peoples narrative and puts forward a more realistic interpretation of this as simply a case of adaptive mobility.↩ 40.
For an overview, see Cline, 1177, 2nd edn. Sometimes this even took the form of linguistic resistance. Ugarit, a multilingual, metropolitan trading hub, adopted a local vernacular language and its own alphabetic cuneiform script. This was seemingly a rejection of the Hittite Empire, which it had come under the control of. See Philip J.
Boyes, ‘Negotiating Imperialism and Resistance in Late Bronze Age Ugarit: The Rise of Alphabetic Cuneiform’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 29, no. 2 (2019): 185–99, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774318000471.↩ 41. Inspired by a figure from Austin Crouch, ‘Egypt and the Bronze Age Collapse’, Culture Frontier, 2023, www.culturefrontier.com/bronzeage-collapse/. The original has been significantly revised and expanded, including the addition of estimated territorial extracts of different empires and regions.↩ 42. Cline, 1177, 2nd edn, chap. 6.↩ 43. These are similar to ‘synchronous failures’: Thomas Homer-Dixon et al., ‘Synchronous Failure: The Emerging Causal Architecture of Global Crisis’, Ecology and Society 20, no. 3 (2015): art6, https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-07681-200306.
Catalytic failures means that the different crises, rather than simply being synchronized, directly catalyse each other. The Late Bronze Age collapse had both.↩ 44. This term was originally coined by my colleague Lauren Holt in a paper I co-authored with her and several others: S. J.
Beard et al., ‘Assessing Climate Change’s Contribution to Global Catastrophic Risk’, Futures 127 (March 2021): 2, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2020.102673.↩ 45. Kemp and Cline, ‘Systemic Risk and Resilience in the Bronze Age’, 214–17. Inspired by Figure 1.↩ 46. Igor Linkov et al., ‘Are Civilizations Destined to Collapse?
Lessons from the Mediterranean Bronze Age’, Global Environmental Change 84 (2024): 102792, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102792.↩ 47. Eric Cline, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations (Princeton University Press, 2024), 15–18.↩ 48. Basri and Lawrence, ‘Wealth Inequality in the Ancient Near East’, 701. Kohler and Smith, Ten Thousand Years of Inequality, chap. 1.↩ 49. Petra M. Creamer, ‘Inequalities in Wealth Distribution Within Imperial Assyrian Graves’, Antiquity 98, no. 400 (2024): 920–35. There are a few problems with measurements using grave goods. In particular, they are performative and can change over time with culture. Creamer discusses and addresses these potential problems on pages 5–6.↩ 50. Guy D. Middleton, ‘Mycenaean Collapse(s) c. 1200 BC’, in Collapse and Transformation: The Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age in the Aegean, ed. G. D. Middleton (Oxbow Books, 2020), 12, 18.↩ 51. On the ‘escape’ from Mycenaean Greece see Erika Weiberg and Martin Finné, ‘Resilience and Persistence of Ancient Societies in the Face of Climate Change: A Case Study from Late Bronze Age Peloponnese’, World Archaeology 50, no. 4 (2018): 595, https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2018.1515035. Also, Joseph Maran, ‘The Crisis Years? Reflections on Signs of Instability in the Last Decades of the Mycenaean Palaces’, Scienze Dell’Antichità 15 (2009): 241–62. Maybe the rural populations were more exposed to bandits and robbers in Dark Age Greece, but for now that is difficult to see.↩ 52. Raphael Greenberg, ‘What Collapsed in 1177?’, Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 10, no. 2 (2022): 193, https://doi.org/10.5325/jeasmedarcherstu.10.2.0191.↩ 53.
Claudia Glatz, The Making of Empire in Bronze Age Anatolia: Hittite Sovereign Practice, Resistance, and Negotiation (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 299, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108867436.↩ 54. Poet or poets? There is a continued scholarly disagreement as to whether Homer was a single, historical figure or a composite of multiple authors.↩ 55. Although, funnily enough, Homer was largely glorifying the Late Bronze Age in his myths.↩ 56. Ian Morris, ‘The Collapse and Regeneration of Complex Society in Greece, 1500–500 BCE’, in After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, ed. Glenn M.
Schwartz and John Jackson Nichols (University of Arizona Press, 2006), 72–85. We can’t say that the collapse directly led to Athenian democracy (the two were centuries apart), but it seems exceedingly unlikely that the latter would have occurred without the former.↩ 57. V. Gordon Childe, The Prehistory of European Society (Spokesman, 2009). For a more complete discussion on the relationship between technological change and production during dark ages, see Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millenium (Verso, 2017).↩ 58. As archaeologist William Dever has observed, speaking of Canaan in the wake of the Bronze Age collapse, ‘Perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn about the “Dark Age”… is that it was nothing of the sort.’ See W. G. Dever, ‘The Late Bronze – Early Iron I Horizon in Syria-Palestine: Egyptians, Canaanites, “Sea Peoples,” and ProtoIsraelites’, in The Crisis Years: The 12th Century B.C., ed. W. A.
Ward and M. S. Joukowsky (Kendall/Hunt, 1992); Cline, 1177, 2nd edn.↩ CHAPTER 10: SHATTERED OBSIDIAN 1. Marcello A. Canuto et al., ‘Ancient Lowland Maya Complexity as Revealed by Airborne Laser Scanning of Northern Guatemala’, Science 361, no. 6409 (2018): 1, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau0137.↩ 2.
Luke Auld-Thomas et al., ‘Running out of Empty Space: Environmental Lidar and the Crowded Ancient Landscape of Campeche, Mexico’, Antiquity 98, no. 401 (2024): 1340–58, https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2024.148.↩ 3. Joyce Marcus, ‘Political Fluctuations in Mesoamerica’, National Geographic Research and Exploration 8, no. 4 (1992): 406–9.↩ 4. ‘Gone with the wind’ comes from Michael D. Coe, The Maya (Thames & Hudson, 2005), 162. On the Cancuén case study, see Arthur A.
Demarest et al., ‘Economy, Exchange, and Power: New Evidence from the Late Classic Maya Port City of Cancuen’, Ancient Mesoamerica 25, no. 1 (2014): 210, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956536114000121.
For an overview of the collapse across the different cities and kingdoms, see Arthur Andrew Demarest, Prudence M. Rice, and Don S. Rice, The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation (University Press of Colorado, 2005).
Storey and Storey, Rome and the Classic Maya, chaps. 4, 5, and 6, provide a view of the collapse across the Maya as a conjoined system.↩ 5. Tobias Braun et al., ‘Decline in Seasonal Predictability Potentially Destabilized Classic Maya Societies’, Communications Earth & Environment 4, no. 1 (2023): 82, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023- 00717-5, provide the most recent evidence on declining predictability.
Shanti Morell-Hart, Lydie Dussol, and Scott L. Fedick, ‘Agriculture in the Ancient Maya Lowlands (Part 1): Paleoethnobotanical Residues and New Perspectives on Plant Management’, Journal of Archaeological Research 31, no. 4 (2023): 593–5, cover the surprisingly diverse and resilient nature of Mayan food production. For nuanced accounts on the impact of drought and its interactions with the political drivers of collapse, see Peter M. J. Douglas et al., ‘Impacts of Climate Change on the Collapse of Lowland Maya Civilization’, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 44, no. 1 (2016): 613– 45, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-earth-060115-012512; B. L. Turner and Jeremy A. Sabloff, ‘Classic Period Collapse of the Central Maya Lowlands: Insights about Human–Environment Relationships for Sustainability’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 35 (2012): 13908–14, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1210106109.
Arthur A. Demarest, ‘The Classic Maya Collapse, Water, and Economic Change in Mesoamerica: Critique and Alternatives from the “Wet Zone”’, in The Great Maya Droughts in Cultural Context, ed. G. Iannone (University Press of Colorado, 2014), 177–206, outlines how the Peten collapse appeared to have preceded the drought. For a nuanced overview of the archaeology of the collapse period, and particularly the drought hypothesis, see Middleton, ‘Collapse Studies in Archaeology from 2012 to 2023’, 30–33.↩ 6. For a summary, see Douglas et al., ‘Impacts of Climate Change on the Collapse of Lowland Maya Civilization’, 636.↩ 7. Petrie, ‘Diversity, Variability, Adaptation and “Fragility” in the Indus Civilization’.↩ 8. John Haldon et al., ‘SDG 13 – How Societies Succeeded or Failed to Respond to Environmental Disruption’, in Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Historical Companion, ed. M. Gutmann (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2022), 385–424, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192848758.003.0014; Joseph A.
Tainter, ‘Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse’, Annual Review of Anthropology 35, no. 1 (2006): 59–74, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123136; Guy D.
Middleton, ‘Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies’, Journal of Archaeological Research 20, no.
3 (2012): 257–307, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-011-9054-1; John Haldon et al., ‘Demystifying Collapse: Climate, Environment, and Social Agency in Pre-Modern Societies’, Millennium 17, no. 1 (2020): 1–33, https://doi.org/10.1515/mill-2020-0002.↩ 9. Tainter, ‘Archaeology of Overshoot and Collapse’.↩ 10. K. W. Butzer, ‘Collapse, Environment, and Society’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no.
10 (2012): 3632–9, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1114845109, 3634–6.↩ 11. Thanks to Marilyn Masson for this point and for her invaluable comments and assistance with this chapter.↩ 12. Urszula Strawinska-Zanko et al., ‘Capital in the First Century: The Evolution of Inequality in Ancient Maya Society’, in Mathematical Modeling of Social Relationships, ed. Urszula Strawinska-Zanko and Larry S. Liebovitch (Springer International, 2018), 161–92, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76765-9_9.↩ 13. Amy E. Thompson, Gary M. Feinman, and Keith M. Prufer, ‘Assessing Classic Maya Multi-Scalar Household Inequality in Southern Belize’, ed. Jacob Freeman, PLOS ONE 16, no. 3 (2021): e0248169, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248169.↩ 14. Turner and Sabloff, ‘Classic Period Collapse of the Central Maya Lowlands’.↩ 15. David M.
Pendergast, ‘Stability through Change: Lamanai, Belize, from the Ninth to the Seventeenth Century’, in Late Lowland Maya Civilization: Classic to Postclassic, ed. Jeremy A. Sabloff and E.
Wyllys Andrew (SAR Press, 1986), 223–49.↩ 16. For a full review of the population and political recovery of the Maya, see Marilyn A. Masson et al., ‘Postclassic Maya Population Recovery and Rural Resilience in the Aftermath of Collapse in Northern Yucatan’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 76 (2024): 101610, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2024.101610. As with the Late Bronze Age, the collapse and recovery varied substantially depending on the region.↩ 17. Douglas J. Kennett et al., ‘Drought-Induced Civil Conflict Among the Ancient Maya’, Nature Communications 13, no. 1 (2022): 3911, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31522-x.↩ 18. Some have claimed that this was partly a rejection of autocracy in favour of more democratic arrangements. See Diane Z. Chase and Arlen F. Chase, ‘Framing the Maya Collapse: Continuity, Discontinuity, Method, and Practice in the Classic to Postclassic Southern Maya Lowlands’, in After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, ed. Glenn M. Schwartz and John Jackson Nichols (University of Arizona Press, 2006), 168–88. That is perhaps an overstatement, given that the new rulers carried on many of the symbols and practices of the southern Lowland holy lords. On continuity of practices in the postclassic period, see Marilyn A.
Masson, ‘Postclassic and Contact-Period Maya Rulership’, in Faces of Rulership in the Maya Region, ed. Patricia A. McAnany (Harvard University Press, 2025).↩ 19. Marilyn A. Masson, ‘The “Othering” of Maya Political Economies’, Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 32, no. 1 (2021): 109–27, https://doi.org/10.1111/apaa.12147.↩ 20. The two potential exceptions are the Indus Valley script and the Rongorongo script of the Rapa Nui, although whether these are original scripts is highly contested.↩ 21. Stephen Houston, John Baines, and Jerrold Cooper, ‘Last Writing: Script Obsolescence in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Mesoamerica’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 3 (2003): 432, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417503000227.↩ 22. Ibid. For Figure 27, the icons for Shang Oracle Bones and Mesopotamian Cuneiform are stylized replicas and hence may not be perfect characters. The icons for Olmec Hieroglyphs come from Wikimedia by the author Madman2001.
See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:San_Andreas_Cylinder_Seal _Print_l.svg. Published under the Creative Commons License Version 4.0. The icons for Egyptian Hieroglyphs come from Wikimedia by Riccardo.mebere. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hieroglyph_brain.org.
Published under the Creative Commons License Version 4.0.↩ 23.
James T. Hooker, Linear B: An Introduction (Bristol Classical Press, 1980); Houston, Baines, and Cooper, ‘Last Writing’.↩ 24. Another example of trade bottlenecks acting as a source of lootable resources, much like the Nabataeans mentioned in Chapter 3. Karl W.
Butzer, ‘Rise and Fall of Axum, Ethiopia: A Geo-Archaeological Interpretation’, American Antiquity 46, no. 3 (1981): 471–95, https://doi.org/10.2307/280596, 489–92.↩ 25. Ibid.↩ 26. Ibid.; Gianfrancesco Lusini, ‘The Decline and Collapse of the Kingdom of Aksum (6th–7th CE): An Environmental Disaster or the End of a Political Process?’, in The End of Empires, ed. Michael Gehler, Robert Rollinger, and Philipp Strobl (Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden, 2022), 321–36, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3- 658-36876-0_15. The pastoralists on its borders for whom it had previously exacted tribute also turned on it.↩ 27. On army size, see David C. Conrad, Empires of Medieval West Africa: Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, rev. edn (Chelsea House, 2010), 71.
On the lack of clarity regarding the break-up of the Ghana Empire, see Nikolas Gestrich, ‘The Empire of Ghana’ (Oxford Research Encyclopedias, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/ACREFORE/9780190277734.013.396.↩ 28.
Madina Ly-Tall, ‘The Decline of the Mali Empire’, in General History of Africa IV: Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, ed. D. T.
Niane (UNESCO/Heinemann, 1984), 172–86, 173–4.↩ 29. Margaret Shinnie, Ancient African Kingdoms (Edward Arnold, 1968), 85.↩ 30. Ibiang Oden Ewa, ‘Pre-Colonial West Africa: The Fall of Songhai Empire Revisited’, Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 26 (2017): 1–24, 20, www.jstor.org/stable/48562076.↩ 31. Ibid. For a more entertaining overview of the rise and fall of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, read Paul Cooper, Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline (Duckworth, 2024), chap. 11.↩ 32. Tobias Hagmann and Markus V.
Hoehne, ‘Failures of the State Failure Debate: Evidence from the Somali Territories’, Journal of International Development 21, no. 1 (2009): 53, https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.1482.↩ 33. Some even suggest that we should not think of cases like the Lowland Maya or the Late Bronze Age as singular collapses. Rather they are just a sequence of different state failures and disasters detonating over centuries. The failure of each city – such as Tikal and Ugarit – and state had its own unique background and trajectory. That case is made most forcefully by the archaeologist Guy Middleton: see Guy Middleton, ‘Do Civilisations Collapse?’, Aeon, 16 November 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-idea-of-civilisational-collapse-saysabout -history. Cases like the Lowland Maya and the Late Bronze Age can, of course, be both. There were chains of numerous catastrophes and state failures over time, but they were also connected. Many of the Mayan city-states were destroyed by competitors and neighbours, but they were also reacting to a shared challenge of drought. The same applies to the Late Bronze Age. The fall of the Ugarit trading hub had ramifications for the greater Mediterranean. We even see this in African cases. The rise of Portuguese shipping undermined the gold trade of the Songhai, just as wars between the Byzantines and Persians, or the expansion of the caliphate, bled the Aksumite Empire dry. For the Maya and Late Bronze Age, the impacts cascaded and amplified to bring down the broader economic and cultural system. There’s no reason to ignore the connections or presume that the wider systems collapse was just a coincidence.↩ CHAPTER 11: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CHINESE GOLIATH 1. This time of decentralization (770 to 481 BCE) became known as the Spring and Autumn period.↩ 2. In 771 BCE Quanrong pastoralists (a Tibeto-Burman group) destroyed the Zhou capital of Haojing (near present-day Xi’an) and killed King You. The Zhou moved to a capital in the east, creating the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (the earlier reign became known as the Western Zhou).
Unfortunately for the Zhou, the loss of their capital undermined their power and their feudal lords began to act more and more independently, negotiating their own alliances and declaring war on each other.↩ 3. This wasn’t just a Qin tactic: the Athenian Empire carried out similar mass executions, as have others.↩ 4. Victoria Tin-bor Hui, ‘Genocide, Extermination and Mass Killing in Chinese History’, in The Cambridge World History of Genocide, vol. I: Genocide in the Ancient, Medieval and Premodern Worlds, ed. Ben Kiernan, T. M. Lemos, and Tristan S. Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 289–93, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108655989.017.↩ 5. Fernanda Pirie, The Rule of Laws: A 4,000-Year Quest to Order the World (Profile Books, 2021). Both legalism and Confucianism were direct reactions to the disorder of their times. Shang Yang (390–338 BCE) and Han Fei (280–233 BCE), the two most prominent philosophers of legalism, advocated a stringent, punishment-based version of law coupled with a strong government and rigid bureaucracy. It was a strategy aimed at restoring imperial control – a strategy that some credit as a strong influence on the centralized approach of modern China today. It was a philosophy that took a dim view of humans, one that looked remarkably similar to the Hobbesian worldview.
Confucianism, in contrast, emphasized the obligations of rulers towards the ruled and opposed codified law. Confucius (551–479 BCE) sought to lay a blueprint for the reestablishment of political order.↩ 6. Mark Edward Lewis et al., ‘The First East Asian Empires: Qin and Han’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, vol. I: The Imperial Experience, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2021), 218–20, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0008.
He took on the title of ‘Huang Di’. It was a pivotal linguistic shift. Previous leaders had called themselves wang, loosely translating to ‘king’. ‘Di’ referred to mythical, heroic sages who first created ‘civilization’, and had previously been used to designate high gods under the Shang. The emperor also began the Feng and Shen rituals in which he would ascend Mount Tai to converse with the gods and become immortal. He had philosophers craft a new cosmic cycle based on the old calendar, which justified his claim to the throne.↩ 7. Ibid., 220–23. The most commonly cited reason for the wall is protection from invaders, but Owen Lattimore suggests that keeping wayward peasants in the grip of the Qin was another major motivation. See Owen Lattimore, ‘The Frontier in History’, in his Studies in Frontier History: Collected Papers, 1929–58 (Oxford University Press, 1962), 476–81.↩ 8. Lewis et al., ‘The First East Asian Empires’, 223.↩ 9. This process of amassing elite treasures was interrupted briefly by the Wang Mang rebellion (9–23 CE). The revolt appears to have been triggered by flooding of the Yellow River, with the ensuing famine and disaster undermining the emperor’s already fraying rule. While typically remembered in Chinese history as a villain, Wang Mang was a Confucian social reformer who abolished slavery and redistributed the land more equally. His forward-looking actions made him enemies.
Soon he was overthrown and killed during rebellions fostered by disgruntled elites. Tristram R. Kidder et al., ‘New Perspectives on the Collapse and Regeneration of the Han Dynasty’, in Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies, ed. Ronald K. Faulseit (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), 70–88.↩ 10. Scheidel, The Great Leveler, chap. 2; Scheidel, ‘The End of “Peak Empire”’.↩ 11. The general history in this chapter relies on Lewis et al., ‘The First East Asian Empires’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, vol. II: The History of Empires, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197532768.001.0001. This particular rendition of the collapse of the Han and Jin is best expressed in Scheidel, ‘The End of “Peak Empire”’.↩ 12. The period between the Tang and the Song is one without unified empire. It is typically called the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It ended in 979 CE when the Song defeated their competitors and re-established a coherent empire.↩ 13.
The notable exceptions being the Warring States period and the end of the Tang Dynasty, which resulted in the battles of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period.↩ 14. Yuhua Wang, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China: The Social Origins of State Development (Princeton University Press, 2022), chaps. 3 and 5; Yuhua Wang, ‘The Curse of Long-Ruling Autocrats’, 18 January 2023, https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-curse-of-long-rulingautocrats.↩ 15. The marauders constantly threatened and harassed China’s northern frontiers, leading to the Han even paying them tribute in an attempt to avoid confrontation. ↩ 16. Wang, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China. ↩ 17. Georg Orlandi et al., ‘Structural-Demographic Analysis of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) Collapse in China’, PLOS ONE 18, no. 8 (2023): e0289748, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0289748.↩ 18. Wang, The Rise and Fall of Imperial China, chap. 2; Chaochao Gao et al., ‘Volcanic Climate Impacts Can Act as Ultimate and Proximate Causes of Chinese Dynastic Collapse’, Communications Earth & Environment 2, no. 1 (2021): 234, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021- 00284-7. For some wise warnings about mistaking climate correlation for causation, see Dagomar Degroot et al., ‘Towards a Rigorous Understanding of Societal Responses to Climate Change’, Nature 591, no. 7851 (2021): 539–50, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03190- 2; Dagomar Degroot et al., ‘The History of Climate and Society: A Review of the Influence of Climate Change on the Human Past’, Environmental Research Letters 17, no. 10 (2022): 103001, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac8faa.↩ 19. Hoyer et al., ‘Navigating Polycrisis’.↩ 20. It’s not as clear in cases discussed earlier, including the systems collapses of the Late Bronze Age and the Lowland Maya, owing to less writing and documentation being available, but there is little reason to suspect it was missing.↩ 21.
In this account, there is a limited number of elite positions and competition becomes a problem once they are all filled. Like a game of musical chairs (or better put, musical thrones), those left without a seat become frustrated elite aspirants willing to upend the status quo to achieve power. While important, there are some nuances and minor problems with this theory. First, many of the apparent frustrated elites come from highly privileged backgrounds (see the examples of Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson below and many of the instigators of rebellion throughout Chinese history). They are usually outraged that they can’t transfer one form of power into another (such as from billionaire to politician) or because they have been publicly humiliated or denied status (such as the failed bureaucrats of China, or, again, Trump and Carlson). Second, elite positions are not always clearly limited in number. There is no limit on how many people can be wealthy in any society. This was more of a problem in pre-modern states and in certain domains (such as government). Third, many elite aspirants clearly have an insatiable hunger for status. Trump is a billionaire, has his name plastered across skyscrapers, and is perhaps the best-known person in the world. Yet, he still ferociously competes for power. Clearly, achieving high office once was not enough for him.
For the most ambitious, status is an infinite resource and getting to sit in one seat in the game of musical thrones will never be enough.
Rather than a case of elite overproduction creating ‘counter-elites’, it is better to see this as status competition heating up as the number of players increases, the number of elite positions becomes saturated, and the size of the prize swells.↩ 22. This process of growing elite competition is part of ‘structuraldemographic theory’. The theory was originally pioneered by the demographer Jack Goldstone. Goldstone helped establish the ‘Political Instability Task Force’ of the US, which used structural-models focused on elite competition to predict which states would fail next.
For an overview, see Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires (Penguin, 2007); Turchin, End Times; Peter Turchin and Sergey A. Nefedov, Secular Cycles (Princeton University Press, 2009). Peter Turchin, the biggest developer of structuraldemographic theory, is now warning that the US is entering a phase of heightened elite competition and crisis: Peter Turchin, ‘Political Instability May Be a Contributor in the Coming Decade’, Nature 463, no. 7281 (2010): 608, https://doi.org/10.1038/463608a. ↩ 23. On the encounter with Jon Stewart acting as a turning point for Carlson, see Devin Gordon, ‘What Happened to Jon Stewart?’, The Atlantic, 21 April 2022, www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/04/the-problem-with-jonstewar t-tucker-carlson/629608/. The calculation on Trump being a millionaire at age eight comes from Ross Buettner, Susan Craig, and David Barstow, ‘11 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into Trump’s Wealth’, New York Times, 2 October 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-wealth-fredtrump.
html.↩ 24. Notably, even competition for bureaucratic positions in China and elsewhere was usually among rich or upper-middle-class families.
Those who failed to translate their riches into other forms of power or more status rebelled.↩ 25. Butzer, ‘Collapse, Environment, and Society’, 3638. There is the historiographical problem that later regimes often had a good reason to brand their predecessors as corrupt. That way, their coup or rebellion was justified. That said, both the recurrence, the genuine evidence of tax dodging and growing fortunes of public officials, and the modern relationship between corruption and inequality, should all give us confidence that this is a real phenomenon.↩ 26. Laura Policardo and Edgar J. Sánchez Carrera, ‘Corruption Causes Inequality, or Is It the Other Way Around? An Empirical Investigation for a Panel of Countries’, Economic Analysis and Policy 59 (2018): 92–102, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eap.2018.05.001; Jong-Sung You and Sanjeev Khagram, ‘A Comparative Study of Inequality and Corruption’, American Sociological Review 70, no. 1 (2005): 136–57, https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240507000107.↩ 27. Scheidel, The Great Leveler, 134.↩ 28. From a version of the Crisis Database provided by Dan Hoyer in August 2024.↩ 29. There are, of course, exceptions. The Yuan Dynasty, a regime of Mongol invaders, adopted many of the structures of previous Chinese dynasties, but kept much of the previous intelligentsia excluded from critical positions.↩ 30. John Haldon et al., ‘Lessons from the Past, Policies for the Future: Resilience and Sustainability in Past Crises’, Environment Systems and Decisions 40, no. 2 (2020): 295, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10669-020- 09778-9.↩ 31.
Naturally there is some nuance here. It took three centuries after the collapse of the Han for there to be reunification under the Sui/Tang.↩ 32.
There are some caveats here. More complex weapons cannot be easily replicated. As we’ll see in later chapters, groups such as the Inuit lost technologies such as kayak making. However, this only tends to occur with smaller, isolated groups.↩ 33. Analabha Basu, Neeta Sarkar-Roy, and Partha P. Majumder, ‘Genomic Reconstruction of the History of Extant Populations of India Reveals Five Distinct Ancestral Components and a Complex Structure’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 6 (2016): 1594–9, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1513197113.↩ 34. Catherine E. Bolten and Richard ‘Drew’ Marcantonio, ‘Usurious Strangers and “a Better Tomorrow”: Agricultural Loans, Education, and the “Poverty Trap” in Rural Sierra Leone’, Economic Anthropology 10, no. 1 (2023): 77 and 87, https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12256.↩ 35. Bennet Bronson, ‘Patterns of Political Regeneration in Southeast and East Asia’, in After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies, ed. Glenn M. Schwartz and John Jackson Nichols (University of Arizona Press, 2006), 144. See also Scheidel, Escape from Rome, chap. 9.↩ 36. Ibid., chap. 8. For some nuance and criticisms, see Peter Turchin, ‘The Great Escape: A Review Essay on Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel’, Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution 11, no. 2 (2021): 78–81, https://doi.org/10.21237/C7clio11251633.↩ CHAPTER 12: THE FALL OF ROME 1. For population, see Morris, The Measure of Civilization, 147–8, table 4.1, and 155–6, table 4.2. For territorial extent, see Rein Taagepera, ‘Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 600 B.C. to 600 A.D.’, Social Science History 3, no. 3 (1979): 115–38, https://doi.org/10.1017/S014555320002294X. The EU is closer to 4.2 million. Bear in mind that such territorial estimates are problematic.
Often an empire would claim ownership of a territory even if their control was tenuous and only really consisted of a garrison.
Nonetheless, Rome’s was remarkably large. For summaries of the general history of Rome that I draw upon, see Scheidel, Escape from Rome; Bang, ‘The Roman Empire’; Walter Scheidel, ‘Ancient Mediterranean City-State Empires: Athens, Carthage, Early Rome’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, vol. II: The History of Empires, ed.
Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2021), 137–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0005. Rome was also remarkably large in population. While estimates are difficult, at its peak the Roman Empire may have governed between a quarter and a third of the world’s population. No other empire has ruled over a larger fraction of humanity (the British Empire only ever encompassed around a fifth of global population).↩ 2. According to one viral meme in 2023, most men apparently still muse about Rome several times a week. ‘The Roman Empire: Why Men Just Can’t Stop Thinking about It’, Guardian, 19 September 2023, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/sep/19/the-roman-empirewhy-m en-just-cant-stop-thinking-about-it. I confess to being in this category, although hopefully with a better reason than most.↩ 3. A king ordered them to be killed and, like Sargon and Moses, they were saved by being set in a basket upon a river. They floated down the Tiber until the two were suckled by a female wolf and then adopted by a shepherd. Rome was built upon the site.↩ 4. Jeremy Armstrong, War and Society in Early Rome: From Warlords to Generals (Cambridge University Press, 2016).
↩ 5. Rome began as a kingdom in 753 BCE, before the nobles overthrew the last king (with the memorable name of King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus).↩ 6. Scheidel, Escape from Rome, 98–104.
Young, land-owning male citizens had to serve in the military for six to seven years (usually while they were young, aggressive, and had yet to inherit family farms), and more during times of crisis.↩ 7. Grain estimates are based on Paul Erdkamp, ‘Annona (Grain)’, in Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. Thomas Wiedermann (Oxford University Press, 2022), 9, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.8000. I’ve taken the common estimate of 30 million modii of subsidized grain imports into Rome and converted it into metric tonnes by assuming each modius is around seven kilograms (the most widely accepted conversion).↩ 8. For those outside the city, participation was limited to those rich enough to easily travel to Rome regularly.↩ 9. For a summary of Rome’s inequality, see Scheidel, The Great Leveler, chap. 2.↩ 10. On corruption, see Scheidel, The Great Leveler, 39, 42. The rapacious governor is cited in Bang, ‘The Roman Empire’, 241.↩ 11. On silver mine yields, see J. C.
Edmondson, ‘Mining in the Later Roman Empire and Beyond: Continuity or Disruption?’, Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989): 85, https://doi.org/10.2307/301182.↩ 12. Joseph A. Tainter, ‘Collapse and Sustainability: Rome, the Maya, and the Modern World’, Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 24, no. 1 (2014): 204, https://doi.org/10.1111/apaa.12038.↩ 13. Scheidel, ‘The End of “Peak Empire”’, 113.↩ 14. On the effects of the Byzantine invasion (and a contrarian take on the fall of Rome) see Edward Jay Watts, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Oxford University Press, 2021). The most forceful case for the impact of climate and disease is made by Kyle Harper in The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton University Press, 2017). This has been significantly challenged, most notably by John Haldon et al., ‘Plagues, Climate Change, and the End of an Empire: A Response to Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome (1): Climate’, History Compass 16, no. 12 (2018): e12508, https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12508.
The effect of the Plague of Justinian (the first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe, which began in 541 CE during that emperor’s reign) in particular has been called into question, since multiple lines of evidence such as burials and coin deposits don’t show the usual telltale signs of a deadly epidemic: Lee Mordechai et al., ‘The Justinianic Plague: An Inconsequential Pandemic?’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 51 (2019): 25546–54, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1903797116.↩ 15. Kemp et al., ‘Societal Collapse as a Powershift’.↩ 16. Walter Scheidel, What Was the Roman Republic Really Like?, Humanities West 2014 Roman Republic Program, www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4Stzxi-m4s. Land area estimates are taken from Taagepera, ‘Size and Duration of Empires: Growth-Decline Curves, 600 B.C. to 600 A.D.’, 125. Scheidel gives the example of a city with the population of Palo Alto and size of Santa Clara County overtaking the contiguous US. Palo Alto is also around 60,000 people while Santa Clara county is approximately three times the size of Rome (3,344 km2 ). The US (9,372,610 km2 ) is approximately half the size of the Roman Empire at its height. Hence, if anything the comparison slightly underestimates the scale of Rome’s expansion.↩ 17.
Ayşe Zarakol, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2022). For a further discussion of the importance of expansion and the myth of civilization to empire, see Bang, ‘Empire – A World History’; Kumar, Empires, chap. 2.↩ 18. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (Vintage Books, 1989); Paul Kennedy, ‘Survival of Empires’, in Survival: The Survival of the Human Race, ed. Emily Shuckburgh (Cambridge University Press, 2008).↩ 19.
Crooks and Parsons, ‘Empires, Bureaucracy and the Paradox of Power’.↩ 20. Covered primarily in Chapter 7. For summaries of the evidence, see Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level; Wilkinson and Pickett, The Inner Level.↩ 21. Covered primarily in Chapter 11. For key recent pieces, see Policardo and Carrera, ‘Corruption Causes Inequality’; You and Khagram, ‘A Comparative Study of Inequality and Corruption’.↩ 22. Covered primarily in Chapters 7 and 11. For summaries, see Turchin, End Times; Turchin and Nefedov, Secular Cycles; Hoyer et al., ‘Navigating Polycrisis’.↩ 23. See Chapter 7 as well as Kemp, ‘Diminishing Returns on Extraction’.↩ 24. Haldon et al., ‘SDG 13’.↩ 25. This is particularly evident in Scott A. J. Johnson, Why Did Ancient Civilizations Fail? (Routledge, 2017); Diamond, Collapse. Technically Scott is an archaeologist and Diamond is more of an anthropologist, but they are both writing in the field of deep history.↩ 26.
For a full summary and further evidence, see Kemp, ‘Diminishing Returns on Extraction’.↩ 27. Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization (Island PR, 2008); Scheidel, ‘The End of “Peak Empire”’.↩ 28. Scheidel, Escape from Rome, 174.↩ 29. Scheidel, ‘The End of “Peak Empire”’, 112.
Remarkably, Rome and the Han Dynasty of China collapsed in a similar way. They even fell at roughly the same time. Both had reigns that were punctuated by periods of crisis and disorder. Rome was beset by the Third Century Crisis and the Han by the Wang Mang rebellion. The Han fell apart just fifteen years before Rome’s crisis period, and the Jin fell just a few decades before Rome capitulated. One leading theory is that the Antonine Plague originated in China and spread to Rome via the Silk Roads (or originated in central Asia before spreading to China and Rome). Like Rome, the Han also had to contend with external invaders.
Rome and the Han were also beset by a changing climate.
Crises during the third century CE for both Rome and the Han occurred during a time of cooling across the northern hemisphere. See Harper, The Fate of Rome; Kyle Harper and Michael McCormick, ‘Reconstructing the Roman Climate’, in The Science of Roman History, ed. Walter Scheidel (Princeton University Press, 2018), 11– 52, https://doi.org/10.23943/9781400889730-006. Compare Haldon et al., ‘Plagues, Climate Change, and the End of an Empire’.↩ 30. This can be seen as a blending of different theories of collapse.
Turchin, Hoyer, and Goldstone all stress the role of popular immiseration and elite conflict in their structural-demographic theory.
Diamond highlighted the role of climate change, loss of trading partners, war, environmental degradation, and poor responses in his five-part explanation. Joseph Tainter suggested that collapse was due to ‘diminishing returns on complexity’: societies become more complex to address new problems but face diminishing returns which eventually overwhelm them. This is usually due to popular discontent (from being overworked and overtaxed) and loss of revenue (due to the sheer complexity of regulatory and social systems). Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson point towards extractive institutions as being the key driver for why some states ‘succeed’ and others ‘fail’ in economic development. Diminishing returns on extraction knits these all together and provides additional clear pathways from inequality to collapse based on evidence. That includes growing studies on the weakness of oligarchy in decision-making through the empirical work on the link between corruption and inequality. Each of these theories has its weaknesses. Structural-demographic theory struggles to explain the role of other factors beyond elite factionalism and popular immiseration.
Diamond’s framework is largely dependent on external shocks and lacks a clear rationale for why some societies respond poorly to catastrophe.
Tainter’s theory is elegant but fundamentally flawed by the fact that complexity is far too ambiguous (scholars have measured this as the number of monuments built, trees felled, the energy ratio, or the size of an army, and, as covered earlier, complexity is usually just used as a euphemism for inequality and hierarchy) and it’s not at all clear why a society needs to increase ‘complexity’ (whatever that is) to resolve oncoming problems, or how exactly this leads to collapse. For a full critique, see Kemp, ‘Diminishing Returns on Extraction’. Bringing these all together into a single explanation links ancient and modern case studies, addresses the shortcomings of the individual theory, and links them to a wider explanation of how and why societies, states, and empires developed over time. It also has overlap with the frameworks provided by Hartley, ‘State Crisis Theory’, and Butzer, ‘Collapse, Environment, and Society’. I agree with their more nuanced frameworks, which suggest that crises can lead to reform, entrenchment, or full-blown collapse. Collapse is not the only possible outcome. For brevity and clarity I’m focusing purely on collapse in this section.↩ 31. Kemp et al., ‘Societal Collapse as a Powershift’.↩ 32. As we’ll see later, the key crisis aspect of structural-demographic theory sees elite competition as a battle over limited high-status positions. In other words, elite competition is status competition.↩ 33. The age of the Byzantine Empire would be around 1,058–1,145 years.
This depends on when exactly you choose to date the formation and end of the empire. Constantinople was conquered by the Ottomans in 1453, but the last outpost of the empire valiantly fought on until 1479.
Personally, I’d opt for the loss of the capital as the marker for state termination. The empire had lost its sovereignty and independence even if a few troops continued to hold out. This would put its age at 1,145 years. Notably, there was a minor collapse in 1204 when the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople and partitioned the empire. It was recaptured in 1261 and limped on for another two centuries. Even if we take this lower bound of 1204, the empire still lasted for an impressive 874 years. The quote of an empire that would not die comes from John F. Haldon, The Empire That Would Not Die: The Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640–740 (Harvard University Press, 2016).↩ 34. Ibid.↩ 35. Robert Perry Stephan, ‘House Size and Economic Growth: Regional Trajectories in the Roman World’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2013.↩ 36. Wyman, ‘How Do You Know If You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire?’↩ 37. Lawrence et al., ‘Long-Term Trends in Settlement Persistence in Southwest Asia’.↩ 38. Nikola Koepke, ‘The Biological Standard of Living in Europe from the Late Iron Age to the Little Ice Age’, in The Oxford Handbook of Economics and Human Biology, ed. J. Kolmos and I. Kelly (Oxford University Press, 2016), 78–81, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199389292.013.34; Nikola Koepke and Joerg Baten, ‘The Biological Standard of Living in Europe During the Last Two Millennia’, European Review of Economic History 9, no. 1 (2005): 76–7, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1361491604001388; Irene Barbiera and Gianpiero Dalla-Zuanna, ‘Population Dynamics in Italy in the Middle Ages: New Insights from Archaeological Findings’, Population and Development Review 35, no. 2 (2009): 375, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2009.00283.x; Monica Giannecchini and Jacopo Moggi-Cecchi, ‘Stature in Archeological Samples from Central Italy: Methodological Issues and Diachronic Changes’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 135, no. 3 (2008): 290, https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.20742.↩ 39. Boix and Rosenbluth, ‘Bones of Contention’, fig. 1.↩ 40. Koepke, ‘The Biological Standard of Living in Europe from the Late Iron Age to the Little Ice Age’, 86–8, 88–90.↩ 41.
For useful summaries, see Joan Ballester et al., ‘Effect of the Great Recession on Regional Mortality Trends in Europe’, Nature Communications 10, no. 1 (2019): 679, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-08539-w; Lynne Peeples, ‘How the Next Recession Could Save Lives’, Nature 565, no. 7740 (2019): 412–15, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00210-0.↩ 42. On the influence of the Roman model on modern emergency powers, see Marc de Wilde, ‘Just Trust Us: A Short History of Emergency Powers and Constitutional Change’, Comparative Legal History 3, no.
1 (2015): 110–30, https://doi.org/10.1080/2049677X.2015.1041728; Daniel D. Slate, ‘Crisis Government’s Legitimacy Paradox: Foreseeability and Unobservable Success’, in Intersections, Reinforcements, Cascades: Proceedings of the 2023 Stanford Existential Risks Conference, The Stanford Existential Risks Initiative, 2023, https://doi.org/10.25740/ZJ321VJ7513; Luke Kemp, ‘The “Stomp Reflex”: When Governments Abuse Emergency Powers’, BBC Future, 28 April 2021, www.bbc.com/future/article/20210427-thestomp-reflex-when-government s-abuse-emergency-powers.↩ 43. Scheidel, What Was the Roman Republic Really Like?↩ 44. Although it wasn’t invented by the Romans; it dates back to at least the Assyrians of the Bronze Age.↩ 45. The loved ones of the crucified often mistakenly gave them water, prolonging their suffering.↩ 46. Although eventually it was resettled. It is now a suburb of Tunis, the capital of Tunisia.↩ 47. States are, as Shakespeare once said, ‘jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth’. There is an abundant and growing literature on war and competition between states as a struggle for status. Seminal works include Jonathan Renshon, Fighting for Status: Hierarchy and Conflict in World Politics (Princeton University Press, 2017); William C.
Wohlforth, ‘Unipolarity, Status Competition, and Great Power War’, in International Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipolarity, ed.
G. John Ikenberry, Michael Mastanduno, and William C. Wohlforth (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 33–66, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511996337.002. States are usually seen as being most likely to resort to war when their actual capabilities outstrip their reputation or as a way to gain face after being subjugated to humiliating events, such as the wartime reparations imposed on Germany after the First World War under the Treaty of Versailles. It is usually produced by either a leader, or leaders, seeking status themselves through their countries’ actions, or domestic groups using national status as a tool to shift foreign policy. For a critical stocktake of the literature on status and outstanding problems and questions, see Paul K. MacDonald and Joseph M. Parent, ‘The Status of Status in World Politics’, World Politics 73, no. 2 (2021): 358–91, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887120000301; Allan Dafoe, Jonathan Renshon, and Paul Huth, ‘Reputation and Status as Motives for War’, Annual Review of Political Science 17, no. 1 (2014): 371–93, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-071112-213421. ↩ CHAPTER 13: FEAR THE RISE 1. Many archaeologists are aware of the problems with these terms and are trying to combat them. ↩ 2. Scheidel, Escape from Rome, 453.↩ 3.
There were a few exceptions, such as Roman concrete, but most of the developments we associate with the Roman Empire came earlier, often from the peoples they conquered.↩ 4. Marie D. Jackson et al., ‘Phillipsite and Al-Tobermorite Mineral Cements Produced through Low-Temperature Water-Rock Reactions in Roman Marine Concrete’, American Mineralogist 102, no. 7 (2017): 1435–50, https://doi.org/10.2138/am-2017-5993CCBY.↩ 5. W. H. R. Rivers, The Disappearance of Useful Arts (Forgotten Books, 2017); Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, chap. 12.↩ 6. Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, chap. 12.↩ 7. On Greek Fire, see John Haldon, ‘“Greek Fire” Revisited: Recent and Current Research’, in Byzantine Style, Religion, and Civilization: In Honour of Sir Steven Runciman, ed. Steven Runciman and Elizabeth Jeffreys (Cambridge University Press, 2006).↩ 8. I use welfare and standards of living interchangeably here. This is gauged by real income (income accounting for inflation), as this is the way it is usually measured in the economic history literature. Thanks to Eric Cline for noticing how this echoes the Egyptian saying of ‘life, prosperity, and happiness’.↩ 9. Bas van Leeuwen, Jieli Li, and Reinhard Pirngruber, ‘The Standard of Living in Ancient Societies: A Comparison between the Han Empire, the Roman Empire, and Babylonia’, 2013, https://pure.knaw.nl/ws/files/5691366/CGEHWP45_vanleeuwenetal_9 .pdf. Notably, this paper has not been published in peer-review literature, although the authors are each well-published economic historians with expertise in most of the relevant case studies. More importantly, the broader point is supported by calculations (drawing from a range of sources) in Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023).↩ 10. On the height of pharaohs, see Habicht et al., ‘Body Height of Mummified Pharaohs’. For evidence on Native Americans and the Mycenaeans, as well as height and inequality more broadly, see Boix and Rosenbluth, ‘Bones of Contention’.↩ 11. For the estimates of agricultural productivity during 1000–1300 CE, see Acemoglu and Johnson, Power and Progress. There was, of course, some variation. Being a farmer in Rome almost certainly was an improvement on being a farmer in Uruk, one of the earliest cities in Mesopotamia. Yet many of those improvements came on the back of conquest, appropriation, and widespread slavery. In any case, these differences were not enormous. For the best estimate of human height over the long run (in the UK), see Gregori Galofré-Vilà, Andrew Hinde, and Aravinda Meera Guntupalli, ‘Heights Across the Last 2,000 Years in England’, in Research in Economic History, ed. Christopher Hanes and Susan Wolcott, vol. XXXIV (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2018), 67–98, https://doi.org/10.1108/S0363-326820180000034003.
The general idea is supported by a range of other estimates summarized in Boix and Rosenbluth, ‘Bones of Contention’, and others.↩ 12. Tomasz Frackowiak et al., ‘Subjective Happiness Among Polish and Hadza People’, Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020): 1173, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01173; Robert William Martin and Andrew J. Cooper, ‘Subjective Well-Being in a Remote Culture: The Himba’, Personality and Individual Differences 115 (2017): 19–22, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2016.10.021. It’s worth noting that people in modern industrialized countries are taller and happier than those living in the Roman Empire, hence there should be an even bigger difference in happiness between nomadic egalitarian foragers and those living during the peak of historical empires.↩ 13. See preceding references in this chapter, as well as chapters 1 and 4.
The evidence that average human height is only just reaching Palaeolithic levels (for men, at least) is strong. While there are only a few studies comparing egalitarian hunter-gatherer happiness to that of industrialized countries, they do produce the common result that the hunter-gatherer societies are mentally better off. Today, OECD countries account for around 17 per cent of global population. A fairer comparison of average global happiness would be a factory worker in China or a peasant farmer in sub-Saharan Africa against an egalitarian forager. The difference in happiness is likely to be far more striking.↩ 14. For an overview, see Acemoglu and Johnson, Power and Progress.↩ 15. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 336.↩ 16. Scheidel, The Great Leveler, 448.↩ 17. It may have been as much as 60 per cent in places such as Greece and the British Isles.↩ 18. On height after the Black Death, see Galofré-Vilà, Hinde, and Guntupalli, ‘Heights Across the Last 2,000 Years in England’; Emily J.
Brennan and Sharon N. DeWitte, ‘Sexual Stature Difference Fluctuations in Pre- and Post-Black Death London as an Indicator of Living Standards’, American Journal of Human Biology 34, no. 10 (2022): e23783, https://doi.org/10.1002/ajhb.23783. Interestingly, women seem to benefit less in terms of height, and in some cases average heights even decrease. This is likely to have been because better nutrition meant that women reached puberty earlier and stopped growing. Sharon N. DeWitte, ‘Mortality Risk and Survival in the Aftermath of the Medieval Black Death’, ed. Andrew Noymer, PLOS ONE 9, no. 5 (2014): e96513, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0096513, found lower mortality rates in the wake of the Black Death. On wages, see Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life: 1400–1800 (Fontana/Collins, 1979), chap.
3. As the historian of epidemics Samuel Cohn Jr remarked, the Black Death did not result in the ‘decline, or collapse of civilizations, at least in Europe, but instilled remarkable resilience’. Samuel K.
Cohn, ‘The Black Death: Collapse, Resilience, and Transformation’, in How Worlds Collapse, ed. Miguel Centeno et al. (Routledge, 2023), 191, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003331384-13.↩ 19. For an overview, see Scheidel, The Great Leveler, chap. 10. On the demise of feudalism and wider institutional impacts, see Remi Jedwab, Noel D. Johnson, and Mark Koyama, ‘The Economic Impact of the Black Death’, Journal of Economic Literature 60, no. 1 (2022): 132– 78, https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20201639; David D. Haddock and Lynne Kiesling, ‘The Black Death and Property Rights’, Journal of Legal Studies 31, no. S2 (2002): S545–87, https://doi.org/10.1086/345566. On the economic benefits of the plague (or, the ‘plague bonus’), see James Belich, The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2022).↩ 20. Van Bavel and Scheffer, ‘Historical Effects of Shocks on Inequality’.↩ 21. Leticia Arroyo Abad, Elwyn Davies, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, ‘Between Conquest and Independence: Real Wages and Demographic Change in Spanish America, 1530–1820’, Explorations in Economic History 49, no. 2 (2012): 149–66, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eeh.2011.12.001. A broader analysis of why power and not just technology matters for real wages can be found in Acemoglu and Johnson, Power and Progress. Inclusive institutions and how power is distributed can also help explain why societies fared differently when facing the plague. Both medieval England (1348–50) and Egypt under the rule of the Mamluk Sultanate (1347–9) were struck by the Black Death. Both suffered in a similar way. Mamluk Egypt lost around a third of its population, which was then followed by a flooding of the Nile, grain shortages, famine, and conflict. The Mamluks completely mismanaged the crisis: they gave little aid to the commoners and instead spent lavishly on new construction projects.
Rural areas suffered large loss of life, lowering the tax revenue of the empire, and it underspent on its irrigation infrastructure, worsening the lot of the farmers. This mismanagement and recurring bouts of the plague for the next century both contributed to its fall in 1517. In contrast, we’ve already seen that England in the decades that followed had a large-scale improvement in the health, wages, and well-being of the population, especially peasants. The difference in outcomes results from a difference in how both elites and commoners responded. And part of that difference was due to inclusive institutions: England already had a parliament, while the Mamluks had a supreme sultan who ruled through generals and provincial governors.↩ 22. While many others had access to gunpowder and iron (including China and the Mughal Empire in India), Europeans more aggressively refined and developed their arsenals, as well as the military tactics to use them. See Philip T.
Hoffman, Why Did Europe Conquer the World?
(Princeton University Press, 2015).↩ 23. Scheidel, Escape from Rome; Hoffman, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? New financial institutions essentially helped to extend the monetary supply and fuel the military-industrial complex. One pivotal development was the creation of the Bank of England, in 1694. It was not constructed to drive economic growth and stability, but rather to assist a war against the French (the War of the League of Augsburg). It issued mutual shares with a guaranteed 8 per cent return and within a year had raised £1.5 million for the war effort. Within a decade Britain had defeated the French. See Tim Di Muzio and Matt Dow, ‘Uneven and Combined Confusion: On the Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism and the Rise of the West’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs 30, no. 1 (2017): 14–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2016.1256949; Tim Di Muzio, Carbon Capitalism: Energy, Social Reproduction and World Order (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015); Haldon, ‘The Political Economy of Empire: “Imperial Capital” and the Formation of Central and Regional Elites’, 201–2.↩ 24. Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson, eds., The Cambridge History of Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139095099.↩ 25. As with the Bronze Age, rarer items from more distant lands usually meant more status.↩ 26. Belich, The World the Plague Made. Book production collapsed with the plague, when far too many of the already scarce class of writers and scholars died. This encouraged the development and uptake of the 1440 Gutenberg printing press. By 1500, Western Europe had produced 20 million books.↩ 27. Another key was fossil fuels. Around the same time, deforestation made timber in England scarce, sending its price skyrocketing and encouraging a move towards alternative energy sources such as coal.
See Di Muzio, Carbon Capitalism. Others argue that it was not deforestation that drove the push towards coal, but rather active attempts by elites to undermine labour power (Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2016).)↩ 28. Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Windmill Books, 2021), 49. The ‘peasants are too rich’ quote comes from Christopher Dyer, ‘A Redistribution of Incomes in England’, Past and Present 39, no. 1 (1968): 11–33, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/39.1.11. Malm, Fossil Capital.↩ 29. Haldon, ‘The Political Economy of Empire’, 184.↩ 30. Rein Taagepera, ‘Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities: Context for Russia’, International Studies Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1997): 485–7, https://doi.org/10.1111/0020-8833.00053.↩ 31. Based on data from Scheidel, ‘The Scale of Empire’. I’ve taken the largest empire of every 500 years for the past 2,500 years, as well as the first empire to approach 1 million km2 (the Akkadian Empire). I’ve made one slight change by opting for the Roman Empire over the Macedonian Empire, mainly because the latter was so short-lived.↩ 32. Daniel Headrick, ‘A Double-Edged Sword: Communications and Imperial Control in British India’, Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung 35, no. 1 (2010): 53, https://doi.org/10.12759/HSR.35.2010.1.51-65.↩ 33. Mohini Lal Majumdar, Early History and Growth of Postal System in India (RDDHI-India, 1995), 252.↩ 34. Mortality estimates for the invasion of the Americas were taken from Alexander Koch et al., ‘Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492’, Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13–36, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.12.004. Estimates for the Black Death are from White, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things.
These were then cross-referenced with global population estimates from Our World in Data, ‘Population, 10,000 BCE to 2021’, Our World in Data, 2022, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?
yScale=log. Luke Muelhauser also provides a useful dataset which compares different high-mortality events with global population estimates: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14I49e43PphzocDcZghYm6ek QZcJ3JeuicJ9ZafTa7GA/edit?gid=447443392#gid=447443392.
However, his estimates of the Mongol conquests under Chinggis Khan are outdated and too high (reaching almost 10 per cent under his calculations). Using more reliable data suggests that the Mongol Empire was closer to killing around 2 per cent of global population (around 10–14 million people, rather than 37–40 million). For a discussion of the problems with the initial estimates of Mongol casualties, and suggestions for more plausible numbers, see Michael Mann, ‘Have Wars and Violence Declined?’, Theory and Society 47, no. 1 (2018): 43–5, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-018-9305-y.↩ 35. On global decimation threats, see Kemp et al., ‘Climate Endgame’.↩ 36. Johan Elverskog, ‘Zünghar (Dzungar) Khanate’, in The Encyclopedia of Empire, ed. Nigel Dalziel and John M. MacKenzie (Wiley, 2016), 1–6, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118455074.wbeoe065.↩ 37. Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, 383.↩ 38. Malešević, The Rise of Organised Brutality. Chains of command also help to diffuse responsibility across numerous individuals, giving every person an easier way to rationalize immoral actions, such as ‘If I don’t do it, someone else will’.↩ 39. Gary Uzonyi, ‘State Failure, Genocide and Politicide Reconsidered’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 25, no. 1 (2023): 83–101, https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211044654.↩ CHAPTER 14: COLONIZATION AND COLLAPSE 1. Not to be confused with the other Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, who founded Nicaragua.↩ 2. The Columbian Exchange may have also introduced syphilis into Europe from the Americas, although this is a matter of ongoing debate.
Others believe that syphilis had already been in Europe for a long period of time. See Marylynn Salmon, ‘Manuscripts and Art Support Archaeological Evidence that Syphilis Was in Europe Long Before Explorers Could Have Brought It Home from the Americas’, The Conversation, 13 July 2022, https://theconversation.com/manuscriptsand-art-support-archaeologicalevidence-that-syphilis-was-in-europelong-before-explorers-could-have-br ought-it-home-from-the-americas182114.↩ 3. On the Aztecs, see Guido Alfani and Alfonso Carballo, ‘Income and Inequality in the Aztec Empire on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest’, Nature Human Behaviour 7 (2023): 1265–74, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01636-3.↩ 4.
Michael E. Smith and Maëlle Sergheraert, ‘The Aztec Empire’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, vol. II: The History of Empires, ed.
Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2021), 276–88, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0024. On taxation, see Michael E. Smith, ‘The Aztecs Paid Taxes, Not Tribute’, Mexicon 36, no.
1 (2014): 19–22, www.academia.edu/6578625/_The_Aztecs_Paid_Taxes_Not_Tribute_ 2014_. For an overview of how advanced Mesoamerican society was, see Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (Vintage, 2006). Smith and Sergheraert, ‘The Aztec Empire’, provide an overview of the empire.↩ 5. Mann, 1491, 124.↩ 6. Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés: The True Story of the Meeting That Changed History (ECCO, 2018).↩ 7. On Motecuhzoma’s hesitation and the paralysis of the Aztecs, see Smith and Sergheraert, ‘The Aztec Empire’, 289–90.↩ 8. Ross Hassig, Mexico and the Spanish Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2006); Nichols and Collins, ‘Episodes of the Feathered Serpent’, 177–9. For good general summaries of the ‘New Conquest History’ literature which emphasize indigenous autonomy and rebellion, see Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Oxford University Press, 2019); Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest (Oxford University Press, 2021).↩ 9. Pizarro was a second cousin, once removed, of Cortés.↩ 10. This might seem an unlikely statistic, but it is corroborated by multiple sources. Bear in mind that we are talking about a dozen or more relay runners, while the horses weren’t being relayed and were not at full gallop since they were on mountainous and often very winding roads.↩ 11. Chris Given-Wilson, ‘Bureaucracy Without Alphabetic Writing: Governing the Inca Empire, c.1438–1532’, in Empires and Bureaucracy in World History: From Late Antiquity to the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Crooks and Timothy H.
Parsons (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 22, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316694312.005.↩ 12. The Incan Empire was an absolute, authoritarian monarchy with the ruling Sapa Incans claiming direct divine lineage. Each local polity had a landscape deity known as a huaca. All local inhabitants believed they had some ancestral link to the huaca, and a local leader, known as a kuraka, claimed direct and privileged lineage to this deity. These kinline relationships, known as ayllus, extended up to the Incan supreme ruler.
This divine web of relations justified the mita taxes (contributions of labour) that the ruling Inca exacted from their territories. However, such a nested hierarchy was new for many peoples and often fragile.↩ 13.
The population data is from Koch et al., ‘Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492’. For a useful overview of the Incan economy and society, see Gordon Francis McEwan, The Incas: New Perspectives (ABC-CLIO, 2006).↩ 14. That resistance continued even after the death of Atahualpa.
Atahualpa’s brother organized a rebellion against the Spaniards and almost succeeded in annihilating them. Despite heavy losses, the Spanish prevailed, pushing the Incan rebels out of the Andes. The Incan renegades moved inland to the edge of the Amazon and established a new hidden capital: Vilcabamba. From there they fought a thirty-six-year guerilla war against the Spanish. For an overview of the fall of the Incan Empire, see Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas (Simon & Schuster, 2008).↩ 15. Nichols and Collins, ‘Episodes of the Feathered Serpent’, 184. See also Laura E. Matthew and Michel R. Oudijk, eds., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).↩ 16. Camilla Townsend, ‘Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico’, American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (2003), https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/108.3.659.↩ 17. Robert J. DiNapoli et al., ‘Approximate Bayesian Computation of Radiocarbon and Paleoenvironmental Record Shows Population Resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)’, Nature Communications 12, no. 1 (June 2021): 3939, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-24252-z; Carl Lipo, Robert J.
DiNapoli, and Terry Hunt, ‘Claims and Evidence in the Population History of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)’, in The Prehistory of Rapa Nui (Easter Island): Towards an Integrative Interdisciplinary Framework, ed. Valenti Rull and Christopher Stephenson (Springer, 2022), 565–85; Terry L.
Hunt and Carl P. Lipo, The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island (Free Press, 2011).↩ 18. The latest evidence suggests that the deforestation came from humans, not introduced rats gnawing at palm tree seeds. See Andreas Mieth and Hans-Rudolf Bork, ‘Humans, Climate or Introduced Rats – Which Is to Blame for the Woodland Destruction on Prehistoric Rapa Nui (Easter Island)?’, Journal of Archaeological Science 37, no. 2 (2010): 417, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2009.10.006.↩ 19. Carl P. Lipo et al., ‘Weapons of War? Rapa Nui Mata’a Morphometric Analyses’, Antiquity 90, no. 349 (2016): 172–87, https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2015.189. The ecocide narrative largely rests on high estimates of a population of around 17,000 prior to European contact. The most recent evidence thoroughly debunks this.
Numerous different methods, including shortwave infrared (SWIR) satellite scanning, have shown that the rock garden agriculture used by the Rapa Nui could never have supported such numbers. Instead, the island would have had a maximum population of around 3–4,000.
That’s also the rough number reported by the Europeans who first contacted the island. See Dylan S. Davis et al., ‘Island-Wide Characterization of Agricultural Production Challenges the Demographic Collapse Hypothesis for Rapa Nui (Easter Island)’, Science Advances 10, no. 25 (2024): eado1459, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ado1459; DiNapoli et al., ‘Approximate Bayesian Computation of Radiocarbon and Paleoenvironmental Record Shows Population Resilience on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)’. For the most recent DNA analysis which upends the ecocide theory, see J.
Víctor Moreno-Mayar et al., ‘Ancient Rapanui Genomes Reveal Resilience and Pre-European Contact With the Americas’, Nature 633, no. 8029 (2024): 389–97, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07881- 4.↩ 20. Nichols and Collins, ‘Episodes of the Feathered Serpent’, 185.
I’ve discounted one outdated, outlier estimate of 22 per cent. There are some suggestions that the particular severity of the introduction of Old World diseases into the Americas could be due to some kind of genetic vulnerability, including lower genetic diversity among indigenous groups.
Increased diversity tends to lead to resistance to disease, while the Americas tended to have lower diversity since only a small outgroup migrated across the Bering Land Bridge into the Americas.
However, this remains speculative. See I. King Jordan, ‘The Columbian Exchange as a Source of Adaptive Introgression in Human Populations’, Biology Direct 11, no. 1 (2016): 6, https://doi.org/10.1186/s13062-016-0121-x. On Australia, see Peter Dowling, Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples (Monash University Publishing, 2021). For Hawaii, Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity (W. W. Norton, 1999), 466.↩ 21. Nichols and Collins, ‘Episodes of the Feathered Serpent’, 179–84.↩ 22. On Tasmania, the population of 7,000 was nearly wiped out by disease, mass killings, and the frequent kidnapping of women and children. The remaining 220 survivors were shipped away from their homeland to Flinders Island. The overcrowded and poorly ventilated conditions made outbreaks of sickness even worse. The mission was closed when only forty-six remained. It is what many historians consider to be an early case of genocide. Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Viking, 2001), 1; Dowling, Fatal Contact.↩ 23. Robbie Ethridge, ‘The Rise and Fall of Mississippian Ancient Towns and Cities, 1000–1700’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (Oxford University Press, 2018), 15–16, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.349; Ben Raffield, ‘Broken Worlds: Towards an Archaeology of the Shatter Zone’, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 28, no. 3 (2021): 871–910, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-021-09520-y.↩ 24. Ethridge, ‘The Rise and Fall of Mississippian Ancient Towns and Cities, 1000–1700’, 14–15.↩ 25. The Haudenosaunee were more complicated. They lost thousands due to introduced epidemics and used captured peoples to replace them – quite literally. During a ritual ceremony known as the requickening, they would have the captive adopt the persona and position of a deceased member.↩ 26. Robbie Franklin Ethridge, ‘Introduction’, in Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, ed.
Sheri Marie ShuckHall (University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 8, 14, 30; Matthew H.
Jennings, ‘Violence in a Shattered World’, ibid., 280.↩ 27. Jennings, ‘Violence in a Shattered World’, 284.↩ 28. Ethridge, ‘Introduction’, 39; Jennings, ‘Violence in a Shattered World’, 281–6.↩ 29. Ronald Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, Studies in the Theory of Imperialism 120 (1972); Ronald Robinson, ‘The Excentric Idea of Imperialism, With or Without Empire’, in Imperialism, ed.
Peter H. Cain and Mark Harrison (Routledge, 2023), 334–58, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003101529.↩ 30. Nichols and Collins, ‘Episodes of the Feathered Serpent’, 184–5; James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford University Press, 1993).↩ 31. Henry Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire: The Making of a World Power, 1492–1763 (Penguin, 2003).↩ 32. Those that were not colonized often took on the shape of the colonizers regardless. Japan first encountered Portugal in 1543.
Thereafter Japan started to look increasingly like a European colonial empire. It adopted their tactics and even their way of defending colonization. For instance, when Japan invaded Taiwan in 1874, it did so under a justification of bringing civilization to a savage, backward indigenous population. It established a powerful colonial empire that was influenced by Europeans. It’s a process that scholars call ‘imperial mimesis’: one empire replicating the features of another successful one.
It is, once again, an example of Goliath evolution. It was far safer to become a colonizer than risk being colonized. Robert Tierney, ‘Japanese Imperialism’, in The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz (Wiley, 2016), 1–7, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119076506.wbeps184. Robert Eskildsen, ‘Of Civilization and Savages: The Mimetic Imperialism of Japan’s 1874 Expedition to Taiwan’, American Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002), https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/107.2.388, explores how Japan used a ‘civilizing’ narrative inspired by the European empires to justify its colonies, including its military expedition to Taiwan. Graeber and Sahlins have instead referred to this as ‘galactic mimesis’, based on their renaming of empires as ‘galactic polities’. See Graeber and Sahlins, On Kings, 13.↩ 33. Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD (Oxford University Press, 2007), table A.1, table A.5. Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel, ‘Capitalism and Extreme Poverty: A Global Analysis of Real Wages, Human Height, and Mortality Since the Long 16th Century’, World Development 161 (2023): 12, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.106026. The figure of 50 million is based on India’s death rate in the 1880s. However, this rate was already high. When compared to mortality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, the estimated excess deaths under British rule triples to 165 million.↩ 34. Scott, Against the Grain, 113–15.↩ 35. At the individual level, a greater degree of involvement with farming is strongly associated with higher fertility, but there is a lot of variation across cultures. For instance, stronger dependence on market labour seems to reduce fertility. See Page et al., ‘Women’s Subsistence Strategies Predict Fertility across Cultures, but Context Matters’. Some studies (H. Jabran Zahid, Erick Robinson, and Robert L. Kelly, ‘Agriculture, Population Growth, and Statistical Analysis of the Radiocarbon Record’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 4 (2016): 931–5, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1517650112) have found that modern North American hunter-gatherers have population growth rates that surpass early European farmers. Yet even if their fertility and growth rates were higher, their long-term population size was still constrained by the environment. This explains why population growth rates from the archaeological record are usually orders of magnitude lower than those observed in modern hunter-gatherers. For a discussion, see Miikka Tallavaara and Erlend Kirkeng Jørgensen, ‘Why Are Population Growth Rate Estimates of Past and Present HunterGatherers So Different?’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376, no. 1816 (2021): 20190708, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2019.0708.↩ 36. The estimates of hunter-gatherer densities come from David Pimentel and Marcia Pimentel, Food, Energy, and Society, 3rd edn (CRC Press, 2008), 45–6.
I’ve then translated these from hectares into square kilometres.↩ 37. Carlo Martuscelli, ‘The Populist Right Wants You to Make More Babies.
The Question Is How’, Politico, 11 September 2023, www.politico.eu/article/eu-populist-right-want-you-make-morebabies-vikt or-orban/. Any slowing of population growth is also usually met with dismay by the powerful. It’s a sentiment perhaps best expressed by Elon Musk’s hyperbolic (as well as wrong and selfserving) opinion that ‘population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming’.↩ 38. Frank Götmark and Malte Andersson, ‘Human Fertility in Relation to Education, Economy, Religion, Contraception, and Family Planning Programs’, BMC Public Health 20, no. 1 (2020): 265, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7. Naturally we need to be careful here as there are multiple confounding factors (although this study does try to control for these by examining five of the most powerful factors: education, religiosity, economic strength (GDP and GDP per capita), the prevalence of contraceptives, and family planning).↩ 39. Geography played an additional, crucial role.
Geographical barriers such as mountains and swamps, which tended to block the spread of Goliaths and favour the art of not being governed, also tended to block the transmission of culture and disease (Chira, Gray, and Botero, ‘Geography Is Not Destiny’). Note that the analysis here is largely for cultural transmission, not disease, although the two are certainly going to overlap; both are primarily transmitted by humans, after all.
Notably, the study did not find support for Jared Diamond’s hypothesis that the axis of continents would significantly help or hinder the spread of culture and disease. Geography also helped with the spread of disease between Goliaths. For instance, the Black Death that ravaged medieval Europe (1346–53) came from Kyrgyzstan, on the border of China, and travelled down the Silk Road; its spread across Europe correlates with traders moving down navigable rivers. See Maria A.
Spyrou et al., ‘The Source of the Black Death in Fourteenth-Century Central Eurasia’, Nature 606, no. 7915 (2022): 718–24, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04800-3. See also Ricci P. H. Yue, Harry F. Lee, and Connor Y. H. Wu, ‘Trade Routes and Plague Transmission in Pre-Industrial Europe’, Scientific Reports 7, no. 1 (2017): 12973, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-13481-2, and ‘Navigable Rivers Facilitated the Spread and Recurrence of Plague in Pre-Industrial Europe’, Scientific Reports 6, no. 1 (2016): 34867, https://doi.org/10.1038/srep34867.↩ 40. The plague also played a role, with the Mongols particularly hard hit owing to their situation at the junction of China and Europe.↩ 41. The Chin and other examples are recounted in Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, chap. 6.↩ 42. They are what the anthropologist David Graeber would have called ‘shit jobs’.
These are not to be confused with ‘bullshit jobs’ like investment banking, which are socially pointless and even harmful but often well reimbursed.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2018).↩ 43. The four ingredients discussed in this section are a combination of ideas from the three great thinkers referenced above: James C. Scott, Jared Diamond, and David Graeber. Scott points to fertility as the key advantage agriculturalists had over foragers. Diamond provides a compelling case for disease and military technology as being key to the triumph of the West. Graeber’s idea of shit and bullshit jobs, while never applied to this topic, provides a conceptual backbone.↩ 44. For a summary, see Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin, How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth (Polity Press, 2022), chap. 7.↩ 45. David Stasavage, ‘Was Weber Right? The Role of Urban Autonomy in Europe’s Rise’, American Political Science Review 108, no. 2 (2014): 337–54; Koyama and Rubin, How the World Became Rich, chap. 7.↩ 46.
A similar point is raised in the framework of Hartley, ‘State Crisis Theory’.
In short, conditions which improve ‘sufficiency’, such as positive technological change, economic development, and more open institutions can help ensure crisis doesn’t escalate into collapse.↩ 47.
David Eltis and Lawrence C. Jennings, ‘Trade Between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era’, American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (1988): 944, https://doi.org/10.2307/1863530. On the link between slave demand and malaria, see Elena Esposito, ‘The Side Effects of Immunity: Malaria and African Slavery in the United States’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 14, no. 3 (2022): 290, 325–6, https://doi.org/10.1257/app.20190372. Particular African ethnicities who appeared to be more malaria-resistant also fetched higher prices in the Louisiana slave market.↩ 48. Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 67.↩ 49. Sullivan and Hickel, ‘Capitalism and Extreme Poverty’.
On life expectancy, see E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge University Press, 1989). On heights, see Galofré-Vilà, Hinde, and Guntupalli, ‘Heights Across the Last 2,000 Years in England’, fig.
5.↩
CHAPTER 15: COLLAPSE IN THE MODERN WORLD 1. The 84 per cent estimate comes from Hoffman, Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, 2. The US also had Cuba as a territory until 1902.↩ 2. The Portuguese held on longest to their official colonial empire, which ended in 1999 when it handed Macau back to the People’s Republic of China (making Portugal the first and last maritime colonial empire).↩ 3.
Daniel Immerwahr, ‘A New History of World War II’, The Atlantic, 4 April 2022, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/worldwar-ii-empire-colo nialism/629371/; Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945 (Viking, 2022); Daniel Immerwahr, ‘How the US Has Hidden Its Empire’, Guardian, 15 February 2019, www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/15/the-us-hidden-empireoverseasterritories-united-states-guam-puerto-rico-american-samoa; Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).↩ 4. Although the White House had been trying to assist France and the UK through finance. It had also already imposed an oil embargo on the Japanese.↩ 5. Sharanya Deepak, ‘A “Forgotten Holocaust” Is Missing from Indian Food Stories’, Gastro Obscura, 17 September 2020, www.atlasobscura.com/articles/indian-food-writing; Michael Safi, ‘Churchill’s Policies Contributed to 1943 Bengal Famine – Study’, Guardian, 29 March 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policiescontri buted-to-1943-bengal-famine-study.↩ 6. John Darwin, Decolonization: A History of Failure, Library of Congress, 13 July 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7bRx5fEJbU, provides an eloquent overview of the process of decolonization and why the disorderly process could even be considered ‘a failure’. Stuart Ward, ‘Decolonization and Neocolonialism’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, vol. II: The History of Empires, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A.
Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2021), 1161–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0042, provides another useful summary.↩ 7. Mohammed Hussein and Mohammed Haddad, ‘Infographic: US Military Presence around the World’, Al Jazeera, 9 October 2021, www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-military-presencearo und-the-world-interactive. Figures come from the SIPRI Military Expenditure Database (1949–2023), www.sipri.org/databases/milex.
Note that when making the defence spending comparison on a purchasing power parity basis (i.e. in real terms for each country), the US defence budget is only about as large as the next two countries (China and Russia) combined. In contrast to the 750 US military bases, China has only one such base overseas: a naval base in Djibouti.↩ 8.
Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, ‘Introducing the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 67, no. 4 (2023): 752, https://doi.org/10.1177/00220027221117546.↩ 9. John Hall, ‘The End of Empires’, in The Oxford World History of Empire, vol. I: The Imperial Experience, ed. Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A.
Bayly, and Walter Scheidel (Oxford University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199772360.003.0017.↩ 10. The quotes come from Ron Suskind, ‘Without a Doubt’, New York Times, 17 October 2004. I unfortunately had to spend far too much time observing how the US shapes the world. My PhD thesis focused on how to manage US participation in international environmental treaties. While US participation tends to be critical to the success of international treaties, it also has the unfortunate habit of rarely ratifying (legally joining) them.
During my PhD I repeatedly warned of the dangers of watering down the Paris Climate Agreement to encourage the US to join it. Alas, I was unsuccessful, and the US got its way in the end. Despite the Paris Agreement being weakened, the US still withdrew from it under President Trump in 2020, and is set to do so again at the time of writing.
We now have an international climate agreement that is universal and useless. See Luke Kemp, ‘A Systems Critique of the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate’, in Pathways to a Sustainable Economy, ed.
Moazzem Hossain, Robert Hales, and Tapan Sarker (Springer International, 2018), 25–41, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67702-6_3; Luke Kemp, ‘Better Out Than In’, Nature Climate Change 7, no. 7 (2017): 458–60, https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3309; Luke Kemp, ‘US-Proofing the Paris Climate Agreement’, Climate Policy 17, no. 1 (2017): 86–101, https://doi.org/10.1080/14693062.2016.1176007.↩ 11. The Catalans instead have been folded into Spain (owing to previous imperial conquest), the Scots into the UK (owing to previous imperial conquest), while the Kurds are dispersed across Turkey, Iraq, and Syria (owing to the victors of the First World War breaking their promise to establish a Kurdish state). Strangely, many will still reflexively hate any attempt by these nations to secede. Kumar, Empires, chap. 4 makes the point about nations and states often not overlapping.↩ 12. There is a copious literature on this, usually under the banner of ‘dependency theory’ or ‘world-systems theory’. The essential idea is that we now operate under a single economic system which has a ‘core’ composed of former colonial empires and their closest allies.
This exploits a ‘periphery’ of formerly conquered and dominated countries, primarily in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
Countries can move between the core and periphery, usually first by becoming a ‘semi-periphery’ country. Prominent examples of such mobility include China and Singapore. The classical text on worldsystems theory is Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis. For an accessible overview of how debt and unfair trade have led to underdevelopment in poorer countries, see Jason Hickel, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions (Heinemann, 2017).↩ 13. Jason Hickel et al., ‘Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy: Drain from the Global South through Unequal Exchange, 1990–2015’, Global Environmental Change 73 (2022): 102467, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102467.↩ 14. Jason Hickel, Morena Hanbury Lemos, and Felix Barbour, ‘Unequal Exchange of Labour in the World Economy’, Nature Communications 15, no. 1 (2024): 6298, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-49687-y.
Note that I’m using ‘unequal exchange’ a little differently from how it is commonly defined in the ecological economics literature. That’s because unequal exchange is such a broad term it better captures all forms of exchange that are done on an unequal power basis, including tribute and tax. I’m terming the transfer of resources from low-income to high-income countries due to structural economic differences – such as debt, wage differences, and trade agreements – unequal trade rather than unequal exchange. That is because trade is the primary conduit for the extraction of resources, not tax or tribute.↩ 15. For a broader discussion of determinants of economic growth across different countries, see Koyama and Rubin, How the World Became Rich. They highlight the key factors as geography, demography, culture, institutions, and colonization. As we’ll cover later, the importance of colonialism leaving more exclusive economic institutions in some countries has also been highlighted in the Nobel Prize-winning work of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson: see especially Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, ‘The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation’, American Economic Review 91, no. 5 (2001): 1369– 401; Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail.↩ 16. The potential sole exception here is North Korea. However, even North Korea still has many of the key ingredients of capitalism: private markets, private companies, wage labour, and a goal of economic growth. While private property is technically banned, it still often occurs in practice and the government still permits (with oversight) the transfer and inheritance of property. North Korea is more capitalist than most think.↩ 17. Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2020), chapter 1.
Milanović, Capitalism, Alone, makes the compelling case that all countries are now capitalist. There are different flavours of capitalism, such as authoritarian and liberal, but they all have the same basic economic structure. On surveillance capitalism, see Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (PublicAffairs, 2019).↩ 18. And the Grand Duchy of Hesse: a tiny country in central Germany ruled by a duke.↩ 19.
Although it was essentially pre-empting Prussia taking it by force.↩ 20.
Tanisha M. Fazal, ‘State Death in the International System’, International Organization 58, no. 2 (2004): 311–44, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818304582048; Tanisha M. Fazal, State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton University Press, 2007).↩ 21. Brandon Valeriano and John Van Benthuysen, ‘When States Die: Geographic and Territorial Pathways to State Death’, Third World Quarterly 33, no. 7 (2012): 1165–89, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2012.691826.↩ 22. Matthias Maass, ‘The International States Systems Since 1648 and Small States’ “Systemic Resilience”’, International Studies Review 10, no. 2 (2009): 31–51, https://doi.org/10.1163/2667078X-01002002.↩ 23. That respect for borders has birthed an entire literature on just how brutal and despotic a regime needs to be before another country is morally justified to undertake a military intervention (known as the ‘responsibility to protect’, or R2P).↩ 24. Despite this, some states have ended and lost their sovereignty since the end of the Second World War. Some of these were through vicious civil wars, such as the break-up of Yugoslavia.
Others were far more benign and temporary, such as when Syria combined with Egypt in 1958 to form the short-lived United Arab Republic.↩ 25. For an overview, see Robert I. Rotberg, ‘Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and Indicators’, in State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (World Peace Foundation, 2003), chap. 1, 25.↩ 26. Daniel Lambach, Eva Johais, and Markus Bayer, ‘Conceptualising State Collapse: An Institutionalist Approach’, Third World Quarterly 36, no. 7 (2015): 1299–1315, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1038338.↩ 27. Jan C. Jansen and Jürgen Osterhammel, Decolonization: A Short History, trans. Jeremiah Riemer (Princeton University Press, 2017), 177. One counter here is that ‘there have been numerous failures before colonization, so it can’t be the key cause in the modern world’.
One of the key points of this book is that not only does collapse change over time, it also depends on how the wider system is structured. We can’t fully understand the Late Bronze Age collapse without looking at the interconnections between different cities and empires; similarly we can’t fully contemplate modern state failure without looking at the history of colonization. Note that the implication here is not that the borders are the only problem: clearly there are numerous African and Middle Eastern countries with borders drawn up by European powers that are not weak or failed states.
However, such borders and the history they represent are often a major problem.↩ 28. Rollin F. Tusalem, ‘The Colonial Foundations of State Fragility and Failure’, Polity 48, no. 4 (2016): 445–95, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41279-016-0006-4.↩ 29. Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (Fourth Estate, 2006), xxv. Thanks to Nathaniel Cooke for suggesting this quote.↩ 30.
Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, ‘The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development’ and Why Nations Fail.↩ 31. Hudson, Bowen, and Nielsen, The First Political Order, ‘Introduction’.↩ 32. The idea of state failure and collapse became prominent after 9/11. US policymakers blamed Afghanistan for allowing Al-Qaeda operations within its borders.
The underlying fear was that weak, fragile, or failed states would be a breeding ground for instability and terrorism. As the 2002 US National Security Strategy declared, ‘America is now threatened less by conquering states than by failing ones.’ There is now a veritable industry of indices that measure state fragility and failure, including by the Brookings Institution and the World Bank. For an overview of the indices, including their similarities, differences, and problems, see Ines A.
Ferreira, ‘Measuring State Fragility: A Review of the Theoretical Groundings of Existing Approaches’, Third World Quarterly 38, no. 6 (2017): 1291–1309, https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2016.1257907.↩ 33. Each of these has some obvious rebuttals. Plenty of fragile states seem to suffer from too many resources rather than too few. Syria had a population density of 124 people per sq. km prior to its civil war, while Italy today has almost double that with 200. Countries such as Australia and the US have lootable resources like coal and oil but are far richer and more stable than similarly endowed Venezuela. For useful critiques of the different hypotheses for why states fail, see Jonathan Di John, ‘Conceptualising the Causes and Consequences of Failed States: A Critical Review of the Literature’, Crisis States Research Centre paper, 2008, https://gsdrc.org/documentlibrary/conceptualising-the-causes-and-conse quences-of-failed-statesa-critical-review-of-the-literature/; Jonathan Di John, ‘The Concept, Causes and Consequences of Failed States: A Critical Review of the Literature and Agenda for Research with Specific Reference to SubSaharan Africa’, European Journal of Development Research 22, no. 1 (2010): 10–30, https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2009.44.↩ 34. World Bank, ‘GDP (Current US$) – Russian Federation’, 2023, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD? locations=RU.↩ 35. Our World in Data, ‘Population, 10,000 BCE to 2021’. Published under the Creative Commons License Version 4.0.↩ 36. Justin McCurry, ‘Story of Cities #24: How Hiroshima Rose from the Ashes of Nuclear Destruction’, Guardian, 18 April 2016, www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/18/story-of-cities-hiroshimajapan-n uclear-destruction.↩ 37. For definitions, see Brian Walker, David Salt, and Walter Reid, Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World (Island Press, 2012); C. S. Holling, ‘Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 4, no.
1 (1973): 1–23, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.es.04.110173.000245; Graeme S. Cumming and Garry D. Peterson, ‘Unifying Research on Social-Ecological Resilience and Collapse’, Trends in Ecology & Evolution 32, no. 9 (2017): 695–713, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2017.06.014; Carl Folke et al., ‘SocialEcological Resilience and Biosphere-Based Sustainability Science’, Ecology and Society 21, no. 3 (2016), https://doi.org/10.5751/ES08748-210341. They all tend to converge around this rough formulation. Academics often summarize resilience as ‘three Rs’: robustness to shocks (such as disease), recovery from damage, and resistance to fundamental change. The three Rs comes from R. Quentin Grafton et al., ‘Realizing Resilience for Decision-Making’, Nature Sustainability 2, no. 10 (2019): 907–13, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0376-1.↩ 38. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Random House, 2014).↩ 39. Philip Riris et al., ‘Frequent Disturbances Enhanced the Resilience of Past Human Populations’, Nature 629, no. 8013 (2024): 837–42, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07354-8. This is technically a meta-analysis of sixteen studies rather than a single study.↩ 40. For instance, the Yandruwandha people of Australia eat a plant called nardoo that is partially indigestible and mildly toxic. Despite this, nardoo is a central part of the Yandruwandha diet because over time, and through trial and error, they have refined a way of cooking it that reduces the thiaminase concentration (involving grinding and leaching the flour, cooking it, and then eating it with mussel shells). If you aren’t taught these traditions, they are difficult to develop suddenly, even in life-or-death situations.↩ 41. Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, chap. 3.↩ 42. Yitzchak Jaffe, Ari Caramanica, and Max D. Price, ‘Towards an Antifragility Framework in Past Human–Environment Dynamics’, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10, no. 1 (2023): 915, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02413-3.↩ 43. Others suggest that bigger populations allowed for more innovations and cultural evolution, although this is highly disputed.↩ 44. Taagepera, ‘Expansion and Contraction Patterns of Large Polities’. For a fuller analysis and discussion, see Scheidel, ‘The Scale of Empire’.↩ 45. There was some selection for more fast-growing grains but no new source of lootable resources.↩ 46. This was part of a host of other governance measures.
In China, the problem of elite competition was partly outmanoeuvred by relying on eunuchs. The working assumption was that the castrated would not seize power or seduce the women of the emperor’s harem.
That often backfired, with scheming eunuchs even playing a role in the overthrow of the Han Dynasty. Others tried depending on slaves instead.
Both the Mughal Empire of India and the Ottoman Empire filled their militaries and bureaucracies with slave soldiers. Slaves were seen as despised outsiders who were not fully human. This was because they’d faced ‘social death’, having been ripped from their homes and lineage.
Since slaves were both widely disliked and isolated, they were seen to be less of a threat, and less likely to jostle for the throne. Empires tried many different types of governance structures, but the most successful, like China’s reliance on big bureaucracy and coins, tended to be selected for and emulated by competitors and later regimes. See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study: With a New Preface (Harvard University Press, 2018).↩ 47. Cline, After 1177, 2nd edn; Kemp and Cline, ‘Systemic Risk and Resilience in the Bronze Age’.↩ 48. Statistics on literacy, height, and infant mortality all come from Our World in Data.↩ 49. See Technology Eats History: Techno Metabolism and Time in the Anthropocene, Institute of the Humanities and Global Culture, 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=57yQRnfiemw.↩ 50. Tim Hatton, ‘Air Pollution in Victorian-Era Britain – Its Effects on Health Now Revealed’, The Conversation, 14 November 2017, https://theconversation.com/air-pollution-in-victorian-era-britain-itseffects -on-health-now-revealed-87208.↩ 51. Sullivan and Hickel, ‘Capitalism and Extreme Poverty’; Simon Szreter, ‘Economic Growth, Disruption, Deprivation, Disease, and Death: On the Importance of the Politics of Public Health for Development’, Population and Development Review 23, no. 4 (1997): 693, https://doi.org/10.2307/2137377.↩ 52. Munira Z.
Gunja, Evan D. Gumas, and Reginald D. Williams II, ‘U.S.
Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2022: Accelerating Spending, Worsening Outcomes’, Commonwealth Fund, 31 January 2023, www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/jan/ushealthcare-global-perspective-2022.↩ 53. Frackowiak et al., ‘Subjective Happiness Among Polish and Hadza People’; Martin and Cooper, ‘Subjective Well-Being in a Remote Culture: The Himba’.↩ 54. Carol R.
Ember, ‘Hunter-Gatherers (Foragers)’, Human Relations Area Files (Yale), 1 June 2020, https://hraf.yale.edu/ehc/summaries/huntergatherers.↩ 55. This is to say nothing about their cost in souls and suffering. Many modern atrocities dwarf historical collapses in their human toll.↩ 56. It was originally a project commissioned by the CIA called ‘The State Failure Task Force’.
Academic contributors included Jack Goldstone, a prominent theorist of collapse and revolutions, and the forefather of structural-demographic theory.↩ 57. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Picador, 2008).↩ 58. Tom Mueller, Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud (Riverhead Books, 2019).↩ 59. There is some emerging empirical evidence that this is the case. See Kemp et al., ‘12,000 Years of Accelerating Social System Death’ (forthcoming, 2025). This is based on a workshop held at the Santa Fe Institute in December 2024.↩ CHAPTER 16: MORS EX MACHINA 1. This vignette is based roughly on the details provided in Pete Pattison, ‘“Like Slave and Master”: DRC Miners Toil for 30p an Hour to Fuel Electric Cars’, Guardian, 8 November 2021, www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/nov/08/cobalt-drcminer s-toil-for-30p-an-hour-to-fuel-electric-cars.↩ 2. Roy Maconachie, ‘“We Miners Die a Lot.” Appalling Conditions and Poverty Wages: The Lives of Cobalt Miners in the DRC’, The Conversation, 30 January 2024, https://theconversation.com/weminers-die-a-lot-appalling-conditions-andpoverty-wages-the-lives-ofcobalt-miners-in-the-drc-220986.↩ 3. Frank Swain, ‘The Forgotten Mine That Built the Atomic Bomb’, BBC News, 4 August 2020, www.bbc.com/future/article/20200803-theforgotten-mine-that-built-the-at omic-bomb. Technically, the Trinity and Fat Man bombs were plutonium bombs made from reprocessed uranium, although both also included pure uranium in the tamper.↩ 4. Joseph Kahn, ‘China’s Coal Miners Risk Danger for a Better Wage’, New York Times, 28 January 2003, www.nytimes.com/2003/01/28/world/china-s-coal-miners-risk-dangerfora-better-wage.html.↩ 5. For the typical hazard list approach, see Rees, Our Final Century; Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković, eds., Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford University Press, 2012); Ord, The Precipice; MacAskill, What We Owe the Future. This means there is little study even on how risks such as nuclear weapons and climate change intersect, even if there are obvious connections. See Sterre van Buuren, Thomas Fraise, and Benoît Pelopidas, ‘Armes Nucléaires et Environnement:’, Raison Présente 230, no. 2 (2024): 97–104, https://doi.org/10.3917/rpre.230.0097.↩ 6. Technically, such a collapse could occur even at or below the level of a decimation threat, owing to the vulnerability of the Global Goliath today (see Chapter 18 in particular). I’ve restricted the present analysis to above the decimation level both for simplicity and analytical clarity.↩ 7. This is a slightly modified definition of global catastrophic risk from Kemp et al., ‘Climate Endgame’, table 1. This diverges from the typical definitions of global catastrophic risk, which are usually unhelpfully broad and loose, such as ‘serious damage to human wellbeing on a global scale’ (Bostrom and Ćirković, Global Catastrophic Risks, 1). Such a definition leaves it unclear whether air pollution or even cigarettes are a global catastrophic risk. Similarly, I diverge from the usual definitions of existential risk as ‘a loss of humanity’s potential’ (Nick Bostrom, ‘Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority’, Global Policy 4, no. 1 (2013): 15–31, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12002; Nick Bostrom, ‘Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards’, Journal of Evolution and Technology 9 (2002), https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.pdf; Ord, The Precipice).
‘Potential’ is either left frustratingly vague or specified to mean a techno-utopian future in which humans have maximum control over nature, that is, a spacefaring society which harvests stars. Hence, staying on earth for the next billion years in a borderline utopia, but failing to take to space, would be an existential threat in this definition. It’s a little silly and not analytically useful. For a full discussion and critique of the usual definitions, see Carla Zoe Cremer and Luke Kemp, ‘Democratising Risk: In Search of a Methodology to Study Existential Risk’, SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021, 3–13, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3995225. The definition I use here is a practical and descriptive one. When people speak of and study existential risk they are referring to the loss of the existence of either our global society or our species, that is, a lasting global societal collapse or human extinction.↩ 8. There is the obvious exception of natural hazards such as asteroids and volcanic eruptions. However, the risk of these also depends on vulnerabilities, as we’ll see in Chapter 18.↩ 9. Estimates of the number of deaths range from 110,000 to 210,000: Alex Wellerstein, ‘Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 4 August 2020, https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshima-andnagas aki/.↩ 10. Zia Mian and Benoît Pelopidas, ‘Producing Collapse: Nuclear Weapons as Preparation to End Civilization’, in How Worlds Collapse, ed. Miguel Centeno et al. (Routledge, 2023), 25–36, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003331384-21.↩ 11. Wallerstein, ‘Nukemap’.
The scenario imagines the use of a Topol SS25 missile (a fairly standard Russian ICBM) in the middle of downtown New York, with an airburst.↩ 12. Alex Wallerstein et al., ‘Plan A’, Science and Global Security Centre, 2019, https://sgs.princeton.edu/the-lab/plan-a.↩ 13. Lili Xia et al., ‘Global Food Insecurity and Famine from Reduced Crop, Marine Fishery and Livestock Production Due to Climate Disruption from Nuclear War Soot Injection’, Nature Food 3, no. 8 (2022): table 1, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-022-00573-0.↩ 14. It might also be better, since that prediction of 5 billion is based on some pessimistic assumptions, especially the modelling assumption that there would be no trade in the wake of a nuclear cataclysm. Yet, as we’ll see, there are even more reasons to expect that this is an underestimate.↩ 15. Jessica Moersdorf et al., ‘The Fragile State of Industrial Agriculture: Estimating Crop Yield Reductions in a Global Catastrophic Infrastructure Loss Scenario’, Global Challenges 8, no. 1 (2024): 2300206, https://doi.org/10.1002/gch2.202300206; Christopher Cooper and Benjamin K. Sovacool, ‘Not Your Father’s Y2K: Preparing the North American Power Grid for the Perfect Solar Storm’, Electricity Journal 24, no. 4 (2011): 47–61, https://doi.org.10.1016/j.tej.2011.04.005. I came across the idea of Border Gateway Protocol preventing a recovery of the internet while participating in the 2024 Global Catastrophic Risk Horizon Scan.↩ 16. Florian Ulrich Jehn, ‘Anthropocene Under Dark Skies: The Compounding Effects of Nuclear Winter and Overstepped Planetary Boundaries’, in Intersections, Reinforcements, Cascades: Proceedings of the 2023 Stanford Existential Risks Conference (Stanford Existential Risks Initiative, 2024), https://doi.org/10.25740/ZB109MZ2513.↩ 17. On the statistical debunking of the long peace, see Braumoeller, Only the Dead; Aaron Clauset, ‘Trends and Fluctuations in the Severity of Interstate Wars’, Science Advances 4, no. 2 (2018): eaao3580, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao3580; Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ‘On the Statistical Properties and Tail Risk of Violent Conflicts’, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and Its Applications 452 (2016): 29–45, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2016.01.050.↩ 18. The number of civil wars has also shown little connection to nuclear weapons and is now at its highest point in the past three decades. See Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, and Max Roser, ‘War and Peace’, Our World in Data, 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/war-andpeace.↩ 19.
Pavel Aksenov, ‘Stanislav Petrov: The Man Who May Have Saved the World’, BBC News, 26 September 2013, www.bbc.co.uk/news/worldeurope-24280831.↩ 20. Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas, ‘Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning, and the Cuban Missile Crisis’, in The Oxford Handbook of History and International Relations, ed. Mlada Bukovansky et al. (Oxford University Press, 2023), 705–20, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198873457.013.47.↩ 21. Personal communication. This is expanded on in Pelopidas, Betting Blind. Note that practices over the past three to five decades are still classified even if older ones have been revealed. Luck is a matter of disobedience, technical failures, and random decisions: all factors that lie outside the control apparatus of the military.↩ 22. Julian E. Barnes and David E.
Sanger, ‘U.S. Considers Expanded Nuclear Arsenal, a Reversal of Decades of Cuts’, New York Times, 7 June 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/us/politics/us-nuclearrussia-china.html.↩ 23. Kai Kupferschmidt, ‘How Canadian Researchers Reconstituted an Extinct Poxvirus for $100,000 Using Mail-Order DNA’, Science, 6 July 2017, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan7069.↩ 24. As noted by Martin Rees in Our Final Century.↩ 25. World Health Organization, ‘Emerging Technologies and Dual-Use Concerns: A Horizon Scan for Global Public Health’, World Health Organization horizon scan, 2021, https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/346862.↩ 26. There is no definitive answer to how likely a global catastrophic bioterror attack is.
My perspective is largely derived from hearing discussions between biosecurity and bioengineering experts while facilitating horizon scans on both bioengineering and dual-use research of concern, as well as in-depth discussions with colleagues who work on biosecurity (such as Lalitha Sundaram, Freya Jephcott, and Tom Hobson) and on existential terrorism (Mel Cowans).↩ 27. For a useful summary of different estimates, see Piers Millett and Andrew Snyder-Beattie, ‘Existential Risk and Cost-Effective Biosecurity’, Health Security, 15, no. 4 (2017): 375, https://doi.org/10.1089/hs.2017.0028.↩ 28. Jansen et al., ‘Biological Warfare, Bioterrorism, and Biocrime’, Clinical Microbiology and Infection, 20, no. 6 (2014): 494–5, https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-0691.12699. The authors conclude that given the low (but not negligible) probability strengthening public health generally may be wise, especially as they will benefit both bioterror response and general health.↩ 29. Kemp, ‘Agents of Doom’. Many of these points have been gathered from expert discussions while running horizon scans on bioengineering, biosecurity and dual-use research of concern (Kemp et al., ‘Bioengineering Horizon Scan 2020’; Kemp et al., ‘80 Questions for UK Biological Security’, PLOS ONE 16, no. 1 (2021): e0241190, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0241190); World Health Organization, ‘Emerging Technologies and Dual-Use Concerns’.↩ 30.
Centre for AI Safety, ‘Statement on AI Risk: AI Experts and Public Figures Express Their Concern About AI Risk’, 2023, www.safe.ai/statement-on-ai-risk.↩ 31. Melissa Heikkilä, ‘A Short History of AI, and What It Is (and Isn’t)’, MIT Technology Review, 16 July 2024, www.technologyreview.com/2024/07/16/1095001/a-short-history-ofai-an d-what-it-is-and-isnt/.↩ 32. For one collection of 71 different definitions, see Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter, ‘A Collection of Definitions of Intelligence’, SocArXiv, 25 June 2007: 1–8, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.0706.3639. Perhaps the most common textbook definition is any machine system capable of functioning ‘appropriately and with foresight in its environment’ (Nils J. Nilsson, The Quest for Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13.↩ 33. The computer science researcher Kate Crawford once remarked that ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’ (Crawford, Atlas of AI (Yale University Press, 2022)). That might be overstating the case a little, but she is pointing out a genuine problem, namely that AI as a term can easily obscure all the materials that go into building an algorithm as well as the real constraints on their performance.↩ 34. The idea of automated cognition is based on personal communications with Carla Zoe Cremer.↩ 35. This is also probably where the idea of the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ – a successful crusade against thinking machines – in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune comes from.↩ 36. Irving John Good, ‘Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine’, in Advances in Computers, 6 (1966), 31–88, https://dio.org.10.1016.50065-2458(08)60418.0.↩ 37. There is, of course, a wider set of potential AI risks, including the slow and gradual disempowerment of humanity.↩ 38. Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford University Press, 2016).↩ 39. For an overview of the different surveys, and other forecasting attempts, see Max Roser, ‘AI Timelines: What Do Experts in Artificial Intelligence Expect for the Future?’, Our World in Data, 7 February 2023, https://ourworldindata.org/ai-timelines. Note that similar surveys turn up similar results. A 2019 survey inquired when AI systems will be able to complete 90 per cent of the economically relevant tasks that humans are currently paid to do: 81 per cent said it would happen within a century, while 1.4 per cent responded that it would never occur. A 2018 survey asked when AI systems could complete 99 per cent of the tasks humans are paid to do with equal or superior competence: 75 per cent said it would happen within the next 100 years, while 22 per cent said it would take longer than 2160. The superforecasters’ estimate is from Ezra Karger et al., ‘Forecasting Existential Risks: Evidence from a Long-Run Forecasting Tournament’, Forecasting Research Institute, 2023. Domain experts in this study put the risk of an AI-induced extinction a little higher, at around 3 per cent.↩ 40. Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton University Press, 2006).↩ 41. Most of these surveys were also funded by Open Philanthropy, an outfit that is deeply worried about AI and that may have a motivation to fund work that exaggerates its threat. This led one researcher to refer to these surveys as a ‘well-funded panic campaign’: Michael Nolan, ‘Weighing the Prophecies of AI Doom’, IEEE Spectrum, 25 January 2024, https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-existential-risk-survey.↩ 42. Vaclav Smil, Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities (MIT Press, 2020).↩ 43. Pablo Villalobos et al., ‘Will We Run Out of Data?
Limits of LLM Scaling Based on Human-Generated Data’, SocArXiv, 26 October 2022, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.04325. The authors are on the more optimistic side that innovations such as synthetic data and efficiency improvements will be able to overcome data limits, although they too note the uncertainty.↩ 44. Gartner, Inc., ‘Gartner Predicts Power Shortages Will Restrict 40% of AI Data Centers By 2027’, 12 November 2024, www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-11-12-gartnerpredi cts-power-shortages-will-restrict-40-percent-of-ai-data-centersby-2027.↩ 45. Allison Morrow, ‘AI Is Hitting a Wall Just as the Hype Around It Reaches the Stratosphere’, CNN, 19 November 2024, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/19/business/ai-chatgpt-nvidianightcap/in dex.html. Perhaps the largest study on whether scaling can continue is Jaime Sevilla et al., ‘Can AI Scaling Continue Through 2030?’ (Epoch AI, 2024), https://epoch.ai/blog/can-ai-scalingcontinue-through-2030. They are optimistic that chip manufacturing, latency, data, and energy constraints can be overcome, at least until 2030. Although this is an uncertain and underexplored area, especially for longer timeframes.↩ 46. There are other issues. Large language models (LLMs) are really large text models. Language is about conveying meaning: if I wish you well, I’m often trying to convey that I genuinely hope you have a positive experience. If Chat GPT wishes you well, it gives you a statistically reasonable response based on its understanding of grammar and vocabulary. It’s not trying to elicit any particular reaction in you. The point on large text models comes from Ted Chiang (personal communication).↩ 47. For the case against current large text models having emergent properties, see Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, and Sanmi Koyejo, ‘Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?’, SocArXiv, 22 May 2023, https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004; Sheng Lu et al., ‘Are Emergent Abilities in Large Language Models Just InContext Learning?’, SocArXiv, 15 July 2024, https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.01809. For an overview of how experts disagree on what cognitive abilities current deep-learning algorithms are displaying, see Carla Zoe Cremer, ‘Deep Limitations? Examining Expert Disagreement Over Deep Learning’, Progress in Artificial Intelligence 10, no. 4 (2021): 449–64, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13748- 021-00239-1.↩ 48. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon & Schuster, 1986).↩ 49. Niamh Rowe, ‘“It’s Destroyed Me Completely”: Kenyan Moderators Decry Toll of Training of AI Models’, Guardian, 2 August 2023, www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbot-traininghuman -toll-content-moderator-meta-openai.↩ 50. James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant, Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI (Canongate, 2024); Ian Tucker, ‘James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Cant: “AI Feeds Off the Work of Human Beings”’, Guardian, 6 July 2024, www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/06/james-muldoonmar k-graham-callum-cant-ai-artificial-intelligence-human-workexploitation-fai rwork-feeding-machine.↩ 51. In some cases, as with social media, one could argue that we are giving away our data in exchange for free access to services. That’s a deceptive argument since most people aren’t aware of how their data is used and have few other options or alternatives but to accept long and dry data-privacy terms (you could say that they have few exit options).
One study calculated that it would take the average US citizen seventysix full-time workdays to read the terms and conditions of privacy policies they agree to every year. Moreover, some initiatives, such as large language models, do rely on just direct data theft from sites across the internet, such as Reddit. OpenAI isn’t offering a service in exchange for data; it’s collecting data without permission to offer a commercialized algorithm.↩ 52. On the case for compensating people for the production of data, and how this could be practically introduced in the near-term, read Imand Arrieta-Ibarra et al., ‘Should We Treat Data as Labor?
Moving Beyond “Free”’, in AEA Papers and Proceedings, vol. 108 (2018), 38–42.↩ 53. For an overview of some of the issues, see Miles Brundage et al., ‘The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation’, SocArXiv, 20 February 2018, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1802.07228.↩ 54. For the proposal, see Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin, ‘America Needs a Dead Hand More Than Ever’, War on the Rocks, 28 March 2024, https://warontherocks.com/2024/03/america-needs-a-dead-handmore-th an-ever/. For sensible warning of why this is a terrible idea, read Zachary Kallenborn, ‘Giving an AI Control of Nuclear Weapons: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1 February 2022, https://thebulletin.org/2022/02/giving-an-ai-control-ofnuclear-weapons-w hat-could-possibly-go-wrong/.↩ 55. Martin Robbins, ‘Has a Rampaging AI Algorithm Really Killed Thousands in Pakistan?’, Guardian, 18 February 2024, www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2016/feb/18/has-arampa ging-ai-algorithm-really-killed-thousands-in-pakistan.↩ 56. Bethan McKernan and Harry Davies, ‘“The Machine Did It Coldly”: Israel Used AI to Identify 37,000 Hamas Targets’, Guardian, 3 April 2024, www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-aidatabase-hamasairstrikes.↩ 57. Nick Robins-Early, ‘AI’s “Oppenheimer Moment”: Autonomous Weapons Enter the Battlefield’, Guardian, 14 July 2024, www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/14/aisoppenheimer-mo ment-autonomous-weapons-enter-the-battlefield.↩ 58. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011). This has been dubbed the 3.5 per cent rule, since movements that involve around 3.5 per cent of the population tend to succeed in achieving their goals.
However, there are exceptions: a nonviolent movement in Bahrain involved around 6 per cent of the population at its peak and still failed.
It’s also a historical trend that can’t be easily projected into the future.
For caveats and cautions, read Erica Chenoweth, ‘Questions, Answers, and Some Cautionary Updates Regarding the 3.5% Rule’, Carr Center Discussion Paper (Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, 2020), www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/2024- 05/Erica%20Chenoweth_2020-005.pdf.↩ 59. Unless it’s hacked or the algorithm glitches, of course.↩ 60. Some of this will not occur over the short term. Clearly, drones are not going to mass-replace soldiers and artillery in the next five years.↩ 61. Guillaume Pitron, The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth (Scribe, 2023).↩ 62. Malina McLennan, ‘The Digital Drill: How Big Oil Is Using AI to Speed Up Fossil Fuel Extraction’, Global Witness, 21 September 2023, www.globalwitness.org/en/blog/digital-drill-how-big-oil-using-aispeed-fos sil-fuel-extraction/.↩ 63. Dan Welsby et al., ‘Unextractable Fossil Fuels in a 1.5 °C World’, Nature 597, no. 7875 (2021): 230–34, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586- 021-03821-8.↩ CHAPTER 17: GAIA VS GOLIATH 1. Matt McGrath, ‘Pollution: “Forever Chemicals” in Rainwater Exceed Safe Levels’, BBC News, 2 August 2022, www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069.↩ 2. Linn Persson et al., ‘Outside the Safe Operating Space of the Planetary Boundary for Novel Entities’, Environmental Science & Technology 56, no. 3 (2022): 1510–21, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.1c04158.
Environmental Protection Agency, ‘Health Effects Support Document for Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA)’, May 2016, www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2016-05/documents/pfoa_hesd_finalplain .pdf.↩ 3. Alison L. Ling, ‘Estimated Scale of Costs to Remove PFAS from the Environment at Current Emission Rates’, Science of the Total Environment 918(2024): 170647, https://doi.org.10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.170647.↩ 4. DDT was responsible for the near extinction of apex predators such as – the symbol of America – the bald-headed eagle. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which is often considered to be the beginning of the modern environmental movement, was also written in response to DDT.
It took decades to discover the full extent of the harms this chemical caused.↩ 5. Ian T. Cousins et al., ‘Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS)’, Environmental Science & Technology 56, no. 16 (2022): 11172–9, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.2c02765; Persson et al., ‘Outside the Safe Operating Space of the Planetary Boundary for Novel Entities’.↩ 6. It was commonly assumed that the earth has experienced five mass extinction events, but recent analysis suggests that it was actually four.
See Jun-xuan Fan et al., ‘A High-Resolution Summary of Cambrian to Early Triassic Marine Invertebrate Biodiversity’, Science 367, no.
6475 (2020): 272–7, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax4953.↩ 7. For an overview of mass-extinction events, species-lost estimates, and hypotheses, see D. Barnosky et al., ‘Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?’, Nature 471, no. 7336 (2011): table 1, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09678; Peter Brannen, Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions (Oneworld, 2017), makes a stronger case for the role of climate change in each mass extinction event.↩ 8. Peter J.
Richerson, Robert Boyd, and Robert L. Bettinger, ‘Was Agriculture Impossible During the Pleistocene But Mandatory During the Holocene?
A Climate Change Hypothesis’, American Antiquity 66, no. 3 (2001): 387–411, https://doi.org/10.2307/2694241.↩ 9. Ibid.; Chi Xu et al., ‘Future of the Human Climate Niche’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 21 (2020): 11350–55, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910114117.↩ 10. For an overview, see Peter Frankopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Alfred A.
Knopf, 2023), chap. 9.↩ 11. Neil Pederson et al., ‘Pluvials, Droughts, the Mongol Empire, and Modern Mongolia’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 12 (2014): 4375–9, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1318677111.↩ 12. Ulf Büntgen and Nicola Di Cosmo, ‘Climatic and Environmental Aspects of the Mongol Withdrawal from Hungary in 1242 CE’, Scientific Reports 6, no. 1 (2016): 25606, https://doi.org/10.1038/srep25606.↩ 13. Kevin D. Burke et al., ‘Pliocene and Eocene Provide Best Analogs for Near-Future Climates’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 52 (2018): 13288–93, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809600115. Interestingly, the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) saw a temperature rise of 4–8°C but no mass extinction event, although there was an enormous shift in biodiversity. For now, we don’t know why.↩ 14. M. Willeit et al., ‘Mid-Pleistocene Transition in Glacial Cycles Explained by Declining CO2 and Regolith Removal’, Science Advances 5, no. 4 (2019): eaav7337, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aav7337.↩ 15. Redesigned from Steve Percy et al., ‘Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: Business Synthesis Report’, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005, fig. 5, www.researchgate.net/publication/259545257_Millennium_Ecosystem _Assessment_Business_Synthesis_Report. This figure now roughly represents the range and spread of different representative concentration pathways from the sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC.↩ 16. Florian U. Jehn et al., ‘Betting on the Best Case: Higher End Warming Is Underrepresented in Research’, Environmental Research Letters 16, no. 8 (2021): 084036, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac13ef; Florian U. Jehn et al., ‘Focus of the IPCC Assessment Reports Has Shifted to Lower Temperatures’, Earth’s Future 10, no. 5 (2022): e2022EF002876, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022EF002876.↩ 17. Peiran R. Liu and Adrian E.
Raftery, ‘Country-Based Rate of Emissions Reductions Should Increase by 80% Beyond Nationally Determined Contributions to Meet the 2 °C Target’, Communications Earth & Environment 2, no. 1 (2021): 29, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-021-00097-8. Most other estimates tend to converge around this interval. The latest figure from the UN Environment Programme is that existing policies will see the world warm by up to 3.1°C: United Nations Environment Programme et al., Emissions Gap Report 2024: No More Hot Air … Please! With a Massive Gap between Rhetoric and Reality, Countries Draft New Climate Commitments (United Nations Environment Programme, 2024), https://doi.org/10.59117/20.500.11822/46404. Estimates that focus on either short- or long-term pledges tend to be more optimistic.
Climate Action Tracker suggests that existing pledges and targets will limit warming to 2.1°C while existing policies put us on track for 2.5– 2.9°C (Climate Action Tracker, ‘Temperatures’, 2024, https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/). Similarly, a recent large-scale analysis of climate pledges and policies found that long-term pledges might limit warming to below 2°C, while existing actions would see the planet warm well above 2°C (Dirk-Jan van de Ven et al., ‘A Multimodel Analysis of Post-Glasgow Climate Targets and Feasibility Challenges’, Nature Climate Change 13, no. 6 (2023): 570–78, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01661-0). Existing actions are a far more reliable measurement than unenforceable, aspirational pledges, especially since delaying climate action is the single biggest factor that increases the costs of reducing emissions (Luke Kemp and Frank Jotzo, ‘Delaying Climate Action Would Be Costly for Australia and the World’, WWF-Australia National Office, 2015, www.academia.edu/23059430/Delaying_Climate_Action_Would_be_ Costly_for_Australia_and_the_World). In other words, the longer actions remain insufficient the less likely we are to achieve ambitious long-term political promises. Moreover, all the issues of uncertainty mentioned later in this section apply to such forecasts.↩ 18. Our ‘best estimates’ here are from the Sixth Assessment Report of Working Group I of the IPCC.
On the 18 per cent estimate, see Kemp et al., ‘Climate Endgame’.↩ 19. James E. Hansen et al., ‘Global Warming in the Pipeline’, Oxford Open Climate Change 3, no. 1 (2023): kgad008, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfclm/kgad008. These higher estimates rely on us currently underestimating how much cooling is being provided by aerosols (these are particles which, like clouds, reflect sunlight away from the earth) emitted by ships and how sensitive the earth system is.
As we’ll cover later, these emissions are not a deliberate attempt to cool the planet. They are just an unintentional side-effect of the ships’ operation. However, in the future some may well try to inject aerosols into the atmosphere deliberately to cool the planet.↩ 20. Tapio Schneider, Colleen M. Kaul, and Kyle G. Pressel, ‘Possible Climate Transitions from Breakup of Stratocumulus Decks under Greenhouse Warming’, Nature Geoscience 12, no. 3 (2019): 163–7, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0310-1.↩ 21. Franziska Gaupp et al., ‘Changing Risks of Simultaneous Global Breadbasket Failure’, Nature Climate Change 10, no. 1 (2020): 54–7, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0600-z.↩ 22. Ibid.; Constantin Arnscheidt, Luke Kemp, and Tim Lenton, ‘Climate Economic Methods Do Not Capture Worst-Case Risk’, submitted to Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024; Asjad Naqvi, Franziska Gaupp, and Stefan Hochrainer-Stigler, ‘The Risk and Consequences of Multiple Breadbasket Failures: An Integrated Copula and Multilayer Agent-Based Modeling Approach’, OR Spectrum 42, no. 3 (2020): 727–54, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00291-020-00574-0.↩ 23. Timothy M. Lenton et al., ‘Quantifying the Human Cost of Global Warming’, Nature Sustainability 6, no. 10 (2023): 1237–47, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01132-6.↩ 24. Kemp et al., ‘Climate Endgame’.↩ 25. Ibid.↩ 26. Athar Parvaiz, ‘India, Pakistan Cross-Border Water Treaty Needs Climate Change Revision’, Nature India, 16 September 2021, www.nature.com/articles/d44151-021-00036-8.↩ 27.
There is general agreement across studies that climate change can increase conflict, especially in specific circumstances such as weak governance and pre-existing ethnic tension. See Marshall Burke, Solomon M. Hsiang, and Edward Miguel, ‘Climate and Conflict’, Annual Review of Economics 7, no. 1 (2015): 577–617, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115430; Katharine J.
Mach et al., ‘Climate as a Risk Factor for Armed Conflict’, Nature 571, no. 7764 (2019): 193–7, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019- 1300-6; Guy J. Abel et al., ‘Climate, Conflict and Forced Migration’, Global Environmental Change 54 (2019): 239–49, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.12.003. In general, the relationship is complicated and climate is not the strongest factor in predicting conflict. However, all these studies are, of course, just looking at recent decades. We don’t know how climate change will influence conflict at 3°C of warming. It’s reasonable to assume that, as impacts become more severe, climate change will become a stronger driver of combat.↩ 28. Previously, 35°C was used as the critical wet-bulb temperature. New empirical evidence suggests that this was an overly optimistic assumption about the human tolerance for heat stress. For a full discussion and justification, see Daniel J. Vecellio, Matthew Huber, and W. Larry Kenney, ‘Why Not 35°C? Reasons for Reductions in Limits of Human Thermal Tolerance and Their Implications’, Temperature 11, no. 4 (2024): 1–3, https://doi.org/10.1080/23328940.2024.2399952.↩ 29.
Daniel J. Vecellio et al., ‘Greatly Enhanced Risk to Humans as a Consequence of Empirically Determined Lower Moist Heat Stress Tolerance’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no.
42 (2023): 3, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2305427120.↩ 30. For a full discussion, see Steven C. Sherwood and Emma E. Ramsay, ‘Closer Limits to Human Tolerance of Global Heat’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 43 (2023): 2, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2316003120.↩ 31. Julius Garbe et al., ‘The Hysteresis of the Antarctic Ice Sheet’, Nature 585, no. 7826 (2020): 538–44, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020- 2727-5.↩ 32. David I.
Armstrong McKay et al., ‘Exceeding 1.5°C Global Warming Could Trigger Multiple Climate Tipping Points’, Science 377, no. 6611 (2022): eabn7950, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn7950.↩ 33. Myles R. Allen and David J. Frame, ‘Call Off the Quest’, Science 318, no. 5850 (2007): 582–3, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1149988.
Jorgen Randers and Ulrich Goluke, ‘An Earth System Model Shows Self-Sustained Thawing of Permafrost Even If All Man-Made GHG Emissions Stop in 2020’, Scientific Reports 10, no. 1 (2020): 18456, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-75481-z; Mika Rantanen et al., ‘The Arctic Has Warmed Nearly Four Times Faster than the Globe since 1979’, Communications Earth & Environment 3, no. 1 (2022): 168, https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00498-3.↩ 34. Peter Ditlevsen and Susanne Ditlevsen, ‘Warning of a Forthcoming Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation’, Nature Communications 14, no. 1 (2023): 4254, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-39810-w.↩ 35. René M. van Westen, Michael Kliphuis, and Henk A. Dijkstra, ‘Physics-Based Early Warning Signal Shows That AMOC Is on Tipping Course’, Science Advances 10, no. 6 (2024): eadk1189, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189.↩ 36. OECD, ‘Managing Climate Risks, Facing up to Losses and Damages: Understanding, Reducing and Managing Risks’, OECD report, November 2021, https://doi.org/10.1787/55ea1cc9-en.↩ 37. Jonathan Watts, ‘“We Don’t Know Where the Tipping Point Is”: Climate Expert on Potential Collapse of Atlantic Circulation’, Guardian, 23 October 2024, www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/23/we-dont-knowwhere-the -tipping-point-is-climate-expert-on-potential-collapse-ofatlantic-circulation .↩ 38. Katherine Richardson et al., ‘Earth Beyond Six of Nine Planetary Boundaries’, Science Advances 9, no. 37 (2023): eadh2458, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458.↩ 39. Ibid.↩ 40. Also called the background rate, i.e. the normal rate of turnover of species without either human impacts or the influence of a mass extinction event.↩ 41. Jurriaan M. de Vos et al., ‘Estimating the Normal Background Rate of Species Extinction’, Conservation Biology 29, no. 2 (2015): 452–62, https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.12380; Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris A.
G. Wyckhuys, ‘Worldwide Decline of the Entomofauna: A Review of Its Drivers’, Biological Conservation 232 (2019): 8–27, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2019.01.020; International Institute for Sustainability, ‘Living Planet Report 2022 – Building a NaturePositive Society’, www.iis-rio.org/en/publications/living-planet-report2022-building-a-nature -positive-society/.↩ 42. Haijun Song et al., ‘Thresholds of Temperature Change for Mass Extinctions’, Nature Communications 12, no. 1 (2021): 4694, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25019-2.↩ 43. Daniel H.
Rothman, ‘Thresholds of Catastrophe in the Earth System’, Science Advances 3, no. 9 (2017): e1700906, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700906; Daniel H. Rothman, ‘Characteristic Disruptions of an Excitable Carbon Cycle’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 30 (2019): 14813–22, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1905164116.↩ 44. S. Solter-Hunt, ‘Potential Perturbation of the Ionosphere by Megaconstellations and Corresponding Artificial Re-Entry Plasma Dust’, SocArXiv, 6 December 2023, https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09329; Daniel M. Murphy et al., ‘Metals from Spacecraft Reentry in Stratospheric Aerosol Particles’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 43 (2023): e2313374120, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2313374120.↩ 45. I’m indebted to Mike Lawrence for raising this interesting point.↩ 46. In March 2024 the international Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS) voted against formally adopting the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch with 1952 as the start date. The entire process was mired in controversy and two members of the twelvemember subcommission refused to vote. They didn’t want to legitimize what they saw as a fundamentally flawed process. One potential reason it was rejected was framing the Anthropocene as a single event, rather than as an accelerating process. In any case, ignoring the enormous impacts of humanity on the earth system is silly, and the Anthropocene will continue to be used regardless of the edicts of a few geologists. See Alexandra Witze, ‘Geologists Reject the Anthropocene as Earth’s New Epoch – after 15 Years of Debate’, Nature 627, no. 8003 (2024): 249–50, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586- 024-00675-8. For a strong critique of the decision, read Simon Turner et al., ‘What the Anthropocene’s Critics Overlook – and Why It Really Should Be a New Geological Epoch’, The Conversation, 12 March 2024, https://theconversation.com/what-the-anthropocenes-criticsoverlook-and -why-it-really-should-be-a-new-geological-epoch225493.↩ 47. More precisely, 82 per cent of the 711 regions assessed by 255 archaeologists in the HYDE project had been modified by huntergatherers by 10,000 years ago: Lucas Stephens et al., ‘Archaeological Assessment Reveals Earth’s Early Transformation through Land Use’, Science 365, no. 6456 (2019): 897–902, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aax1192; Erle Ellis, ‘The Deep Anthropocene’, Aeon, 1 October 2020, https://aeon.co/essays/revolutionary-archaeology-reveals-the-deepestpo ssible-anthropocene.↩ 48. Will Steffen et al., ‘The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 81–98, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614564785.↩ 49.
The idea of the Anthropocene as a process beginning with fire is inspired by Scott, Against the Grain, chap. 1.↩ 50. The figure comes from Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, ‘Land Use Over the Long Term’, Our World in Data, May 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/land-use. Published under the Creative Commons License Version 4.0.↩ 51. Thomas Wiedmann et al., ‘Scientists’ Warning on Affluence’, Nature Communications 11, no. 1 (2020): 3107, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16941-y; Ashfaq Khalfan et al., ‘Climate Equality: A Planet for the 99%’, Oxfam International, 2023, https://doi.org/10.21201/2023.000001.↩ 52. UNEP, ‘Global Resources Outlook 2024: Bend the Trend – Pathways to a Liveable Planet as Resource Use Spikes’, United Nations Environment Programme, 2024, www.unep.org/resources/GlobalResource-Outlook-2024.↩ 53. Peipei Tian et al., ‘Keeping the Global Consumption within the Planetary Boundaries’, Nature 635 (2024), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08154-w.↩ 54. UNEP, ‘Global Resources Outlook 2024’.↩ 55. Peter Christensen, Kenneth Gillingham, and William Nordhaus, ‘Uncertainty in Forecasts of Long-Run Economic Growth’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 21 (2018): 5409–14, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1713628115.↩ 56. Jefim Vogel and Jason Hickel, ‘Is Green Growth Happening? An Empirical Analysis of Achieved versus Paris-Compliant CO2–GDP Decoupling in High-Income Countries’, The Lancet Planetary Health 7, no. 9 (2023): 759, https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(23)00174-2.
Systematic reviews of the evidence of decoupling have also concluded that decoupling would need to be far more rapid and sustained than anything seen thus far. See Helmut Haberl et al., ‘A Systematic Review of the Evidence on Decoupling of GDP, Resource Use and GHG Emissions, Part II: Synthesizing the Insights’, Environmental Research Letters 15, no. 6 (2020): 065003, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ab842a.↩ 57. On the required rate of emissions reductions, see United Nations Environment Programme et al., Emissions Gap Report 2024. The estimate of reductions due to Covid-19 comes from Zhu Liu et al., ‘Global Patterns of Daily CO2 Emissions Reductions in the First Year of COVID-19’, Nature Geoscience 15, no. 8 (2022): 615, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-022-00965-8.↩ 58. For useful overviews of the problems of perpetual growth and how to move beyond it (frequently called ‘post-growth’), see Hickel, Less Is More; Jason Hickel et al., ‘Urgent Need for Post-Growth Climate Mitigation Scenarios’, Nature Energy 6, no. 8 (2021): 766–8, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00884-9.↩ 59. Wiedmann et al., ‘Scientists’ Warning on Affluence’; UNEP, ‘Global Resources Outlook 2024’; Khalfan et al., ‘Climate Equality’.↩ CHAPTER 18: THE DEATH-STAR SYNDROME 1. Smil, Growth.↩ 2. Amanda Glassman, Charles Kenny, and George Yang, ‘The COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout Was the Fastest in Global History, But Low-Income Countries Were Left Behind’, Center for Global Development Working Paper, 2022, https://www.cgdev.org/publication/covid-19-vaccinedevelopment-and-roll out-historical-perspective.↩ 3. Reuters, ‘Suez Canal Blockage Could Cost $6 Billion to $10 Billion in Lost Trade – Allianz’, 26 March 2021, www.reuters.com/article/business/suez-canal-blockage-could-cost-6- billion-to-10-billion-in-lost-trade-allianz-idUSKBN2BI25Y/.↩ 4. Yrjö Kaukiainen, ‘Growth, Diversification and Globalization: Main Trends in International Shipping since 1850’, in International Merchant Shipping in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed.
Lewis R. Fischer and Even Lange (Liverpool University Press, 2008), 1–56.↩ 5. Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, Diana Beltekian, and Max Roser, ‘Trade and Globalization’, Our World in Data, April 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/trade-and-globalization.↩ 6. Daron Acemoglu, Asuman Ozdaglar, and Alireza Tahbaz-Salehi, ‘Systemic Risk and Stability in Financial Networks’, American Economic Review 105, no. 2 (2015): 564–608, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20130456.↩ 7. M. Scheffer et al., ‘Anticipating Critical Transitions’, Science 338, no.
6105 (2012): 345, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1225244. They note that ‘the same prerequisites that allow recovery from local damage may set a system up for large-scale collapse’.↩ 8. Luckily, flash-crashes are also usually marked by speedy rebounds, but it’s not a pattern we should rely on.↩ 9. BBC, ‘Thailand Floods Disrupt Production and Supply Chains’, BBC News, 13 October 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15285149.
The impacts cited here are summarized in IPCC, Climate Change 2022 – Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability: Working Group II Contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2023), fig.
Cross-Chapter Box INTEREG.1, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009325844.↩ 10. ‘Global GDP over the Long Run’, Our World in Data, 16 May 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-run.↩ 11.
Steffen et al., ‘The Trajectory of the Anthropocene’. The upper graph comes from Our World in Data, ‘Global GDP over the Long Run’, 16 May 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-thelong-run.
The lower graph is from Hannah Ritchie, ‘Global Primary Energy Consumption by Source’, Our World in Data, January 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption. Both are published under the Creative Commons License Version 4.0.↩ 12.
Monica Caparas et al., ‘Increasing Risks of Crop Failure and Water Scarcity in Global Breadbaskets by 2030’, Environmental Research Letters 16, no. 10 (2021): 3, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748- 9326/ac22c1.
In other words, around 43 per cent of the calories consumed today come from just 2.5 per cent of countries (albeit four larger countries, such as the US).↩ 13. Hope Shand, Kathy Jo Wetter, and Kavya Chowdhry, ‘Food Barons 2022: Crisis Profiteering, Digitalization and Shifting Power’, ETC Group, 2022, www.etcgroup.org/files/files/food-barons-2022- full_sectors-final_16_sept.pdf.↩ 14. Liam Keenan, Timothy Monteath, and Dariusz Wójcik, ‘Hungry for Power: Financialization and the Concentration of Corporate Control in the Global Food System’, Geoforum 147 (2023): 103909, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103909.↩ 15. Open Markets Institute, ‘Monopoly by the Numbers’, Open Markets Institute, 2024, www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-thenumbers.↩ 16. For just a small selection of articles highlighting the importance of diversity to resilience, see Reinette Biggs et al., ‘Toward Principles for Enhancing the Resilience of Ecosystem Services’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources 37, no. 1 (2012): 421–48, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-051211-123836; Brian Walker et al., ‘Response Diversity as a Sustainability Strategy’, Nature Sustainability 6, no. 6 (2023): 621–9, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893- 022-01048-7; Grafton et al., ‘Realizing Resilience for DecisionMaking’. ↩ 17. Gregory S. Cooper, Simon Willcock, and John A. Dearing, ‘Regime Shifts Occur Disproportionately Faster in Larger Ecosystems’, Nature Communications 11, no. 1 (2020): 1, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467- 020-15029-x.↩ 18. Ord, The Precipice.↩ 19. Lara Mani, Asaf Tzachor, and Paul Cole, ‘Global Catastrophic Risk from Lower Magnitude Volcanic Eruptions’, Nature Communications 12, no. 1 (2021): 4756, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25021-8; Michael Cassidy and Lara Mani, ‘Huge Volcanic Eruptions: Time to Prepare’, Nature 608, no. 7923 (2022): 469–71, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02177-x.↩ 20. Mani, Tzachor, and Cole, ‘Global Catastrophic Risk from Lower Magnitude Volcanic Eruptions’; Cassidy and Mani, ‘Huge Volcanic Eruptions’. The one in five figure was calculated on the latest ice record dating of volcanic eruptions in M. Sigl et al., ‘Volcanic Stratospheric Sulfur Injections and Aerosol Optical Depth during the Holocene (Past 11,500 Years) from a Bipolar Ice-Core Array’, Earth System Science Data 14(2022): 3167–96, https://doi.org.10.5194/essd14-3167-2022.↩ 21.
Kemp et al., ‘Climate Endgame’, table 1.↩ 22. Homer-Dixon et al., ‘Synchronous Failure’; Dirk Helbing, ‘Globally Networked Risks and How to Respond’, Nature 497, no. 7447 (2013): 51–9, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12047.↩ 23. Qi Zhang et al., ‘Assessing the Extent and Persistence of Major Crisis Events in the Crude Oil Market and Economy: Evidence from the Past 30 Years’, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11, no. 1 (2024): 903, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03364-z; HomerDixon et al., ‘Synchronous Failure’.↩ 24. Lawrence et al., ‘Global Polycrisis’, 2.↩ 25.
Greater speed, size, concentration, and connectedness may also make collapse more severe. When systems become bafflingly complicated and quick-moving, accidents, including catastrophic ones, can become commonplace and perhaps even unavoidable. It is an idea that sociologists call ‘normal accidents’. ↩ 26. Alexander F. Siegenfeld and Yaneer Bar-Yam, ‘An Introduction to Complex Systems Science and Its Applications’, Complexity 2020, no.
1 (2020): 9, https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/6105872.↩ CHAPTER 19: THE RUNGLESS LADDER 1. On disease, see Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ‘Tail Risk of Contagious Diseases’, Nature Physics 16, no. 6 (2020): 606–13, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-020-0921-x. For violence, see Christoph Trinn and Lennard Naumann, ‘Guns and Lightning: Power Law Distributions in Intrastate Conflict Intensity Dynamics’, Conflict Management and Peace Science 40, no. 4 (2023): 373–97, https://doi.org/10.1177/07388942221092126; Michael Spagat, Neil F.
Johnson, and Stijn van Weezel, ‘Fundamental Patterns and Predictions of Event Size Distributions in Modern Wars and Terrorist Campaigns’, PLOS ONE 13, no. 10 (2018): e0204639, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0204639; Juan Camilo Bohorquez et al., ‘Common Ecology Quantifies Human Insurgency’, Nature 462, no.
7275 (2009): 911–14, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08631; Sergio Picoli et al., ‘Power-Law Relaxation in Human Violent Conflicts’, European Physical Journal B 90, no. 8 (2017): 156, https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2017-80127-3. Some have even used this distribution to estimate casualties for conflicts with a lack of data. See Jeffrey A. Friedman, ‘Using Power Laws to Estimate Conflict Size’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 59, no. 7 (2015): 1216–41, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002714530430.↩ 2. One could try to translate the loss of life into a monetary outcome. If you value your life highly enough then the expected value of playing Russian roulette is far worse. This doesn’t negate the underlying point of this thought experiment: tail risk matters immensely.↩ 3. A metaphor inspired by Cirillo and Taleb: Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, ‘What Are the Chances of a Third World War?’, Significance 13, no. 2 (2016), www.academia.edu/35897110/What_are_the_chances_of_a_third_wor ld_war.↩ 4. Cirillo and Taleb, ‘Tail Risk of Contagious Diseases’.↩ 5.
Jesse L. Reynolds, ‘Solar Geoengineering to Reduce Climate Change: A Review of Governance Proposals’, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 475, no. 2229 (2019): 20190255, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2019.0255.↩ 6. International Maritime Organisation, ‘IMO2020 Fuel Oil Sulphur Limit – Cleaner Air, Healthier Planet’, 28 January 2021, www.imo.org/en/MediaCentre/PressBriefings/pages/02-IMO-2020.aspx.
Ironically, a single regulation by the IMO may have done more to affect the climate than the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.↩ 7. Kemp et al., ‘Climate Endgame’; Aaron Tang and Luke Kemp, ‘A Fate Worse Than Warming? Stratospheric Aerosol Injection and Catastrophic Risk’, Frontiers in Climate 3, no. 720312 (2021), https://doi.org/doi: 10.3389/fclim.2021.720312.↩ 8. Tang and Kemp, ‘A Fate Worse Than Warming?’↩ 9. Andy Parker and Peter J. Irvine, ‘The Risk of Termination Shock from Solar Geoengineering’, Earth’s Future 6, no. 3 (2018): 459, https://doi.org/10.1002/2017EF000735.↩ 10. Garbe et al., ‘The Hysteresis of the Antarctic Ice Sheet’, 538. For instance, under different future warming scenarios the West Antarctic Ice Sheet wouldn’t reach its current levels unless we cooled the earth to 1°C below pre-industrial levels (or, around 2.1°C below current long-term average temperatures).↩ 11. Note that confusingly cyclones in the Atlantic and east Pacific are usually called ‘hurricanes’ while cyclones in the west Pacific are normally labelled ‘typhoons’.↩ 12. Jack Miller et al., ‘The Feasibility and Governance of Cyclone Interventions’, Climate Risk Management 41 (2023): 100535, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crm.2023.100535.↩ 13. Michael Cassidy, Anders Sandberg, and Lara Mani, ‘The Ethics of Volcano Geoengineering’, Earth’s Future 11, no. 10 (2023): e2023EF003714, https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EF003714.↩ 14. Ellen Glover, ‘What Are Robot Bees?’, Built In, 6 February 2025, https://builtin.com/robotics/robot-bees.↩ 15. Some have taken to calling this Gaia 2.0: actively managing planetary boundaries. Timothy M.
Lenton and Bruno Latour, ‘Gaia 2.0’, Science 361, no. 6407 (2018): 1066–8, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau0427.↩ 16. Far-UVC refers to electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths between 200 and 230nm.
One of the main advocates has been MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt, e.g.
Michael Le Page, ‘Pandemic Terrorism Risk Is Being Overlooked, Warns Leading Geneticist’, New Scientist, 14 November 2022, www.newscientist.com/article/2345737- pandemic-terrorism-risk-is-being-overlooked-warns-leadinggeneticist/.
For an overview of the technology, see Ernest R. Blatchley et al., ‘Far UV-C Radiation: An Emerging Tool for Pandemic Control’, Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology 53, no. 6 (2023): 733–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/10643389.2022.2084315.↩ 17. A similar point is made in David Manheim, ‘The Fragile World Hypothesis: Complexity, Fragility, and Systemic Existential Risk’, Futures 122 (2020): 102570, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2020.102570.↩ 18. Blanton et al., ‘Moral Collapse and State Failure’.↩ 19. John M. Gowdy, Ultrasocial: The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future (Cambridge University Press, 2021).↩ 20. Parker and Irvine, ‘The Risk of Termination Shock from Solar Geoengineering’.↩ 21. Juan Camilo Castillo et al., ‘Market Design to Accelerate COVID-19 Vaccine Supply’, Science 371, no. 6534 (2021): 1107–9, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abg0889.↩ 22. Estimates include 0.46, 1.88, 4–6, and 20.3 per cent. See David Moriña et al., ‘Probability Estimation of a Carrington-like Geomagnetic Storm’, Scientific Reports 9, no. 1 (2019): 2393, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-38918-8; Pete Riley and Jeffrey J.
Love, ‘Extreme Geomagnetic Storms: Probabilistic Forecasts and Their Uncertainties’, Space Weather 15, no. 1 (2017): 53–64, https://doi.org/10.1002/2016SW001470; Ryuho Kataoka, ‘Probability of Occurrence of Extreme Magnetic Storms’, Space Weather 11, no. 5 (2013): 214–18, https://doi.org/10.1002/swe.20044.↩ 23. Anthony M.
Barrett, Seth D. Baum, and Kelly Hostetler, ‘Analyzing and Reducing the Risks of Inadvertent Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia’, Science & Global Security 21, no. 2 (2013): 106–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/08929882.2013.798984.↩ 24. Over the sixty-six years prior to 2013; see Carl Lundgren, ‘What Are the Odds? Assessing the Probability of a Nuclear War’, Nonproliferation Review 20, no. 2 (2013): 361–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/10736700.2013.799828.↩ 25.
Graham Allison, ‘Putin’s Doomsday Threat’, Foreign Affairs, 5 April 2022, www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-04-05/putinsdoomsday-thr eat.↩ 26. Peter J. Scoblic and David R. Mandel, ‘Opinion: How to Assess the Risk of Nuclear War Without Freaking Out’, CNN, 28 June 2022, www.cnn.com/2022/06/28/opinions/nuclear-war-likelihoodprobability-russ ia-us-scoblic-mandel/index.html. This was for a nuclear strike before 5 August 2022. This question and timeframe lie more within the domain of a superforecaster: it’s within twelve months for a tightly bound question.↩ 27. Based on a statistical study of the frequency of pandemics since 1600: Marco Marani et al., ‘Intensity and Frequency of Extreme Novel Epidemics’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no.
35 (2021): e2105482118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105482118.↩ 28.
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ‘Oil-Climate Index’, 2015, https://oci.carnegieendowment.org/#total-emissions.↩ 29. Charles A. S. Hall, Jessica G. Lambert, and Stephen B. Balogh, ‘EROI of Different Fuels and the Implications for Society’, Energy Policy 64 (2014): 151, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.05.049.↩ 30. Victor Court and Florian Fizaine, ‘Long-Term Estimates of the Energy-Return-on-Investment (EROI) of Coal, Oil, and Gas Global Productions’, Ecological Economics 138 (2017): 145–59, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.03.015.↩ 31. Paul E. Brockway et al., ‘Estimation of Global Final-Stage EnergyReturn-on-Investment for Fossil Fuels With Comparison to Renewable Energy Sources’, Nature Energy 4, no. 7 (2019): 612–21, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-019-0425-z.↩ 32. Louis Delannoy et al., ‘Peak Oil and the Low-Carbon Energy Transition: A Net-Energy Perspective’, Applied Energy 304 (2021): 117843, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.117843.↩ 33. Court and Fizaine, ‘Long-Term Estimates of the Energy-Return-onInvestment (EROI) of Coal, Oil, and Gas Global Productions’.↩ 34. M. Diesendorf and T.
Wiedmann, ‘Implications of Trends in Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI) for Transitioning to Renewable Electricity’, Ecological Economics 176 (2020): 106726, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106726.↩ 35. Brockway et al., ‘Estimation of Global Final-Stage Energy-Return-onInvestment for Fossil Fuels with Comparison to Renewable Energy Sources’.↩ 36. The term ‘energy blind’ comes from Nate Hagens. Nate hosts the podcast The Great Simplification, which I would highly recommend.↩
CHAPTER 20: THE ROOTS OF OUR ENDGAME 1. Rebecca Solnit, ‘Big Oil Coined “Carbon Footprints” to Blame Us for Their Greed. Keep Them on the Hook’, Guardian, 23 August 2021, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coinedcarbonfootprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-thehook.↩ 2.
Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes, ‘Rhetoric and Frame Analysis of ExxonMobil’s Climate Change Communications’, One Earth 4, no. 5 (2021): 696–719, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2021.04.014. It is also an old strategy. In 1971 an iconic anti-littering advertisement which came to be known as ‘the crying Indian’ was released. It showed a Native American clearing trash that had been discarded by cars passing by. He gently wipes a tear from his eye as in the background a narrator reads, ‘People start pollution, and people can stop it.’ The campaign was organized by Keep America Beautiful, a body that was funded and founded in 1953 by Coca-Cola and Pepsi.↩ 3. A slightly more nuanced version of this is used to explain existential risk in Kristian Rönn, The Darwinian Trap: The Hidden Evolutionary Forces That Explain Our World (and Threaten Our Future) (Crown, 2024). In it, existential risk is cast as a Darwinian problem where our evolved characteristics lead to ‘Darwinian Traps’. I’ll show later in this chapter why this game-theoretic explanation doesn’t fully make sense.↩ 4. Carbon Majors, ‘The Carbon Majors Database: Launch Report’, April 2024, https://carbonmajors.org/site/data/000/027/Carbon_Majors_Launch_R eport.pdf.↩ 5. The discovery of the greenhouse effect is commonly misattributed to the Irish physicist John Tyndall. See Megan Darby, ‘Meet the Woman Who First Identified the Greenhouse Effect’, Climate Home News, 2 September 2016, www.climatechangenews.com/2016/09/02/thewoman-who-identified-thegreenhouse-effect-years-beforetyndall/.↩ 6. Kemp, ‘Agents of Doom’.↩ 7. Johannes Friedrich et al., ‘This Interactive Chart Shows Changes in the World’s Top 10 Emitters’, World Resources Institute, 2 March 2023, www.wri.org/insights/interactive-chart-shows-changes-worlds-top-10- emitters.↩ 8. Hans Kristensen, Matt Korda, and Eliana Johns, ‘Nuclear Notebook: Nuclear Arsenals of the World’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (2025), https://thebulletin.org/nuclear-notebook/.↩ 9. Alejandra Muñoz, Susi Snyder, and Cor Oudes, ‘Untenable Investments: Nuclear Weapon Producers and Their Financiers’ (ICAN, PAX, 2024), 4. See www.dontbankonthebomb.com/untenableinvestments/.↩ 10. McKenna Fitzgerald, Aaron Boddy, and Seth Baum, ‘2020 Survey of Artificial General Intelligence Projects for Ethics, Risk, and Policy’, Global Catastrophic Risks Institute, 2020, https://gcrinstitute.org/papers/055_agi-2020.pdf.↩ 11. Christophe Bonneuil, Pierre-Louis Choquet, and Benjamin Franta, ‘Early Warnings and Emerging Accountability: Total’s Responses to Global Warming, 1971–2021’, Global Environmental Change 71 (2021): 102386, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102386.↩ 12. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (Bloomsbury, 2010).↩ 13. Bonneuil, Choquet, and Franta, ‘Early Warnings and Emerging Accountability’.↩ 14. Nadia Gaber, Lisa Bero, and Tracey J. Woodruff, ‘The Devil They Knew: Chemical Documents Analysis of Industry Influence on PFAS Science’, Annals of Global Health 89, no. 1 (2023): 8–10, https://doi.org/10.5334/aogh.4013.↩ 15.
Ibid., 8–10.↩ 16. Kristensen, Korda, and Johns, ‘Nuclear Notebook’; Snyder and Oudes, ‘Untenable Investments’.↩ 17. Elisabeth Eaves, ‘Why Is America Getting a New $100 Billion Nuclear Weapon?’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 8 February 2021, https://thebulletin.org/2021/02/why-is-america-getting-a-new-100- billion-nuclear-weapon/.↩ 18. Corporate Europe Observatory, ‘Stop the Revolving Door: Fossil Fuel Policy Influencers’, 2021, https://corporateeurope.org/en/stoprevolving-door.↩ 19. Clive Hamilton, Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change (Black Inc. Books, 2007).↩ 20. Jeffrey Bien and Vinay Prasad, ‘Future Jobs of FDA’s HaematologyOncology Reviewers’, BMJ, 27 September 2016, i5055, https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i5055.↩ 21. Summarized and linked in Kemp, ‘Agents of Doom’.↩ 22. Stop AGI, ‘Quotes from AI Leaders’, 2024, https://pauseai.info/xrisk/.↩ 23. Nick Robins-Early, ‘OpenAI and Google DeepMind Workers Warn of AI Industry Risks in Open Letter’, Guardian, 4 June 2024, www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/04/openai-googleai-ris ks-letter. The NDAs meant that employees couldn’t even mention the existence of non-disparagement agreements. ↩ 24. Garrison Lovely, ‘With Newsom’s Veto, Big Tech Beats Democracy’, Jacobin, 30 September 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/09/gavinnewsom-ai-tech-bill-sb-1047. On the very same day that Newsome vetoed the bill, he announced a new board of AI advisors. One of them was Fei-Fei Li ‘the Godmother of AI’, who has a billion-dollar AI start-up and publicly opposed the bill.↩ 25.
Jack S. Levy, ‘Military Power, Alliances, and Technology: An Analysis of Some Structural Determinants of International War Among the Great Powers’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1976; Neil C. Renic, ‘Superweapons and the Myth of Technological Peace’, European Journal of International Relations 29, no. 1 (2023): 129–52, https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661221136764.↩ 26.
Sam Altman, ‘Who Will Control the Future of AI?’, Washington Post, 25 July 2024, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/25/samaltman-ai-democrac y-authoritarianism-future/.↩ 27. Sam Altman, ‘Planning for AGI and Beyond’, OpenAI, 24 February 2023, https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond.↩ 28. Will Knight, ‘What Really Made Geoffrey Hinton Into an AI Doomer’, Wired, 8 May 2023, www.wired.com/story/geoffrey-hinton-ai-chatgptdangers/.↩ 29.
There is admittedly a huge number of definitions of rationality and no single consensus definition. However, this definition captures the key assumption that goes into game theory.↩ 30. Garrett Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243–8, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243.↩ 31. For a good overview of the results of game-theoretic lab experiments, see Colin F.
Camerer and Teck-Hua Ho, ‘Behavioral Game Theory Experiments and Modeling’, in Handbook of Game Theory With Economic Applications, vol. 4 (Elsevier, 2015), 517–73, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-53766-9.00010-0.↩ 32. Brett M.
Frischmann, Alain Marciano, and Giovanni Battista Ramello, ‘Retrospectives: Tragedy of the Commons After 50 Years’, Journal of Economic Perspectives 33, no. 4 (2019): 211–28, https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.33.4.211.↩ 33. Ibid.↩ 34. Douglas P. Fry et al., ‘Societies within Peace Systems Avoid War and Build Positive Intergroup Relationships’, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 8, no. 1 (2021): 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00692-8.↩ 35. David Runciman, The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs (Liveright, 2023).↩ 36. It was originally used for the legal territories of Rome (status imperii, or status ecclesiasticus for the papal states). It seems to have drifted since then from describing the legal standing of a territory to a territory’s independence and self-governance.↩ 37. The current Official Development Assistance aim is for rich countries to provide 0.7 per cent of their Gross National Income (GNI) as aid.
The US has not agreed to the targets and in 2023 the US provided just 0.24 per cent of its GNI as aid.↩ 38. Ironically, Machiavelli appears to have been intentionally giving bad advice. The book was originally intended for the Medici family, who killed Machiavelli’s father. Machiavelli himself was a staunch republican, and The Prince diverges dramatically from his other work, such as The Discourses. There is a strong case to be made that Machiavelli was attempting to give the Medicis bad advice so they would anger the populace and start a rebellion. See Mary G.
Dietz, ‘Trapping the Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception’, American Political Science Review 80, no. 3 (1986): 777–99, https://doi.org/10.2307/1960538.↩ 39. There is now ample evidence that states fall prey to some of the same cognitive biases that individuals possess. For instance, people are far more likely to stay in an ‘opt-out’ organ donation scheme (they are automatically part of the agreement unless they explicitly object) than to opt into one. States show a similar pattern when it comes to humanrights treaties, favouring opt-in protocols at similar rates (Jean Galbraith, ‘Treaty Options: Towards a Behavioral Understanding of Treaty Design’, Virginia Journal of International Law 55, no. 2 (2013): 309–64). For an overview of the biases of states, see Veronika Fikfak, Daniel Peat, and Eva van der Zee, ‘Bias in International Law’, German Law Journal 23, no. 3 (2022): 281–97, https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2022.23.↩ 40. Paul Deutchman and Jessica Sullivan, ‘The Dark Triad and Framing Effects Predict Selfish Behavior in a One-Shot Prisoner’s Dilemma’, PLOS ONE 13, no. 9 (2018): e0203891, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0203891; Marta Malesza, ‘The Effects of the Dark Triad Traits in Prisoner’s Dilemma Game’, Current Psychology 39, no. 3 (2020): 1055–62, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144- 018-9823-9.↩ 41. Pieter D. Wezeman et al., ‘Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2023’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2024, www.sipri.org/publications/2024/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-internationalarm s-transfers-2023.↩ 42. Others call this a ‘multipolar trap’ or ‘Moloch trap’.
Some have also pointed towards ‘Darwinian traps’: that existential risk and collective action problems are problems of game theory and human nature (which, as covered, isn’t the case). Other scholars have suggested that the current world is facing a set of fourteen ‘Anthropocene traps’, such as an over-pursuit of growth and short-termism (all fourteen traps fall into one of the three categories of Goliath trap I’ve outlined). The Goliath-traps framework suggested here is an improvement on these previous suggestions. It ties the trap dynamic back to specific, welldocumented human behavioural patterns and can help explain why game theory seems to work in some contexts (and with some individuals) but not others. See Peter Søgaard Jørgensen et al., ‘Evolution of the Polycrisis: Anthropocene Traps that Challenge Global Sustainability’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 379, no. 1893 (2024): 20220261, https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0261; Rönn, The Darwinian Trap; Scott Alexander, ‘Meditations on Moloch’, Slate Star Codex (blog), 30 July 2014, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-onmoloch/.↩ 43. As you might have spotted, this is a play on the mythical Norse Tree of Life, ‘Yggdrasil’. Feel free to call this ‘Yggdrakill’, the tree of death.↩ CHAPTER 21: THE FATES OF GOLIATH 1. All these numbers refer to irrecoverable collapse or a collapse leading to an extinction-level event. The figures quoted are from David Wallace-Wells, ‘Jared Diamond: There’s a 49 Percent Chance the World As We Know It Will End by 2050’, New York Magazine, 10 May 2019, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/jared-diamondon-his-new-bookupheaval.html; Rees, Our Final Century; Bostrom, ‘Existential Risks’; Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, ‘Global Catastrophic Risks Survey’, FHI Technical Report #2008-1, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University, 2008, www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/reports/2008-1.pdf; Ord, The Precipice.↩ 2. As superforecasting pioneer Philip Tetlock said, ‘There is no evidence that geo-political or economic forecasters can predict anything ten years out.’ Tetlock and Gardner, Superforecasting, 243. On this, and a broader set of problems with forecasting, see Kemp, ‘Foreseeing Extreme Technological Risk’. It’s always possible to point to a few potential exceptions, even when it comes to predicting social crisis.
One example is Peter Turchin, the pioneer of structural-demographic theory, who declared in a letter to Nature in 2010 that the 2020s would be a period of heightened political violence and instability in the US (Turchin, ‘Political Instability May Be a Contributor in the Coming Decade’). He’s right so far. Despite this success, it doesn’t mean we can reliably forecast the long-term future. His wasn’t a clear, quantitative forecast, and we’d need multiple examples to know that Turchin is consistently accurate, especially since much of the violence in the early 2020s was a reaction to the pandemic and lockdowns, something Turchin didn’t foresee. Generally speaking, however, we have no effective way to make detailed bets about future events beyond a year or two into the future. Turchin, to his credit, has made a more precise forecast of whether his theory is right: we should expect more than 100 political instability events (such as riots) in the period 2020–25 and fatalities of more than 5 per million citizens (Peter Turchin, ‘A Quantitative Prediction for Political Violence in the 2020s’, 21 January 2017, https://peterturchin.com/quantitativeprediction-political-violence-2020s/).
Whether his bet proves to be right remains unknown.↩ 3. Kemp, ‘Foreseeing Extreme Technological Risk’. We also currently have no evidence that superforecasters work for very low-probability, high-impact events, like 9/11 or the Russian Revolution.↩ 4. Elaine Scarry, Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between Democracy and Doom (W. W. Norton, 2014).↩ 5. David Frye, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick (Scribner, 2018), 165.↩ 6. For a useful summary, see Scheidel, The Great Leveler, chaps. 4 and 5.↩ 7. Gabriel Zucman, ‘Global Wealth Inequality’, Annual Review of Economics 11, no. 1 (2019): 109–38, https://doi.org/10.1146/annureveconomics-080218-025852. Zucman’s initial figures only extend to 2016, hence I’ve updated these to 2022 using data from the World Inequality Database. See https://wid.world/world/. The figure comes from the World Inequality Database, ‘Top 10% National Income Share, 2025’, https://wid.world/world#£sptinc_p9op100_z/US;FR;DE;CN;GB/last/e u/k/p/yearly/s/false/24.981500000000004/80/curve/false/country.
Published under the Creative Commons License Version 4.0.↩ 8. For a full and accessible structural-demographic analysis of the US, see Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (Penguin, 2023).↩ 9. The original data is from Vaclav Smil, ‘War and Energy’, Encyclopedia of Energy 6, no. 3 (2004): 63–71, https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-12-176480-X/00016-4. I’ve added in a rough date for each weapon and exchanged his example of a Boeing 767 (used in the 9/11 terrorist attacks) for the first nuclear bomb used in combat (Little Boy) and the largest hydrogen bomb ever tested (the Tsar Bomba). I’ve also dropped the bow and arrow from the data. Its origins are so ancient that including it makes the graph far more difficult to read.↩ 10. Office of Naval Research, ‘Directed Energy Weapons: Ultra-Short Pulse Laser and Atmospheric Characterization’, 2024, www.onr.navy.mil/organization/departments/code-35/division353/directed -energy-weapons-uspl-and-atmospheric-characterization; Defense Adapted Research Projects Agency (DARPA), ‘ACK: Adapting Cross-Domain Kill-Webs’, 2024, www.darpa.mil/program/adapting-cross-domain-kill-webs.↩ 11. Maria Nordström, ‘AI under Great Uncertainty: Implications and Decision Strategies for Public Policy’, AI & Society 37, no. 4 (2022): 1712, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01263-4.↩ 12. This is the central tenet of Paul Romer’s Nobel Prize-winning endogenous growth theory.
See Paul M. Romer, ‘Endogenous Technological Change’, Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 5, Part 2 (1990): S71–102, www.jstor.org/stable/2937632.↩ 13. Deborah Strumsky, José Lobo, and Joseph A. Tainter, ‘Complexity and the Productivity of Innovation’, Systems Research and Behavioral Science 27, no. 5 (2010): 496–509, https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.1057.↩ 14. Nicholas Bloom et al., ‘Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?’, American Economic Review 110, no. 4 (2020): 1104–44, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20180338.↩ 15. Elias Dinopoulos and Constantinos Syropoulos, ‘Rent Protection as a Barrier to Innovation and Growth’, Economic Theory 32, no. 2 (2007): 309–32, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00199-006-0124-4.↩ 16. Suzanne Goldenberg, ‘Oil Company Records from 1960s Reveal Patents to Reduce CO2 Emissions in Cars’, Guardian, 20 May 2016, www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/20/oil-company-recordsexxon -co2-emission-reduction-patents.↩ 17. MacAskill, What We Owe the Future.↩ 18. Steven J. Hoffman et al., ‘International Treaties Have Mostly Failed to Produce Their Intended Effects’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no. 32 (2022): e2122854119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2122854119; Marina Nord et al., ‘Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot: Democracy Report 2024’, University of Gothenburg, V-Dem Institute, 2024, 6–7, www.vdem.net/publications/democracy-reports/.↩ 19. Geoffrey West, Scale: The Universal Laws of Life and Death in Organisms, Cities and Companies (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017), 563–7. Figure 49 is adapted from Martin Hilbert, ‘Digital Technology and Social Change: The Digital Transformation of Society from a Historical Perspective’, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 22, no. 2 (2020): fig. 1, https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2020.22.2/mhilbert. It is technically a schematic of Schumpeterian waves of economic development. The figures aren’t exact, but are correct in terms of orders of magnitude.↩ 20.
West, Scale, 563–7.↩ 21. Hannah Ritchie, ‘How Much Plastic Waste Ends Up in the Ocean?’, Our World in Data, 5 October 2023, https://ourworldindata.org/howmuch-plastic-waste-ends-up-in-the-ocean.
↩ 22. Vaclav Smil, How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present, and Future (Viking, 2022).↩ 23. While it’s commonly claimed that 70 per cent of internet traffic is routed through the US, hard figures are difficult to come by. The best analysis I could find was Tim Stronge, ‘Does 70% of the World’s Internet Traffic Flow Through Virginia?’, Telegeography, 30 May 2019, https://blog.telegeography.com/does-70-of-the-worlds-internettraffic-flowthrough-virginia.↩ 24. Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.↩ 25.
Kemp, ‘Agents of Doom’.↩ 26. Annie Jacobsen, The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency (Little, Brown, 2015).↩ 27. On this and other examples, see Kemp, ‘The Stomp Reflex’.↩ 28. Two good analyses of this long-term growth in administration and information processing can be found in Mann, The Sources of Social Power I, and Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now.↩ 29. See Kemp, ‘Agents of Doom’.↩ 30. Nick Bostrom, ‘The Vulnerable World Hypothesis’, Global Policy 10, no. 4 (2019): 455–76, https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12718.↩ 31. There is an old idea of ‘Amara’s Law’ in foresight which suggests that we tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technology and underestimate its long-term effects. While not an iron law, it is a useful heuristic in this case.↩ 32. Nick Bostrom calls this ‘turnkey totalitarianism’: all it takes is one dictator to turn the system into a far more oppressive apparatus (Bostrom, ‘The Vulnerable World Hypothesis’, 470).↩ CHAPTER 22: AFTER THE FALL 1. Robert H. Gray, ‘The Fermi Paradox Is Neither Fermi’s Nor a Paradox’, Astrobiology 15, no. 3 (2015): 195–9, https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2014.1247.↩ 2. Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler, and Toby Ord, ‘Dissolving the Fermi Paradox’, SocArXiv, 6 June 2018, 1, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1806.02404.↩ 3. Katie Mack, The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) (Simon & Schuster Audio, 2020), provides a summary of the main theories including the Big Rip (dark energy causing the universe to expand until even the tiniest particles are pulled apart), the Big Crunch (essentially a reversal of the Big Bang), Heat Death (expansion until the universe becomes a cold, bland vacuum where nothing happens any more), and Vacuum Decay (which is well beyond my pay-grade to explain in a single sentence).↩ 4.
Andrew E. Snyder-Beattie, Toby Ord, and Michael B. Bonsall, ‘An Upper Bound for the Background Rate of Human Extinction’, Scientific Reports 9, no. 1 (2019): 1, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598- 019-47540-7.↩ 5.
Rosalind P. Murray-McIntosh et al., ‘Testing Migration Patterns and Estimating Founding Population Size in Polynesia by Using Human mtDNA Sequences’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 95, no. 15 (1998): 9047, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.95.15.9047; Jody Hey, ‘On the Number of New World Founders: A Population Genetic Portrait of the Peopling of the Americas’, ed. Andy G. Clark, PLoS Biology 3, no. 6 (2005): 0965, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0030193; Heng Li and Richard Durbin, ‘Inference of Human Population History from Individual Whole-Genome Sequences’, Nature 475, no. 7357 (2011): 494, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10231.↩ 6. Cameron M. Smith, ‘Estimation of a Genetically Viable Population for Multigenerational Interstellar Voyaging: Review and Data for Project Hyperion’, Acta Astronautica 97 (2014): 16–29, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2013.12.013. Other studies have turned up numbers that fall within this range. For instance, F. Marin and C. Beluffi, ‘Computing the Minimal Crew for a MultiGenerational Space Travel Towards Proxima Centauri b’, SocArXiv, 11 June 2018, https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1806.03856, suggest a strangely precise minimum viable population of ninety-eight.↩ 7. Luisa Rodriguez, ‘Civilization Re-Emerging After a Catastrophic Collapse’, EA Forum, 24 December 2020, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/GsjmufaebreiaivF7/what-isthe-lik elihood-that-civilizational-collapse-would. While simple and compelling, there are good reasons to be sceptical of this. Namely that it’s a 10–20-hour exploration and was published on a blog. ↩ 8. We rarely completely exterminate a virus or disease as we did with smallpox.
Instead, it usually becomes endemic and widespread throughout the population, making it far less lethal and more easily controlled through vaccinations. That is what has happened with influenza and Covid-19.↩ 9. Persson et al., ‘Outside the Safe Operating Space of the Planetary Boundary for Novel Entities’.↩ 10. Hagai Levine et al., ‘Temporal Trends in Sperm Count: A Systematic Review and Meta-Regression Analysis’, Human Reproduction Update 23, no. 6 (2017): 646–59, https://doi.org/10.1093/humupd/dmx022.↩ 11. Damian Carrington, ‘Arctic Stronghold of World’s Seeds Flooded after Permafrost Melts’, Guardian, 19 May 2017, www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-strongholdof-wor lds-seeds-flooded-after-permafrost-melts.↩ 12. David Denkenberger and Joshua M. Pearce, Feeding Everyone No Matter What: Managing Food Security After Global Catastrophe (Academic Press, 2014); Juan B.
García Martínez, Jeffray Behr, and David C. Denkenberger, ‘Food Without Agriculture: Food from CO2 , Biomass and Hydrocarbons to Secure Humanity’s Food Supply Against Global Catastrophe’, Trends in Food Science & Technology 150 (2024): 104609, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tifs.2024.104609.↩ 13. Jillian Scudder, ‘The Sun Won’t Die for 5 Billion Years, So Why Do Humans Have Only 1 Billion Years Left on Earth?’, The Conversation, 12 February 2015, https://theconversation.com/the-sun-wont-die-for-5- billion-years-so-why-do-humans-have-only-1-billion-years-left-onearth-37 379.↩ 14. Karim Jebari, Civilization Re-Emerging After a Catastrophic Collapse, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhx5ieX-HPY; Michael Aird, ‘Civilization Re-Emerging After a Catastrophic Collapse’, EA Forum, 27 June 2020, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Z8A5qGFbjdehRrkf3/civiliza tion-re-emerging-after-a-catastrophic-collaps; Lewis Dartnell, The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch (Penguin, 2014).↩ 15. Lewis Dartnell, ‘Out of the Ashes’, Aeon, 13 April 2015, https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation-withoutfoss il-fuels.↩ 16. I’ve calculated the number of years of fossil-fuel supply left using data from Our World in Data, ‘Years of Fossil Fuel Reserves Left, 2020’, Our World in Data, 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/years-offossil-fuel-reserves-left. I’ve then subtracted five years to produce the final figures. Estimates of total recoverable reserves come from Hannah Ritchie and Pablo Rosado, ‘Fossil Fuels’, Our World in Data, 2024, https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels.↩ 17. This often reveals more about the techno-utopian values of those who study existential risk than the preferences of future people. See Cremer and Kemp, ‘Democratising Risk’.↩ 18. Max Popp, Hauke Schmidt, and Jochem Marotzke, ‘Transition to a Moist Greenhouse with CO2 and Solar Forcing’, Nature Communications 7, no. 1 (2016): 10627, https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10627. For overarching summaries, see Kemp, ‘Ecological Breakdown and Human Extinction’, chap. 7 in The Era of Global Risk, ed. S. J. Beard et al. (Open Book Publishers, 2023), 157–8; Lynas, Our Final Warning, chap. 6.↩ 19. For informative and evocative overviews, see Peter D. Ward, Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future (HarperCollins, 2008); Lynas, Our Final Warning, chap. 6.↩ 20. Gregory A. Brennecka et al., ‘Rapid Expansion of Oceanic Anoxia Immediately Before the End-Permian Mass Extinction’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 43 (2011): 17631–4, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1106039108; Jitao Chen et al., ‘Marine Anoxia Linked to Abrupt Global Warming During Earth’s Penultimate Icehouse’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 119, no.
19 (2022): e2115231119, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2115231119.↩ 21.
Mark O’Connell, ‘Why Silicon Valley Billionaires Are Prepping for the Apocalypse in New Zealand’, Guardian, 15 February 2018, www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valleybillionaires-ar e-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand.↩ 22. Maya Yang, ‘Bankman-Fried Planned to Buy Nauru and Build Apocalypse Bunker – Lawsuit’, Guardian, 21 July 2023, www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/21/sam-bankman-friednauru-bu nker-ftx. Effective Altruism is a movement that seeks to maximize the impact of charitable donations and careers through hardnosed mathematics.↩ 23. Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires (W. W. Norton, 2022).↩ 24. Chris Begley, The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival (Basic Books, 2021).↩ 25. Moersdorf et al., ‘The Fragile State of Industrial Agriculture’, 1, 7.↩ 26. They might even benefit. The wealth of banks, living largely as digital numbers in an account rather than as the hard reality of gold and silver, would disappear alongside the power system.
African nations would suddenly have an extra $163 billion they wouldn’t need to repay in debt.↩ 27. Technically, Phoenician is an ‘abjad’, a system of writing in which only the consonants are represented. The Greeks modified it by adding symbols for the vowels, thus making it a complete alphabet.↩ 28. Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton University Press, 2015).↩ 29. Haydn Belfield, ‘Collapse, Recovery, and Existential Risk’, in How Worlds Collapse, ed.
Miguel Centeno et al. (Routledge, 2023), 61.↩ 30. There is an old cliché that crisis creates more draconian government.
The Bolshevik Revolution begat the Gulag of the Soviet Union. Mao’s communist revolution led to the mass deaths of the Great Leap Forward.
Yet these are completely different from a global collapse.
Indeed, none were collapses. Each one relied on highly centralized, bureaucratic, and effective power hierarchies. And we’ve encountered examples that went the other way: Somalia, post-Mycenaean Greece, and Egypt during the post-imperial epochs. ↩ 31. Cline, After 1177, 216.
Kemp and Cline, ‘Systemic Risk and Resilience in the Bronze Age’, 221.↩ CHAPTER 23: FIAT JUSTITIA, NE PEREAT MUNDUS 1. Macron complained that ‘you can’t say that just because 150 citizens wrote something, it’s the Bible or the Koran’. Well, nor is the legislation produced by less than a thousand of France’s richest and most powerful in the National Assembly.↩ 2. Several others and I have suggested different ways of using open democracy to mitigate catastrophic risk.
See Kemp et al., ‘Climate Endgame’; C. Z. Cremer and J. Whittlestone, ‘Canaries in Technology Mines: Warning Signs of Transformative Progress in AI’, Apollo – University of Cambridge Repository, 24 September 2020, https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.57790; Cremer and Kemp, ‘Democratising Risk’.↩ 3. The best-known usage was as the motto of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I (r. 1556–64). Immanuel Kant later used it as a retort to his utilitarian critics, although his translation was ‘Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it.’↩ 4. Bostrom, ‘The Vulnerable World Hypothesis’.↩ 5. See Chapter 7 for a summary.↩ 6. Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking (Experiment, 2020).↩ 7. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness, 2nd edn (Random House, 2016).↩ 8. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).↩ 9. Taleb, Fooled by Randomness.↩ 10. George Eliot, Middlemarch. Thanks to Itzxul Moreno for introducing me to this beautiful quote.↩ 11. While tragedy is typically invoked to describe history as well as nuclear arms races, it is rarely an apt framing and hides political responsibility. For a full discussion in the realm of nuclear weapons, see Benoît Pelopidas and Neil C. Renic, ‘The Tragedy Trap: On the Tragicized Politics of Nuclear Weapons and Armed Drones and the Making of Unaccountability’, Ethics & International Affairs 38, no.
2 (Summer 2024): 209–31, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0892679424000145.↩ EPILOGUE: SLAYING GOLIATH 1. IDDRI, ‘Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project’, 2024, www.iddri.org/en/project/deep-decarbonization-pathways-project.↩ 2.
Karn Vohra et al., ‘Global Mortality from Outdoor Fine Particle Pollution Generated by Fossil Fuel Combustion: Results from GEOSChem’, Environmental Research 195 (2021): 110754, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2021.110754.↩ 3. Simon Black et al., ‘IMF Fossil Fuel Subsidies Data: 2023 Update’, IMF Working Paper, 2023, www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2023/08/22/IMF-Fossil-FuelSub sidies-Data-2023-Update-537281.↩ 4. A trillion equals one thousand billion. UNESCO estimates that providing sanitation and safe drinking water to all low- and middleincome countries would cost around US $114 billion. The International Institute for Sustainable Development calculated that ending hunger would cost an additional US $11 billion per year between 2016 and 2030 (for a total of $176 billion). The development economist Jeffrey Sachs has calculated that ending extreme poverty would cost around $175 billion. Together this is around $465 billion. Even if these are underestimates and it costs three times as much, the revenue from fossil-fuel subsidies would still cover it, with over half a trillion to spare. See Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, new edn (Penguin, 2015); David Laborde and Livia Bizikova, ‘Ending Hunger: What Would It Cost?’, International Institute for Sustainable Development and the International Food Policy Research Institute, 2016, 3, www.iisd.org/system/files/publications/ending-hunger-what-would-itcost.
pdf; UNESCO, ‘Valuing Water Supply, Sanitation Services’, UN World Water Development Report, 2021, www.unesco.org/reports/wwdr/2021/en/valuing-water-supplysanitation-s ervices.↩ 5. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ‘Working Group III Technical Summary’, in Climate Change 2022 – Mitigation of Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 51–148, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157926.002. ↩ 6. One calculation for the US suggests that the health costs of coal are 0.8–5.6 times more than the value it adds to the economy. See Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus, ‘Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy’, American Economic Review 101, no. 5 (2011): 1649–75, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.101.5.1649.
That’s just the health costs, and those would be far higher in many other countries. For a wider discussion of health co-benefits, read Kemp, ‘Ecological Breakdown and Human Extinction’, 162–5.↩ 7. For a fuller exploration of potential options, see Jason Hickel et al., ‘Degrowth Can Work – Here’s How Science Can Help’, Nature 612, no. 7940 (2022): 400–403, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04412- x.↩ 8. Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan, ‘How Much Growth Is Required to Achieve Good Lives for All? Insights from Needs-Based Analysis’, World Development Perspectives 35 (2024): 100612, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612.↩ 9. Matthijs M. Maas, ‘Paths Untaken: The History, Epistemology and Strategy of Technological Restraint, and Lessons for AI’, Verfassungsblog, 9 August 2022, https://verfassungsblog.de/pathsuntaken/.↩ 10. Arrieta-Ibarra et al., ‘Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving beyond “Free”’.↩ 11. Girish Sastry et al., ‘Computing Power and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence’, SocArXiv, 13 February 2024, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.08797.↩ 12. On company activism, see Haydn Belfield, ‘Activism by the AI Community: Analysing Recent Achievements and Future Prospects’, SocArXiv, 17 January 2020, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2001.06528.↩ 13. This list of interventions is based on advice from Matthijs Maas.↩ 14. Moritz Kütt and Zia Mian, ‘Setting the Deadline for Nuclear Weapon Removal from Host States under the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons’, Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament 5, no.
1 (2022): 148–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/25751654.2022.2046405.↩ 15.
Tytti Erästö, ‘Revisiting “Minimal Nuclear Deterrence”: Laying the Ground for Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament’, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 2022, 5, www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/2022- 06/sipriinsight2206_minimal_nuclear_deterrence_1.pdf. This figure of 300 is the lowest number covered in this review of minimal nuclear deterrence estimates.↩ 16. Jonas Jägermeyr et al., ‘A Regional Nuclear Conflict Would Compromise Global Food Security’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117, no. 13 (2020): 7071, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1919049117.↩ 17. For instance, in 1939 the US produced 2,141 planes. In 1944, three years after entering the Second World War, it was producing almost 100,000 per year and had completely transformed its economy and society, including conscripting over 10 million men and introducing a rationing system.↩ 18. See Benoît Pelopidas and Sanne Cornelia J. Verschuren, ‘Writing IR after COVID-19: Reassessing Political Possibilities, Good Faith, and Policy-Relevant Scholarship on Climate Change Mitigation and Nuclear Disarmament’, Global Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1 (2023): ksad006, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksad006.↩ 19. Both Open Democracy by Hélène Landemore and Plurality by E. Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang outline multiple ways in which old forms of governance and new technology can be combined to create bigger, more inclusive democracies than ever seen before. See Hélène Landemore, Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2020); E. Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang, Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy (RadicalxChange, 2024).↩ 20. For an overview, see Bokyong Shin et al., ‘A Systematic Analysis of Digital Tools for Citizen Participation’, Government Information Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2024): 101954, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2024.101954. Notably, most existing tools are owned by big tech. That won’t be a sustainable situation if we want genuine democracy.↩ 21. Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay (W. W. Norton, 2019).↩ 22. For a full suite of options, see Hickel, The Divide, chap. 8.↩ 23. Matthew Connelly, The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets (Pantheon Books, 2023).↩ 24. International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, ‘US Protest Law Tracker’, 2024, www.icnl.org/usprotestlawtracker/.↩ 25. Cremer and Whittlestone, ‘Canaries in Technology Mines’.↩ 26. A similar proposal is covered (with more depth) in Kemp et al., ‘Climate Endgame’, 2, 3, and 7.↩ 27. Colleagues and I have referred to this as a financial oath of Maimonides (originally the traditional oath for physicians and pharmacists that is more expansive in its requirements, opening with ‘The eternal providence has appointed me to watch over the life and health of thy creatures’). For further details of how and why institutional investors should use their portfolios to reduce catastrophic risk, read Luke Kemp et al., ‘Financing Our Final Hour’, in An Anthology of Global Risk’, ed. S. J. Beard and T. Hobson (Open Book Publishers, 2024), 682, https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0360.23.