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Introduction: A People’s History of Collapse Unravelling History Through Collapse – Goliath’s Curse – Our Fragile Future – A Blessing in Disguise – A 1 per cent View of History – Is History Relevant for the Future? – A Historical Autopsy UNRAVELLING HISTORY THROUGH COLLAPSE Human history is the story of a power struggle. Power comes in four different forms: control of decision-making, including by setting up a centralized government; control of the resources that others depend on, such as the wheat and rice that most people eat every day; control through threats and violence; and control of information to understand and manipulate others, whether by a bureaucracy, a priesthood, or a big tech company. Then there is the great amplifier: power depends on who you are controlling – the size, skills, and health of the population.1 Each of these power structures can fall apart. When a government – whether in ancient Rome or modern-day Somalia – falls apart, we call it a state collapse or ‘state failure’. When the economy breaks down, as with the Great Depression in the 1930s, we call it an economic collapse. When a large number of people die, we call it a ‘bust’ or population collapse.
When all these power systems crumble together in a relatively rapid and enduring manner we call it a societal collapse.2 Societal collapse has shaped our history and will determine our future.
Around 500 kilometres south-west of modern-day Chicago, a city of flattopped earthen pyramids rises above the Mississippi River. At one stage there were almost 200 of these mounds covering around thirteen square kilometres. The largest pyramid – Monk’s Mound – stands at almost thirty metres, making it taller than the White House. These flat-topped pyramids were made by hand. Villagers would dig up the rich soil, transport it with baskets, and layer it carefully to form miniature mountains. They surrounded a grand plaza 490 metres long and 265 metres wide. The layout was eerily similar to those found over 2,000 kilometres south-west, in the pyramid cities of Mesoamerica.3 This is Cahokia, the first true city of the US (Figure 1).4 Around 1,000 years ago (1050–1100 CE), the settlement grew into a city of 10,000–15,000 people.5 Just a century or so earlier in 900 CE corn had been introduced to the area. The boom in agriculture, construction, and population was accompanied by more disturbing practices. Within the abandoned pyramids lie the remains of hundreds of men and women.
One of the mounds (Mound 72) contains 272 burials, many of which were ritual sacrifices. They were killed and then tossed into graves as part of an elite funeral.
One burial site alone has the skeletons of fifty-three women, all of which are of reproducing age: fifty-two are fifteen to twenty-five years old and one was around thirty-five. The women may have been virgins, or a harem of slaves. Another pit contains four men with their heads and hands cut off.
Other victims kept their hands but suffered slower deaths, with their fingerbones left digging into the sand as they tried to claw their way out.
At the top of the burial are two men who were buried lavishly, with one sporting a 5cm-thick blanket of 20,000 shell beads. Cahokia had become unequal and centralized, with a priestly ruling class who used human sacrifice to legitimize their reign. It was on course to become the first state of North America centuries before Europeans would arrive.6 A few decades later, the first signs of instability emerged. A farming complex supplying the city with grain was abandoned, a palisade was erected around the central settlement, and people began to exit the city.
Within fifty years its population had halved. Just over a century after that, the entire site, and the area extending hundreds of kilometres to the southeast of Cahokia – once full of similar pyramid-centred towns – had been abandoned. It became known as ‘the Vacant Quarter’, a vast tract of swampy land that was avoided by the indigenous people. Remarkably, the Native Americans of the area have no stories or oral traditions about Cahokia. It was as if they had intentionally forgotten it. This pioneering civilization-building project was over and would never be resurrected.7 Figure 1: An artistic depiction of Cahokia around 1050 CE Over 8,000 kilometres away, across the Atlantic, lies the city of Rome. It was once the beating heart of Europe’s largest, most enduring empire.
While relatively few know of or visit the ruins of Cahokia, millions flock to see the remains of Rome: the stone and marble skeletons of the Forum and the Colosseum. Rome collapsed, the western half of the empire fragmented, and the population of the city shrank from around 1 million people to 30,000. Unlike Cahokia, Rome was never entirely abandoned.
It remains a thriving metropolis of 2.8 million people. And unlike Cahokia, the legacy of Rome would be kept alive by dozens of later kingdoms and empires, including the British. Cahokia’s collapse was terminal, while the city of Rome, its culture and institutions, and the eastern half of its empire headquartered in Constantinople (now modern-day Istanbul) lived on.
Both Rome and Cahokia collapsed. How they fell and the legacy they left varies dramatically. Rome was revered, while Cahokia was left as a bad memory to rot in the swamps of the Mississippi.
To understand the similarities and differences of Rome and Cahokia we need to unravel some of the biggest questions of history. Why did people build these states and civilizations? Why did some of these first attempts to build great power structures fall apart? Why was Rome replaced by dozens of imitators while Cahokia’s collapse was seemingly permanent?
What did these systems of power mean for the health and wealth of the people living in them? What do these past collapses mean for us in the modern world?
Once you pull on the thread of collapse, the entire tapestry of history begins to unravel.
GOLIATH’S CURSE A state is a set of centralized institutions that imposes rules on and extracts resources from a population in a territory, whether that be ancient Egypt or the US today.
8 All states throughout history have eventually ended. The average lifespan of a state is 326 years. The largest states – mega-empires covering over a million square kilometres – are more fragile, lasting on average just 155 years. But these averages obscure a staggering range, from the fleeting four-year reign of the Later Han Dynasty in China to the Byzantine Empire of the Mediterranean, which lasted over 1,000 years.
While all states have ended, most did not end in societal collapse.
Societal collapse is a rarer phenomenon. A phenomenon that afflicts not only states but also broader power structures. Structures that many would call ‘civilization’.9 When most people speak of civilization they are referring to a few basic ingredients: hierarchy (government, bureaucracy), the capture and use of great amounts of energy (agriculture and monuments), and dense populations living in close quarters (cities and urbanism). Collapse involves a rapid and enduring loss of each of these ingredients of civilization. Yet civilization seems to be a wholly inappropriate term for what we see in Cahokia and Rome. It is derived from the Latin civilitas, which implies restraint, moderation, and good political conduct. Slavery, war, patriarchy, sacrificing teenage girls as the priests of Cahokia did, punishing slaves with crucifixion as in Rome, or dropping atomic bombs on cities as the US did less than a century ago, are not what most of us would consider civilized conduct. Orchestrating mass sacrifices or building bombs that vaporize cities does not require altruism, civility, or democracy. It requires top-down obedience enforced through the threat of violence. While the term ‘civilization’ is still commonly used, scholars have always struggled to agree on a sensible definition. Some suggestions include an advanced culture (an idea as vague as it is prejudiced against indigenous peoples), or a random checklist of factors such as writing (which neither Cahokia nor the Incan Empire had) and long-distance trade (which essentially all hunter-gatherers conducted).
The problem is that most of us are uncomfortable in recognizing the most common element of civilization: rule through domination.
A more apt label for these systems of violence is ‘Goliath’. A Goliath is a collection of hierarchies in which some individuals dominate others to control energy and labour. Goliath refers to a figure from the Old Testament (1 Samuel 17), a towering Bronze Age warrior who tormented the Israelites.
Despite his size he was eventually brought down by David, the future King of Israel, who slung one smooth stone directly between his eyes.
Similarly, Goliath societies began in the Bronze Age, are imposing in size, rely on violence, and can often be surprisingly fragile.
It was Goliath, not civilizations, that we saw arise in places such as Egypt, China, and Cahokia thousands of years ago. ‘Goliath’ is a far more useful term since it pinpoints what exactly changed in the lands around the Nile, the Yellow River Valley, and the Mississippi. It was a move towards human societies organizing, like many of our chimp cousins do, as a dominance hierarchy. That is, a social-ranking system in which one group or individual is placed above others owing to their ability to impose penalties, including violence. It was the emergence of Goliath.
A Goliath is not just a state. While the Roman Empire was the political heart of the Roman Goliath, there were other hierarchies that preceded it: rich and poor, master and slave, man and woman. A Goliath is a collection of dominance hierarchies organized primarily through authority and violence.
We can use the term ‘Goliath’ in a similar way to civilization. We use civilization to refer both to a general way of organizing society and to specific societies. We speak of ‘the rise of civilization’, or of the ‘global civilization’ of today, yet we also refer to specific civilizations, such as China and Egypt. I’ll be using Goliath in a similar manner. Goliath can mean a general template of organizing society into dominance hierarchies that control people and energy. It can also mean a specific set of dominance hierarchies that often coincide with an empire, such as Rome or China. Goliaths contain the seeds of their own demise: they are cursed. This is why they have collapsed repeatedly throughout history.
Sometimes it is not just a single Goliath that is toppled, but an entire group of them. Approximately three millennia ago, the Mediterranean and Near East were ruled by a network of Bronze Age empires and states. This Late Bronze Age world-system (around 1700–1200 BCE) included the Egyptians, the Mycenaeans in ancient Greece, the Minoans in Crete, and the Assyrians and Babylonians of Mesopotamia. In about 1200 BCE this entire system began to unravel.
Around a millennium later, Europe and Asia were dominated by two empires: the Roman Empire in western Europe and the Han Dynasty in China. Each at their peak ruled over some 5–6 million square kilometres of land and 60–70 million people.10 Collapses can be abrupt and unforeseen. The Han faced a small popular uprising that snowballed into the capture of the capital and the end of their dynasty within five years. It took under a century for Rome to go from rule by a single emperor to being a fractured chessboard of competing kingdoms. The fall of the Bronze Age system also took under a hundred years to unfold. Even the most entrenched power structures can be torn apart quickly and unpredictably.
As far as we can tell, no one living at the time anticipated the demise of these empires. Apart from individual disasters, famines, and sacked cities, they likely did not know they were living through a collapse. While a historian may see collapse as a graph of falling population or territory, the first-hand experience is far different. People living through collapse tasted the fear on their tongue while fleeing a city, they felt the heady rush of anger while raiding a granary, and they heard the screams of conflict coming closer. But we can see clearly only when looking back.
Collapse may be invisible until after it has occurred. We may be today living through a collapse that is for now slow and imperceptible.
Gazing up at the faded marble columns of Rome or the abandoned granite bones of Machu Picchu often brings a sense of tragic inevitability.
A reminder that death comes not just for every individual, but also for every great power structure. Percy Shelley caught that feeling in his sonnet ‘Ozymandias’: And on the pedestal, these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Both Ozymandias and real-world examples, such as ancient Rome, evoke a certain ominous uncertainty. Will we face the same fate?
Collapse is the spectre that haunts the victors of history.
Collapses throughout history can offer an insight into how and why different power structures unravel, and whether there are any patterns across the millennia. History is a vast database we can learn from, but it must be done soberly. Bear in mind that Shelley’s Ozymandias was modelled on the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II (Ozymandias was the Greek version of his name) and it was not a lament for pharaohs or for lost civilizations. Shelley was a staunch believer in republican rule, and the poem was a reminder about the ephemeral nature of tyrants such as Ramesses II.
Historical collapses are neither uniform nor apocalyptic. Many historians and archaeologists now prefer to speak of ‘transformation’ rather than collapse. While some were quick, others were protracted, taking entire centuries to play out. Cahokia lost half its population in half a century, while the fall of the Western Roman Empire took multiple generations.
The effects also varied depending on who and where you were. A woman born in Roman Britain in 360 CE could have grown up in a prosperous market town using currency, speaking Latin, seeing columns of Roman soldiers, and glimpsing the bathhouses of the elite. If she lived to sixty, she would have inhabited a Britain with no large towns, no currency, no Roman soldiers or administrators, abandoned bathhouses and monuments, and surrounded by pagan immigrants who didn’t speak a word of Latin. By contrast, an aristocrat in southern France during the same period would have experienced little change, apart from who they paid their taxes to. To a historian, the fall of Rome may look like an obvious event in global history.
To a peasant in Spain, it may have barely been perceptible. Collapse is partly in the eye of the beholder.
11 The people and culture of collapsed states often persist after the fall.
The language, customs, and culture of Rome lived on through new Germanic rulers, and the empire itself persisted for another millennium through the Eastern Roman Empire. The US Senate was inspired by Rome, and the Roman language of Latin is still used in institutions today.
The Incan language of Quechua is still spoken by around 10 million people today in Peru and surrounding areas. Much of the Mississippian culture that Cahokia pioneered lived on in future Native American communities for centuries, even if the experiment with cities and rulers was forgotten.12 Collapse reveals the fragility of empires, but also the resilience of culture and communities.
Collapse doesn’t just change across space, but also over time. And the future of collapse looks far grimmer than the past.
OUR FRAGILE FUTURE We live in a uniquely dangerous time. Our world is scarred by a pandemic, beset by unprecedented global heating, riven by inequality, dizzied by rapid technological change, and living under the shadow of around 10,000 stockpiled nuclear warheads. Since the invention of the atom bomb the world has come frighteningly close to nuclear war at least a dozen times.
The climate change we face is an order of magnitude (ten-fold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90 per cent of life on earth 252 million years ago. Viruses can now spread at the speed of a jet plane, and computer viruses at the speed of an internet connection.13 The better-known and more deeply studied threats of nuclear war and climate change are joined by new, more hypothetical technological terrors.
In 2023, hundreds of AI scientists and other luminaries (strangely including the CEOs of the main companies building these new AI systems, such as Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind) released a statement warning against the risk of human extinction from AI.
They fear that an uncontrolled, ultra-intelligent machine whose interests are not aligned with those of humanity (or at least most of us) will either destroy or enslave us. Other scholars, including biological scientists, have warned of advances in bioengineering that could create doomsday diseases – far more contagious and deadly than anything that has ever existed. And those are just the present threats. Who knows what new hazards rapid technological change could conjure in the coming decades. The confluence of these different threats has led some to call our current predicament the ‘metacrisis’, ‘the precipice’, or a ‘global polycrisis’.14 Such apocalyptic angst is not new. Every age has its doomsayers and extinction panics. In the 1920s Winston Churchill warned that humankind was in the unprecedented situation of being able to ‘unfailingly accomplish its own extermination’ in the morbidly titled essay ‘Shall We All Commit Suicide?’ The Czech play R.U.R. (which coined the term ‘robot’, derived from the Slavonic robota, meaning servitude or forced labour) told the story of an uprising of intelligent machines that wiped out their human masters.
This occurred in the 1920s, a time still reeling from a global pandemic, the First World War, and rapid industrialization. This doesn’t mean that either current concerns, or those from a century ago, are invalid. It means that we need a reliable way to put the current threats we face into perspective.15 The history of collapse is the most relevant historical phenomenon we can learn from. The present is an extension of the past.
The past can tell us how catastrophes have unfolded, how people have proved resilient to them, and why we find ourselves in our own acutely dangerous predicament.
Looking at collapse also forces us to confront how societies can destroy each other, as well as produce threats that undo themselves. Collapse isn’t just about how great power structures die, but also about how they kill.16 History can also help us understand the origins of the risk we are facing today. Studies of current global risk tend to become a checklist of different threats: nuclear weapons, climate change, pandemics, and AI.
Focusing on each in isolation and looking for technical solutions – such as building benevolent, controllable AI systems – is useful yet short-termist. In 1950 there was only one well-known global risk: nuclear weapons. Diplomatic efforts in the 1980s to reduce nuclear stockpiles by around 80 per cent were welcome, yet they haven’t stopped the world from spiralling into new arms races with algorithms or killer drones, or stockpiles mushrooming again. If we don’t find a way to address the underlying drivers of arms races, then we are doomed in the long term.
We need to reverse the root causes of global risk, not just build new technology to cope with the symptoms.
Competing companies and countries didn’t just appear overnight; they have a history that can be traced back to human psychology.
Fundamental psychological factors and the environmental changes that allowed them to shape the world are the root causes.17 Excavating these root causes can help us determine what we can do next to safely navigate the coming decades and centuries. This excavation of root causes will take us all the way back to 300,000 years ago, when we first developed as a species.
Yet while a future clouded by threats such as nuclear weapons, climate change, and uncontrolled technological change may seem dire, collapse has not always been a bad thing. Throughout history it has been a blessing for many.
A BLESSING IN DISGUISE Somalia is often used as an example of a modern-day collapse. In 1991, the small sub-Saharan African country fell into civil war. It had been ruled by the brutal dictator Mohamed Siad Barre since a bloodless coup in 1969 put him in power. Armed rebel groups began to surface in the 1980s, before overthrowing the Barre regime. Centralized government was lost, a power vacuum opened, and Somalia became what many would call a ‘failed state’, or even a collapsed one.
But the loss of the Somali state was a blessing for its citizens. A decade later almost every indicator of welfare and development had improved compared to life under the Barre regime. The number of mothers dying during childbirth had decreased by 30 per cent, infant mortality had been reduced by 24 per cent, and extreme poverty had dropped by almost 20 per cent.
Many difficult-to-measure aspects of life also flourished. Under the Barre regime, media was censored, foreign travel restricted, and many forms of free speech (including ‘gossip’) and free association could be punished by death. After the state collapsed, people spoke more openly and moved freely across borders, while numerous media outlets thrived.
Yet these advances cannot be explained purely by the collapse of the brutal Barre government. Somalis’ lives improved in most development indicators even relative to their more stable neighbours in Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia. The only areas of life that got worse were school enrolment and adult literacy, mainly because Western donors withdrew their aid from education programmes. Local militias and governments proved to be more responsive and less extractive than the UN-recognized (and US-backed) reign of Barre. Somalia was better off stateless.18 Somalia’s experience is not unique.19 Many historical cases of collapse may have been a net benefit for many citizens. This should not be too surprising: most states of the past were predatory constructs not dissimilar to Barre’s government.
Despite their splendid ruins, we need to keep in mind the ugly reality of past empires. Rome was an autocratic machine for turning grain into swords. Between 410 and 101 BCE the Roman Republic was at war for well over 90 per cent of the time.20 The Roman Empire was the largest slave system ever to have existed, enslaving around 100–200 million people during its reign.21 The Incan Empire was an ethnic pyramid scheme with the ruling Sapa Inca regularly and forcibly displacing hundreds of thousands of people (perhaps up to a third of the empire’s population).22 The different Egyptian kingdoms were national economies organized around a royal burial cult. Much of the workforce was mobilized to build grand cemetery monuments, such as pyramids, to ensure a few leaders’ safe passage into the afterlife. Today, many look at the Great Wall of China as an impressive achievement, a wonder of the world. It’s easy to forget that it was built by prisoners and slave labour, and was intended not just to keep mounted raiders out but to keep citizens in.23 Most empires strove to be endless. The poet Virgil wrote of how the god Jupiter gifted to Romulus, the founder of Rome, an ‘empire without end’.
The Nazi regime dreamed of a thousand-year Reich. We should be grateful that such quests for imperial immortality have been repeatedly unsuccessful.
The collapse of a Goliath is not always a largely beneficial affair, as it was with Somalia. It can involve mass displacement, the breakdown of long-distance trade and communication, an end to government services, increased violence, the abandonment of writing and loss of some technologies, and large-scale loss of life. The more typical view of collapse as a historical tragedy is not entirely unwarranted. Collapse is a process that has costs and benefits, winners and losers. This more complicated picture is often missing in popular depictions of collapse.
The experience of Somalia and the blessings of collapse may seem unexpected because the entire idea of collapse is shrouded in myth. It is rooted in deep beliefs about human nature and our apparent need for hierarchy. The most popular image of collapse is that, in the absence of a powerful authority, chaos and disorder reign; people turn to violence in a panicked scramble for resources. Hence, the misguided doomsday ‘prepper’ strategy of gathering guns, ammunition, and tinned foods into remote bunkers. Such myths inform how we think about history. It’s common to envision the past as a series of rises into golden ages during the peak of an empire and falls into post-collapse dark ages. These stories are the hallmarks of disaster movies, fictional post-apocalyptic stories, and bestselling non-fiction books. And these stories persist because the history we have is, of course, not an objective account of the past. It was written on parchment and engraved in stone by the conquerors and slave-owners of the past.
A 1 PER CENT VIEW OF HISTORY ‘The whole of Upper Egypt died of hunger and each individual had reached such a state of hunger that he ate his own children.’ This inscription comes from the autobiography of Ankhtifi, a southern provincial governor of Egypt during the end of the Old Egyptian Kingdom c. 2181–2055 BCE. The story etched into his tomb depicts an almost cosmic breakdown of law and order.
Ankhtifi was not alone in describing the loss of the Old Egyptian Kingdom as a tragedy. The Admonitions of Ipuwer, a collection of poems written on papyrus scrolls decades later, also paints an ugly picture. It is a typical example of what historians call ‘lamentation literature’, which gazes mournfully back at a fallen empire and lists a series of evils that befell it, ranging from civil war to famine. The Admonitions of Ipuwer described what is known in Egyptian history as the ‘first intermediate period’, or what most of us know as a dark age.24 Yet the fall of the Old Egyptian Kingdom, as told through Ankhtifi’s autobiography, was deceptive. It seems that there was a drought, but there is little evidence of mass death, starvation, or cannibalism as reported in his inscription.
The pharaoh lost power, and there does appear to have been increased conflict, but it was not a complete catastrophe. Instead, non-elite tombs became richer and more common. Grave goods, monuments, and amuletic symbols that had previously been used only by an elite became more widely available. Egyptologists refer to it as a ‘democratization of religion’. Government decentralized to provincial levels. Nobles became more impoverished, while commoners appear to have become richer and more socially mobile.25 The Admonitions of Ipuwer confirms this.
Most of the text is a tirade against the empowerment of the peasants and an inversion of the social order: The corn of Egypt is common property … Indeed, the poor man has attained to the state of the Nine Gods, he who could not make a sarcophagus for himself is now the possessor of a tomb … Behold, noble ladies are now on rafts, and magnates are in the labour establishment, while he who could not sleep even on walls is now the possessor of a bed.
Servants spoke freely. The nobles lamented. And the poor rejoiced.26 The horror of servants gaining free speech and the collective ownership of collectively produced food is not usually what comes to mind when one thinks of collapse. Though clearly it was for the writers of the Admonitions of Ipuwer. The poems expend far more energy fretting about this reversal of fortunes than on war and starvation.
Many people benefited from the fall of the pharaoh and the Old Egyptian Kingdom. As a nomarch (provincial governor) of Upper Egypt, Ankhtifi himself may have been a beneficiary. When the authority of the pharaoh disappeared, nomarchs took on more power. Ankhtifi was buried in a lavishly decorated tomb, which portrays him as a great saviour during this period of instability. His autobiography was mainly an exercise in selfaggrandizement.
Ankhtifi and lamentation literature more generally are emblematic of a key problem: the 1 per cent view of history. Most of the archaeological evidence we have – palaces, pyramids, and written records – is all from the smallest, wealthiest class.
We judge historical collapse based on what archaeologists have dug up. The easiest remains to find are monumental structures such as palaces, temples, and fortresses, as well as grand burials with a few prized individuals buried with their weapons and jewellery. In short, the more stuff you produced and left behind, the larger your entry in the archaeological record. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people in the past left faint, biodegradable fingerprints. For over 99 per cent of humanity’s time on earth people have not lived in cities but as foragers or as peasant farmers.27 Even at the height of the Roman Empire around 90 per cent of the population were rural farmers. And yet, we know most about what happened to a few palaces and city centres, not the thousands of farms and villages.28 This leads to problems when studying ancient collapses. Did the fall of the Classic Lowland Maya and the Western Roman Empire lead to largescale losses of life or mass displacement? People who leave cities and move back to the land leave behind fewer traces. They become archaeologically invisible. This migration from urban to rural areas can make it difficult to tell whether much of the populace perished or simply moved away. It can also make it difficult to know how their lifestyles changed, giving us a skewed picture of how collapse unfolded.29 The elite bias is most evident in writing. Writing and other forms of documentation were an exclusive art for government bureaucrats and aristocratic representatives up until the invention of the printing press. The earliest forms of fully fledged writing, dating back to around 3000 BCE in Mesopotamia, were not letters or poems but tax records, administrative documents, and government propaganda. The first writer was probably an accountant.
Writing, for most of human history, has not been a widespread practice.
Most people in the world couldn’t read or write until the nineteenth or twentieth century. This was because the average individual faced numerous impediments to literacy. Writing materials were expensive and hard to procure, writing is often difficult to learn (it takes years of training for children even today), there were frequently restrictions (particularly for women) on who could learn, and there was usually little to no benefit if you were a farmer or peasant. Before the advent of the printing press, writing was dominated by a small, select number of scribes employed by rulers and the richest families.30 Records are also mainly penned by the victors of history. We have a deep insight into the lives of the Roman elite, but little knowledge of the nonstate peoples who covered most of the world.31 Most of our sources tend to show collapse through the eyes of its greatest victims: enriched elites. ‘Elite’ does not mean individuals who are particularly skilled or high-performing, but rather the top 1–10 per cent of decision-makers and wealth-holders in a society. We need to go beyond the elite view and provide a more realistic analysis of history and collapse.
What did it mean for the health and wealth of the slaves, peasants, and farmers?32 We need something closer to a people’s history of collapse.
IS HISTORY RELEVANT FOR THE FUTURE?
A common question is whether the history of crisis and collapse in agricultural empires can provide lessons for the modern, globalized, and industrialized world. While many factors distinguish the modern world from ancient history, they don’t make collapse less relevant. In each of the key dimensions of collapse – energy capture, population density, and hierarchy – the modern world is simply an intensification of the past. The study of collapse is more relevant than ever.
Globalized society is dependent on unfathomable amounts of energy. In just the last 200 years energy consumption has risen ten-fold.33 The surge in energy use can also be seen in how much energy is ‘captured’ per person.
That is, how much energy – calculated in terms of calories – is taken from the environment and used by humans, whether that be for food, heating, electricity, or construction. The average ice-age hunter-gatherer in Europe would have captured about 4,000 calories per day. The average European now uses around 230,000 calories.34 While fossil fuels are a new source of energy, we are still dependent on the same few types of grains to feed almost the entire world. About twothirds of the world’s food energy intake comes from three staple grasses: wheat, rice, and maize. Wheat alone provides about one-fifth of global dietary calories. We are still agrarian in our tastes, even if we now rely on fossil-fuel-devouring production.35 Collapse tended to hit urban areas far harder than rural ones. Today we also live in an unprecedentedly urban age. For most of human history, the majority of humanity has lived in rural settings. It was not until 2007–8 that over half of the global population resided in urban areas. By 2050, around two-thirds of the global population (6 billion) are expected to live in urban areas.36 Societal collapse is mainly about the fall of great power structures. The world is dominated not just by cities, but by hierarchy. It is covered by a single political type: political states. If you are reading this, you are almost certainly a citizen of one of the 205 states that cover the world.
Modern nation-states have their roots in far more ancient institutions.
The first state was the First Dynasty of Egypt (around 3100 BCE). Now, almost every square inch of habitable land is under sovereign rule.
Previously, large states shaped how people and disease spilled across the land. Now, they can unleash nuclear war across continents and change the global climate.
Perhaps most importantly, the basic human psychology that has driven war and collapse throughout human history has not changed.
Modern technology may seem like a saviour, but it also brings unprecedented threats, whether it be nuclear weapons or fossil-fuel-driven climate disruption. Remember that it was innovations in gunpowder, steel, and navigation that provided the basis for the transatlantic slave trade.
A HISTORICAL AUTOPSY We’ll examine dozens of cases of collapse, from the first cities to modern state failure, as well as a novel database of over 300 states spanning the past 5,000 years. This is the Mortality of States (MOROS) dataset, named after the Greek god of doom. It also includes the leading work of others, such as the Seshat Global History Databank (named after the Egyptian goddess of knowledge), the world’s largest dataset on global history, maintained by a group of archaeologists, historians, and others.
This broad-sweeping approach diverges from how others have analysed collapse. Most popular books on collapse have tended to focus on a few select examples. Jared Diamond’s well-known Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive covers five historical cases: the Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Rapa Nui, the Greenland Norse, the Anasazi, and the Lowland Maya. Four of these are small, isolated communities and three were islands. The Lowland Maya were a collection of competing city-states with a common culture living in a unique environment with a tropical climate and a fragile topsoil. While these are helpful as isolated examples, they are not necessarily the most instructive cases for the globalized, interconnected world of the twenty-first century. Eric Cline’s magisterial 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed surveys a more relevant case: the Late Bronze Age (1200–1150). The Late Bronze Age was, in many ways, a Mediterranean microcosm of our contemporary world: a group of diverse empires, kingdoms, and cities with close political and trade ties. The splintering of the Bronze Age world is informative, but there are still thousands of years and hundreds of other cases that need to be considered. We can’t discern any general patterns, and absorb their lessons, without taking a broader view across time and space, one that reaches back to our very beginning as a species.37 Part One examines collapse from the dawn of our species to the emergence of the first states. Part Two surveys the rise and fall of empires over the past five millennia. Part Three concludes by looking at the future and the prospect of a modern global societal collapse.
Part One DAWNS AND ENDS 1 Hobbes’s Delusion Collapsing Back into Human Nature – Fluid Civilizations – Neither Nasty nor Brutish – The Myth of Mass Panic – Egalitarian Origins – Killing in the Name of Equality – Status Competition COLLAPSING BACK INTO HUMAN NATURE Our views of human nature and collapse have been profoundly shaped by one seventeenth-century philosopher: Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes’s mother reportedly entered labour in 1588 when she heard that a Spanish armada was approaching the English coast. Later Hobbes remarked that ‘my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear’, and Hobbes’s life was scarred with fear and insecurity. He lived through repeated periods of political turmoil, including the English Civil War, during which he was exiled for eleven years to France. His pessimistic philosophy about human nature reflected the chaotic life he endured.
Hobbes’s most lasting idea was the ‘social contract’: a political bargain in which citizens give up some liberty to a supreme ruler who can provide them with security. The monarch protects the people from each other.
Hobbes saw ‘the state of nature’ – life without a central political authority – as one of perpetual war of all against all. In a much-quoted passage Hobbes decries how this ‘state of nature’ would entail no navigation, no industry, and ‘no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ Without government, chaos would rule instead.1 Hobbes had no access to archaeological finds, psychological experiments, or anthropological ethnographies to verify these theories. So instead, he constructed a list of assumptions about human psychology and used them to paint a dark picture of life without rulers. People lived in the deadly and destitute ‘state of nature’ until they managed to agree on a social contract and appoint a sovereign ruler to keep them from each other’s throats.
His views are also representative of why so many people fear collapse: once the social contract breaks, the state of nature re-emerges with dire consequences. This bleak vision is known as veneer theory: ‘a thin veneer hiding an otherwise selfish and brutish nature’. Once civilization is peeled away, chaos spreads like brushfire. Whether it be in post-apocalyptic fiction, disaster movies, or popular history books, collapse is often portrayed as a Hobbesian nightmare.2 None of this originated with Hobbes. The story of kings rising up to tame a primordial chaos is thousands of years old. One of the foundational documents of Hinduism, the Mahabharata of the first millennium BCE, has a warrior reflect, ‘We have learned that peoples without kings have vanished in the past, devouring each other, the way fishes in the water eat the smaller ones.’ The Buddhist scriptures known as the Dīgha Nikāya recount how during a mythical time of discord and theft a group of people went to the one ‘who was most handsome and good-looking, most charismatic, and with the greatest authority’ and gifted them the powers of a ruler such as the ability to accuse and banish others. In exchange, the people offered a portion of rice to their new leader: an early, edible tax. Similar fables of mutual dependence between the rabble and a necessary ruler are retold in literature throughout the ages, from Aristotle’s writings about an ‘elected dictator’ through to Zhou-era songs in China. Hobbes merely gave the bestknown philosophical articulation to a story that has been told for thousands of years.3 Hobbes’s ideas weren’t even novel for his own time. They reflected the Puritan Christian belief that the natural state of humanity was one of perpetual war against each other, God, and all creation. It was only through God’s grace that they could be peaceful with each other and eventually reach heaven. Hobbes’s contemporary John Milton claimed that states were formed ‘to avoid the discord and violence that sprang from Adam’s transgression’. Earlier leaders of the Church had similarly used the supposed sinfulness of man since the fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to justify the establishment of governments.
Church and state became an extension of the heavenly hierarchy on earth. Hobbes borrowed an idea from theology and applied it to political philosophy.
4 The Hobbesian worldview is closely entwined with another collapserelated stereotype: mass panic. The story goes that as soon as a crisis hits, whether it be a war, pandemic, earthquake, volcanic eruption, asteroid strike, or a plague of zombies, people will react with a selfish and irrational rush for resources. This is related to what some call ‘civil disorder’.
Disasters bring out the worst in people, leading to rioting, looting, robbery, and violence.5 Scenes of mass panic can be seen in almost every disaster film, including Independence Day, Armageddon, and Contagion. One survey of 448 UK citizens and emergency-response professionals suggests that this assumption about mass discord is common.6 The Hobbesian nightmare of panic, disorder, and bloodshed colours how we think people act in crises.
This Hobbesian nightmare of violence and mass panic is a theory not just about life outside government but also about human nature. Hobbes built his image of humanity on a mythical ‘state of nature’, a time before government. This is a kind of fictional, primordial situation when true human nature shone through. There is, of course, a non-fictional parallel we can draw on, the period from around 300,000 years ago when humans evolved in a world without governments or great power structures. This is commonly called the ‘Palaeolithic’ (see Table 1; I’ll be using ‘Palaeolithic’ or ‘ice age’ throughout the rest of the book), a time before the unusually warm and stable climate known as the ‘Holocene’ began 12,000 years ago.
When scholars claim that humans are innately violent or antisocial it is built on how humans evolved during this stateless time. The Palaeolithic can indeed help us see our evolutionary inclinations (what is usually referred to as human nature). That is, the innate behaviours we tend to adopt unless culture strongly compels us not to.7 Table 1: Human epochs (BP = Before Present) Lower Palaeolithic Middle Palaeolithic Upper Palaeolithic Holocene 3.3 million – 300,000 BP 300, 000 – 50,000 BP 50, 000 – 12,000 BP 12, 000 – 80 BP Everyone has assumptions about our evolutionary inclinations, Hobbesian or otherwise. With so many blank pieces in the puzzle of history, we fall back on our view of innate human drives to fill in the gaps.
Even the most careful historian will still end up stitching together any loose threads using their own unspoken assumptions about humanity.
Rather than silent assumptions or old philosophers, we are better off relying on evolutionary biology, studies of modern foragers, and the thousands of archaeological sites and artefacts from the Palaeolithic to construct a picture of how human societies organized during the ice age.8 That can give us an idea of our evolutionary inclinations: the behaviours that shape the causes of collapse and our response to disaster. The picture that is emerging is far more interesting, and hopeful, than a Hobbesian chaos.
FLUID CIVILIZATIONS The Palaeolithic was a challenging time to survive. The world went through a period of glacial cycles. During the coldest periods global temperatures were around 5°C lower than today and glaciers covered up to 30 per cent of the earth’s surface. This would have made prolonged, intensive agriculture impossible.9 Africa was far drier than today and littered with around eighty-six active volcanoes.10 During this time our ancestors wandered out of Africa into the wider world in sociable, well-connected, egalitarian, nomadic bands. This was no random choice of social structure: it was a winning strategy to survive the ice age.11 These egalitarian bands were cosmopolitan and varied in size. The average was likely to have been small, around twenty to forty individuals, but may have ranged up to 150–200 people. They were not restricted to family members. Recent genetic evidence suggests that in many huntergatherer groups less than 10 per cent of individuals in a band were closely related.12 Each group drew on a wider pool of non-genetically close individuals, often from far-flung territories, who may not have even spoken the same mother tongue.13 These unrelated friends are vital. Studies of the Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines and the Bayaka of central Africa show that some types of knowledge, such as information about plants, are more commonly shared among close friends than family members. When it comes to keeping groups together and progressing culture, friendship is as thick as blood.14 This almost certainly held true for our ice-age ancestors. Without webs of friendships, we also wouldn’t have seen new stone tools and rituals develop and spread. Without intermarriage across groups to encourage genetic diversity, we would have fallen prey to inbreeding and other genetic problems.
Our Palaeolithic ancestors were intensely social. Not just among their bands, but also across far broader networks. For a long time, people believed that close human connections had a ceiling of roughly 150 people.
This is called Dunbar’s number and crops up in areas ranging from the size of church congregations to Facebook groups.15 Dunbar estimated this by looking at the size of the neocortex (a part of the brain responsible for higher cognitive functions) of primates relative to the size of their groups and then extrapolating this to humans. Whether this extends to humans is questionable, and numerous studies using updated data and multiple methods have tended to come up with larger numbers across a wider range, the estimates varying from 2 to 520.
There is no easy, clear ceiling to our social connections.16 It is also a little misleading. While we might have a flexible cap on how many people we can closely know at a given time, this doesn’t stop us from frequently changing and updating our connections to create a far larger web.
Hunter-gatherer groups of today have fluid, flexible social networks with thousands of connections. Individuals are constantly mobile and moving between groups, picking up new friends, family, and sometimes partners along the way. They are more like a city dweller than an isolated family in the countryside. There is no easily numbered ceiling on human social group size.17 Our Palaeolithic predecessors were never antisocial loners focused solely on their families and distrustful of strangers. They were well-travelled, well-connected socialites who usually lived in vast societies. We inherited their innate sociability. There is a good reason why solitary confinement is the worst punishment that can be handed out, even in prisons. Our love of other people led to vast webs of shared culture and trade.
Our ancestors constructed a regional microcosm of the current globalized world. They were a people on the move who traded raw materials and shell beads over distances of about 200 kilometres per year (as egalitarian huntergatherers do today). Many of these networks are truly ancient. Obsidian – a black, volcanic glass that can be used as a tool, decoration, or blade – was traded over 160 kilometres around 200,000 years ago while ostrich eggs were exchanged across eastern and southern Africa at least 50,000 years ago. Much of this was built on gift-giving and reciprocity: the impulse to give back whenever we receive, whether that be gifts, help, or favours.18 These trade networks could overlap to spin webs of shared culture and technology. Across the world we see that Palaeolithic foragers crafted large, continent-spanning zones of common tools, and rituals. We may have the African Union today, but 120,000 years ago hunter-gatherers were exchanging genes, tools and musical instruments from one side of the continent to the other.
19 Around 43,000–28,000 years ago, across Europe and Asia, from Siberia to France, people left similarly crafted tools, weapons, figurines, and even artwork in what archaeologists have called the ‘Aurignacian’ cultural tradition. It was a zone of common culture that surpassed the European Union in size. Similarly, people across North America 13,050–12,750 years ago all used the same ‘Clovis’ tipped projectiles, stone blades, bone rods, and other tools. Mobility was the connective tissue of these giant cultural bodies.20 As the Cambridge anthropologist Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias observed, ‘movement was never just a means of finding food, but of finding one another across entire continents’.21 Think of these as fluid civilizations: networks of cooperation built on foot by people moving and intermixing (Figure 2).22 The lives of those within these fluid civilizations were not poor, unhealthy, or doomed to be ‘short’ and ‘nasty’. Ice-age foragers were taller and in better health than the farmers who took over the world. Today, foragers are less likely to face famine than non-industrial farmers.23 The modern forager-horticulturalist Tsimané of the Bolivian Amazon have the lowest rate of atherosclerosis (hardening and thickening of the arteries, a key precursor to stroke and heart disease) of any recorded group. The Tsimané also experience less brain atrophy than their industrial counterparts. They lose 70 per cent less brain volume as they age than their peers in Europe and the US.24 The Tsimané are not an outlier. Reviews of hunter-gatherer populations have found that they have exceptional health, with low rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer, stroke, heart disease, and other cardiovascular and metabolic health problems.25 These findings are even more impressive given that modern foragers are often marginalized groups.26
The working hours of foragers also compare favourably to both agriculturalists and modern workers. One study compared the Agta foragers of the Philippines to an Agta group that had been paid by governments to settle and take up rice farming. The foragers had about ten hours more leisure time per week than their farming neighbours.
While estimates vary, most studies suggest that hunter-gatherers work around forty hours (with a range of approximately twenty to fifty) per week. This ‘work’ includes hunting, fishing, gardening, foraging, cooking, and walking through natural landscapes. Most people would not necessarily consider this work and go hiking or hunting for holidays.
Many of these studies also classify walking, childcare, and domestic chores as work. If we applied that same definition to the average American, they would spend around fifty-five to seventyseven hours a week working.27 There is a vast difference between spending your days following orders in an office or factory, and fishing with friends. Critically, the average person in the world today is also not a middle-class worker in Australia or Norway with paid holiday leave. Instead, they are more like poor farmers or sweatshop workers in India or China.
The lives of both our prehistoric ancestors and non-state foragers were still far from ideal. Roughly a quarter of children died before reaching the age of one, and only half made it to puberty. Literacy was non-existent, and many tasks involved hard labour. There are reasons to pick being a citizen of modern Denmark over being a Palaeolithic forager. Still, hunter-gatherers who made it past childhood generally led healthy, happy, relatively long, and deeply social lives. A centralized authority was not necessary to ensure coordination or prevent deprivation.
Instead, our mobility and sociality allowed us to create great webs of shared culture and technology. All of that would have been difficult if humans had been trapped in a state of perpetual war against each other.
NEITHER NASTY NOR BRUTISH The key to the Hobbesian story about human nature and collapse is violence. Without an overseer, people allegedly turn on each other. An orgy of disorder and bloodshed is not conducive to trade, constructing buildings, or doing anything else that involves cooperation.
It is worth pausing here to specify what we mean by violence. In this case we can focus narrowly on direct acts of lethal aggression. This includes both interpersonal violence (between individuals) and warfare (between groups). Just how violent are stateless foragers?28 Foragers without a government in the modern world vary dramatically in their rates of violence. One study across fifteen hunter-gatherer groups found homicide rates per 100,000 person-years of life ranging from 1 (in the Batek of Malaysia) to 1,018 (in the Hiwi of Venezuela and Colombia).
In other words, for a population of 100,000, every year there would be one murder among the Batek and 1,018 among the Hiwi. Another found a spectrum from the peaceable Bakairi (of Brazil) who had 0 per cent of deaths from violent causes to the Ache (of Paraguay) who had a chilling 55.5 per cent. We thus have a range from the safest people on earth to people whose daily existence is more dangerous than in most war zones.
Rates of violence can also change substantially over time.29 Looking across all modern foragers isn’t always the most reliable method, since these groups have been shaped by their interactions with farmers and colonizers, including invasions and confrontations. These rates of lethal violence among non-state peoples also misleadingly include massacres and murders inflicted by farmers, miners, and other intruders.
This makes the high estimates of violence among foragers entirely misleading. For instance, all the cases of large numbers of Ache being killed (often mistakenly reported as war-deaths) were due to slave-traders and Paraguayan frontiersmen. Similarly, many of the instances of lethal violence among the Hiwi (and all reported war-deaths) were caused by invading ranchers.30 These statistics also include homicides fuelled by alcohol or drugs, which were usually introduced by colonizers. Many of the deaths are better attributed to colonization than to our immutable ancient instincts.31 Rather than just looking at living examples of stateless hunter-gatherers, we can turn to archaeological evidence. In 2013, the anthropologists Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli of Chicago’s Field Museum conducted the most comprehensive analysis of violence in pre-history. They looked at almost 3,000 skeletons from over 400 sites before 10,000 BCE.
They concluded that interpersonal violence in the Palaeolithic was rare and warfare absent. Only six sites contained any indications of violence at all.
One was a triple burial in the Czech Republic, although none of the skeletons bore any of the telltale signs of a grisly death. Four more sites had one or more individuals with projectile points embedded into their bones.
However, these could have been accidents, perhaps a mishap while hunting.
The only legitimate site that indisputably shows interpersonal violence is as famous (at least among archaeologists) as it is exceptional: Jebel Sahaba in Sudan. At this site, fifty-eight skeletons were buried, twenty-four of which had signs of violence etched into their remains. Yet the injuries seemed to be repetitive, and some were healed. This may suggest occasional raids and ambushes rather than a single bloody war.
The site also dates to 12,000– 10,000 BCE, at the very end of the Palaeolithic during a time of environmental upheaval when the planet warmed and exited the ice age.32 Another systematic study produced similar results to Haas and Piscitelli: the observed deaths in the archaeological record equate to a 1.3 per cent violent death rate. In other words, about one in every hundred people died due to some form of physical violence, whether that be a hunting accident or interpersonal conflict. This makes the Palaeolithic more or less as peaceful as the modern world. Today, about 0.9 per cent of deaths globally are due to homicides or war. Another 1.3 per cent are today due to suicide, putting total violent deaths at 2.2 per cent.33 These numbers may seem surprising. Many famous accounts suggest that the Palaeolithic was a war zone with homicide rates of 15–25 per cent. Perhaps the most well-known is Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, which estimates a Palaeolithic violence rate of 15 per cent.
These numbers don’t stand up to scrutiny. The anthropologist Brian Ferguson has shredded the list of twenty-one archaeological sites that Pinker draws from: three are duplicates, three have only one case of violent death (no reliable indication of war), and another has no war fatalities at all. Of the remaining two-thirds, only one case dates to the Stone Age. The systematic studies of Hass, Piscitelli, and others, which found a much lower rate, are a far better guide to violence before the Holocene.34 The skeletal record of low rates of violence is reinforced by the history of cave art. Before 8000 BCE, there are thousands of depictions of humans hunting and butchering animals. There are only three caves with art that can be interpreted as depicting human-on-human killing. Cosquer, Cougnac, and Pech Merle in France collectively contain four images that could be construed as a figure punctured with spears. Yet even that reading seems suspect: two of the figures have tails (see Figure 3) and the other two more closely resemble a goat antelope frequently drawn in other caves.35 Phylogenetic evidence (studying the evolutionary relationships between species using genetics) can also shed light on our proclivities for both war and peace. One study surveyed the rates of violence within species for 1,024 mammalian species to predict how violent humans should be.
Species that are genetically closer to us, such as chimpanzees, should be a better predictor than mammals generally of how murderous humans are. Their analysis suggests that prehistoric hunter-gatherers have an interpersonal kill rate of about 2 per cent, similar to other great apes. In other words, for every hundred ancient foragers, two would have died from a lethal attack from another human. That is hardly evidence of a belligerent nature or of Palaeolithic war. And it is ten times or so lower than the 15–25 per cent kill rates that more pessimistic scholars have claimed. There is also evidence that we are less violent than some of our primate relatives.36 Figure 3: Human or horse?
The figure on the left is from Cougnac cave and the one on the right is from Pech Merle cave, both in France. Both have been interpreted by some as humans riddled with spears and arrows. Ask yourself, do these look like unfortunate victims of war, or a successfully hunted horse, buffalo, or antelope goat, complete with tail? Scholars frequently cite examples of warfare and fighting among chimpanzees as evidence that we are genetically predisposed towards violence. Yet chimps and humans are quite different. Chimpanzees have developed several genetic changes that allow them to endure more pain, heal more rapidly, and stay calm during high levels of stress. These are adaptations to higher levels of interpersonal violence. They were also all genetic changes that appeared to have happened after humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor.
37 This is evidence of our relative peacefulness, not aggression. And those few examples of chimp ‘warfare’? Most of them seem to be caused by human interference, whether that be the destruction of chimpanzee habitats causing territorial conflicts or anthropologists feeding chimps.38 It’s important to bear in mind that chimpanzees are just one of our primate relatives which is often cherrypicked to cast humans in a bloody light. We have other relatives, such as bonobos, among whom violence between groups is virtually absent.
Perhaps the most compelling proof of our relative pacifism comes from our simple reluctance to hurt each other. Interviews with soldiers, examinations of weapons, analysis of combat photos, and re-enactments of battles all suggest that in past conflicts weapons were often unused by well over half the combatants, and that soldiers often misaimed intentionally to avoid hurting their enemies.39 It wasn’t until the Vietnam War that the US developed more immersive training experiences to overcome this squeamishness and brainwash men into being better fighters.40 The truth is that most of us are not hardwired to hurt or kill each other. We need to be programmed to commit murder.
This doesn’t match the Hobbesian story. If our deep past was marked by persistent battles, then shouldn’t we be aggressive killers? The pacifists and peaceniks would have been killed off before they could reproduce.
Soldiers today shouldn’t need so much training and moulding. They certainly shouldn’t be psychologically scarred by being on the battlefield.
This scenario of pre-history as a war zone also doesn’t fit with the presence of fluid civilizations. If there were such high rates of violence, especially between groups, then long-distance trade and constant migration across groups would have been offputtingly risky. No one wants to walk across a war zone. Yet we see ample evidence of trade, intermingling, and the sharing of culture and technologies across vast areas of the world. None of this is to say that there wasn’t competition between groups or that violence didn’t exist in the Palaeolithic. Rather, lethal conflict was muted with a maximum of around two out of every hundred people dying owing to interpersonal violence (if the genetic evidence proves reliable). That makes the Palaeolithic a little safer than the modern world (if we include suicide) and far safer than most other historical periods. Small-scale war may still have existed, but we simply have no evidence for it.41 Palaeolithic violence was probably highly personal. With little inequality, there would have been few material rewards for killing others. One study of 148 deaths in modern nomadic hunter-gatherers found that 55 per cent were caused by violence between individuals. Two-thirds were due to interfamily disputes, accidents, in-group executions (usually of an aspiring tyrant or violent individual), and sexual jealousy.
42 We should take evidence from more recent hunter-gatherers with a dose of scepticism, but in this case it is limited to nomadic groups who have lifestyles and food-gathering strategies similar to those of our Palaeolithic ancestors. It is also simply logical that violence in the Palaeolithic would be similarly personal, given the lack of wealth to fight over. Crimes of passion will be as old as human emotions; war, however, is a modern phenomenon. At this point a sceptic might still argue that, while we can cooperate, our true violent, disorderly tendencies emerge during a time of scarcity and crisis. Disasters reveal our true nature.
Palaeolithic foragers may overturn Hobbes’s view of human nature in general, but what about during a collapse?
THE MYTH OF MASS PANIC Scholars of modern disasters refer to the idea of ‘mass panic’ as a myth.
Groups panicking and devolving into a directionless rabble is ubiquitous in Hollywood films and the warnings of politicians but is rarely spotted among actual crises. Instead, people rapidly self-organize to provide medical care, support, and essential services.43 Fifty years of sociological, psychological, and documentary evidence has converged on this simple yet profound finding. It has been reported in study after study, including earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorist attacks such as 9/11, and the mass bombings of cities.44 The world crumbles away, often revealing the best in us – our cooperative, civil side.45 People not only tend to respond quickly, creating alternative arrangements for services that may have been disrupted, but they also tend to remember these moments of disruption with fondness. They describe a peak experience where the fabric of reality split open and revealed not chaos, but the possibility of a more intimate and meaningful community.
Rebecca Solnit explores this beautifully in A Paradise Built in Hell, showing that, whether it be 9/11 or the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, people usually respond with empathy, generosity, and resourcefulness.46 It makes sense when we think of this from an evolutionary perspective.
The winning strategy to surviving in the Palaeolithic was to use our mobility, extreme sociality, and broad connections to our advantage during calamity. If there was extreme weather in one area, rather than panic, you could migrate to a set of friends or relatives elsewhere as a social safety net.
We still see this among the nomadic Ju/’hoansi of South Africa today.
They maintain long-distance gift-giving and sharing relationships (Hxaro exchange partnerships) up to 200 kilometres away as a kind of insurance policy. When disaster strikes, they can rely on these distant friends for shelter, food, and companionship. Many other egalitarian foragers have similar arrangements. This is logical: individuals who could rely on their social networks during disaster were more likely to survive and pass on their genes (as were their friends whom they would have supported as well).
That same evolutionary logic also applies to groups. If a Palaeolithic group of hunter-gatherers were hit by a drought, a storm, or a volcanic eruption, then responding with panic would have only made things worse.
Groups who reacted with disorder would have been less capable of an effective emergency response, such as sharing food and migrating to friends, while those who worked together would have survived and passed their genes and culture on.
The prevalence of cultures of hospitality towards guests may even be a relic of this ancient approach to handling disasters. The Greeks and Romans had the idea of hospitium, the divine duty of the host to help, entertain, and even give gifts to guests. Hospitium was underpinned by cautionary tales of the god Zeus disguising himself as a beggar to punish those who abused their guests and reward the hospitable hosts. The Norse too had an emphasis on guest rites with similar stories of Odin dressing as a traveller to test different households; the Indian Upanishads advise Atithi Devo Bhava: the guest is akin to god. Being kind to visitors and strangers in need is perhaps the lingering memory of how we helped each other through the ice age.
Fluid civilizations may have even been partly driven by this friendly solution to managing disasters. Treating guests with great kindness would have encouraged mobility and sharing, especially when faced with disasters. That, of course, wouldn’t have happened if mass panic had been our automatic response.
It would be strange if people’s response to historical collapse was contrary to both modern behaviour and evolutionary logic. Rather, historians see the same displays of communal resilience and solidarity throughout cases of societal collapse from antiquity to the modern world.47 Collapse is not a matter of reverting to instinctual violence and civil disorder. Whether it be the sack of Rome, or famine in Egypt, or Covid-19, the response of most people is not mass hysteria, selfish struggle, or pervasive conflict. It is instead often fairly egalitarian altruism. EGALITARIAN ORIGINS For the vast majority of human history there were no chiefs, commanders, or aristocrats. There were none of the usual signs of disparities in power, whether that be unequally sized dwellings or an individual or group buried with especially extravagant goods. These indicators didn’t unambiguously appear until around 11,000 years ago, once we exited the ice age. Our Palaeolithic ancestors were egalitarian.
Part of this was simply due to the environment they lived in. In a world of volatile weather and scarce resources, being constantly on the move was a necessity. That mobility also meant that few resources could be carried around or hoarded. This prevented the build-up of economic inequality.
Human numbers were also incredibly low and widely dispersed. By the Late Palaeolithic, the combined populations of Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia totalled roughly half a million people. That’s about the population of a small city such as Bristol in the UK or Atlanta in the US. It would have been easy to escape anyone who tried to dominate a group.
Yet this egalitarianism was not a passive condition but an active choice. Modern egalitarian foragers have an array of customs and traditions to strictly enforce sharing. The Ju/’hoansi swap arrows before a hunt and it is the original owner of the arrow – not the hunter who fires it – who allocates the meat from a kill. Thus no single hunter is ever able to amass a resource surplus over the rest of the group. Such food sharing is common across egalitarian foragers where any refusal to share food or resources is met with opprobrium (there is evidence of meat sharing from Palaeolithic carcasses too).48 This makes good evolutionary sense: no individual could rely on being the most successful hunter or gatherer every day. Sharing was both an insurance mechanism and a bonding method. That love of sharing is deeply ingrained in us. For most of us, the best activities are ones that are shared, whether food, jokes, beds, or lives.49 Sharing also meant sharing political power. Democracy comes from the Greek words demos (‘people’) and kratos (‘power’).
Democracy is people power: how equally shared is the ability to govern and make decisions. It is a spectrum of (more or less) equal and inclusive political practices. Any endeavours that require collective decision-making can be democratic, whether it be workplaces, families, or organizations. Across the board, hunter-gatherers tended to be deliberative and inclusive, often more so than even modern democracies.50 In many modern forager communities, decisions are made either by individuals or by consensus. Many foragers, from the Huron peoples of North America to foragers in central, southern and eastern Africa, regularly practise small-scale consensus deliberations.
There are no permanent chiefs or commanders. When leaders do appear – individuals who are more outspoken, persuasive, or respected and heeded by the community – they are shackled by expectations.
They are expected to be modest, generous, and egalitarian, and are kept politically toothless. The anthropologist Robert H. Lowie in his studies of numerous hunter-gatherer groups across the Americas, such as the Ojibwa, the Dakota, and the Nambikuára, found that chiefs had no power to impose decisions on others. They were more like unpaid facilitators. Again, while we can’t easily extrapolate from present hunter-gatherers to ancient ones, the evidence suggests that a similar model was followed in the Palaeolithic. We have no signs of enduring inequality or hierarchy, and modern nomadic-egalitarian groups who have the lifestyles closest to our deep past are especially democratic. Today, we often make the mistake of thinking that democracy is a Western invention and simply a form of representative government using elected officials. This is just one recent, elitist model of democracy. It can first be seen in the parliaments of bishops, warrior aristocrats, and the rich organized by Alfonso IX in León, Spain, around 1188 CE to achieve support for increased taxes. Britain later adopted a similar parliamentary system, which it exported throughout the world during colonization.
Democracy goes far deeper than this. It can be direct democracy, like an assembly of citizens collectively deciding on whether to go to war or what to build. We see signs of these in ancient Africa, China, and Mesopotamia.
It can be sortition, where citizens are randomly selected to represent their peers. Ancient Athenian democracy (from about 508 until 322 BCE) was a combination of both assemblies of free men and magistrates selected randomly by lottery. The democracy of hunter-gatherers, with major decisions decided on by a group of equals, is even more intensely democratic than the Greek version, which was restricted to free adult men.
All evidence suggests that political power was widely shared in the Palaeolithic and group decisions were made democratically. Democracy is humanity’s default political system.51 When we think of this in terms of power, each form (political, economic, violent, and information) was evenly distributed. Perhaps a particularly skilled shaman or warrior may have temporarily gained an advantage over a group, but we have no signs that this ever resulted in a lasting hierarchy. We had a division of labour but this never resulted in a large, lasting division of power. There is also a compelling evolutionary reason behind our democratic-egalitarian origins. One written in blood.52 KILLING IN THE NAME OF EQUALITY Those who didn’t share, or tried to bully others, were met with harsh sanctions. These ‘counter-dominance’ strategies were originally documented by the anthropologist Christopher Boehm, for a wide variety of foragers. Such strategies to keep would-be dominators in check included teasing, gossiping, shaming, ridicule, and even expulsion from the group.
The most severe cases could result in death. Among the modern Ju/’hoansi there was a skilled hunter named /Twa who was causing problems. He was impulsive and brutal, having killed three others. The Ju/’hoansi took matters into their own hands: ‘All the men fired at him with poisoned arrows’ until, one informant recalled, ‘he looked like a porcupine’. Then, after he was dead, all the men and women stabbed him with spears. It was a symbolic way to share responsibility for his death. /Twa’s attempt to dominate his peers cost him his life. The fate of /Twa might explain the few skeletons marked by lethal violence in the Palaeolithic.
This violent edge to egalitarianism began around 2 million years ago.
Anatomical changes in our shoulder joint around this time allowed for accurate throwing, whether that be of rocks or spears. (Other primates can, of course, throw objects, but humans can do so with transformative power and precision.) These physical changes had momentous political implications. Projectiles levelled the playing field, allowing for a single individual or small coalition to easily defeat an aspiring alpha male (as David did Goliath). Even the largest, most imposing fighter could easily be killed by a spear or poison arrow during an ambush or while they slept. Around the same time, there occurred a significant growth in brain size, with Homo erectus toting a cranium with twice the capacity of a chimp. This growing brain seems to have evolved largely for navigating more complex social environments, helping our ancestors to build coalitions against any single individual who wanted to dominate.
Together, these were the evolutionary cornerstones of counter-dominance. They led to the ‘first great levelling in human history’.53 Violence was also accompanied by more gentle pressures for cooperation. Evolution selected for communities that could parent collectively. Early humans faced a dilemma. Walking upright on two legs required narrower hips, which was unfortunately a poor match for bigbrained babies. Those who had children at a younger age were more likely to survive (as were their offspring). Unlike most mammals, our young are helpless for their first few years of life. Individuals who could rely on help from a community were more likely to have children who survived and thrived (and to return the favour to those who helped them). Children require constant care and attention, and, if the culture is to grow and evolve, education. A group relying on a single male hunter to provide this would quickly fall behind a more dynamic one where the youngsters are receiving better attention, and lessons from the best hunters, fishers, cooks, and storytellers.54 Our bodies reflect this egalitarian past. Ape groups where one alpha male dominates, such as gorillas, tend to have much larger males with bigger canine teeth. That is because the most physically dominant male could defend a harem and pass on his genes. We don’t see that in humans. We have comparatively small canine teeth and the difference in stature between men and women is a mere 15 per cent. As history played out, sharp teeth and brawny physiques were of little use against multiple opponents hurling spears and firing poison arrows.
Our eyes also betray our more equal past. Unlike gorillas or chimps, we have ‘cooperative eyes’: you can see the whites of our eyes (the sclera), which gives away what we are looking at. That’s useful for cooperation but isn’t ideal for dominating others. It’s difficult to launch a surprise attack if your intentions are given away by your eyes. Similarly, lying, deceiving, and manipulating others is harder to do with legible eyes.
Hence why great apes have round dark eyes, and why dictators, mafia dons, and poker players prefer sunglasses. One study drawing on fifty-five primatologists found that apes who were more tolerant of a direct gaze were more egalitarian. Primates with dominance hierarchies showed little tolerance for direct eye contact, which is associated with social status and imminent aggression. By contrast, our high tolerance for it suggests that we evolved in egalitarian social settings.55 This egalitarianism extended into a balance between the sexes. The fact that hunter-gatherers usually settle in groups that are not based on kin might seem strange from an evolutionary perspective. Surely you would want to help and protect those who are more closely related to you and ensure your genes get passed on? The fact that bands are so mixed and diverse can be explained by men and women having equal choice in where to move to.
Modelling by anthropologists suggests that if men and women have the same decision-making power and both want to live closer to their wider family then it results in more mixed bands. Sometimes the men get their way, sometimes the women do. The outcome is diverse, fluid groups, rather than the men or women sticking rigidly to their families over generations.
Gender egalitarianism helped create our more mobile, diverse social structure.56 Our ancestors did (as far as we can tell) have a rough division of labour with men hunting and women gathering (although women occasionally hunted too). However, a division of labour is not a division of power. Our Palaeolithic ancestors probably had relative equality of the sexes, especially when compared to the agricultural kingdoms that would come later.
57 STATUS COMPETITION This is no utopian vision of humanity. There would be no need for counterdominance strategies if at least some of us did not harbour a desire to rule.
That desire to rule stems from status competition. All of us crave status to some degree: to be respected, admired, valued, and deferred to by others.
It’s clearly visible throughout history. Emperors and kings regularly kept harems of hundreds or thousands of wives and concubines. King Tamba of Banaras in the sixth century BCE reportedly had a harem of 16,000 (probably an exaggeration). The conqueror Chinggis (often called Genghis) Khan sired so many children across the lands he conquered that around 0.5 per cent of men today are directly related to him.58 Higher status through conquest meant more children and a bigger genetic legacy. We see it repeatedly throughout history, including with the Vikings invading eastern England, Ireland, and Iceland, as well as the patriarchal, nomadic Yamnaya of the Steppe sweeping through Europe.59 Similarly, genetic evidence suggests that there was a collapse in male genetic diversity 8,000–4,000 years ago, coinciding with the intensification of agriculture and adoption of more top-down social structures.60 The leading hypothesis is that the new oligarchs, generals, and kings simply started to monopolize reproduction. A few high-status individuals disproportionately passed on their genes by having more children (and more who survived) than those of lower status.61 This deeply ingrained desire for status is still central to the human experience. Losing status or being humiliated is one of the worst things that can happen to us. A dominant ethnic group losing status within a country is the single best predictor of civil war today.
62 The greatest shared common characteristic across mass shooters is not mental illness but rather a sense of frustrated status and a history of being socially humiliated. Because of that, many warn against reporting about the individual killers to avoid giving them the infamy – that is, the status – they crave.63 Falling down the status ladder is also one of the key contributors to people taking their own lives.64 People are willing to kill for status, whether that be others or themselves.
Today, seeking to become a CEO, celebrity, billionaire, or world leader is still often a pursuit of status. The Texas oil tycoon Haroldson L. Hunt, one of the richest men in the world during the early twentieth century with an estimated fortune of up to $700 million, once reflected that ‘for practical purposes, someone who has $200,000 a year is just as well off as I am.
Money’s just a way of keeping score.’ Getting a higher ‘score’ is a quest to win the status game (Hunt had fifteen children from three wives).65 The great longing for legacy that many of us feel, to be remembered after our death (or the more modern desire to cheat death), is largely just a continued quest for status beyond the grave. Status competition is hardwired into us. Status comes in two flavours: prestige and domination. Prestige and dominance have distinct behaviours and neurochemistry, and were selected for by different evolutionary pressures.66 Prestige is when others want you to lead based on the skills you can offer or your wisdom. We naturally perceive the difference, with children as young as two readily distinguishing between bullies and leaders.67 It’s common in huntergatherers that an outstanding hunter has a greater say during a hunt. They may even be admired. Yet if the gifted hunter tries to aggrandize themselves or order others around outside of a hunt, they will face a backlash. Prestige existed, but it was limited and couldn’t be passed down through generations. Hence anthropologists speak of our ingrained appreciation of ‘task-based leadership’.68 It’s something that continues today: we admire and often try to emulate great athletes, writers, and orators.
Domination is a different, darker strategy for achieving status. It is the ability to gain status through violence, intimidation, or control of resources.
Dictators throughout the ages have built a towering social standing because they could threaten to murder or starve much of the populace.
We remember Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, and Alexander the Great because of the great brutality they could and did wield over others. That was an enormous change from our ancestral hyper-egalitarian foragers, who could gift prestige and tolerate task-based leadership but were willing to kill to avoid domination. Because of that, for most of human history, an attempt to dominate others was more likely to get you an early burial than a place in the history books.69 Nonetheless, a small fraction of our population persisted in their attempt to dominate. While the desire for status is universal,70 it is not evenly distributed. The need to compete for status varies across individuals; men are more likely to be status-hungry. Men are also more likely to pursue status through dominating others. In Boehm’s work almost every upstart trying to dominate the forager group was a man.71 Seeking status by dominating others isn’t just more common among men.
It’s also more common among certain types of people. That is, those who rank high in what psychologists call the ‘dark triad’: psychopathy (callousness, and a lack of empathy and remorse), narcissism (an inflated sense of entitlement and self-importance), and Machiavellianism (manipulating others for personal gain).72 It is unsurprising that the dark triad leads to a greater tendency to try to dominate others. Psychopathy and Machiavellianism are characterized by a disregard for others, while narcissism is a desperation to have others recognize an overvalued ego.
The desire for dominance is not just a darker path, but also an older one.
It is one that we inherited from our primate ancestors. While higher status does lead to greater reproductive success in humans, the effect is four-fold higher among primates. Achieving status through dominance is also stronger among primates. Chimps build intimidating coalitions to become alpha males, while among gorillas a single male silverback monopolizes a harem with size and strength.73 There is a clear evolutionary picture here: status competition (especially through dominance) was more intense in our hominid ancestors before Homo sapiens and then counter-dominance strategies over the last 2 million years selected against would-be tyrants and overly eager status seekers. Status competition – especially through domination – is lower in modern humans but was never eliminated.74 We are stuck in this eternal bind between two evolved traits: a desire for status and an aversion to dominance. Counter-dominance strategies and more leadership based on prestige were reasonable outcomes, since only a small proportion of us seek status through domination, while no one likes being dominated. Some of us seek to rule, but if we can’t then we prefer to be equal. For 300,000 years the balance was maintained against dominance.
Not because we are innately good in our hearts, but rather because egalitarianism was a winning strategy in the challenging conditions of the Palaeolithic.
We can be sure that this view of our deep past is accurate because it is supported by multiple lines of evidence, including archaeological finds, studies in evolutionary biology, and observations of modern egalitarian foragers. These groups include the Hadza of East Africa, the foragers of central Africa (such as the Aka, Efe, and Mbuti), and the Khoisan of the Kalahari Desert (especially the well-studied Ju/’hoansi of southern Africa).
These foragers are not relics from the Palaeolithic, but they are the closest analogues of our Palaeolithic ancestors. Most live in Africa, the cradle of humanity, and practise similar kinds of hunting and gathering to those of our ice-age ancestors. All the archaeological sites we have from the Palaeolithic left the footprint of egalitarian foragers with residential base camps, hunting stands, lithic quarries, and evidence of food sharing.
Modern egalitarian foragers and ancient ice-age hunter-gatherers also appear to have travelled and traded over similar distances.
Importantly, many of these groups appear to have had a continuous cultural and genetic presence in their regions for over 100,000 years.
Genetic evidence for the Khoisan suggests that they diverged from other groups around 300,000–200,000 years ago, and now represent the most genetically diverse and divergent lineage of all living peoples in the world.
Similarly, foragers of central Africa have distinct lineages that are hundreds of thousands of years old, and the Hadza diverged at least tens of thousands of years ago. That is not to say that their culture has remained unchanged, but we have no evidence that there have been large changes to their basic egalitarian, democratic way of life.75 Indeed, remarkably they all seem to share several characteristics; including a polyphonic song style, use of body paint, similar creation myths and cosmologies, and an egalitarian way of organizing.76 That is more likely to result from a shared origin, rather than a mere coincidence. We’ll never have a completely clear window into the life of our ancestors in the Palaeolithic, but we have more than enough evidence to be confident in this account of our egalitarian origins.
This account of our species is radically different from what Hobbes envisaged and is one that has momentous implications. Doomsday preppers today (and most post-apocalyptic fiction) imagine the survivors of a collapse as being self-reliant individuals ready to deal death to stay alive.
It’s a strategy that might work well in a Hobbesian fiction but bears little resemblance to our shared history. For most of history people coped with disasters and catastrophes by moving, giving and receiving aid, and cooperating as equals.
We are a species that survived the ice age by being intensely social, cooperative across groups, and equal, even during times of need and danger.
There appears to have been peace across groups, but individuals were willing to kill, especially to avoid oppression. Those aggressively seeking status or wanting to dominate others were both figuratively and literally cut down. That egalitarianism is what made us human. Yet, deep down, our primal heritage still hungers for status. Some of us are willing to lie, cheat, threaten, and even murder for it. These traits – mobility, collaboration (especially through reciprocity), status competition, the dark triad, and an aversion to dominance – have shaped the course of collapse and history.
2 Collapse for 99 per cent of Human History Homo solus – The History of Human Extinction – Collapse During the Palaeolithic – Coming Together and Breaking Apart – Seasonal Cycles HOMO SOLUS Recorded human history is less than the tip of an iceberg. Just 10 per cent of an iceberg is visible, while the remaining 90 per cent of its mass is hidden beneath the surface of the water. Just the most recent ~1 per cent of human history is visible through the lens of written records.
Ninety-nine per cent of human history occurred before the first symbols were stamped onto clay; before states and Goliaths – hierarchies in which some individuals dominate others to control energy and labour – emerged.
The first states arose approximately 5,100 years ago, with the First Dynasty of Egypt. This represents around 1.7 per cent of the roughly 300,000 years that anatomically modern humans have wandered the earth.
The rise of agriculture and states across the world was unsteady and uneven. We don’t know when exactly empires and states came to capture most of the human population. It was still an arduous process, and many areas, such as North America, were free from permanent states until around the eighteenth century. At best, states dominate less than 0.5 per cent of the human timeline. What did collapse look like for non-state peoples, that is for over 99 per cent of human history?1 For most of this time we weren’t the only humans wandering the planet.
We once shared the earth with at least eight other human species including Homo neanderthalensis (the Neanderthals). We shared territories with them, bred with them, and likely even played and travelled with them. Our deceased hominin ancestors left a lingering mark on most of us, with modern non-African humans having inherited 1–3 per cent of their genome from Neanderthals (since it was only the groups that emigrated to Europe and Asia that met and interbred with the Neanderthals).2 It was a perilous existence for our ancestors. All our hominin cousins died out by 40,000–30,000 years ago. Human extinction has happened before numerous times, just not to us. We, the survivors, are Homo sapiens: sapiens means ‘one who knows’ in Latin, and Homo sapiens means ‘wise man’. Perhaps we would better be known as Homo solus: the solo human, or human alone.
THE HISTORY OF HUMAN EXTINCTION Why did we end up alone? Extinction is the most extreme form of collapse: energy capture, population, and hierarchy permanently reach zero.3 Such complete ends to a social order and its people have very rarely happened throughout history. Yet, understanding why our hominin relatives died out can help us understand why we persisted, and what pressures ancient sapiens would have faced. Unfortunately, apart from our genes, most of our hominin cousins have left scant archaeological remains. This gives us few clues as to why they perished. One exception is the Neanderthals. They left enough evidence to permit some informed speculation about their extinction.
It is easy to imagine that we outlasted the Neanderthals and came to dominate the world owing to our intellectual superiority. That’s part of the story; we are remarkably intelligent but we often overestimate our uniqueness and intelligence. For instance, chimpanzees have a better shortterm working memory than us. What is more important than our individual intelligence is our ability to cooperate with one another.
We can cooperate flexibly and in large numbers partly because we can share ideas to create imagined communities. It’s a fundamental insight, one that dates back at least as far as the sociologist Émile Durkheim in the nineteenth century, before being summarized by the historian Benedict Anderson, and later eloquently popularized by Yuval Noah Harari. A monkey cannot identify itself as part of a mythical construct like a nation or a company, but we humans can. Storytelling is key to our existence. Among modern hunter-gatherers such as the Agta, storytelling is still the most desired skill, and the best storytellers have the most children. Stories that encourage cooperation and a shared identity also create stronger groups that are more likely to survive. Good storytelling is evolutionarily advantageous for the storytellers and their group.4 Stories are important not only because they create imaginary communities but also because they can communicate ideas. Our great superpower is ‘social learning’: our capacity to imitate and learn from each other. Chimpanzees and other primates can create and use tools, such as sticks for digging out termites, and they imitate each other. Of course, we excel at this and can pass our ideas along to each other and down through the generations. Tests between chimpanzees and toddlers show that, while the chimps are comparable (and sometimes superior) in cognitive abilities, toddlers completely outpace them when it comes to imitation and social learning. If you and a chimpanzee were placed in a random patch of wilderness with just your wits to survive, the chimp would outlast you. If you had a few forager mentors who had generations of accumulated knowledge of how to survive in that environment, you would beat the chimp. This accumulation of selected knowledge is known as ‘cumulative cultural evolution’ (for ease, I’ll be calling it ‘cultural evolution’). Culture can evolve far more quickly than our bodies, which is what allows us to adapt to a wide variety of environments, from the deserts of the Sahara to the tundra of the Arctic. Cultural evolution, whether it be in language, tools, technology, or traditions, is a human superpower.
5 Cultural evolution is made possible by our egalitarianism and our wide social networks. Chimpanzees lower in the pecking order are less likely to be copied or show behaviours they learned from others if they are in the vicinity of a dominant figure. The world is siloed in these hierarchies, and, with fewer close interactions, juvenile chimpanzees have fewer opportunities to master new tools and technologies. In contrast, in egalitarian hunter-gatherers, children regularly observe and learn from scores of individuals – individuals who walk hundreds of kilometres to reach new groups, where they in turn share and learn. The breakdown of social hierarchies enabled our superpower of cultural evolution.6 It was once believed that many of these traits were unique to us. The old hypothesis was that we had a rapid ‘cognitive revolution’ 70,000 years ago and acquired the magical gifts of language, imagination, and cultural learning. The modern human brain was born. That idea is no longer tenable.
We now know that 600,000 years ago there was a radical increase in the complexity of stone tools. In other words, hominids before us could already learn from each other. Our ancestors were using the red pigment ochre 500,000 years ago. Ochre is commonly used for decoration during rituals.
There is evidence of abstract artwork on rocks dating from up to 158,000 years ago. These are signs that hominids already had imagination, as well as shared ideas and rituals that were passed down across generations, well before the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’.7 We also overestimate how unique our brains are. Many of our hominid cousins, especially the Neanderthals, were remarkably similar to us.
Neanderthals had brains that were larger than ours in size (cranial capacity).
They also had complex burial practices with their graves containing tools, weapons, flowers, and sacrificed animals; they nursed their ill and injured; they even appear to have adorned themselves with jewellery and feathered decorations. All this suggests some capacity for imaginative thought, perhaps even a belief in the afterlife, and an ability to share those ideas.8 Neanderthals even beat us to painting cave art. In three caves across Spain are the earliest examples of cave art, which date back 64,000 years.
That is 20,000 years before we arrived in Europe. These collections of sketched animals, handprints, and geometric shapes were created by Neanderthal artists. The earliest cave art from modern humans – a depiction of a human-like figure and a pig in Indonesia – is 51,200 years old.9 Neanderthals were not just similar to us mentally, but also physically. If you walked past a Neanderthal in the street dressed in modern garb you might not look twice (see Figure 4).10 Overall, it appears that the cognitive differences between modern humans and Neanderthals are minor. This is a radical change from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Neanderthals were regularly depicted as club-toting brutes, to the extent that the German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel suggested renaming them Homo stupidus. Turns out they’re just about as smart (or stupid) as we are, and there is much to learn from their extinction.
Figure 4: ‘The Neanderthal Businessman’ A model of a Neanderthal dressed as a modern businessman, contemplating what a freeze in the mammoth market might mean for his investment portfolio.
Three possible explanations are usually offered for Neanderthal extinction: competition, environmental change, or population vulnerability (small, disconnected populations that could easily collapse). The competition hypothesis posits that Neanderthals were either killed off by us, or we were simply better hunters than they were, leaving them to starve.
Environmental factors include a cold snap that pushed Europe into subarctic conditions 40,000 years ago. The demographic argument is that Neanderthals were doomed in the long run owing to poorly connected, small population numbers. This could have led to widespread problems with fertility and inbreeding.11 One recent survey of 216 palaeoanthropologists who’ve published on Neanderthal extinction shows a surprising consensus emerging: demography was the principal cause.12 Neanderthals lived in small, fragmented communities, making them less genetically diverse, more prone to inbreeding, and vulnerable to population collapse owing to a small increase in deaths (or decrease in births). An analysis of thirteen Neanderthal remains in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia found that six of the members were relatives and all showed low levels of genetic diversity. These levels are as low as those found in endangered mountain gorillas, which live in tiny groups of four to twenty individuals.13 In contrast, Palaeolithic humans are notable for having far higher levels of genetic diversity and for usually being buried with distant strangers and non-kin.
The Neanderthals’ comparative lack of diversity and connection, as well as high mortality rates, meant that all it might have taken was a few bad winters, or an encounter with a new disease, to cause entire groups to fall apart. With so few members, recovering without inbreeding and genetic issues would have been difficult. Indeed, one calculation suggests that just a 1.5 per cent drop in how many Neanderthal children made it to adulthood could have resulted in their extinction in just 2,000 years.14 These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Climate change, new diseases, and competition with Homo sapiens could have all interacted and led to population loss. The population vulnerability of Neanderthals made these cuts in their numbers deeper and recovery less likely. The exact contribution of demography, environment, and competition with humans would have varied across time and place.
Modelling by anthropologists and physicists supports this idea that Neanderthals went extinct owing to diverse, local causes rather than one single factor. Over centuries their communities fragmented and diminished until the last breath of the last Neanderthal was drawn in the cold.15 In the field of disaster risk, we refer to four determinants: threat, vulnerability, exposure, and response (Figure 5).16 Take the case of a tsunami. The tsunami (threat) is only dangerous if you lie in its way (exposure), and you lack robust shelter that could withstand the wave (vulnerability) or the ability to escape (response). For Neanderthals, climate change and competition with us were hazards, while small, isolated populations were their underlying vulnerability. We have little idea about how they responded. We should think of the overall risk and how each of these determinants contributed to the extinction of our Neanderthal cousins, rather than bickering about whether it was just one factor.
Figure 5: The determinants of risk Just as there was no single cause behind the extinction of the Neanderthals, there was also no single extinction event. There were instead a series of population collapses that eventually, cut by cut, drained the species out of existence. Each of these local disasters would have had a slightly different cause; one may have been triggered by disease and another by a particularly bitter winter.
Competition with us may have been part of it, but there are no signs of massacres or conflict. The strongest signs of violence we have are two Neanderthal skeletons – one with a stabbed (and healed) rib and the other with a fractured skull – but we have no idea whether these injuries were accidental, intentional, or even caused by humans.17 No matter the threat, the underlying vulnerability was the same: the disconnected nature of Neanderthal communities.
The vulnerability for the Neanderthals was not their wits. Neanderthals, too, were intelligent, and capable of making and sharing ideas and stories.
Their weakness was their fragmented, isolated groupings. In contrast, humans had sprawling networks that formed a constant cultural and genetic melting pot. Our fluid civilizations provided us with a safety net during lean times, which Neanderthals lacked. We survived and became Homo solus not (just) because of our intelligence but because of our interconnectedness.
Yet, like the Neanderthals, when those linkages were broken, calamity wasn’t far away.
COLLAPSE DURING THE PALAEOLITHIC It was long believed that humans first left Africa in a ‘Great Exit’ 70,000– 55,000 years ago. The Apidima Cave in southern Greece tells a different story. Archaeologists there uncovered a skull dating to 210,000 years ago.
That skull was of an anatomically modern human. In the same cave they found a skull of a 170,000-year-old Neanderthal.18 Humans left Africa far earlier than the Great Exit, spreading out to the Mediterranean and the Levant. (However, it is likely that all non-Africans today are descended just from that one Great Exit.) Something clearly happened to these earlier scouting parties that departed Africa. What fate befell them is unclear. Some may have gone extinct. Cut off from the wider fluid civilization of humanity, they may have lacked the genetic diversity and cultural know-how to survive in a new, alien world. As the Neanderthals had learned, a small, isolated population is a vulnerable one. Perhaps they fell apart in the face of ash and cold from one of the volcanic eruptions that characterized the ice age. Maybe they were outcompeted by their Neanderthal cousins. We like to think of ourselves as the more successful human variant that always won out, yet there may have been countless times when we were the losers.19 Perhaps some Homo sapiens did persist as small enclaves outside Africa but left little to no archaeological footprint. They may have then been subsumed by the larger wave of migrants out of the African continent during the Great Exit. After tens of thousands of years of isolation, it must have been quite the reunion.
Climatic swings, particularly those caused by volcanoes, can be blamed for many of the failed migrations and losses of regional populations.
Variations in climate and hunter-gatherer populations were closely entwined. Studies suggest that for Britain and Ireland during the Last Glacial Maximum (27,000–19,000 years ago) climate was one of the key drivers of population change. These changes could be dramatic.20 One event 73,000 years ago could have brought humanity close to extinction: the massive volcanic eruption of Mount Toba, in what is now Indonesia.
This would have been the largest eruption in the past 2 million years. It created a volcanic winter, dropping temperatures sharply in many areas across the world and blanketing India with two and a half metres of ash.21 The eruption seems to have created a genetic bottleneck across Homo sapiens – a significant reduction in genetic diversity, suggesting a large loss in population numbers. However, genetic bottlenecks don’t always mean large losses in people and many human settlements in northern India and southern Africa continued relatively unfazed.22 North America, Europe, and central Asia suffered far more severely than the southern hemisphere.23 The global climate was disrupted, but regional shelters persisted. We got lucky. It seems likely that Toba led to the die-off of more isolated groups, such as those in the Levant, while many others in India and elsewhere escaped relatively unscathed.
Dips in numbers, dispersal, and changes in culture were also found by archaeologists across three large volcanic events in the northern hemisphere: the Aniakchak eruption (~1645 BCE) in Alaska, the Mazama eruption (~5630 BCE) in western North America, and the Laacher See eruption (See is German for ‘lake’, and the explosion left a two-kilometrelong lake in central Germany) (~11,000 BCE). The Aniakchak eruption separated the Aleut and Inuit peoples in the Alaskan Peninsula, and may have caused an ethnic and language divide between them that persists to this day.
24 Throughout the Palaeolithic the closest we have to a societal collapse is the extinction of communities, largely due to environmental shocks, especially volcanic eruptions. There were no Goliath structures like empires to collapse. Ice-age foragers captured very little energy beyond what was necessary for subsistence: the basic food, shelter, clothing, and technology needed to survive and reproduce. Any large drops in energy capture meant starvation and death. Reductions in the density of communities was one of the few things that could happen. And it seemed to occur with surprising frequency.
COMING TOGETHER AND BREAKING APART Our ancestors led lives of constant flux and movement. They would break apart during the day to hunt and gather before coming together in the evening to share food, stories, and beds. In modern hunter-gatherers we see groups can break off to join others, or even form their own enclave, for a range of reasons from bickering to falling in and out of love. Sometimes they rejoin the original community and sometimes they remain estranged.
(This could even have been a counter-dominance strategy to flee from a megalomaniac.) These fission-fusion movements involve several smaller groups briefly fusing together into a larger community, before dissolving again. These patterns are common across cognitively advanced species such as dolphins and elephants, but especially humans.25 While abandoning a city or town is a recurring feature of collapse, such reductions in the concentration of communities were common and advantageous for our ancestors. Moving, travelling, coming together, and then breaking away have always been part of our human heritage.
These things helped make us human.
Constant movement across vast networks, and fission-fusion cycles, were central to our Palaeolithic past.26 This was probably done to exchange tools, gifts and knowledge, to build new relationships and search for seasonal resources, and to use rituals to reaffirm the bonds that held together scattered communities. It also helped create the social safety nets and fluid civilizations that allowed us to survive the ice age. There would have been the constant churn of individuals, couples, and groups leaving one location to join friends and relatives elsewhere.
There may have been regular ceremonies throughout a year (or special events such as marriages and funerals), which brought groups together as we see in foragers today. For instance, the longest trips taken by the Mbendjele Bayaka of central Africa are for Eboka ceremonies, in which they sing together and conduct rituals to connect with forest spirits.
Other times, groups fleeing a catastrophe such as a drought would have joined far-flung neighbours for safety. Our mobility and willingness to regularly change groups may have even given us the unique human ability to gossip – to talk about others who aren’t currently present.
Gossip was partly developed as one way to keep a mental grasp on people who had temporarily left. It now makes up around two-thirds of human conversation.27 Our genetics, as well as archaeological finds, suggest we lived through cycles of isolation and connectivity. The failed early migrations out of Africa are one example, but there are others.
Researchers have found fossils in the Democratic Republic of Congo that resemble 300,000-year-old hominids but are only 22,000 years old.28 This seems to have been a group that became cut-off from the broader fluid civilization of humanity. Then, with the change of climate, they may have died off or rejoined the wider web of people. They are just one indication of groups that became environmentally dislocated yet persisted and developed their own unique culture.
When these wayward communities rejoined the great human highway of shared culture and genes, it could cause a renaissance. What have typically been mistaken as ‘cognitive revolutions’ in tools and thinking are more likely to have been the merging of previously separated groups, unions that spark vast changes, much as the combining of cultures or technologies does today.
29 Such changes were not, of course, collapses. Yet they do show that humans have always been mobile and prone to leaving arrangements that were dangerous or no longer desirable. Leaving a city that is becoming poorer with every passing year or departing an empire that is deteriorating is not necessarily a bad thing. It is, in many ways, an entirely normal and sensible adaptation. This was a precursor to collapse: a deeply encoded survival strategy that can help us make sense of later collapse events. There is another such precursor: our ability rapidly to build and dismantle entire social structures.
SEASONAL CYCLES Some modern hunter-gatherers don’t just change the size of their communities. At times they also shift their social structures.
We see this in the accounts of anthropologists over the past centuries from North America to Australia. In the Great Plains, an expanse of flatlands across the central United States and western Canada, the Lakota and Cheyenne would change their societies with the rhythm of the seasons.
Typically, they existed in small groups reminiscent of the nomadicegalitarian model. That changed during the large bison hunts and ‘sun dance’ rituals of the summer, when they congregated and organized into a far more authoritarian society. A quasi-police force would form based on clan affiliation, membership in a military club, or ad hoc appointment.
These soldiers could confiscate game, whip offenders, destroy their property, and even kill those who disobeyed orders.30 This is not an isolated example. The Shoshone of the Great Plains of the US lived most of the year in egalitarian, unranked families. Periodically some would adopt ‘rabbit bosses’ and ‘antelope shamans’ to lead and coordinate rabbit drives. In Australia, far north on the Cape York Peninsula, the Wik-Mungkan lived nomadically during the dry season before settling down into villages during the wet season when the plains were flooded.31 Far further north, the Inuit would hunt as small family groups under a patriarchal figure in the summer, and then in the winter come together in more communal, egalitarian settings where partner sharing was practised.32 Across the world, people came together and broke apart, fusing and splitting, changing their customs, politics, and even sexual norms in the process.
These seasonal gatherings also disproportionately resulted in the building of impressive new ritual sites and temples. Stonehenge in the UK was built between 3000 and 2600 BCE, probably by herders practising seasonal ceremonies. For migrating pastoralists, such gatherings around great monuments could have provided a time to cross-breed animals (to ensure better genetic diversity and health), find partners, and host great feasts and alliance-building marriages. Similarly, Göbleki Tepe in eastern Turkey was seemingly built by foragers 9,000 years ago as a seasonal settlement near a point where migrations of gazelle passed. It is a vast site of twenty megalithic structures, including 5.5-metre-high, eight-tonne T-shaped pillars sculpted with images of predators, prey, headless men, and a surprisingly high number of phalluses.33 These seasonal cycles are, like fission-fusion patterns, another precursor to collapse, a sign that groups can and do easily change their power structures and populations. It should give us pause in thinking of collapse as an aberration. These routine social shifts instead suggest that disassembling a hierarchy is neither scary nor remarkable if that hierarchy was never meant to be permanent. This precursor followed from our fission-fusion practices and is a more recent phenomenon. We have little evidence that these seasonal cycles occurred through most of human history.
The oldest evidence of such cycles comes from Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic 36,000–30,000 years ago. The main signs come in the form of grand burials. These include remains from Sungir, northern Russia, which were adorned with thousands of perforated fox canine teeth and mammothivory beads. The fox teeth alone are estimated to have required 10,000 hours of work. The most lavish decoration is for a boy and girl who are flanked by mammoth tusks. Then there is the burial of the Lady of SaintGermain-la-Rivière, in south-western France. An adult woman was delicately placed on ornaments, shells, and stag teeth sourced from 300 kilometres away. Grand burials were also accompanied by grand buildings: 18,000–12,000 years ago, foragers across eastern Europe, from Kraków in Poland to Kyiv in Ukraine, constructed small buildings from mammoth tusks and bones. It was during this time of mammoth-bone houses and opulent burials that the first examples of European cave art also appear.
34 Most of these impressive and anomalous remains from Upper Palaeolithic Europe occurred near points of rich, periodic resources, such as floodplains or the choke points of migrating herds of deer, bison, or mammoth. Just like the Shoshone, Lakota, and Cheyenne, ice-age hunters adapted their social structures to their environments. Large collective hunts brought together great populations of people, triggering artistic and architectural booms.35 Then, once the season had changed or the hunt had ended, people disbanded across the landscape once again.
These dynamics should be unsurprising since migrating animals were central to the European way of life during the late ice age; so much so that the very first stirrings of writing were created to help track them. At least 400 European caves contain hauntingly beautiful painted images of animals and figures alongside strange dots, lines, and Y-marks (see Figure 6). They range across France and Spain, in Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira. The dot and line symbols began at least 42,000 years ago, and the depictions of animals such as horses and aurochs date to 37,000 years ago. Analysing a database of hundreds of images, researchers have proposed that this was a kind of calendar and proto-writing system. The Y-marks show when an animal gives birth, while the dots and lines represent lunar months after the start of spring, when animal mating seasons began.36 These peoples were tracking the birthing and mating of their prey. Seasons, and lunar months, were so critical to Palaeolithic Europeans that they enshrined them into the world’s first recorded calendar and rudimentary writing system. Figure 6: Examples of Palaeolithic proto-writing The aurochs and deer are both from cave sites in Lascaux (France) and the salmon from Abri du Poisson (also France).
The new relics we see during the seasonal cycles of Upper Palaeolithic Europe – the artisan jewellery, large buildings, and rich burials – could have been either celebrations of successful hunts or perhaps even temporary bursts of inequality as a small group or individual used the surplus to establish a fleeting ice-age nobility. The latter seems unlikely.
Most of the graves do not contain alpha-male leaders or their children but, rather perplexingly, individuals who were disabled or disfigured. The finds are also rare; humans lived in these areas for tens of thousands of years but left only a handful of such relics.37 These seasonal cycles are highly unlikely to have occurred earlier than the Upper Palaeolithic (c.50,000–10,000 BCE) in Europe. We have no evidence of opulent burials or grand structures in Africa or elsewhere at any earlier periods.
That makes sense since ice-age Africa didn’t experience the same kind of seasons as we have today. The cold, arid, volatile climate of the Palaeolithic also would have made seasonal changes more muted.38 What triggered this precursor to collapse? Understanding why people propped up and then took down social structures can help us glean some lessons for why people in more established kingdoms may have let them fall (or even overturned them). The obvious answer is that they are adapting to new material circumstances. The Wig-Mungkan dispersed when water was scarce and came together when it was concentrated into a flood, and the Inuit settled down into warmer, closer communities when faced with the harsh, cold darkness of the Arctic winter. The Inuit ‘are governed by environmental circumstances’, observed the famed anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who wrote some of the most seminal studies of the Inuit.39 For the Shoshone, Lakota, and Cheyenne people, migratory herds presented an enviable, enormous source of food. To capitalize on that they needed a larger group of swiftly coordinated hunters. It was task-based leadership on steroids: good hunters and leaders were given temporary powers to make the most of the situation. Once the emergency ended, so did their powers.40 Some scholars have suggested that these seasonal cycles were playful political choices rather than savvy adaptations. Foragers had the political superpower of being able to experiment with new social structures, erecting and collapsing them for fun.41 But these shifts didn’t happen at random: they followed the seasons. Nor did the tribes sit down before each hunt or season and agree on what new political structure to use that year (which would give the young a say and help refresh old traditions). It’s a tradition they built over time to fit environmental conditions. This doesn’t mean they lacked choice or agency. It means that, like us, they were practical thinkers who were shaped by their circumstances.
Fission-fusion dynamics and seasonal cycles are a happier alternative to full-blown collapse. They suggest that collapse need not be seen as an unintentional or undesired fall from grace. Instead, it was always part of our adaptive strategy. Whether it be to prevent individuals from dominating the group, to coordinate hunts, resolve conflicts, move with the availability of water, or encourage marriage across groups, regular changes to population concentration and sometimes culture were not something to be feared. They were part of what it meant to be human.
They were also precursors to collapse. Given that we are a mobile, socially fluid people, the biggest question is perhaps not why later empires and kingdoms fell apart, but how they contained so many of us in the first place.
For the Palaeolithic, collapse usually meant local extinctions. For the Neanderthals their disconnected groups were their weakness, and climatic change was the threat. Similarly, for us, communities were vulnerable when they were cut off from the wider fluid civilization and faced threats such as volcanic eruptions. While the small-scale extinction of Neanderthal communities eventually snowballed into the loss of their species, our local failures never did. That is because we were flexible, able regularly to break apart and come back together to find food, explore, trade and share, and renew our connections. That connectivity is what allowed us to become Homo solus, the sole human survivor of the ice age. A surviving species that emerged into a warmer, different world.
3 From Hunting and Gathering to Being Hunted and Gathered When People Became Fierce – Goliath Fuel – The Origins of War – Evolutionary Backsliding, or Dropping the Progress Narrative – The Instability of Domination WHEN PEOPLE BECAME FIERCE In 1549 Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda was shipwrecked on the coast of Florida. Hernando was a thirteen-year-old student, born in Colombia to wealthy Spanish parents and on his way to Salamanca for his studies. He never made it there. Instead, he became a captive among the indigenous hunters of Florida. The native foragers he met there resembled Spanish society more than the Hadza or Khoisan.
Fontaneda was taken captive by the Calusa, a name that meant ‘fierce people’ in their own language. His brother and most of the other shipwreck survivors were sacrificed. This was a normal practice for the Calusa, who also used their captives as servants. The Calusa operated like a minikingdom. It was a hereditary monarchy of sorts, with a ruler, elites, and around 300 full-time warriors. They had a fleet of war canoes, which were used to raid surrounding lands. The ruler of the Calusa was a supreme chief who claimed to own the lands and renewed their fertility by undertaking regular, secret rituals. He was so powerful that when he died children were often sacrificed.1 The Calusa were not farmers; they were fisherfolk. They built great houses that could hold up to 2,000 people and made watercourts covering 6,000 square kilometres to store fish. They controlled around fifty villages that together contained some 20,000 people, including farmers who grew corn and squashes. They demanded ‘tribute’ – irregular payments designed to show submission, respect, or allegiance – from these surrounding peoples. The Calusa exacted their tribute in the form of food, gold, and European or African captives. The stratification of the Calusa resembled Fontaneda’s original destination of Spain: society split between nobles and commoners, the rulers and the ruled. The Calusa were not an anomaly.
2 If Fontaneda had been shipwrecked on the other side of the continent further north he would have encountered the north-west coast Native Americans. Some were egalitarian and subsisted on acorns and nuts as staple crops. Others, such as the Kwakwaka’wakw and Tsimshian, more closely resembled the Calusa. These north-west coast Native Americans built long houses, had hereditary chiefs who waged war and took captives, and even kept slaves. During the winter months they dwelled in large coastal villages.
Most of these hierarchical foragers relied on great salmon runs that passed through the rivers, which they caught, smoked, and stored. Elites would also host decadent banquets. During these ceremonies one chief would host another, as well as many onlookers, and either give away or destroy a large amount of wealth in the form of food, canoes, and slaves.
These ceremonies served many purposes, increasing prestige, cementing alliances, and destroying competitors. The guest chief was expected to host an equally lavish feast in return. A failure to do so could result in a loss of status and followers. The competing chief could even go into debt to host an adequately opulent feast. For some groups, anyone who coughed or laughed during the celebration would be coerced into throwing a feast themselves.
The chiefs who oversaw these feasts and ceremonies claimed exclusive access to ritual knowledge and sometimes even heavenly beings. Some ethnographers have referred to them as ‘terrorist organizations’ that ruled through violence and black magic (which wouldn’t put them out of place among empires, with the Roman Republic once being described as a mafia cartel). A leisure class of hereditary nobles with slaves competing through banquets and dazzling aesthetic ceremonies looks more like the courtly estates of medieval Europe than hyper-egalitarian foragers.3 Though far rarer than mobile, egalitarian groups, these unequal, hierarchical foragers existed (and some still do) around the world. There were the Chinchorro (7000 to 1500 BCE), violent fishermen of modern-day Chile who mummified some of their dead, and the Jarildekald Aboriginal people of Australia, who fished along the Murray River. Both were sedentary, with bigger, more unequal populations than egalitarian foragers.
One review of past and present foragers found seventeen examples of unequal, stratified hunter-gatherers, all of which were either semi- or fully sedentary.
4 Anthropologists imagine a spectrum of foragers, from nomadic to sedentary, peaceful to warlike, equal to unequal. Nomadic egalitarian foragers are at one end, hierarchical sedentary hunter-gatherers at the other.
5 Hierarchical hunter-gatherers are ancient. The first conclusive evidence for them is around 12,500–10,800 BCE. This is when the earth began to warm and exit the ice age. These were the early Natufians, who hunted and gathered across modern-day Syria, Palestine, and Israel. Their descendants would eventually be the first farmers and state-builders in the world.
As the climate changed, so too did the Natufians. They began to develop more permanent settlements, including large stone huts. They wore personal adornments such as shell, bone, and stone pendants, systematically buried their dead, produced large amounts of refined stone tools, and domesticated the dog. They may have also been the first to practise horticulture and animal husbandry. They collected wild cereals, legumes, and nuts, and hunted deer, aurochs, and gazelle.
The Natufians were also unequal. Some of the burials were lavish, with 8 per cent sporting pendants and beads imported from as far as 400 kilometres away. Some houses were larger than others and possessed larger stone mortars that are typically used for feasting. The original 1 per cent were foragers, not farmers.
Yet the Natufians were not purely foragers or farmers. They were on the path to farming through the collection of wild cereals. While we often say ‘farmers’ or ‘hunter-gatherers’ for simplicity, in reality most people after the Holocene almost always practised a combination of hunting, gathering, foraging, pastoralism, fishing, horticulture, and agriculture.
The Calusa, for instance, were fishers and foragers who also demanded tribute from parttime farmers. The first ‘farmers’ of the world in Mesopotamia, who followed on from the Natufians, spent thousands of years still supplementing their diet with fish, herded cattle, and hunted gazelle. Even English peasants in the thirteenth century relied on foraging and hunting in shared woodlands alongside farming.
Nonetheless, the main resources a group relied on tended to shape how they organized themselves. And if the climate or availability of certain resources changed, societies usually did too.
This happened with the Natufians. Those first stirrings of a rich class – feasting and unequal burials – disappeared as the world temporarily reentered an ice age around 10,900–9700 BCE (known as the ‘Younger Dryas’ period) and the Natufians returned to their more mobile ways. In the eyes of some archaeologists, this represents the first collapse in history. That is because they see the Natufians as the first stirrings of Goliath.6 The Natufians were just the forerunner of what was to come.
GOLIATH FUEL Entering the Holocene (around 9700 BCE) meant entering a new world (see Figure 7).7 People began to settle into larger villages and become sedentary. Agriculture was adopted and intensified, as was the rearing of domesticated animals. Wealth inequality between people intensified.
Goliaths – whether they be hierarchical hunter-gatherers or agrarian states – arose. This period after the ice age but before the first states is called ‘the Neolithic’.8 The usual story is that groups who developed a ‘surplus’ of resources through agriculture could afford to support administrators and a ruling class. There is undoubtedly some truth to this, but it isn’t the full story.
Hierarchical foragers show that inequality, slavery, war, and hierarchy can all occur without agriculture. Many of these hierarchical hunter-gatherers also had only modest surpluses yet became mini-kingdoms. What mattered was the type of resource they used.
Hierarchical foragers, violent pastoralists, and farming kingdoms all gained access to resources that could be easily seen, stolen, and stored.
In other words, ‘lootable resources’. Large stocks of these lootable resources became available in the Holocene as the planet warmed and intensive agriculture and animal rearing became possible.9 The Calusa ate shellfish, molluscs, and different types of fish. Similarly, north-west Pacific coast Native Americans relied on salmon runs. The Natufians had access to patches of wild cereals, which they harvested and stored.
Horseback kingdoms and hierarchical pastoralists prized horses and livestock (as well as the grain of the communities they conquered). Great runs of salmon, farms of shellfish, patches of wild cereals, domesticated animals, and (more ideally) tilled fields of wheat, rice, or corn, could all be easily monitored and controlled. When the resources were ready to harvest, a tax collector would know and could easily take a share, transport it elsewhere and store it. A commoner could not easily hide their flock or their harvest of cereals, salmon, or shellfish. One review of eighty-nine forager societies along the Pacific coast of North America found that clumped, defensible (lootable) resources, especially aquatic ones such as salmon, were associated with slavery, social ranking, and unequal access to food. It is a trend we see across the world: certain resources tend to lead to dominance hierarchies.10 Figure 7: Post-Holocene social trajectories in Eurasia and the Americas While the timing varies, most world regions followed a similar post-Holocene trajectory: sedentism (and more intensive agriculture) was followed thousands of years later by war and then the creation of states.
Lootable resources didn’t have to be edible. Some kingdoms could be built solely on controlling trade and strategic resources. The Nabataeans were originally Arabic nomads who built a kingdom by taxing the traders who passed through their territory, which was on a popular route for transporting incense. Other early states and hierarchical hunter-gatherers have arisen in areas where they could control an unavoidable trade route (like the Nabataeans) or around a highly prized and concentrated resource like obsidian. Trade, like salmon, often had to pass through a choke point, whether that be a desert, mine, or mountain pass, making it easy for someone to establish an armed monopoly over it.11 That monopolized wealth could then be passed down through generations. Before this moment, it was almost impossible for parents to bequeath their own status or advantages to their children. A study of twentyone different populations across the world found that neither physical ability nor social connections could be easily transmitted across generations from parents to children, but material wealth such as land could.12 Lootable resources allowed for individuals and groups to become not just rich but also powerful. The four fundamental ways to gain power over others is to control valuable information (information power), to control by threat or force (violent power), to control the decision-making (political power), or to control the critical resources that others need (economic power). In an egalitarian forager group with few status differences, an ambitious status seeker could pursue one of these, but it was difficult if not impossible to achieve all of them. You could become a shaman and claim exclusive access to the spirits. You could try to bully others. You could use charisma to build a coalition of supporters. But having the charisma, brawn, and intelligence to be a master priest, negotiator, and hunter is rare, especially since each requires dedicated time, practice, and innate talent.
The magnetic genius-prophet-warrior may be common in movies and comic books, but not in reality. Even if some preternaturally talented figure did emerge, they could not easily pass down their status and skills to their progeny. Being rich was essentially impossible since critical resources were spread far and wide across the landscape.
What changed between the egalitarian ice age and the rise of inequality in the Holocene was the use of lootable resources. Once you had resources that others depended on, you could leverage them for other forms of power.
The economic power of access to stores of fish or cereal could be converted to other forms of power by throwing feasts, such as with the north-west coast Native Americans, making others work for them in return for resources, or gifting them to create debts and obligations. The Calusa king was at once a religious head, a military commander, the supreme authority, and disproportionately rich.
Lootable resources were, in the words of economists, ‘fungible’: economic power could be transferred into other forms of power. Yet, salmon, livestock, and grain did not automatically create dominance hierarchies. A tyrant needed force to both take lootable resources and defend their stockpiles.13 Taking and defending resources required weaponry – ideally these new weapons or tactics would be concentrated and give one group an advantage over competitors. For instance, the few who had access to bronze swords and armour had a significant advantage over those fighting with wooden spears. Warriors on horseback could outrun or run over those on foot. Think of these as monopolizable weapons. Sometimes even minor changes could provide a competitive edge over others. The Chumash of central and southern California show no signs of inequality or warfare until after 600 CE, when they developed ocean-going canoes. This enabled them to hunt not just marine mammals but also their neighbours along the coast.14 We see a similar story with the Comanche, a native American confederation of nomadic peoples who practised no agriculture. Instead, they relied on horses to raid their neighbours. Horses were introduced into South America by European invaders, and by the early seventeenth century had spread to North America via indigenous trade networks.15 Horses are not just great for transport; when combined with projectiles and the right tactics they become four-legged war machines. The Comanche put horses to good use, becoming hierarchical raiders who took hold of the southern plains and travelled as far south as Mexico.16 Monopolizable weaponry allowed the few to conquer and hold the resources of the many (and sometimes the many themselves as slaves). Monopolizable weapons were also a post-Holocene invention: horses were domesticated in central Asia around 3500 BCE and bronze weapons appear around 3300 BCE in the Near East.17 Yet neither lootable resources nor military might would lead to oppressive conditions if people could easily escape.
The geography of a Goliath is caged land: territory with few exit options.
Exit options are people’s ability to vote with their feet and easily leave an area. A bully or aspiring tyrant will be of little threat if people can easily flee in the middle of the night. Even if a dictator can lay claim to a set of lootable resources, they will be forced to negotiate with their subjects if the subjects can simply walk away, taking their labour with them. This is evident in the wider animal kingdom. Species with greater ‘dispersal’ options usually develop weaker hierarchies.18 The same is true of humans.
For both the Calusa and north-west Pacific coast Native Americans it was difficult for people to move away easily. The salmon runs and watercourts were concentrated and not readily available elsewhere.
People were trapped and tethered to the rivers and coastline if they wanted easily available food. The rich spots of cereals in the forests of the Natufians were scarce.
When people couldn’t escape and were tied to their lands or herds, they were more likely to accept subordination.19 Just growing wheat did not mean a society would automatically become hierarchical, but more abundant lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and fewer exit options together pushed people towards hierarchy (Figure 8).20 Culture and choice played an important role too, but over the long term environmental conditions encouraged particular social arrangements and made them easier to sustain.21 Lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and caged land are all sources of Goliath fuel. These are different conditions that allow one group to control another; that allowed a group or individual to gather the greatest resource of all: status. It took thousands of years, but our social arrangements started to look more like the dominance hierarchies of gorillas and chimpanzees. But while our social arrangements began to seem more primal, there was one interesting, unique twist: power became hereditary.
Across other primates, status cannot be easily passed down from the parents to their offspring. The son of a powerful silverback is not gifted the harem once his father passes away. For us, resources and claims to a throne can be inherited. In 2024, all billionaires under the age of thirty had inherited their fortunes and all the status and power that accompany them.22 Figure 8: From Goliath fuel to Goliaths Goliath fuel allowed for large differences in wealth and power that could be accumulated and passed down through generations.
We were democratic, egalitarian foragers until Goliath fuel appeared in the Holocene. The transition from egalitarianism to dominance hierarchies thereafter was not smooth or straightforward. It was a bloody affair.
THE ORIGINS OF WAR Warfare emerges as Goliaths develop. Violence develops from one-on-one fights, through small groups raiding and skirmishing, to organized armies waging mass warfare as societies become more unequal and centralized.
We see this development of war across the world. In the Oaxaca Valley in Mexico, groups appear to have lived in peace for 6,000 years (8000–2000 BCE) before the first villages and settlements began to appear. Just over a millennium later (800–450 BCE) signs of violent raids appear alongside the first hierarchical societies. War arrives alongside the first state, the Zapotec.23 In Japan during an earlier part (13,000–800 BCE) of the Jomon Period there are no fortifications or other signs of warfare. Then weapons and defensive structures begin to appear alongside the first signs of agriculture.24 In eastern North America there were six millennia (11,000– 5000 BCE) of just interpersonal homicides. This was a time of egalitarian, mobile foragers.
It was then another four millennia (5000–1000 BCE) of small-scale raiding as groups became stratified and settled into towns. Then war took root alongside agriculture, large villages, and societies based on domination and tribute.25 In Europe, there are no signs of war during the Palaeolithic. Around 9500 BCE, after the entry into the Holocene, evidence of lethal violence begins to become more common. After around 5500 bce, as agriculture spreads across Europe, people settle down, and inequality intensifies, clearer indications of warfare, including fortifications, towns surrounded by ditches, and evidence of massacres, all creep upwards.26 The Near East follows a similar trajectory. The Natufians killed each other at low rates and didn’t conduct war. For thousands of years we find just a few skeletons with fractured skulls and embedded projectiles. Then in the seventh century BCE, perhaps the first fortification in the world – Tell Maghzaliyah in northern Mesopotamia – was constructed near a node of long-distance obsidian trade.
Thereafter, trade began to shift from obsidian to flint, probably a reaction to someone restricting the supply of obsidian.
Around 5700–5600 BCE the Halafians, a culture from northern Mesopotamia with a keen interest in the obsidian trade, began to leave behind mass burials. The Halafians then moved south and built fortified settlements along an east–west overland trade route (mainly for obsidian).
They razed pre-existing towns and built over the top of them.27 The war for lootable resources had begun.
Societies, in different environments and even on opposite sides of the world, all follow the same pattern. Organized warfare arises as groups become more unequal, sedentary, and hierarchical.
This pattern is supported by artwork. After 8000 BCE, as settlements, hierarchy, and farming spread across Europe, China, and the Near East, cave art becomes increasingly populated with images of spear- and bowwielding groups (Figure 9).28 The relationship between organized conflict and hierarchy is also clear in modern hunter-gatherers. One systematic analysis of thirty contemporary forager groups (including twenty-one mobile, egalitarian ones and nine settled, non-egalitarian ones) found that group-on-group violence was correlated with bigger, denser, and more sedentary groups.29 This is just one study in a larger literature on the correlation between violence and inequality.
30 This was not just about more people being involved in conflict. It was a transformation of how and why we killed each other. Among egalitarian hunter-gatherers, murdering another human is a personal affair: it usually results from a quarrel or sexual jealousy, or perhaps the solemn execution of a budding tyrant. In contrast, the larger-scale massacres we see after the end of the ice age often involve the indiscriminate killing of entire communities, including women and children. These atrocities also frequently involved torture and mutilation. This is noticeable in a range of cases, including the first farming communities in Europe.31 The target of violence shifts from an individual wrongdoer to an entire group. It doesn’t matter whether you kill a particular individual since you can replace them with another member of their group. The victim becomes interchangeable.32 Figure 9: A cave art battle scene (5000–3500 BCE) found in Sefar, southern Algeria War transformed the very character of violence because the motivations for violence changed. Conflict was no longer about personal grievances and disagreements but about eliminating a threat, procuring resources, or, most importantly, expanding the power and status of a group and its leader(s). Who you killed became less important and violence became more indiscriminate. As we can see with the early signs of torture, mutilation, and genocide, it also became much more brutal.
War, or any large-scale act of violence, has three key ingredients, all of which increased in the Neolithic. First, it needs a large-scale organization to corral and coordinate troops. Second, it needs an ideology to inspire them to fight, whether it be communism or nationalism. Third, it needs to create tight bonds between groups of fighters (usually young men). Ideologies that justify bloodshed and tightly connected groups of fighters don’t come naturally. They require extensive organization, training, and indoctrination. That is something the first hierarchies and states started to offer. It is something that the militaries of today provide even more successfully.
Rather than violence decreasing across history, the ingredients for warfare have steadily increased, starting with the warmer, bloodier world of the Neolithic.33 It’s easy to see why the Palaeolithic was warless.
There weren’t the largescale organizations to coordinate mass killings, to craft ideologies encouraging battle, and to train small groups of young men to become efficient murder squads. An ambush, raid, or full campaign requires planning, commitment, and the motivation to risk one’s life. It wasn’t possible, nor was it worth risking death to strike another group that had no accumulated riches and with whom you were probably trading. War was pointless without lootable resources to battle over, or the advantage provided by new battle aids such as horses and Bronze Age swords.
Some have suggested that we may have gone to war during the Palaeolithic over women. One group would assault another to capture and carry off new wives and partners. But intermarriage and continuous migration across groups would have prevented the need for bloody raids to capture women. We also simply don’t see modern egalitarian foragers commit these kinds of raids.34 One study of twenty-one nomadic forager societies found that only 0.7 per cent of the cases of lethal violence were due to the theft of women between neighbouring groups (and only 1.4 per cent were due to disputes over resources or territory).35 Naturally, the skeletons we have dug up from the Palaeolithic are only a small fraction of the people who lived and died. Nonetheless all the evidence – skeletons, cave paintings, and cultural zones of open trade – points to one conclusion: organized warfare came only after we entered the Holocene.36 EVOLUTIONARY BACKSLIDING, OR DROPPING THE PROGRESS NARRATIVE War, inequality, patriarchy, and slavery are probably not what come to mind when you hear ‘progress’. Nor is it easy to see the move from nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers like the Khoisan towards groups like the Calusa as a social advance. Yet this is how these developments have historically been framed.
Our ideas of progress have been shaped by nineteenth-century thinkers such as Lewis Henry Morgan. In 1877 Morgan pioneered an influential three-step blueprint in which societies moved up the staircase of progress, with abrupt changes in technology and society marking the steps from one stage to another. ‘Savagery’ was marked by a reliance on hunting, gathering, fishing, and simple technology such as the bow and arrow.
‘Barbarism’ involved horticulture, domesticated plants and animals, as well as new practices such as pottery. ‘Civilization’ was a stage where groups adopted intensive agriculture, towns and cities, and innovations such as writing.37 We now know that things are not that simple.
Hierarchical huntergatherers had many of the hallmarks of what most would see as civilization (sedentism, inequality, rulers, war, and more monuments) yet relied on foraging.38 They were denser, captured more energy, and had more hierarchy but didn’t farm. Some groups jumped straight from being mobile foragers or herders to being states. Other groups, such as the north-west coast Native Americans, stayed hierarchical without ever becoming a state.
Many regularly collapsed in a continuous process of fission-fusion, coming together under a leader and then splintering apart, on either a seasonal or more random basis.39 There is no stepladder.
40 Because of these problems with the stepladder approach many historical scientists don’t talk about progress, savagery, barbarism, or civilization.
Instead, many now talk about an increase in ‘complexity’. In the eyes of many archaeologists the Calusa and north-west coast Native Americans would be classified as ‘complex hunter-gatherers’, while the Khoisan would be less complex or ‘simple’ hunter-gatherers. On that scale of complexity, modern, industrialized societies are – of course – the most complex. Most of the well-known books on collapse, whether Jared Diamond’s Collapse or Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, define collapse as a sudden and enduring loss of social complexity. It is, in essence, falling down the stepladder of progress.41 While complexity may seem like a more savoury alternative to talking about progress and civilization, the two are still largely interchangeable.
One of the most accepted and common definitions of early civilization is ‘the earliest and simplest form of class-based society’.42 Similarly, many archaeological definitions of complexity focus on hierarchy, inequality, and centralization. It is about a small group controlling the labour and resources of others. For many archaeologists, the first signs of rulers, a military, bureaucracy, and inequality are the first signs of complexity.
43 Characterizing the move towards hierarchical hunter-gatherers and states as an increase in complexity doesn’t make sense. Many democratic foragers have more complex politics than the Calusa or even the Roman Empire.
Hierarchy, for example top-down orders from a Roman emperor, is intended to simplify decision-making. By contrast, decisions among democratic foragers require extensive debate, negotiation, and compromise among equals. Something is more complex when it is has more diverse and interconnected parts, not when one part controls the others through violence.
This archaeological idea of complexity is also oddly selective and leaves out most of what makes up a society. For instance, look at the Australian Aboriginal peoples. These groups possessed at least 250 languages prior to European invasion, practised ingenious environmental management tools such as firestick farming (deliberate, controlled bush-fires), and have a varied and rich ‘dreamtime’ set of beliefs that aid coordination, navigation, and their understanding of the land. Yet if they dropped all the languages and started speaking English, adopted a few staple crops for farming, built a big bureaucracy rather than relying on subtle cultural practices, and dropped their rich cosmology in favour of worshipping a single god-king, they would apparently be becoming more ‘complex’. They are clearly not: they are getting more hierarchical, capturing more energy, and living more densely. Yes, bureaucracies and monument-building might get bigger and more complicated, but much of life, from diets to culture, is simplified. The use of complexity is not just inaccurate; calling a society simple is akin to accusing its people of backwardness.44 What we are seeing here during the Neolithic is not progress or increasing complexity but rather the painful growth of a Goliath. A slow, reversible, and messy shift towards social relations built on dominance hierarchies. Hierarchy is when some are ranked above others in status and authority. We are surrounded by these: CEOs are above managers who are above workers.45 A hierarchy can be more democratic (with more people sharing decision-making power), or more dominance-based (with just a few wielding power backed by violence). Dominance hierarchies are imposed by the powerful for their own benefit, usually through violence.
Such dominance hierarchies are essentially the opposite of the fluid civilizations of the Palaeolithic, which had non-hierarchical, democratic cooperation. In the Palaeolithic our hunter-gatherer ancestors relied on trade, hospitality, reciprocity, and mutual aid to cooperate, maintain the peace, and survive the ice age. They were practising what we usually think of as ‘civilized conduct’: restraint, political wisdom, and cooperation without coercion. Violence is still used in civilizations (remember the counter-dominance executions of the Khoisan) but is only legitimate when it’s done collectively as a last resort, as opposed to being regularly imposed top-down.46 Rather than a stepladder of progress, this movement from civilization to Goliath is better described as evolutionary backsliding. Our egalitarianism and counter-dominance shaped our bodies and minds and supercharged our cultural evolution. They made us unique and helped us navigate the Palaeolithic. The move towards Goliath – whether it be through class or patriarchy – made us look more like the harems of patriarchal gorillas and the chimpanzee hierarchies built on violence and politicking.
Goliath and civilization are not air-tight categories; they are a spectrum.
It is about the main way in which cooperation is organized in society: hierarchy, violence, and rule by the few; or democracy and voluntary cooperation. Whether we work together at the end of a handshake or the barrel of a gun. There are other types of social forms beyond the civilization–Goliath spectrum. The temporary hierarchies we see in egalitarian hunter-gatherers, such as in hunting parties, are democratic hierarchies: the members choose a temporary, restrained ruler to achieve a common goal. Leaders exist for the public good, rarely have violent power, and are always accountable to their followers. A good way to distinguish between democratic and dominance hierarchies is the consent test: if you say stop and the hierarchy continues regardless and any resistance is met with force, then you are existing in a dominance hierarchy.
47 One could also have an arrangement in which everyone is trying to relentlessly and violently dominate, but no one ever succeeds. No dominance hierarchy is ever achieved: think of this as ‘chaos’. It’s what Hobbes was envisaging in his fictional ‘state of nature’. For a pictorial overview, see Figure 10.
48 Figure 10: Forms of human society Some countries, such as the liberal democracies of Scandinavia, are more like democratic hierarchies. Yet these democracies rely on the flimsy idea that choosing between a few different potential rulers every four years or so is a sufficient degree of power sharing. The party with the most funding tends to win and governments rarely represent popular opinion or implement policies with the strongest popular support. The ancient Athenians would have recognized our current systems not as democracies, but as oligarchies.49 This is at best a broad yet weak version of democracy, one in which the rules are still applied using brute force. All other areas of life are still organized into dominance hierarchies. Most of us work nine-to-five in minidictatorships (where one individual or a small group can hire, fire, and direct most others), pray in top-down churches, and invest in markets controlled overwhelmingly by a few big firms. Even the citizens of Norway, the US, or Australia still live in a Goliath. Indeed, humankind now lives in a single Global Goliath.
The Goliath of today is the product of a 5,000-year process. One that was marked by setbacks, reversals, and collapses.
THE INSTABILITY OF DOMINATION In northern Iraq lies a hill jutting up from the desert, and inside it are dozens of layers of settlements. When one was destroyed or decayed, another would be built over it. The layered villages of Tepe Gawra can give us a glimpse into just how dangerous the early Holocene was.
The first village was created 6,500 years ago, and over time became increasingly unequal. Around a thousand years after its creation, three great mudbrick temples painted red and purple were erected. Then they were abandoned. Thereafter, the site was turned into a fortified village with a single narrow entry road overlooked by a watchtower. Its defences didn’t work. The village was raided and burned, with its largest elite house hit hardest. Inside, a baby and a twelve-to-fourteen-year-old child were buried under 15cm of ash. The town remained abandoned for a century. It was eventually reoccupied. And then burned down again. The cycle repeated itself in the centuries thereafter. Tepe Gawra is emblematic of the fate that befell many settlements in the early Holocene. Inequality encouraged more people to turn to plundering their neighbours. Villages, towns, and cities became prime targets. Other times, there were no signs of invaders. Sites were constructed, grew more unequal, and were simply abandoned. Why would people just walk away en masse from a site that they had tied their lives to?
4 Abandoned Experiments I: Failed Farmers A Slow and Resisted Revolution – Why Even Bother? – Growth Fetish – Reversals of Agriculture – Cursed by Grain A SLOW AND RESISTED REVOLUTION While the ‘agricultural revolution’ was revolutionary in its consequences, it was not so in its pace. The transition from agriculture and stationary living, through cities and inequality to states, was a long, protracted affair. Each step took thousands of years and there were many reversals.
Mesopotamia is the earliest and best-studied example of this transition.
Twelve thousand years ago, the Late Natufians started experimenting with seasonal settlements. Then they collapsed and dispersed as the climate changed. Around two millennia later the first signs of full-time sedentary living begin. Pottery becomes commonplace 1,500 years after that. About another 1,500 years later there is the first undisputed evidence of warfare.1 Then, two millennia later, the first state – Uruk (3200 BCE) – is built and the first cuneiform documents are written. This is the slow, arduous development of a Goliath (Figure 11).2 Across the world this sequence repeats itself again and again, though the details and timing vary. For instance, South America was a late bloomer but experienced a more rapid transition. It didn’t see sedentism until around 4,000 years ago and states emerged 2,600 years later. On average, the lag between the adoption of intensive agriculture and states was approximately 3,000 years – a period greater than that which separates today from the beginnings of Classical Greece.3 Merely moving from part-time to full-time farming was a lengthy process.4 In most fields in south-west Asia, it took over 5,000 years for the share of grasses (such as wheat, emmer, and einkorn) to increase from around 20–30 per cent to approximately 50–60 per cent of crops grown.5 That is roughly the same period that separates today from the first states in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Figure 11: The Mesopotamian post-Holocene social trajectory While the exact sequence varied, sedentism and agriculture often went hand in hand. As one became more dependent on tilled, fixed-field agriculture, it usually became more sensible to stay put as the fields needed the full-time work of sowing, weeding, and fending off pests. An agrarian community was more likely to develop a larger population and eventually become a city. In most of Mesopotamia and Egypt, people started to settle down in sedentary communities while beginning the slow process of intensifying crop cultivation. Still, it was entirely possible to be sedentary without having agriculture, as we’ve seen with numerous cases of hierarchical foragers.6 The adoption of agriculture was not always an inevitability. Numerous areas with suitable ecological conditions and foragers who were almost certainly aware of cereal farming never adopted it, such as in Native American California. When farming did spread, whether it be from Turkey into Europe or Mesoamerica into the south-west US, it was often a stopstart affair.
Arrival into a new region would often lead to a pause of a few centuries before it spread once again. The lack of uptake wasn’t due to the ignorance of the hunter-gatherers surrounding farmer communities. The farmers and their fields would have been hard to miss, and in some cases hunter-gatherers were even having children with them. The picture is one of foragers who were reluctant to adopt full-time farming.7 Indeed, the strangest conundrum is why our ancestors chose to adopt farming and sedentary living at all.
WHY EVEN BOTHER?
From our perspective, it’s easy to assume that agriculture and cities were steps forward in the march of progress. But in the beginning at least, they were a disaster for health and well-being.
If living in villages and cities meant more disease, noisier neighbours, and a greater threat of being raided, then why bother? We don’t fully know the answer, and multiple factors must have played into the decision to stay put. Over the space of centuries and millennia people started spending more time in seasonal camps. They may have used these temporary camps for trade, rituals, or better access to seasonal food and migratory herds. People then became tied to the land as populations grew and they became more dependent on agriculture.8 The vast intensification of agriculture during the Neolithic is more difficult to explain. Hunter-gatherer diets are substantially healthier and involved more enjoyable labour than those of farmers. This decline in health and diet is reflected in the height of people across the world. Height is a decent indicator of general physical health. Eating more calories, more protein, and a wider variety of foods tends to lead to a taller, healthier population. What we see in skeletons during the transition to agriculture is a decrease in height. While studies vary, most see a reduction of a few inches in height between our ice-age ancestors and those who took up farming.
This shrinkage in stature is not the only marker of a decline in general health.9 Agriculture meant a more restricted diet that was lower in protein and nutritional quality. As people became increasingly sedentary, exercise and physical activity were replaced by the repetitive physical stress of a farmer’s lifestyle. A telltale indicator of an early agriculturalist is deformed bones in the knees and toes of women. These are the results of countless hours spent rocking back and forth on one’s knees to grind grain. Sedentary communities that became increasingly reliant on grain also suffered from substantial enamel defects, dental cavities, and oral infections. Agriculture was a wrecking ball to human health and height, and it also meant more work.10 Hunter-gatherers are also renowned for being work-shy. They produce far less food than they are capable of producing and choose to maximize leisure time instead of working harder to produce a surplus. They also tend to view farming as unnecessary drudgery. As one Ju/’hoansi told an anthropologist, ‘Why should I farm when there are so many mongongo nuts?’Australian Aborigines have a similar ethos: ‘You people go to all that trouble, working and planting seeds, but we don’t have to do that. All these things are there for us.’11 Across the world, foragers tend to act in a way that minimizes the expenditure of energy. For instance, when population density is low, they hunt big game, which often provides the biggest caloric return, before moving on to collect tubers, plants, and animals that offer fewer calories for the energy expended. We can still see this in farmers who tend to practise less laborious forms of agriculture, such as shifting agriculture (in which a field is used, burned, left fallow and then returned to later), unless they are compelled to produce more by an external force, such as a market or master.
Similarly, pre-capitalist peasants would often take up wage work to meet a certain target (for instance, to pay for a wedding) and would stop working as soon as they reached it. If they were offered higher wages they would simply work less, because their target would be reached sooner.
12 It is a pattern that completely contradicts conventional economic logic (you should want to work more when the wage is higher). Farmers also often tend to return to these less onerous ways of producing food whenever a collapse occurs, or when they are trying to evade a state.
This is known as ‘the principle of least effort’. Moving from this to intensified agriculture is a radical change, not just in how one produces food but also in priorities.
It’s unlikely they made such a change unless compelled by great benefits or penalties.13 Farming does offer benefits. It can support denser populations and sometimes provide more calories per hour of work. But it’s hard to see why the average hunter-gatherer would opt for more calories and bigger families over better work, food, health and more leisure time. Even if they wanted to, it wouldn’t be an easy switch.
Farming requires highly specialized knowledge about seasons, crops, fertilizers, and techniques that take painstaking time and effort to accumulate. It is unsurprising that we rarely see hunter-gatherers voluntarily adopt farming. Instead, they are usually displaced or killed off by, or intermingle and marry with, the intruding farmers.14 Still, there clearly remained some populations that did adopt and expand agriculture, even if slowly and reluctantly. Why? One hypothesis is that population growth led to overhunting in some areas, such as the Near East.
Around Mesopotamia, big game dwindled and even became extinct during the early Neolithic. Bigger communities with less protein-rich food had to rely more and more on calorie-dense and predictable agriculture, as well as on domesticated animals. They probably started by adopting easier farming methods, such as flood-retreat agriculture. This entails waiting by a floodplain, casting some seeds in the soil after a flood, and reaping the harvest with little effort. That helps to explain why the earliest Goliaths arose around flood-prone rivers, such as the Nile in Egypt, the Yellow River in China, and the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia.
Something then gave them a gentle push towards relying more on agriculture. It could have been a change in the climate or the collapse of other food sources, such as large game.15 From there, population and agriculture reinforced each other with farmers generally being more fertile and agriculture offering more support for big, dense populations.16 Population may have been one factor that pushed us towards farming, but it’s not a complete explanation. One problem is that most areas that developed intensive agriculture were areas of abundance, not scarcity.
For instance, the earliest Goliaths in Mesopotamia, as well as the cities of Tiwanaku and Teotihuacan sprang up in rich wetland areas. Another issue is that many early cultivated crops are not staples but more luxury foods, such as avocados and chilli peppers in central America.17 Clearly, something more than just population growth and a lack of big game was behind the intensification of agriculture. GROWTH FETISH Status competition can help provide a more complete explanation of the great intensification of food production. Signs of feasts, such as the potlatches of north-west coast Native Americans, appear all over the world after the Holocene. Neither avocados nor chilli peppers are commonly eaten, but they’re regular foods for feasts among the highland Maya and others. That was the allure of these foods: avocados and chillis were all scarce, high-status foods fit for a feast. Dogs, too, may have been domesticated initially as high-status objects rather than four-legged helpers.
Throwing banquets is primarily an act to gain status and power: it can aggrandize an individual or family, cement alliances, and even create debt peonage. The catch is that feasts require more food and more work for everyone in a community. Hierarchical hunter-gatherers across the world marginalize those who refuse to work harder to support banquets.
Dissenters are harassed, ostracized, ridiculed as ‘lazy moochers’, ‘rubbish men’, and ‘abominable people’ and are even physically attacked.18 The archaeologist Brian Hayden has compiled decades of work to show how the transition to agriculture wasn’t (just) a matter of more people demanding more food, but rather a few status seekers cajoling, corralling, and coercing others into producing a surplus. Once lootable resources became accessible, cycles of feasting both exacerbated inequality and demanded ever-greater quantities of food be produced. Nomadic-egalitarian groups, too, often hold collective banquets, but these seem to be more for group bonding rather than the aggrandizement of a single individual or family. For many, feasting morphed into a tool of politics and status competition.19 Status competition can help us make sense of not only the adoption and intensification of farming, but also of many of the other trends we see in the earliest farming communities and cities. When archaeologists look for signs of inequality they search for feasts, human sacrifices, items imported from vast distances (even further than hunter-gatherer trade), unequally sized houses, great monuments such as palaces, and grand burials where an individual is left with a disproportionate number of luxury items such as jewellery, weaponry and even sacrificial victims.
Two things unite these indicators of inequality: they all signal distinction and are of little practical use. More than being unnecessary, they are detrimental for a group trying to live in a landscape with a paucity of food or an abundance of enemies. These activities are now what we call ‘conspicuous consumption’: wasteful spending to enhance social status.
It is the inverse of the principle of least effort. If conserving energy is a common intuition, then wastefully using resources and the labour of others is the ultimate display of power. Having others expend time and energy building a palace or a grand burial also helps to reinforce social divides. Nothing says ‘I’m more important than you’ like having masses of people spend their living days toiling to create a tomb for a dead leader.
20 That wasteful consumption to gain and signal status easily becomes a preoccupation with growth. If you can improve your status through throwing a feast, then an even larger feast with a greater variety and abundance of foods will be even better. If you are competing with another chief, then there is an even stronger compulsion to grow a bigger crop to outdo them. The same goes for importing exotic jewellery from thousands of kilometres away, conquering enemies, or building a great tomb. The bigger the waste, the more status it signals, the wider the gap between you and the others it creates and the greater the chance you will be remembered.
Today we still tend disproportionately to know of and value the biggest monuments of the past: the Colosseum, the Great Wall of China, and the pyramids of Giza. Unfortunately, status is an inexhaustible resource and competition is endless. Hence, wasteful consumption becomes a fixation on material growth and accumulation: a growth fetish.
Wasteful consumption and inequality were often not warmly welcomed, as we see in the first farming communities across the world.
REVERSALS OF AGRICULTURE Perhaps unsurprisingly, settling down and eating grain was far from universally accepted – or irreversible. Fixed-field farming and sedentary living were adopted and abandoned on multiple occasions throughout the early Holocene. People rebelled, left, and went to war as the social arrangements accompanying farming became more lopsided and exploitative. Nowhere does the transition towards agriculture look more chaotic and bloodier than in Europe.
Agriculture did not begin in Europe. Instead, it was imported from modern-day Turkey through the Mediterranean and further north into Britain and Scandinavia. Grain-based lifestyles appear to have first arrived in south-eastern Europe around 6500 BCE. Genetic data suggests that native Europeans rarely adopted farming practices.
Instead, the intrusion of farming came via migrants originating in modern-day Turkey and Greece.21 Farming practices had expanded into the area of modern-day Paris by approximately 5200–5100 BCE and took another millennium before they reached Ireland, Britain, and Scandinavia.22 The time it took for farming to spread from northern Turkey to Ireland was more than the same span of time that separates us from the time of Jesus of Nazareth. This was not a simple success story of the inexorable march of grain (see Figure 12).23 What followed was a boom-and-bust pattern of population growth and collapse across Europe. Populations spiked, before dropping back to preceding levels, or even dramatically below them.24 Farmers were arriving, establishing a community, flourishing in numbers over several generations, and then suddenly dying off or dispersing. Some settlements just declined, while others were completely abandoned.
How long it took to go from boom to bust varied. For Ireland and Britain, the arrival of farming (around 4000 BCE) was followed by a drop-off in population after 300–400 or so years. Similarly, in Scandinavia a peak was reached after 400 years, then populations dropped by some 70 per cent in the next 300 years. In regions across central Germany there was a slower population decline that took almost a thousand years.25 Despite differences in regions, all of them experienced some depopulation.26 This was often accompanied by changes in diet and agriculture. In Britain and Ireland, the initial population surge is associated with increased use of wheat, while the decline sees wheat replaced with hardier barley and hazelnuts.27 Eventually almost all the grain was phased out in favour of hazelnuts.
Changes in population and diet were accompanied by another, more disturbing, trend. As farmers settled down across Europe, their lives changed. Prior to the arrival of farming, there are no signs of large-scale violence or fortifications. Across the different communities there is then evidence of wealth accumulation, inequality, and defensive structures such as walls and palisades. In southern Britain we see the slow build-up of defensive structures such as enclosed causeways. These are torn down or abandoned once the population falls.
People didn’t just pick up the plough; they also picked up the sword.
While interpersonal violence wasn’t absent from Neolithic Europe before farming, it was low, with no signs of warfare. This changed as farming progressed. Around 11 per cent of skeletons from a sample of 2,363 individuals in Neolithic Europe have some form of cranial trauma. As signs of inequality and stratification increased, violence intensified. Mass burials begin to appear. Demographic collapses in Germany and Austria saw at least three massacres numbering twenty-six, thirty-four, and sixty-seven victims. In some areas, such as Hesse in central Germany, there were signs of torture and mutilation.28 The victims included women and children, suggesting it didn’t matter whom you killed so long as they were from the opposing group. If this was a battle for scarce productive land then mass killings would help to dislodge existing communities, making it easier to colonize. In other mass burial sites across Germany and Europe there is a conspicuous lack of remains from adolescents or women. Many archaeologists interpret this as evidence that they were taken as slaves and spoils of war. The massacres were sometimes brutal and systematic enough to have wiped out entire communities. This period may represent a ‘high watermark of human violence’.29 Farmers from Turkey and Greece didn’t just bring grain to Europe: they brought war and Goliath.
These bloody agrarian cycles happened not just in Europe. Across the world in North America before European colonization we see the same pattern unfolding in an entirely different landscape, with an utterly different culture. In the arid deserts of the south-west United States lie the ruins of clusters of sandstone houses. They seem impossible: great houses jutting out from such an inhospitable terrain. They were the ‘pueblos’ (Spanish for ‘village’) of the Ancestral Puebloan people.30 Chaco Canyon, one of the grandest locales, houses buildings that appear to be aligned to capture solar and lunar cycles. They were the largest non-earthen buildings constructed in North America until the nineteenth century. These were a people founded on a trio of crops that would become known as ‘the three sisters’: beans, squash, and maize.
All of these were imported from the southern lands of Mesoamerica.
Maize was especially important, constituting up to 90 per cent of their caloric intake. These resilient peoples settled down in villages, took up increasingly ritualized, hierarchical arrangements, fell into infighting then frequently left their increasingly unequal settlements.
Puebloan settlements in key parts of the Mesa Verde experienced four boom-and-bust cycles. The busts were marked by drops in wood cuttings, maize harvests, and population. These periods of crisis occurred in 700, 890, 1145, and 1285 CE. Each crisis saw a preceding increase in inequality, followed by spikes in violence, depopulation, and then declines in inequality. Each of these crises also coincides with a drying of the climate.
The final termination of 1285 was catastrophic.
In 1245 there were around 25,000 farmers in the northern south-west of the US. Forty years later there were none. Climate change, in the form of drought, played a key role in cutting maize production. In the first three downturns, the droughts were not decisive; indeed, there were many similar climatic fluctuations that the Puebloans had previously weathered with only a few losses. The fourth drought was more severe. Across these boom–bust cycles is another recurring feature. In each case the Puebloan communities saw rising wealth inequality, more exploitative conditions, and falling social cohesion. These deteriorating social conditions were the vulnerability and climate change was the threat.
When the two coincided, things fell apart.31 After the final depopulation of the northern south-west US by farmers in 1285 CE, people moved south and east to occupy larger, more peaceful towns. These towns were placed in areas that were less reliant on variable rainfall for their farming. This way of life proved to be far more resilient to swings in the climate. Despite Spanish and then American colonization, the Puebloans remain in their ancestral lands today.
32 CURSED BY GRAIN There are a few different reasons why the first experiments with farming in North America, Europe, and elsewhere experienced such cycles of collapse.
All of them hinge on grain creating larger populations and bigger problems.
It should come as no surprise that climate change played a recurring role across so many of these early collapses. Bigger populations with less mobility and more restricted diets made these first farmers more vulnerable and reliant on good weather. When that weather didn’t come, disaster could follow. The termination periods of the Ancestral Puebloan peoples coincided with drought, and the swings in population among the first farmers of Europe also show a loose relationship to the climate. The onset of wetter and cooler conditions in Britain and Ireland had a deleterious impact on food production and coincided with the population collapses.33 Farming communities were also the first in which humans, animals, and crops were packed together along with commensals including mice, rats, and crows, as well as a host of microparasites such as ticks, fleas, and mosquitoes. This cramming together of species created a hotbed for zoonotic infections. These are diseases that jump from animals to humans.
Many of the plagues of the world today, such as influenza, measles, mumps, cholera, smallpox, chicken pox, and, of course, Covid-19 are all recent developments from the past ten thousand years. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors never had to endure the throaty cough of influenza or the painful and disfiguring scabs of chicken pox or smallpox, which emerged only with the advent of urbanism and agriculture. These ‘density-dependent’ diseases require intense interaction between humans and animals, something many of the earliest cities provided in abundance.34 Such diseases also need a sufficiently large population so they don’t burn themselves out by killing all their hosts. If a new infection passes through the population, killing half, then the remaining half will be immune. A large population and high birth rate are needed for the disease to continue to infect and mutate. For smallpox, this is estimated to be a population of around 300,000. Early farming settlements would have provided enough of a crowd of people for some diseases to becomes self-perpetuating.35 Disease has been the scourge of cities throughout history. In London, for every year until 1800, there were more deaths than births. The city required a constant infusion of new people to survive. This was due in large part to the spread of typhus, syphilis, cholera, and the plague (caused by Yersinia pestis bacteria). And the same is true for many cities throughout history.
36 Bigger groups also meant that there was more chance of a disease both sparking in a population and spreading like fire. There is evidence this occurred. An analysis of 108 Scandinavian skeletons from the Neolithic found that 17 per cent contained the plague. It appears that 5,200 years ago three waves of plague swept through at least some of these communities, with the first two being smaller and the final one more severe. None contained the gene that allows for transmission through fleas, meaning that these would have been far less widespread than the later Black Death that ravaged Europe. Such a horrific disease could have played a role in the collapse of Europe’s first farming communities. Yet the outbreaks can’t quite explain the boom-bust cycle, and don’t appear to have played a role in the similar cycles that the Puebloans experienced.37 Disease could have also contributed to the abandonment of many other early settlements, although we lack evidence for now.
38 Larger densities of people can also cause conflict. Urban archaeologists use the term ‘scalar stress’ to refer to how more people packed together means more issues and disputes. Even today some crime increases more than proportionally to population. For example, if you double the population of a city then instances of theft more than double. Crime in this case is just one example of the underlying increase in conflict and disagreements. The theory of scalar stress suggests that people needed to deal with this increased social friction. This included old ways, such as breaking off to form new communities (fission) or using new or larger rituals to give people a renewed sense of unity.
Others suggest they took the novel approach of organizing hierarchically. 39 Scalar stress provides one potential explanation for the boom-bust cycles we see with early farmers. Indeed, one study of the first farmers of Europe found that a simple density-dependent conflict model matched the boombust record well. Yet it isn’t a convincing explanation as to why people left the early European farms or Puebloan settlements just as inequality and hierarchy were becoming entrenched. Moreover, coming from fluid civilizations of hunter-gatherers, we were already evolved to deal with strangers all the time. The bigger change we now faced was that we were no longer equals.40 We see the same pattern in many of these first large settlements and cities of deepening inequality preceding social breakdown.
5 Abandoned Experiments II: Voting With Feet and Fire Aborted Goliaths in Eurasia – Abandoning the First Goliaths of the Americas – The Forgotten Pyramid Cities of North America – Forgetting the Experiments – Walking Away from History ABORTED GOLIATHS IN EURASIA It wasn’t just agriculture that was a slow, staccato process. The same can be seen with the adoption of Goliaths and cities across the world.
Cities are permanent settlements with large, dense populations who have different social and economic roles (such as traders, bakers, and soldiers). Both the earliest large farming settlements and the earliest cities were slow to form and often collapsed in a similar fashion. And this wasn’t the case of the occasional disaster pushing back the tide of progress. Rather, these early collapses appear to have been a deliberate abortion of an experiment gone wrong.1 *
Man-made mounds are scattered across the world, lumps rising out of deserts and plains. Within them lies a trove of historical treasure. In archaeology, these are called ‘tells’: hills built from previous settlements.
Layer after layer of refuse, buildings, and sediment are piled together into one rounded legacy of a past community as at Tepe Gawra. There are thousands of tells in the Near East alone. Some have never been excavated. Others have been built over. Many are the remnants of settlements, communities, cities, and villages built before the world’s first states (Figure 13).
One of the best known is Çatalhöyük, in modern south-central Turkey.
Çatalhöyük is renowned as having been the largest village in the world at the time. Around 9,000 years ago, 7–8,000 people lived there, packed together in just ten hectares of land. It was a fascinating fractal of crowded, near-identical houses. Each mud-brick residence acted as a house, temple, and mausoleum. These were multifunctional houses where families slept on platforms that contained the remains of their ancestors, often their preserved skulls, which were modelled to resemble the living. The houses were crammed together so closely that for many the only means of entry was through holes in the rooftops and down ladders that descended directly into the houses. They practised agriculture alongside foraging, with a diet of wheat, barley, lentils, peas, goat, and mutton. Violating the usual expectations about agriculture, men and women appear to have had the same social status, and there were no walls, fortifications, or signs of warfare.2 Perhaps the most striking feature of Çatalhöyük is its equality. The houses are of similar size and there are almost no signs of large differences in wealth, nor any administrative or government buildings. Ian Hodder, the lead archaeologist of the Çatalhöyük excavation, once called it ‘just a very, very large village’ that ‘pushed the idea of an egalitarian village to its extreme’.3 It was not a city, but it was long-lived. It persisted for around 1,000 years before something changed.
In the middle of the seventh millennium BCE, the equality between houses came to an end. Larger complexes, dwarfing those of the preceding era and of their neighbours, began to be built. The differences in the size of houses show a dramatic increase in inequality. The Gini coefficient (a 0–1 measure of inequality) more than doubled from 0.206 in 6650 BCE to 0.499 in around 6300 BCE. That is a larger jump than moving from being as equal as the Netherlands to as lopsided as Brazil.
There are fewer signs of communal feasting and other collective activities. There are indications that animals that may have been collectively stewarded previously were increasingly under private ownership.4 This does not look to have been a welcome change. Around 6400–6300 BCE, the northern segment of Çatalhöyük was suddenly abandoned. The southern side continued for another 400 years or so, although it shrank as well. During this period, violence also increased.
Many skulls with healed fractures have been found across the site, alongside clay balls that were hurled by slingshot.5 Many other factors could have contributed to the abandonment, ranging from a drying climate to environmental destruction.
There was no single great sacking, riot, or terminating blaze. Instead, there was a slow drain of occupants until this settlement was abandoned in around 6000 BCE (Figure 14).6 Figure 14: A timeline of Çatalhöyük The slow fade-out from around 6250 BCE marks a decline over time. It is used when there are competing dates over exactly when a society collapsed and/or clear indicators of a strong deterioration prior to the collapse.
A similar pattern can be seen further afield in Africa. Jenne-Jeno is one of the oldest urban complexes in all of that continent. It was an ancient city, embedded in the rich floodplain of the Niger Delta in modern Mali. It was first settled in 250 BCE and over the course of centuries grew into an ancient African metropolis. By 800 CE, 50,000 people lived within an afternoon’s walk of each other, all revolving around a forty-two-hectare urban centre.
That complex had no palace, plaza, or public buildings, but rather was a maze of interwoven alleys and interlocking compounds. Like Çatalhöyük, there are no signs of stratification or inequality. Like Çatalhöyük, the JenneJeno people were neither solely farmers, herders, nor foragers: they relied on a cuisine of fish, cattle, and African rice. The site appears to have been originally occupied during specific seasons, before groups began to settle permanently and become more specialized. Potters, blacksmiths, fishers, crafters, and herders all lived cheek-by-jowl.7 For over a thousand years Jenne-Jeno remained equal. Then, around 900 CE, the first monument was constructed. It was a wall around the urban centre, erected at a time when trans-Saharan trade routes began to offer novel opportunities for lavish wealth accumulation. The first signs of increased wealth and power also appear to signal the decline of JenneJeno.8 About a century later, the abandonment of Jenne-Jeno began. Nearly twothirds of the settlement around the main mound was deserted. Some families moved into the walled compound, but most dispersed into smaller, self-sufficient villages. A chief took over the central mound and erected a palace. In 1180 CE he converted to Islam and shifted his palace to the nearby site of Djenné. The move coincided with flooding of the delta, which may have spoiled the rice harvests. But it also gave the chief an opportunity to break from the egalitarian tradition of Jenne-Jeno, or what remained of it. Some of the families loyally followed the chief, while the rest disappeared into the countryside.9 A similar yet subtly different trend unfolds some 11,000 kilometres away in northern China. There, the city of Taosi is the site of one of the earliest rebellions. In 2300 BCE, centuries before the earliest states of China, a fortified sixty-hectare town grew into a city nearly five times as large. Both the residences and burials were segregated, with the poor split off from the wealthy. Wealthy burials were replete with hundreds of lacquered vessels, jade axes, and traces of luxurious feasts.
The city was ringed with walls, criss-crossed with roads, and studded with monuments.10 Around 2000 BCE the city wall was razed to the ground. Ritual sites to the south were abandoned, elite quarters were retrofitted to make stone-tool workshops, royal tombs and monuments were destroyed, and the former palace became occupied by commoners and surrounded by rubbish pits. It was a clear act of rebellion.11 Now unwalled, the city swelled in size and population. Some archaeologists lament that ‘the city had clearly lost its status as a capital and was in a state of anarchy’ (described elsewhere as ‘collapse and chaos’).12 Yet it grew and flourished for another two centuries in this apparently perilous state.
Taosi started as a Goliath before being overthrown. The city was reborn in the ruins of the ruling class and lived on for two hundred years. Life did, of course, change: the monuments, mansions, and palaces were no longer maintained. This didn’t mean that people’s lives were worse. The palaces were now dilapidated whispers of their former glory, but they housed more people, while the old mansions produced practical stone tools rather than richly dressed nobles. Each of these cases is different.
Jenne-Jeno and Çatalhöyük had egalitarian origins, while Taosi started as a Goliath. There are also similarities, with each one showing signs of either rebellion or abandonment in reaction to inequality and centralization. In some ways, this is not dissimilar to the counter-dominance strategies used by foragers.
Ostracizing an aspiring ruler develops into walking away from established rulers, while execution of a domineering individual is scaled up to mass rebellion. In Jenne-Jeno and Çatalhöyük it was accomplished by the people voting with their feet, while the residents of Taosi voted with fire.
These abandonments were not rare. We see it not just in Eurasia but across the Atlantic in the Americas, too.
ABANDONING THE FIRST GOLIATHS OF THE AMERICAS Stone heads engraved with eerie, lidless eyes mark the land of Mesoamerica’s oldest city. Now, it is a graveyard of basalt faces. The largest of these weighs 40–50 tonnes. They were truly colossal undertakings.
These heads were the work of the ‘Olmecs’, Mesoamerica’s first Goliath.
San Lorenzo (we don’t know what the Olmecs called it) was their capital and it sat on a salt hill that rose almost fifty metres above the surrounding plains of east-central Mexico. The ruby jewel atop this mountain was the ‘Red Palace’, a vast earthen temple that was stained rust-red by haematite and held up by giant basalt columns. From here, the Olmec rulers held feasts with copious quantities of maize-beer to legitimize and expand their rule over the commoners who lived on the slopes and plains below.
13 San Lorenzo didn’t begin with a palace, colossal stone heads, and cornbeer-keg parties, however. Instead, 800 years earlier, the site was occupied by semi-sedentary hunter-gatherers who built artificial mounds on the floodplains to act as island homes during inundations. The city itself appears to have been a ceremonial centre. As the population grew, these ceremonies would have become more important as a way of fostering a sense of connection between larger groups. More rituals meant that more maize was grown. It was during this period, which archaeologists call the ‘Chicharras phase’ (1250–1150 BCE), that an elite class began to emerge, and the construction of the Red Palace commenced. The demand for commoners to grow more maize for the rituals appears to have run contrary to their hunter-gatherer traditions, stoking tension between them and the elites. Shortly after its peak in power, around 1000 BCE, residents began to drift away. Some scattered to the countryside while others emigrated to the rival city of La Venta. As San Lorenzo declined, instability grew. Many of the great stone heads were mutilated and buried, indicating a violent rejection of elite rule and symbols. By 400 BCE, the city was a mausoleum of basalt decapitations sinking into the mud.
This was not uncommon in Mesoamerica, although some early settlements were much longer-lived.14 Take, for instance, one of San Lorenzo’s neighbours, Monte Albán. Around 1500 BCE farmers began to settle permanently into the different arms of the Oaxaca Valley in southern Mexico. A millennium later, a new settlement appeared on a central hill, almost two kilometres above sea level, overlooking the surrounding plains.
Whoever built it levelled the top of the hill, creating a vast ceremonial plaza. At 150 by 300 metres, this was large enough to host a small city for public rituals. It also had a long, narrow stone ballcourt, used for playing a popular Mesoamerican game in which opposing teams tried to strike a ball through their opponent’s hoops using their hips.15 Over the centuries, thousands of people flocked to this new, growing city of Monte Albán. They lived in dried mud-brick (called ‘adobe’) houses high above the valley, ate hot tortillas made from corn, used tools made from imported obsidian, and increasingly warred with their neighbours. By 150 BCE it was a city of 17,000, with irrigated canals and monuments celebrating their successful raids.
It was a surprisingly equal city. There are no signs of a central palace, no hoards of personal wealth, no centralized food storage, no large differences in housing size, and no aggrandizing depictions of rulers.
From 500 to 100 BCE the closest we have to a glorified advertisement for a ruler is a stone carving of a masked individual leading a ritual procession. There may have been some rulers and elites, but they were largely faceless. Then things slowly began to change.16 In the seventh century CE, inequality began to rise.17 Rulers began to erect carved stone artworks. These represent genealogies and marriages, a way to flaunt hereditary prestige. Monte Albán was losing its collective character. Eventually, the populace began to abandon the city. Two of the most established archaeologists of Monte Albán, Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas, observe that commoners may have simply ‘voted with their feet’.18 There was an ancient conurbation in Mesoamerica even greater than Monte Albán. On the outskirts of Mexico City lie the remains of a city dating from around 100 BCE, crowned with colossal pyramids.
We don’t know what the city was originally called, but 700 years after it fell apart the Aztecs named it Teotihuacan, meaning ‘place of the gods’.
It was a preColombian metropolis, which held perhaps up to 100,000 people and covered twenty square kilometres.
Between 100 BCE and 550 CE Teotihuacan appears to have been a planned city. It was organized into quadrants, its north–south axis known as the Street of the Dead and its east–west axis marked more prosaically by two avenues named East and West. The settlement is framed by three gigantic monuments: the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon, and the Feathered Serpent Pyramid. Despite the glut of monuments, there are no clear signs of centralized hierarchy, nor any artwork that shows one human subjugating another. Its inhabitants appear to have known about the writing systems of the Maya and the Zapotec, but rarely used their own, apart from a few scant glyphs on murals.19 Whether Teotihuacan began with an oligarchy of kings or as some kind of collective arrangement is unclear. What is clear, however, is that it changed dramatically. That change occurred shortly after the Feathered Serpent Pyramid was built, around 200 CE, with the sacrifice of some 200 victims.
Most were from outside the city, and had their hands tied behind their backs before being killed. Despite this opening massacre, the pyramid didn’t last long. About fifty years later it was desecrated, its offerings looted, and the plumed serpent statues that adorned it pulled down and smashed to the ground. What was left of it was covered by a raised platform. This practice of defacing or smashing items and then covering or burning them is common in Mesoamerica, and is known as a ‘termination ritual’. It is designed to sever the cosmic connection between a site or object and a deity. After the termination of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, no new pyramids were built and no more people were sacrificed. Instead, wealth and energy were channelled into an urban renewal. New great stone multi-occupancy apartment buildings were erected across the city. It was not just the rich who lived in these dwellings, but also the broader populace. Each dwelling contained well-plastered walls and ceiling, internal drainage systems, and around a hundred people. We don’t know how they were governed, but it does not appear to have been in a top-down manner (at least not one that turns up in their art, writing, or buildings). The most likely reality is some kind of decentralized management across twenty or so ‘three-temple complexes’, with each overseeing around a hundred apartment blocks.
While there were probably still nobles and elites, the city was remarkably equal in wealth. Some tentative calculations based on the size of houses suggest that income inequality was under half that of modern-day Denmark.20 It was not to last. Towards the final periods of Teotihuacan, the walled compounds begin to become more isolated. Each developed its own trade routes to foreign locations and controlled access points.
Teotihuacan had become a cluster of gated communities. More signs of wealth inequality emerge. In about 500 CE, the city descended into flames. Over 150 buildings across the city were burned, including almost all of those on the Street of the Dead. All the temples, pyramids, and public buildings were demolished, the images of gods destroyed, and people butchered in the palaces. There appear to be no signs of foreign invaders. There is evidence of drought, but this appears to occur after the great burning of Teotihuacan. Instead, this appears to have been a case of popular rebellion and elite conflict. We can’t see the details, but archaeologists suggest that it could have been ‘intermediate elites’ (the rich or neighbourhood leaders) attempting to topple the ruling class, or factional strife among elites, or a mass revolt, or a bit of all three. We simply don’t know. What we do know is that there was a systematic campaign to incinerate the ritual heart of the city.
21 Within a century the population of the city had dropped by half. It was essentially abandoned but lingered. In the epi-classic period (550–850 CE) the population dropped to 30,000 or lower as people retreated into the surrounding hills and mountains. Teotihuacan never recovered.
Evidence of emigration and revolution can be seen in other areas, such as the Andes of South America. Take, for instance, the collapse of the later city of Tiwanaku (c.500–1000 CE).22 Tiwanaku, founded on the shores of Lake Titicaca in western Bolivia, begins as an egalitarian site.
After it grows into a city of tens of thousands, inequality and hierarchy creep up. Massive stone monoliths of high-status individuals are erected.
Public ceremonial centres begin to be cordoned off. The locally managed countryside that fed the city is grabbed and remade into a top-down production system.23 It results in over-exploitation of land, resources, and people.24 By 800 CE Tiwanaku is a Goliath. It continues in this unequal state for around another two centuries. Then, within a few decades, it falls apart. The monolithic Gateway of the Sun is toppled, and storage jars smashed, in an act that bears all the hallmarks of a revolution. The peoples who left the city disregard the previous elite culture. Post-Tiwanaku pottery styles are bereft of elite-imperial iconography such as the ‘Front Face Deity’ and ‘Puma Head’. The new, smaller, rural communities replicated many of the old ceremonies performed at Tiwanaku, but these now took place in open, collective spaces. Those who left Tiwanaku seemed intent on rejecting the power and authority of its previous elite.25 Tiwanaku and San Lorenzo faced additional pressure in the form of climate change: these highland peoples were reliant on an agricultural system that was susceptible to drought. The abandonment of San Lorenzo coincided with a prolonged phase of drought. And the flight from Tiwanaku and reorganization of its politics also seems to have coincided with a period of drought, indicated by the fluctuating levels of Lake Titicaca. Notably, as they move away from Tiwanaku, they become reliant on a more flexible combination of fishing, hunting, gathering, and herding.26 This is not a comprehensive account of the different sites that were abandoned in a similar way across southern and central America. There are signs of revolt across the Andes, largely in modern-day Peru, including the Wari culture (c.600–1000 CE), the Moche (100–700 CE), and the ritual site of Pukura.27 What we see across all of them is a pattern (see Figure 15).28 People revolted and abandoned urban settlements as they became increasingly unequal and hierarchical. It looks similar to what happened thousands of kilometres away with Çatalhöyük, Jenne-Jeno, and Taosi.29 These weren’t just abandonments or rebellions. People were choosing to walk away from what we tend to see as the natural course of history: the adoption of cities, agriculture, and states.
Figure 15: Inequality and collapse in early Goliaths THE FORGOTTEN PYRAMID CITIES OF NORTH AMERICA The first European explorers often portrayed the land they invaded as an empty wilderness filled with wild animals and even wilder humans. In North America, they overlooked the signs of more urban, centralized peoples who farmed and built monuments. The Puebloans of the south-west US were not the only pre-European farmers and builders of North America.
European colonizers came across the remains of numerous old cities and towns built around great flat-topped pyramids made from soil. They dismissed these as being either inspired by the Spanish or built by a more advanced and civilized people who preceded the indigenous Americans.
They ignored the fact that the modern-day United States was once littered with indigenous farming cities. All of which collapsed prior to European arrival.
A millennium ago, in a land of dispersed hunter-gatherers, arose a city of vast earthen temples and powerful priests. This was Cahokia, the first city of the US. Before Cahokia there had been villages with no signs of war and some indications of democracy, such as longhouses that could have held councils of two to three dozen people. Domesticated corn arrived in the area in 900 CE and took an increasingly prominent role in the diet of the Native Americans there. Just over a century later the ‘big bang’ of Cahokia occurred. Neighbouring villages were drained of their populaces, who resettled into Cahokia. Cahokia appears to have been a ceremonial centre and the sacrifices were one element of its ritualistic practices. Whatever services it did provide, they didn’t last long.30 As we’ve already seen, Cahokia was abandoned and became a haunted marsh of derelict pyramids.31 A thousand years ago, the US was dotted with urban centres and emerging Goliaths built around great piles of earth. In northern Alabama there is ‘Moundville’, a collection of twenty-eight flat-topped mounds housing perhaps 10,000 people.
Stretching across the southern Appalachians (northern Georgia and some of the surrounding areas of Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina) are dozens of similar sites.
Bordering the Puebloan farming communities of the south-western US were the Huhugam (previously called the Hohokam by archaeologists), who had flat-topped pyramids for public rituals. They also had plazas and ballcourts, much like Mesoamerican cities such as San Lorenzo.
The Huhugam built all this in the desert of modern-day Arizona using vast networks of irrigation canals. Hiding in plain sight are a host of ancient North American Goliaths.32 Despite being thousands of kilometres apart, these different sites have much in common. All were built at similar times, with initial construction for both Moundville and Cahokia beginning in 1000 CE, and 1050–1150 CE for a range of sites across the Huhugam culture, due probably to favourable climatic conditions. During 950–1250 CE the northern hemisphere underwent an unusual period of warmth known as the Medieval Warm Period. This would have provided better conditions for growing crops and supporting bigger populations. Like the Puebloans, all these sites and cities were built on the three sisters of corn, beans, and squash. The Huhugam, Moundville, and the mounds of northern Georgia all also look strikingly similar to the cities of the Maya and the Aztecs, with flat-topped pyramids and grand plazas (the ancestral Puebloans are a notable exception to this architectural trend). The Huhugam even had a similar ballgame to the one played in San Lorenzo and Monte Albán.
Many of the ingredients for cities and Goliaths seem to have been imports from Mesoamerican empires. The three sister crops were first grown in Mesoamerica and then spread via indigenous trade routes through the deserts of the south-western US (the Puebloans and Huhugam) before disseminating across North America and even into Canada. They flowed into Cahokia, Moundville, and northern Georgia.
These routes that snaked up and across the Americas may have carried not just food, crops, and jewels, but also ideas, stories of cities, great rectangular ballcourts, and imposing religious rulers who cemented their reigns through the blood of sacrificed men, women, and children. Some activities, like mound building, preceded the influence of Mesoamerica.
For instance, the first earthen pyramids in the Americas dating back to 3500 BCE can be found in northeastern Louisiana, not in Mexico or the Yucatán. Other practices among the first Goliaths of North America, such as growing the three sisters, ballcourts, using stone-chipped daggers that represented gods, and much of the cosmology, seem to have been inspired by Mesoamerica. Nonetheless, in North America these were combined to make new, unique societies.33 All these sites progressed in a fashion that will by now be familiar.
Moundville began as a small settlement of dispersed mounds. Two centuries later the two largest temples, a plaza, and a surrounding palisade were built. Shortly thereafter there are signs of a religious elite receiving tribute in the form of food from the surrounding villages. Elite burials adorned with costumes and jewellery begin to turn up in the pyramids.34 Over the course of two centuries people began to leave Moundville, returning to the surrounding villages. The palisade was no longer repaired or replaced and many of the pyramids became unused shells. What was once a city of up to 10,000 people became a purely ceremonial centre populated by a few elite families. By the end of the sixteenth century, all the pyramids had been abandoned. The exact reason for the slow drain away from Moundville is unclear. However, it’s hard to ignore the pattern of inequality rising and then the commoners making an exodus from the city.
35 Around 2,500 kilometres across the green ridges and valleys, and the burnt-gold deserts of southern North America, lies the Sonoran Desert.
There the people known as the Huhugam built open, small, rounded platforms that were used for public events and ceremonies. These platforms were accompanied by open ballcourts for public games.
Dozens of stadiummound-centred villages were sprinkled across the Gila River to form a hive of thriving towns, often within a day’s round trip of each other. The indigenous peoples made an oasis in the deserts of the south-western US.36 Then things began to change. Many of the towns were consolidated into cities as populations surged. The rounded mounds became taller, steeper, flat-topped pyramids. The public stadiums were vacated. The games were clearly over. Rich residences began to be placed atop these stepped monuments, which now leered over the city. Elites began to be buried differently, in their own adobe sarcophagi.
Around the year 1300 CE the Huhugam chief Siwani would have sat over an ancient desert metropolis full of pyramids and a sixty-square-kilometre irrigation system that fed another five cities and a castle that the Spanish would later call Casa Grande. By the end of the century the cities and villages lay largely empty. The irrigation systems fell into disuse and the canals were not repaired. Specialists have pointed to numerous reasons for this decline, including disease, drought, conflict, overpopulation, and environmental degradation.37 The Huhugam ditched their cities and powerful chief in favour of more resilient smaller communities.38 Other areas seem to have undergone periodic collapses that look more like the Puebloans. The mini-Goliaths throughout the Appalachians would rise up, last a century or two, and then contract and collapse. Accounts from the first Spanish invaders, archaeological remains of palisades and warfare, and studies of similar societies can give us some insights. Across these mini-kingdoms individual warriors and leaders would compete for status, leading not only to infighting among elites, but also to warfare between neighbours.
In some ways, war was an extension of elite conflict: a pursuit of power and status through violence scaled up from individuals to larger groups.
A lack of control over citizens, who regularly left, and uprisings also seem to have been factors. The Appalachian mini-Goliaths are not remarkable: these problems of elite competition, warfare, instability, and abandonment were often endemic in chiefdoms, hierarchical huntergatherers, and Goliaths that had yet to become states.39 In each of these cases (as well as those of the Puebloans, the Calusa, and north-west coast Native Americans) we see a similar phenomenon. A small priestly class emerges and begins to boss others around. They display their power, sometimes through innocent means such as feasts and opulent burials, and sometimes through more unsettling methods, such as slavery and human sacrifice. Many archaeologists have pointed to these ‘secret societies’ as being one of the original blueprints for gaining power.
Exclusive groups claiming access to special knowledge and skills would use their religious advantage to threaten others, gain political power, and amass more resources. Once lootable resources appeared, these covert cabals could fuse together all the sources of power: control of information, violence, authority, and resources.40 All these sites across North America share another trait. All of them collapsed around the same time. Warmer conditions helped to create larger surpluses that these cities and pyramids were built on. Similarly, cooler conditions seem to have played a key role in their demise. The ends of the cities and hierarchies of Cahokia, Moundville, the Puebloans, and the Huhugam all came with the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the onset of the ‘Little Ice Age’, c.1250–1850 CE (Figure 16). There were a series of pulses of cooling across the northern hemisphere, with some areas cooling by around 1°C. In some cases, a changing climate seems to have played a central role. The big bang of Cahokia coincided with one of the wettest fifty-year periods in the last 1,000 years, while the abandonment of upland farming complexes occurred during a series of severe droughts.41 Figure 16: A timeline of the first Goliaths of North America FORGETTING THE EXPERIMENTS What is most telling is how this period of nascent cities and urbanism was remembered by later generations. It was not looked on fondly.
Indigenous people today across these regions have oral traditions, stories passed down by word of mouth, which recount this as a time of rebellions against overbearing despots. The modern Puebloans recall the Chacoan collapse as a reaction to the concentration of power in leaders. In the Navajo rendition, a stranger called the ‘Great Gambler’ (or Noqoìlpi) descended to the Puebloans. He challenged them to games, beating them so consistently that he came to own much of their property, as well as their men, children, and women. He then tricked the rest of the Puebloans into building Chaco Canyon on the false promise that he would release their property and people. Eventually the people aligned with a group of gods to overthrow him.42 The Cherokee, whose nation covers much of the mounded territory of northern Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, recall once being ruled by the Ani-Kutani, a hereditary secret society who built the pyramids that the abandoned towns were once centred around. These rulers grew arrogant and oppressive and, in some versions, even became cannibals. The people despised these tyrants, but also feared them, and so endured their fate in silence. Eventually, the people rose up in revolt and destroyed the moundbuilders.43 The O’odham descendants of the Huhugam pyramid builders see the collapse of these earlier cities and pyramids as stemming from a fight between the cultural hero Elder Brother and the ruling priest class at the time. The ruling priests grew arrogant, suggesting that they knew more than Elder Brother. They offended him, and rather than apologize, they tried to murder him on multiple occasions. Elder Brother retaliated and assembled an army of the disenfranchised. As they approached Casa Grande the rebels sang ‘Yonder stands the doomed habitation. About the pueblo runs its frightened chieftain.’ The chieftain ran, never to return.44 Then there is of course Cahokia, which the Native Americans chose not to remember at all. The Native Americans didn’t just drop their elites and cities; they organized themselves in such a way as to prevent them from re-emerging.
The peoples of Moundville, Cahokia, and the Huhugam dispersed into smaller towns and farms. Across the Mississippi, these towns still often contained mounds, but they were usually open, smaller, and used for public ceremonial celebrations. The O’odham descendants of the Huhugam started to build new stadiums with a ballcourt game played by women. Some mound-based mini-kingdoms remained around the Mississippi, such as the Natchez and Tunicas in the Lower Mississippi Valley (crossing Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi), but these were smaller and fewer than before.
Religion became decentralized: priests no longer ruled towns and ceremonies. Spirituality and medicine became more shared, public practices. The Cherokee replaced the fabled Ani-Kutani with individual healers and conjurers. The Huhugam stopped burying elites in adobe coffins. Instead, they cremated the remains of all the dead. The priests of Cahokia, Moundville, and Huhugam likely justified their rule through exclusive access to rituals and the supernatural. These peoples were rearranging religious practices to ensure that no such imbalance could form and be exploited again.
Leaders still existed across North America in the centuries that followed the fall of the Goliaths. Yet these communities tended to be democratic hierarchies with strict checks and balances. Each Cherokee town had both a council of men and a council of women, while family-based clans spread their members across towns as a check against the councils and chiefs. Most Native Americans (both men and women) contributed to major decisions, such as whether to go war. Sometimes great assemblies convened to seek a consensus decision. These decentralized political webs were held together by threads of reciprocal gift-giving, trade, and, in some cases, food sharing.
Diplomatic arrangements, like confederacies of different nations (such as the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois people) helped to bring people into larger groups without over-centralizing power.
Most of these dispersed, egalitarian peoples began to rely more on hunting and gathering and less on farming. After the Huhugam, the Tohono O’odham (desert people) derived less than 20 per cent of their calories from agriculture, while the Hia-Ced O’odham got even less than that. The arrangements were not perfect: there was still war and suffering, as well as some inequality and hierarchy. Yet it is hard to see this as a worse arrangement than their world before the collapse. For most people it meant healthier diets, more movement, and freedom from the threat of having a loved one, or yourself, beheaded and thrown into a shallow grave beneath a pyramid of dirt. There is a good reason why the later generations organized themselves to prevent a Goliath from being reborn.45 This pattern of organizing to prevent Goliath rebirth was aided by the climate. The cooler, more drought-prone conditions of the Little Ice Age would have made creating large agricultural surpluses much more difficult.
This is perhaps why the Calusa and other hierarchical foragers (who relied on fish rather than grain) persisted until European contact, while the agrarian pyramid builders of Cahokia and Moundville fell apart and never returned. The climate conspired against Goliath.46 WALKING AWAY FROM HISTORY Twelve thousand years ago, our communities changed alongside the climate. Yet our psychology did not. As lootable resources were gathered, some came to try to dominate others in a slow, protracted struggle. Some chose to accept the new arrangement, while many suffered, rebelled, or simply walked away. The adoption of agriculture, cities, and states took thousands of years partly because it was resisted by so many of us. That was due to our deeply ingrained psychological traits.
One was our aversion to being dominated. Many of the cases here are not just collapses but also examples of successful counter-dominance strategies.
Intentionally destroying elite monuments and exiting (voting with both feet and fire) are a larger-scale version of ostracizing or eliminating an upstart hunter. Groups coming together and then breaking apart when conflict arises are also not dissimilar to earlier fission-fusion patterns.
Indeed, some scholars have even described the rise and fall of mini-Goliaths across northern Georgia as exactly this kind of process.47 Interestingly, many of the cases, such as Tiwanaku, San Lorenzo, and Jenne-Jeno, cut against the conventional wisdom that states allowed for the creation of large-scale farming and eventually cities. The logic was that people needed rulers and bureaucracy to create stable food production to sustain a city’s large population. This clearly wasn’t necessary: across the world cities and large-scale irrigation preceded centralized, hierarchical arrangements. And they often fell apart once a domineering Goliath emerged.
Rather than people willingly and logically choosing to adopt rulers and then cities, they were developing agriculture and cities (in different orders) and sometimes aborting them once these social experiments became infected with dominance hierarchies. Rather than states being constructed to allow for irrigation and cities, we often see cities arising first, elite groups hijacking and repurposing pre-existing food production, then people often resisting an emerging hierarchy. It’s not a universal pattern. Other areas of the world see a smoother rise from inequality to hierarchical cities. Yet, history and the march towards states was far slower, messier, and more resisted than is commonly assumed.48 Cahokia, and the other cases covered here, are indicative of the fate that befell many infant Goliaths, not just in the Americas but across the world.
Cities and settlements often began in an egalitarian fashion with no signs of leaders and roughly equal-sized houses. These more collective communities often persisted for an extraordinarily long time: Çatalhöyük for some two millennia, and both Jenne-Jeno and Monte Albán for around a thousand years. (Only a few exceptional empires, such as the Byzantine, persisted for a thousand years or more.) Then, inequality slowly, haltingly grew into more entrenched forms of rulership, a process that was often accompanied by war, fortifications, centralized agriculture, and human sacrifice. Then, people left. Sometimes it was a more peaceful affair; at other times their exit was celebrated with smashed gates and monuments and cities set ablaze.
This trend would continue for millennia. The boundary between Goliaths and surrounding non-state peoples was porous. Whether it was Chinese peasants joining the nomadic raiders to the north or Romans defecting to the Huns, citizens regularly and voluntarily left Goliaths. When the walls were weak and social control underdeveloped, fading back into the periphery was a tempting option.49 Despite this general pattern, we also need to be aware of the differences.
The collapse of Tiwanaku and Cahokia took a generation or two, while the draining of Çatalhöyük and San Lorenzo played out over centuries.
The aftermath of the collapse also varied. While swathes of land around Cahokia and the Mississippi Basin were left vacant, the communities that followed Monte Albán in the Oaxaca Valley were even more unequal and autocratic with bigger, richer palaces. These differences, while important, should still not distract us from the underlying picture that early Goliaths were frequently fragile and rejected. It’s a trend we can see beyond the case studies covered here.50 There were thousands of villages and settlements during the Neolithic.
While we can’t carry out a systematic investigation, there is some evidence of a similar pattern. In 2023, the archaeologist Dan Lawrence and his colleagues examined the long-term trends of several hundred urban sites across south-west Asia, from 12,000 to 2,000 years ago.
They initially expected that the longest-lived settlements would be those with the most productive agricultural land. That wasn’t the case. Many of the most persistent settlements were in marginal environments. Instead, settlement longevity was negatively correlated with more centralized arrangements.
Whether due to war or abandonment, longevity declined as hierarchy increased. The earlier settlements were astonishingly persistent. Their average age during the period 12,000–10,000 years before today is over 3,000 years. This drops in subsequent periods as Goliaths grow and take over.
51 The earlier settlements were perhaps more egalitarian, but also much more resilient. We’ll need to wait for more evidence and bigger studies to see whether or not this trend is a statistically significant one across the world.52 This pattern, if robust, could even extend to more recent finds.
Laser scanning across the Amazon has revealed cities and settlements with advanced irrigation systems hidden beneath the lush canopy. In the Ecuadorian Amazon 2,500 years ago, the inhabitants crafted a city of 6,000 earthen platforms that would have held tens of thousands of people. Those platforms, like those in Cahokia and the Maya, were organized around a central structure that itself had a raised platform.
The platforms were connected by roads, the longest of which is 25 kilometres. In the south-west Amazon are several urban sites dotted with rectangular platform mounds, stepped platforms, and conical pyramids standing up to twenty-two metres tall. The Ecuadorian sites were inhabited for around a millennium. Yet eventually all these cities and settlements were abandoned in favour of more dispersed lifestyles. For now, we don’t know why. But it is yet another reminder that the path towards urbanism, and often the inequality that accompanied it, was reversible.53 Not all early Goliaths were aborted or abandoned, however. Some became far larger, more permanent structures that spread across the world.
6 Goliath Rises New Fuels, New Goliaths – How to Escape a Goliath – Goliath Evolution – Our Sacrifice – Stories of Subjugation – A Gendered Goliath – The Losers of Evolution NEW FUELS, NEW GOLIATHS Sixteenth-century New Guinea had practised agriculture for as long as Egypt (since 5000–4500 BCE), growing yam, taro, and bananas. Despite this, New Guinea looked rather different from Egypt. It never developed a large, stratified society, let alone a pharaonic ruler and towering pyramids.
In the seventeenth century a new crop was introduced to the archipelago of New Guinea: the starchy orange tuber that we call sweet potato.
Portuguese colonizers took it into their Indonesian provinces, and it travelled from there through the hands of local traders. For a time, it appeared that the introduction of the sweet potato might lead to an indigenous state arising in New Guinea. This new staple led to a surge in agricultural productivity and a boom in population. People began to craft and trade more prestige goods. Yet, no group ever went the way of Egypt. A state never arose, and the politics remained fragmented in competing communities.1 Understanding why some areas of the world established enduring empires and kingdoms while others didn’t means understanding not just how Goliaths were created, but how they evolved the right structures to persevere and avoid collapse.
The famed economist Adam Smith, the forefathers of communism Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and many big history books have all theorized that agriculture created a surplus of resources, thus enabling full-time rulers to manage everyone else without wasting time on producing food. It’s clear that this isn’t the full picture. We have already encountered hunter-gatherers who produced hierarchies and a surplus but never tilled a field. Then there is New Guinea, which developed large agricultural surpluses yet never produced a state or a large-scale Goliath.
There were ten centres of independent agricultural production around the world, and only around four of them (the Near East, the Yellow River Basin in China, the Andes, and Mesoamerica) developed states (see Figure 17).2 These were the five original states (initial experiments that did not emulate a neighbour or competitor): the First Dynasty of Egypt, Uruk in Mesopotamia, the Xia Dynasty in China, Monte Albán in Mesoamerica, and the Wari (or potentially Tiwanaku) in the Andes.
Original states were only ever created in these centres of food production. States became the political scaffolding for Goliaths, creating far more organized, stable, and large-scale societies. All the abandoned experiments we’ve covered, from the first farmers of Europe to the pyramid cities of North America, also relied on agriculture. Clearly, agriculture is a necessary but not sufficient condition for creating a state.3 Goliath fuel (caged land, lootable resources, and monopolizable weapons) can help explain why states arose in these areas yet not in Japan or New Guinea. They all required restricted exit options, monopolizable weapons, and new lootable resources in the form of domesticated crops and animals. Growing populations and a reliance on agriculture shrank exit options. Mesopotamia was a land cordoned off by two rivers (the name quite literally means ‘the land between rivers’ in Greek), while Egypt was trapped between the Red Sea and Sahara Desert.4 New weapons were still needed to capitalize on greater masses of trapped people.5 The rise of the earliest macro-states (covering an area of more than 100,000 square kilometres) – such as Akkad in Mesopotamia and the Old Egyptian Kingdom – coincided with the spread of bronze metallurgy in the region and the proliferation of hand-held weapons such as bronze swords (around 3000 BCE).6 These probably would not have been enough without the new lootable resources that became available after the end of the ice age: domesticated crops and animals.7 Cereals are the ultimate lootable resource. Wheat and barley (in Mesopotamia and Egypt), rice and millet (in China), and maize (in Mesoamerica) all have regular harvest periods, are all calorically dense, and can be easily spotted, confiscated, and carted off to a distant ruler. They can’t be easily hidden by a farmer from a tax collector or harvested at unpredictable times. One broad-spanning analysis over several millennia found that the production of cultivated cereals was the strongest predictor for the development of states.8 Another, covering Europe in the period 1300–1700, showed that observable calories (easily seen food sources) were highly correlated with stronger states with a greater tax base.9 Unlike salmon or other fish, cereal cultivation can also support far larger, denser populations.
The world relies on a handful of cereals today largely because they were an ideal tax crop five thousand years ago. As James C. Scott proclaimed, ‘grains make states’.10
Although it wasn’t just grains. Domesticated animals helped as well.
Cattle, goats, and sheep provided a storable and mobile source of calories and protein, as well as materials such as hide, wool, bone, and sinew.
Horses can aid in war and trade. Cattle and horses can both assist and supercharge agriculture. We see this when we compare Mesoamerica and North America to Eurasia. Eurasia developed far greater disparities in wealth than Mesoamerica or North America did. That is largely because Eurasia had horses and other large, domesticated mammals (such as cows, goats, and sheep), while the Americas did not. Ploughs pulled by horse and ox allowed for a greater surplus and disproportionately benefited the few who owned land and could afford them. Eventually, warriors mounted horses to conquer others.11 The new lootable resources of domesticated crops and animals were not evenly distributed. They were largely a matter of geographical fortune.12 China got pigs, rice, and millet; Mesopotamia and Egypt received cattle, goats, sheep, wheat, barley, and einkorn; Mesoamerica was bequeathed turkey, beans, squash, and maize; and the Andes were handed llamas, alpacas, and potatoes.
Goliath fuel can also explain why some regions of the world had agriculture but never built a state. New Guinea, western Africa, the Sahel, Ecuador, and the eastern US had domesticated crops but few to no lootable ones. New Guinea had bananas that can only be stored for a month or so before rotting. Ecuador and the eastern US had squash that does not have one easy harvest period during which a tax collector could drop by. Rather, they can be harvested over a period of several months.
Taro, potatoes, and sweet potatoes are all grown underground and can only be stored for around 1–6 months. They can also often be left underground after their harvest period. These were not crops that were easily captured and monopolized by an elite class. In contrast, wheat, rice, and corn are all highly visible: corn advertises itself with high stalks, while rice paddies and waving golden fields of wheat are difficult to miss.
All of them require significant labour, have predictable harvest times, and can be stored for years or decades in the right circumstances. Crops such as corn, rice, wheat, and barley are highly lootable (see Table 2).13 Table 2: The lootability of different crops Crop Visibilit y Postharvest storabilit y (in optimal conditio ns) Labour intensity Lootabili ty Banana High 1–2 months Low Low Maize High Around a decade Moderat e High Potato Low 4–5 months Low Low Squash Moderat e 2–6 months Moderat e Low Sweet Potato Low 6 months Low Low Taro Low 1 month High (moderat e if irrigated) Medium Rice High Decades High High Wheat High Decades High High While western Africa and the Sahel had more lootable resources such as African rice and pearl millet, they lacked domesticated animals and had a low population density. The geography was made up of flat coastal plains and inland hilly plateaus, providing plenty of exit options.
Eventually, the rice-growing Ghana Empire (300–1050 CE) did emerge in the western Sahel, although likely after having interacted with other states.14 While northern Japan did have millet, it was cultivated late (around 689–1015 CE) and after the introduction of rice.15 Rice laid the foundation for later elite groups and an empire. When exactly an empire was established in Japan is shrouded in myth, but the current Japanese emperor (Naruhito) appears to have an unbroken lineage from around 500 CE.
Eastern North America was well on its way to building a state with Cahokia before it fell apart. Even then, these pyramid cities arose only after the importation of corn from Mesoamerica. And they struggled to rebuild large Goliaths during the Little Ice Age when the conditions meant less Goliath fuel to support and tax big, dense populations. North America also had bountiful exit options.
However, the fall of Cahokia, Moundville, the Huhugam, and the Puebloans does not mean that North America would never have seen an indigenous empire arise. On the contrary, across the world state-building was a slow process that took centuries or millennia and was littered with failed attempts. It was less than two centuries between the failure of the first Goliaths of North America (about 1250–1350 CE) and the arrival of the first European invaders (around the 1530s). On the coast, European expeditions encountered the Calusa. Further inland, when they arrived at the Mississippi Basin, they still encountered several small, mound-based mini-kingdoms.
Imagine if the Europeans hadn’t arrived for several more centuries, indigenous populations had continued to grow (decreasing exit options), trade had intensified with Mesoamerica, and North America had had time to emerge from the Little Ice Age. North America would still almost certainly have built an indigenous state eventually, as did all other world regions with Goliath fuel.
Well, all except one. The Indus Valley Civilization is the only remaining case of a centre of agricultural food production that never developed a Goliath. This group (beginning around 3200 BCE) was a collection of commercially connected cities across the Indus Valley in modern Pakistan.
The largest city of Mohenjo-daro housed roughly 40,000–60,000 people at its peak. They had plumbing for communal bathhouses and communal halls that appeared to be open to the public. Despite having lootable resources (namely rice and millet) and being located in a riverine valley, there are no signs of inequality or hierarchy. Here was a community with plenty of Goliath fuel but no Goliath.16 The Indus perhaps never developed a Goliath owing to low population density. The Indus cities were more spread out than those in Uruk or Egypt, which meant that people had less need to protect their assets or compete for status with neighbours. Or perhaps the Indus simply managed to maintain norms and counter-dominance mechanisms that prevented state formation.
Such cultural safeguards would largely be invisible to us today. For now, we don’t know. Whatever the reason for its exceptional equality (and longevity, having lasted almost a thousand years) it eventually broke apart. A millennium later South Asia was dominated by kingdoms such as the Magadha Empire.17 Once a Goliath emerges in a world region – as we see in China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia – it tends to re-emerge despite collapses. Yet, history is not just a story of the endless march of empire. People regularly escaped from Goliaths and tens of millions still do so today.
HOW TO ESCAPE A GOLIATH In the highlands of Southeast Asia lies an unusual land. It is a 2.5-millionsquare-kilometre expanse containing 130 million people. If it were a country, it would be the tenth largest in both land area and population. It crosses ten states – China, Taiwan, India, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Bangladesh – yet none of them control it. It is called Zomia and its population is, practically speaking, stateless. It contains a plethora of peoples with hundreds of different languages, ethnicities, and cultures. Many are resolutely egalitarian, but there are also some smaller feudal and hierarchical societies, such as the Shan (in Myanmar), as well as the Tay and Nung (in Vietnam). Yet none are fullblown states, nor have they been incorporated into their larger neighbours.
For all intents Zomia is a stateless giant hidden in plain sight.
Zomia appears to be an intentional creation rather than the remnants of ancient ‘uncivilized’ peoples. For the past few centuries, both the surrounding states and many scholars believed that the highlands were populated by barbarians who pre-dated the rice-growing lowland kingdoms and empires around them. That’s why they lacked kings, writing, and intensive agriculture. But the anthropologist James C. Scott, who spent months living in Zomia, came to the opposite conclusion: Zomia was mainly created in opposition to the states surrounding it. It was a haven of people trying to evade state capture, whether they be refugees, exiles, bandits, rogues, escaped slaves, or oppressed minorities. For instance, the Akha recall their origins as highlanders who moved to the lowlands to farm before being pushed back to the highlands by Tai warriors. Sure enough, their accounts seem to chime with the creation of the first city-state by Tai raiders in the twelfth century, followed by the expansion of the Chinese Yuan Dynasty in the thirteenth century. The lifestyles of the Akha and many others were not archaic relics, but active attempts to escape empire.18 The violence of building and growing empires in the lowlands, as well as the pandemics that accompanied them, quite literally made people run for the hills.
Sometimes what made them flee were the violence and economic losses that accompanied a collapse. There was a constant churn of new identities as more groups migrated into the area, mixing into the cultural soup. Some of those who walked and ran into the hills maintained a semblance of hierarchy. Yet most became dispersed and egalitarian.
Zomia is a land that is not ruled by a Goliath. That appears to be an intentional choice rather than a historical accident.
The location of Zomia, the mobile ways in which these groups live, the crops they grow, and even the stories they tell, were all designed to evade being detected and caught by their Goliath neighbours. Not only that, but also to prevent their own societies from generating systems of domination.
In many ways they resembled the several Native American groups who turned towards more mobile hunting and gathering, and egalitarian practices and stories, after the collapse of the first Goliaths. Both were practising what Scott called the ‘art of not being governed’.19 This art of not being governed can help us understand how people behave during collapse: how many return to more mobile, rural ways of life, and how many avoid returning to a Goliath.
The people of Zomia, and countless non-state refuges over the past 5,000 years, have relied on their landscape, mobility, agriculture, and culture to avoid being caught by a Goliath.
Zomia’s geography is made up of hilly highlands that range from 300 to 4,000 metres above sea level. The mountains and the hills are difficult for an army to invade, easy to hide in, have plenty of bottlenecks to fight off a far larger foe, and provide ample exit options for fleeing people. It’s an inaccessible terrain that is difficult to conquer and even harder to keep hold of. The landscape provides opportunities for hit-and-run tactics, is difficult to operate in, and gives those who have local knowledge a critical advantage. That’s partly why the highly trained technologically supreme US military struggled to beat the Viet Cong in the wetland forest of Vietnam and Laos, or Taliban fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan (which has earned the country the moniker of ‘the graveyard of empires’). Similarly, governments throughout South America have laboured against insurgents and crime syndicates who hide in the jungle. They are choosing land that favours guerilla warfare.
It’s not just rebels, outlaws, and criminals who use geography to their advantage. Escaped slaves (maroons) did too. Many of the slaves who broke away from the cotton-plantations of the American South fled to the ‘Great Dismal Swamp’ that lies across Virginia and North Carolina.
Others stayed closer to the slave plantations, concealed in nearby wilderness. Some started families, built homes, and cultivated farms in the impenetrable marshes that separated them from the grasp and lashes of their former masters. Geography can help create distance and friction between dominators and the oppressed, and people have used that to their advantage perennially.
20 The influence of geography in limiting the spread of Goliath can be seen across the world. One analysis of 1,094 traditional societies found that environmental barriers, such as higher elevations or more hard-to-traverse terrain, led to less diffusion of culture. Interestingly, this was the same for Eurasia and Mesoamerica, undermining the famous idea that Eurasia saw more cultural transmission owing to its east–west axis. Instead, Eurasia likely developed earlier, larger Goliaths simply because it had more Goliath fuel and domesticated its crops and animals earlier.
21 How you get your food can also help evade a Goliath. Crops such as cassava, taro, and potatoes are less lootable since, unlike grain, they can’t be stored for very long and can be left in the ground. Colonial administrators in the Americas deplored these crops and actively tried to paint those who farmed them as lazy. Their fear was that someone with cassava, fishing gear, and a shotgun to defend themselves had no reason to take on wage labour working on the hacienda plantations.
Foods such as potatoes also made their way back to Europe, causing similar problems for overseers. Many Europeans adopted the potato during the Dutch Revolt (1556–1648) for the simple reason that it couldn’t be easily confiscated.
Peasants could leave their crop buried when a marauding army passed through and dig it up after they had left. The soldiers were left hungrier and the poor a little richer. Across Europe, most of the areas that adopted these ‘escape crops’ tended to experience increases in population without an increase in hierarchy. Escape crops are essentially the opposite of lootable resources: they have low storability once harvested, are less visible, have more unpredictable harvest times, and often require less labour to grow.
22 It wasn’t just what you grew, but how you grew it. Shifting agriculture (also known as ‘swidden’ farming) makes farmers far more mobile. More mobile people are harder to control. The Punan Lusong people in Malaysia left rice farming and returned to the forests as foragers and swiddeners when the Japanese invaded. They returned to their farms in 1961, once the Japanese threat had well and truly subsided. Across Zomia and many other stateless areas we see the same use of these ‘escape crops’ and a greater reliance on hunting-gathering and swiddening.23 Like the Native Americans, many of the peoples of Zomia have stories and traditions that warn against rulers. The Akha people have a tale of a thirteenth-century king (Dzjawbang) who tried to create the first census before being executed by his own people. His son is recalled as an Icaruslike figure who flew a shamanic horse with wings glued with beeswax too close to the sun before plummeting back to earth. They are tales warning about hubris and hierarchy. Dzjawbang is slain for trying to control his subjects too closely, and his son for soaring too high into the heavens. The Native Americans remembered their old rulers as evil, oppressive magicians (such as the Ani-Kutani) and malicious trickster gods (such as the ‘Great Gambler’) who eventually faced justice. The generations who lived after a failed Goliath project tended to remember them very differently from how we often recount history. Westerners still often look back to Rome with nostalgia, many Egyptians take great pride in the sandy tombs of the pyramids jutting up from the desert, and the Chinese often celebrate their 2,000 years of ‘civilization’. Yet imagine if the earliest Goliaths in the Near East and China had collapsed and never returned. How would we remember them today? Would we reminiscence about great kings with advanced civilizations who drove progress, or remember them as mad wizards and corrupt tyrants who were overcome by their people? Or, would we have just forgotten them entirely, as the Native Americans did with Cahokia?
Stateless peoples, whether in the wake of a collapse or fleeing a Goliath, often turn to the same strategies. They limit access to Goliath fuel by dwelling in inaccessible lands and staying mobile to help maximize exit options. They avoid growing lootable resources. They create cautionary tales of how hierarchy went wrong in the past. The exact approach depends on the circumstances. In the Andes, people usually fled to the lowlands and jungles rather than the mountains, simply because these tended to be forested and have less lootable resources. Many escaped slaves in the Great Dismal Swamp in the south-eastern US did grow rice and maize, but only when they were truly camouflaged by the land.24 While places such as Zomia may have avoided dominance hierarchies, they are still a tiny minority today. That’s because Goliaths have evolved over time, developing better ways to control and coordinate larger groups of people without collapsing.
GOLIATH EVOLUTION In 1519 a group of Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés arrived in Mesoamerica and met the Aztec Empire. Like Fontaneda meeting the Calusa, they did not encounter an entirely alien society. Instead, they saw a remarkably familiar one: the Aztec Empire was organized into commoners and elites, with a central government ruled by a king; the commoners gave away resources in tax and tribute; the elites intermarried and threw great feasts; they had a writing system that helped keep records and celebrate leaders; they had cities that were fed by the surrounding towns, as well as a road system for moving troops and trade goods. Out of the myriad ways in which one could organize a society, the Aztec Empire looked astoundingly like its Spanish counterpart. Two societies separated by 8,000 kilometres and the Atlantic Ocean somehow came up with similar social blueprints.
We see this around the world. Different Goliaths from Cahokia and the Maya in the Americas to Egypt and Benin in Africa, and the earliest states of China, may have had different conceptions of kings and class, but that doesn’t change the remarkable fact that they all had them, as well as slavery and ideologies that justified domination. This is what is commonly called ‘convergent evolution’: different Goliaths independently evolved similar structures.25 Part of this convergent evolution is that early rulers faced similar challenges and often devised similar solutions – solutions that, if they worked, were more likely to survive and be passed down over time. For instance, early states all faced the common problem of controlling lands that were too far away from the capital and the direct grasp of the ruler.
Goliaths began to develop internal administrations when they conquered territories that lay beyond a day trip from the capital. This appears to have happened to some extent in Mesoamerica (Monte Albán), Egypt, Mesopotamia (Uruk), and China.26 When an early state expanded too far the leaders had to (begrudgingly) delegate authority to bureaucrats, governors, princes, and local elites. They had to do ‘government at a distance’. This included relying on governors while trying to ensure they didn’t break away and form their own kingdoms. Every empire thereafter has had to do the same, even today.
Bureaucracy and administrations were a case of convergent evolution.
It wasn’t just that rulers developed similar strategies to shared problems; they also created more effective ways of spreading them across time and space. Agrarian, state-based communities usually had effective ways of faithfully transmitting culture through generations and regimes, particularly through writing. Leaders and elites could also actively adopt and amplify certain practices and ideas. Coin-based currencies in both China and Lydia (modern-day Turkey) seem to have been set up by private individuals before being embraced and spread by governments.
Christianity was already becoming widespread across Rome, but its official adoption by Emperor Constantine (which outlawed the persecution of Christians and supported the Church) aided its ascent.
Hence there was sometimes a conscious process of either adopting and spreading innovations or emulating the successful structure of other groups and empires. It wasn’t perfect but, in the long run, evolution selected for larger, more powerful Goliaths.27 Those who were the most successful at violent conflict tended to last longer and grow larger, making it more likely that their religions, warfare tactics, and models of governance would be adopted by others. Through cultural evolution, empires slowly accumulated technologies and practices that let them conquer and control larger groups of people over larger stretches of land. Most of the first states conquered and demanded tribute to siphon off resources, used human sacrifices and ceremonies to entrench their rule, and often had minor part-time bureaucrats and accountants help administer the territory. Scripts, when they did exist, were initially rudimentary, such as cuneiform, hieroglyphs, and Mayan glyphs, rather than fully fledged writing systems. These first states developed roads for shuttling troops and messages. While impressive, these mechanisms still meant that how much territory an empire could closely control was significantly limited. As we’ll see, these limits were slowly lifted over time as technology and culture developed. The outcome was not just that Goliaths evolved but also that they often ended up on similar evolutionary trajectories.28 OUR SACRIFICE We’ve already seen numerous cases of convergent evolution in the earliest Goliaths. One is human sacrifice, which was practised in Cahokia, Tiwanaku, Teotihuacan, Monte Albán, and by the Olmecs of San Lorenzo.
Almost all the earliest states across Mesopotamia, China, the Americas, and western Africa practised it as well. The burial of a ruler alongside dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of human victims occurs across the world in early states from the Shang Dynasty in China, Ur in Mesopotamia, Keber in Nubia, as well as the Wari and Moche in South America (the precursors to the Inca). At Yinxu, the capital of the Shang Dynasty, China’s second earliest state, around 13,000 people were sacrificed over two centuries.
Many appear to have been slaves and war captives who were brought into the city, forced to work with a restricted diet, and then executed.
Hundreds at a time were sacrificed, with the victims often beheaded and mutilated.29 Human sacrifice was a popular practice partly because it helped to establish early Goliaths. It is a political performance that intimidates challengers and justifies the political order. Most cultures have taboos against in-group killing. A ruler can legitimate their rule by showing that ingroup killing is acceptable only when the ruler does it.
Studies suggest that the biggest predictors of human sacrifice across cultures are hereditary rulers, bigger populations, and internal conflict over resources.30 Publicly showing that you can legitimately murder others, and that the lives of the many are worth less than one elite individual, can help a budding ruler demonstrate their power to a big crowd of allies (and rivals).
It even happens outside states. A study of ninety-seven pre-colonization Austronesian societies found a clear correlation between human sacrifice and social hierarchy. Over two-thirds of the cases with a strong hierarchy practised human sacrifice, while just a quarter with little to no stratification chose to sacrifice people. Those who used human sacrifice were less likely to revert to egalitarianism.31 But as hierarchies became entrenched, the practice of human sacrifice fell out of favour. Relying on a bureaucracy and religion was less costly and less prone to backlash than the spectacle of public murders. Administration trumped intimidation. Emerging kings across the world faced a similar problem in trying to prove they had the right to rule. Human sacrifice was a solution that many converged on and then later dropped.32 Human sacrifice may have provided the grounds for other points of convergence. Sacrificing people was usually a way of giving a gift to superior beings (such as gods or revered spirits and ancestors) to avoid punishment and gain favour. In other words, it was a supernatural form of tribute. You were simply offering human lives to a god or ancestor, rather than slaves or gold to a monarch.
It also hints at one of the most powerful commonalties across every Goliath: the ability to deal out random violence. Over time, leaders have become more constrained by law and expectations against the arbitrary execution of their citizens, but this was once the ultimate primeval display of power. It’s an act that puts the ruler above ordinary morality.
Polities across the world have all settled on the importance of violence to make rulers legitimate.33 STORIES OF SUBJUGATION We also see convergent evolution when it comes to stories that defend the domination of the few over the many. One version of this propaganda is the Hobbesian story. Hobbes’s philosophy is not just about bringing peace to a violent world, but also about bringing order to a supposedly chaotic one. It crops up across the world, from Europe to China and India. Empires have always made similar claims that they bring unity and equilibrium to the cosmos. The Assyrian Empire (2025–609 BCE) depicted their lands outside their borders as an ‘outer realm’ of chaos.
The emperor was morally obliged to expand the frontier and tame the chaos into civilization. It was a divinely sanctioned duty. Like human sacrifice, the Hobbesian story was adopted by many early rulers to help lower the natural aversion of their subjects to dominance.
That Hobbesian tale was part of another common story that almost all Goliaths developed: the battle between the civilized and the uncivilized.
It’s a near universal myth. The Toltecs and people of Teotihuacan of Mesoamerica labelled non-state foragers as chichimeca (dog people). In Imperial China non-state peoples were split into categories of ‘raw’ (sheng) and ‘cooked’ (shu). The cooked were those who had been incorporated into the empire and could become normal (good, or liang) subjects. The raw were those who were still too uncivilized to be properly integrated into the empire. The very term ‘barbarian’ is derived from the Greek noun barbaros: an insult, indicating that, to the Greeks, foreigners spoke rough, staccato tongues that sounded like ‘ba-ba’. The transatlantic slave trade and mass killings across the Americas and Australia were also defended as fulfilling a sacred duty to bring civilization to savages.
Today, civilization is still largely used as a positive term associated with progress. We have popular stories of how the adoption of agriculture and states has been a march towards less violence and more prosperity. The narrative of civilization makes those outside the state look backward and dangerous, and those within the walls more refined and superior. It’s a useful fiction for making the existing order seem just and to deter anyone from leaving.34 Accompanying these stories of civilization have been stories to justify the inequalities integral to Goliaths. Egyptian pharaohs were supposedly reincarnations of gods. Sumerian kings usually referred to themselves as representatives of gods on earth. In China, the first rulers painted themselves as oracles, and later kings and emperors claimed that heaven had bestowed on them the right to rule for the good of the people (the ‘Mandate of Heaven’). Even the king of the Calusa was a divine figure.35 The historian and archaeologist Ian Morris once defined ideology as ‘a pack of lies that benefits someone’. Most ideologies are ideologies of domination: they benefit those atop a hierarchy. Whether it’s the Hobbesian story, the caste system, racism to justify slavery, kings representing gods, or the myth that progress rests on the indispensable genius of a few billionaires, every society has stories to justify their inequalities.36 Such stories overcame our dominance aversion by justifying hierarchies as a matter of equity, fairness, or simply sheer superiority.
These stories still work today. The modern story for inequality is the myth of meritocracy: the fable that people attain power thanks to individual skill and performance (see the above number of hereditary billionaires).
One study of twenty-three modern, rich countries found that those with higher levels of economic inequality had stronger beliefs that wealth was earned meritocratically. Stories and inequality work in a feedback loop: the myth of meritocracy justifies higher inequality and higher levels of inequality result in more powerful people reaffirming the myth.37 Moralizing religions too are an outcome of Goliath evolution. Across the world it appears that people moved from general animist beliefs as huntergatherers (a belief that spirits or life-force permeate all the things around us) to a belief in the afterlife, a veneration of ancestors, and eventually the adoption of punitive gods. Gods who constantly watch people and punish or reward moral behaviour are a highly effective force for controlling large groups. These surround us today in the gods of the Abrahamic religions – Islam, Christianity, and Judaism – and reappear across different continents and time periods, such as the Incan supreme god Viracocha. One systematic analysis of hundreds of sites found that in all cases these gods appeared only after large, unequal, hierarchical societies developed. Big kings preceded big gods. It makes sense: a hierarchy in heaven justifies a hierarchy on earth.38 What we see in the first Goliaths is a slow fusing of the different forms of social power. All the first states had some form of authoritative hierarchy (political power), backed by force (violent power), with rituals and a story that bequeathed a right to rule (information power), and took resources (economic power) from a community of people (demographic power).
There was no single path to statehood, yet they all looked remarkably similar: elites taking wealth and labour from a mass of commoners. They all converged on a similar evolutionary pathway: a pathway that placed men on top.39 A GENDERED GOLIATH Patriarchy – a social arrangement in which men hold most power and women are excluded – is one of the most common shared characteristics across states and Goliaths. The Aztec Empire, the Spanish Empire, the imperial dynasties of China, and the kingdoms of Mesopotamia were all dominance hierarchies based on gender.
Patriarchy was another point of evolutionary convergence.
Patriarchy had modest beginnings. As covered earlier, men have stronger inclinations for status competition and are far more likely to pursue it through violence and domination. On top of that, men are more capable of achieving status through force. Men are generally larger, stronger, and more aggressive (women on average have 52 per cent of men’s upper-body strength and 66 per cent of their lower-body strength).40 There is a reason why men have been the main soldiers and killers across history. While it is not the strongest or meanest who commands the military, mafia, or state today, physical strength and aggression were far more vital in the wars that involved the use of axes, bows, and spears.41 Within early hunter-gatherer groups these differences did not seem to translate into large-scale male oppression.
That is because violence was muted. This changed as lootable resources became available and war arose.
Lootable resources are storable but also make a society a prime target for raiding. Having a close-knit group of male fighters who know and trust each other is advantageous in a conflict. Groups that were regularly engaged in warfare tended to need to keep fighting men together and hence were disproportionately likely to be patrilineal. That is, when marriage across groups occurred, the men stayed in their own group while the women migrated. A migrating woman who was in a new setting and uprooted from her family and friends had far less social power than the man she was now married to. The power balance between the sexes shifts dramatically when this happens.42 The groups that persisted and won battles were more likely to be the patrilocal ones that favoured keeping their male fighters together. Such groups were also more likely to become conquerors and pass on their patriarchal practices and beliefs. That is what we see throughout history.
Successful early conquerors tended to have strongly patriarchal cultures with a glorification of male violence and rule. The Akkadian Empire, which conquered much of Mesopotamia, Anatolia [modern-day Turkey] and the Levant, and the Yamnaya raiders from the Pontic Steppe both shaped the early culture of Eurasia, and both were aggressively patriarchal.
Patriarchal societies also tended to become more oppressive over time. Institutions, religions, and legal codes all reinforced and amplified male rule and shrank women’s status. The first states were a turning point with large-scale, centralized hierarchies that celebrated and endorsed male rule.43 This was reflected in their legal doctrines. The Code of Ur-Nammu (2100 BCE), the first-known legal code in the world, was obsessed with sex; one of its rules was that if a married woman committed adultery she would be put to death (but her lover would receive no punishment). Such rules tended to spread. For instance, biblical laws on sex, such as cutting off the hand of a woman who injures the testicles of a man (Deuteronomy 25:11– 12), seem to be borrowed from the Assyrian Empire, a rival neighbour to the Kingdom of Israel.44 Similarly, monotheistic religions – including the Abrahamic faiths – valued sexual segregation, valorized male rule, and praised chastity as well as practices such as veiling. Whether it be states, legal codes, or monotheistic religions, the rules disproportionately benefited men and reinforced their privilege. Such rules may have also helped to quell infighting over women and property in larger societies. Patriarchy is another example of Goliath evolution.45 Patriarchy was not (and still isn’t) in the interests of all men. As we’ve already covered, the adoption of lootable resources 8,000–4,000 years ago happened alongside a collapse in the male gene pool.46 That’s because a small number of men were dominating reproduction. Similarly, harems and polygyny only benefit a sliver of men in a society. Patriarchy was not a social blueprint created by men for men.
Instead, patriarchy was the outcome of a blind process of Goliath evolution. Goliath fuel such as monopolizable weapons and lootable resources also fuelled male domination. A few minor differences in psychology and physiology meant men were more likely to try to seize power by violence, and violent conquerors were more likely to be patriarchal. Over time the power imbalance between the sexes was amplified by new rules and religions, resulting in the deep divides that are carved into history. Domination of women by men became central to the story of Goliath.
THE LOSERS OF EVOLUTION These different features of convergent evolution were attempts to stabilize a Goliath. In the language of systems, they are ‘balancing feedbacks’: they serve to resist change and reinforce existing structures. (Think of a thermostat. It monitors the temperature of a room and turns on the heating if it gets too cold or turns it off if it’s too hot. Similarly, balancing feedbacks dampen and resist attempts to change the system.) There is evidence that they worked and that a failure to evolve the right mechanisms often led to collapse.
The original states all developed some kind of internal administration and bureaucracy. They formalized their structures of rule and eventually developed state religions. One study using the Seshat databank found a clear correlation between the size of the polity and its ‘information processing’ tools (mechanisms to order and store information, such as writing and bureaucracy).47 Such tools allow for better tracking of citizens (for tax, conscription, and even to identify dissidents), propaganda, and government at a distance. When we look at many of the earliest Goliaths, whether it be the Puebloans, the first farmers of Europe, or the mound-based kingdoms of the Mississippi, most of them never developed those kinds of tools. Tellingly, they often went through fission-fusion cycles and showed higher levels of hierarchy and inequality before collapsing, fragmenting, and repeating.
Hierarchical hunter-gatherers and other unequal farmers seem to have experienced a similar fate of fission-fusion. Across modern India, Tibet, and Bhutan are different traditional societies that practise shifting agriculture (also known as ‘slash-and-burn’ or ‘swidden’ agriculture), in which a field is used, burned, left fallow, and then returned to later.
Societies such as the Konyak Naga of modern north-eastern India frequently cycle between hierarchical societies in which people are ranked – and those social positions are passed down through birth – and more egalitarian settings in which people are unranked, with leaders who are not hereditary and have more limited power. This looks much like the fission-fusion patterns that have been practised for millennia. Part of this may be due to shifting agriculture, whereby lootable resource are created, but the constant movement of people and their homes undermines centralized control. Part of it may be that they have never had the Goliath fuel to develop greater mechanisms for stability and control. These live examples of inequality in the making show that inequality does not occur automatically. It is fought for and often resisted.48 The Calusa and north-west coast Native Americans underwent centuries of struggle to create a dominance hierarchy. Trying to gain control over a community with a deep history of egalitarianism is a momentous challenge.
These hierarchical foragers would have been preceded by many failed attempts to create a Goliath. Even then they tended to be small, unstable, not highly centralized, and prone to infighting. Some archaeologists have referred to these early Goliaths as ‘fragile’: leaders vie for status and authority; people seek independence; and there is no well-developed bureaucracy to hold everything together.
49 A fission-fusion cycle tends to ensue. The battle for status, with either words or weapons, made the transition to Goliaths fraught, haphazard, and prone to failure.50 This lack of mechanisms to control a populace was one curse that plagued the earliest Goliaths.
7 Goliath’s Curse Do Societies Age? – Why Inequality Grows With Lootable Resources – Extractive Institutions and Unequal Exchange – How Extraction Creates Fragility – Triggering Collapse – Survival of the Fairest – The Wisdom of Democracy DO SOCIETIES AGE?
There is a trend that we see over the past ten millennia. Over time many hierarchical societies appear to become more fragile. They seem to be ageing.
This doesn’t just happen in the earliest Goliaths, like Cahokia and Tiwanaku; it is common in far more developed empires and kingdoms as well. The Western Roman Empire fell to infighting and invaders but had been successfully coping with both for centuries. The Lowland Maya (neighbours to Monte Albán and Teotihuacan) collapsed during one severe period of drought but had navigated earlier ones.
Does this apparent pattern of ageing hold true for a larger selection of cases? To find out, I and a group of complexity scientists led by Professor Marten Scheffer analysed two databases of state lifespans: the Seshat Global History Databank (the world’s largest historical dataset) and the Mortality of States database (MOROS, a collection of 324 states from 2000 BCE to 1800 CE). This study covered fully developed states, not just early Goliaths. We’ve encountered only a few of these thus far, such as Monte Albán and Tiwanaku, but most collapses are usually centred on states. We found that states were increasingly more likely to terminate over the first two centuries of their existence. After this point, they had a high but stable rate of termination.
Imagine that your likelihood of dying increases as you age up until seventy. Thereafter your odds of perishing each year stay at that high rate until you do eventually go to your grave. We saw a similar pattern in states: a rising risk over the first 200 years followed by a constant high risk of termination. It’s not a one-off result either. One database of 168 crisis events (the ‘Crisis Database’) showed that the average duration for polities was 201 years.1 As something grows more vulnerable it often begins to recover more slowly from disturbances. We see this in the elderly, who begin to struggle more with recovering from illness or injury, such as a broken hip. This is called ‘critical slowing down’ and tends to precede a ‘tipping point’ before a rapid, large-scale shift. That critical slowing down appears to have occurred in cases we’ve already encountered, such as the first farmers of Europe and the Pueblo societies of south-western America. Analyses of population levels among the first farmers of Europe and construction efforts (measured by the number of trees felled) among the Puebloans suggest that these communities recovered more slowly from shocks such as droughts and population losses just before their collapse.2 The statistics reflect what we’ve seen in the case studies: many societies do appear to become more fragile over time.
WHY INEQUALITY GROWS WITH LOOTABLE RESOURCES The first farmers of both Europe and the American south-west, and many of the earliest cities and settlements, faced a similar problem.
Inequality and rulers began to creep up from within their communities. It is a persistent trend throughout history: inequality tends to increase once a community becomes hierarchical. That is, until it undergoes a major institutional reform or is hit by a great leveller: a bloody revolution, mass mobilization warfare, a mass-mortality pandemic, or a deep collapse.
Fire and sword often leave a level playing field.3 This trend of rising inequality is because of Goliath fuel (lootable resources, caged land, monopolizable weapons). One global review by archaeologists highlighted that lowered mobility (caged land), big populations, and surplus resources that were predictable, dense, and could be transferred across generations (lootable resources), were the key factors that led to inequality. Similarly, a review of the global history of democracy found that the factors favouring early democracy were an abundance of exit options, smaller populations, and a lack of knowledge by rulers about what citizens were producing (lootable resources are easy to observe).
In other words, all the sources of Goliath fuel favoured inequality and autocracy.
4 Once a Goliath was created, inequality tended to increase over time and in turn favour more autocratic arrangements. There are two key reasons for this persistent pattern. First, wealth can easily be translated into other forms of power (and vice versa). Richer families with more land among the first farmers of Europe would have had not just more food, but also more riches to purchase weapons with. The feast-throwing leaders of hierarchical hunter-gatherers were essentially turning edible wealth into political power in the form of debts, prestige, and alliances.
We still see this today. It can be as subtle as companies lobbying regulators and politicians for rules that increase their profits, or as blatant as a billionaire becoming president and then introducing tax breaks for the rich. Power begets more power.
5 Second, the value of capital (assets such as land and stocks) tends to rise more quickly than the value of labour. The economist Thomas Piketty famously showed that the financial returns on capital (land, assets, stocks) have outpaced the returns on labour (wages) for at least the past two centuries. That is despite labour requiring more effort and skill than does charging rent on land or betting on stocks. Simply put: the rich get richer quicker than the poor can get richer, and often the poor simply get poorer.
More riches can then be transferred into other forms of power and the cycle continues. Some have taken to calling this a ‘wealth pump’: money is transferred from the bottom of society to the top.6 If a Goliath didn’t collapse, the levels of inequality reached were often staggering. One review of twenty-eight pre-modern states, from the time of Rome to British India in 1947, found that they were on average 77 per cent towards the theoretical maximum level of wealth inequality. That maximum means a situation where an individual or small group takes all the excess produced by a society (‘the surplus’), leaving just enough for the rest to survive and reproduce (‘subsistence’). Sixteen of those kingdoms and empires were close to being as unequal as possible.
Things have improved as most modern states today are around 44 per cent towards the maximum level of inequality (from a low of the Netherlands of 29 per cent to a high of 63 per cent in Brazil).7 A few cases even exceeded this maximum level. That could be due to bad measurement, or because a proportion of the population was being worked to death.
Throughout most of history, the top 1 per cent tended to capture 10–40 per cent or so of the total income of a society, and even more of its wealth.
Egypt and Cahokia didn’t just build pyramids: they were social pyramids.8 There are a few cases that were more equal, such as ancient Athens, and early modern Holland and England, but these were far from democratic, egalitarian arrangements. Athens was a slave-holding society where only 10–15 per cent of the population – just free, male citizens – could participate through voting and speaking at the assembly (ekklēsia) or being picked for the law courts that oversaw legal decisions (the dikasteria that were randomly chosen). Holland and England were aristocratic monarchies.
Inequality has been the rule of history since the first Goliaths.
EXTRACTIVE INSTITUTIONS AND UNEQUAL EXCHANGE Not all Goliaths are the same. They can diverge in how unequal the distribution of power is. More concentrated power (including control of resources, decision-making, violence, and information) within a society tended to lead to elites extracting more wealth, energy, and labour from the rest of society. Hence extractive institutions are effectively a measure of how concentrated social power is. A society may be a Goliath but have a broader distribution of power: compare the more egalitarian, semidemocracy of ancient Athens to the highly unequal militarized dictatorship of the Assyrian Empire, or Norway to Saudi Arabia today. All of them technically still organize into dominance hierarchies in which a few make rules that are enforced with the threat of violence, but there is still an enormous difference in how democratic they are, or how free and diverse their media is. In other words, it’s not just wealth inequality, but how unequal the other forms of power are, including how autocratic decisionmaking is in government, companies, and families.9 Increasing wealth inequality tends to spill over into other forms of power and make the overall society more extractive. Tiwanaku and Monte Albán didn’t only become more unequal; they also became politically lopsided with rulers rising up and becoming more powerful and self-aggrandizing.
Rome fell from republic to dictatorship as inequality rose, and that dictatorship and its bureaucracy became increasingly captured by rival elite families and power-hungry generals. In each case, Goliaths were becoming more unequal and extractive: all four forms of power were becoming more concentrated, and these inequalities in power were used by elites to take more energy, labour, and resources from the rest of the populace.10 Concentrations of power are extractive because they tend to lead to unequal exchange. Imagine two traders with equal power.
Their exchange of goods should be relatively fair. Now imagine one of them suddenly acquires a large arsenal of weapons that they brandish in front of their trading partner. Suddenly one trader may be more likely to accept a bad deal. One actor having more power has changed the bargain and made the exchange more unequal and extractive. We see this in the case studies covered thus far. The maize beer feasts provided by the elites of Monte Albán (or later by the Incan emperor to his subjects) was only a small fraction of the corn that he took from them.
Rulers would keep the rest of the surplus for themselves, which of course showed up in the larger houses they dwelled in, the more lavish decorations they adorned themselves with, and the grander monuments they had built to celebrate themselves with (all acts of conspicuous consumption for status).
Often the benefits provided by leaders as part of the exchange were immaterial. The priests of Cahokia might well have claimed that they controlled the weather (and the harvest) but they did not. Nonetheless, in exchange for their ineffective services they were rich and powerful in life, and were gifted thousands of beads and dozens of sacrificed lives in death.
This is key to why stories of subjugation – be it weather-controlling priests, kings who represent gods, or billionaires taking us to space – work: they justify unequal exchange. They give an explanation as to what the leader is providing (as invisible or fake as that might be) and why the exchange is fair. Suddenly giving up a quarter of your wheat harvest may seem reasonable if the ruler is protecting you from evil spirits or a nearby neighbour.
11 Many of these early Goliaths did offer benefits even if they were an unequal exchange. The rituals of Cahokia could have built camaraderie, and the leaders of Monte Albán may have been skilled military commanders (although we have no evidence that early pharaohs or kings were particularly good decision-makers). Yet as the society grew more unequal and extractive, the costs began to pile up and exceed the benefits.
HOW EXTRACTION CREATES FRAGILITY The people of Tiwanaku, Çatalhöyük, and San Lorenzo did not just walk away from their homes as a way of avoiding domination. We have signs that inequality by itself is corrosive to societies. More unequal countries tend to have poorer physical health, worse mental health, more violence, and suffer from other social ills ranging from more crime to more teenage pregnancy. It’s unsurprising that a species evolved in conditions of general equality has a rough time living in unbalanced communities.12 As inequality rises, the society becomes more extractive. A wealth pump is established in which social arrangements increasingly benefit elites at the expense of the poor. In short, the exchange across societies gets more unequal. That could be due to ancient kings and elites demanding more and more grain from their subjects while offering less and less in return, or lobbying by the rich in the modern world to give themselves tax breaks while more heavily taxing (or eliminating benefits for) the poor.
The cost of living gets higher and higher, leading to worsening health and decreasing standards of living. This is what some refer to as ‘popular immiseration’: the impoverishment of the masses.13 Inequality also tends to trigger other knock-on effects. One of the most important is elite competition. We see signs of this through the rebellion in the grand city of Teotihuacan to the fission and fusion of mound-based societies across the south-east of the US. It will become even more apparent in larger empires. As wealth inequality grows and the society becomes more top-heavy, the competition for high-status positions intensifies. The rich and powerful tend to have more resources to cause trouble, whether that be starting a war with a neighbour (as with the first farmers of Europe), stoking a revolution (potentially in the case of Teotihuacan), or creating an outright civil war. Goliath’s Curse is that extractive institutions hold the seeds of their own demise. The abandonment of many early Goliaths is the first manifestation of that curse. Counter-dominance intuitions meeting new rulers, the costs of inequality, and rising elite competition all eroded societies from within.
Early Goliaths also lacked the mechanisms to control their populace, leading to either fission-fusion/boom-bust patterns or wholesale abandonment. This meant that even emerging Goliaths with low levels of inequality (such as many of the mini-Goliaths of North America) could prove unstable and fall apart. Sometimes the rejection of a new elite was swift, while at other times it was a slow process of growing fragility. Yet, weak institutions and growing inequality were sometimes not enough to cause a collapse. Something more was needed.
TRIGGERING COLLAPSE One verbal retelling of the Huhugam collapse involves a great chief (Siwani) and two servants. The servants are the Wind and Storm Cloud.
Together they provided great harvests for their people. Then, one day, the Siwani grew irritated with the Wind and Storm Cloud and ordered them both to leave. Naturally, this didn’t end well. The harvest came to a halt and then there was a great flood. The Siwani was deposed by an angry, starving mob.14 Many early rulers, like the Siwani of the Huhugam, seemingly built their authority on an ability to ensure good harvests and avoid the ill will of the spirits. We still see this in religions across the world, which regularly include gods for the harvest, the sun, and even lightning and thunder (notably, the Norse god and now Marvel character Thor). When the weather turned foul and a flood or drought struck, it was a blow to the legitimacy of the ruling class (much as incumbent politicians tend to lose popularity when the economy tanks or inflation rises today). Even without weathercontrolling kings, a few bad harvests could make living in a hierarchical city look far less appealing.
Climate change is a common presence across collapses. Sometimes it played a central role in causing collapse and sometimes it didn’t. Not all droughts are created equal, and more severe ones could do far greater damage, as was the case with the final termination of the Puebloans. In Monte Albán, nearby settlements experienced a similar drought but were not abandoned. While the climatic record matches some of the collapses of the first farmers of Europe, it’s not a perfect fit and can’t explain the boombust pattern they experienced. Moreover, different farming communities responded differently to climatic shifts. We see this in the first farmers of Europe. Scotland experienced similar conditions to England and Ireland yet did not see the same downturn in population.
Climate change as a threat was most dangerous when it hit an already vulnerable society, one that was already riven with discontent against rulers and rising inequality. Climate change was most often the trigger that exploded a society flammable with social tension.15 Another trigger could have been disease. Packing people and animals together into cities created a hotbed for new infections. Although the telltale signs of an outbreak, such as mass burials, aren’t always in evidence, we can’t rule out the possibility that diseases caused by crowded people and animals instigated a slow or rapid exodus from early settlements. Then there is the threat of invaders. Many early European farming communities were wiped out by their neighbours.
When faced with such threats, communities that were increasingly vulnerable often collapsed. Tiwanaku, Cahokia, San Lorenzo, Monte Albán, the Puebloans, and the first farmers of Europe were all becoming more fragile as they became more extractive and then fell apart as they faced shocks, usually in the form of drought. A useful metaphor here is that of a ball (a system or community) rocking in a valley (a particular structure or way of life). More extractive institutions made the valley shallower, while shocks such as war, rebellion, and drought all violently knocked the ball around (see Figure 18).
When the ball sits on the cusp, ready to roll out of the valley or back, we can think of it as a ‘crisis’: a tumultuous period that can lead to a collapse, reform, or an entrenchment of the regime.16 When the ball is finally knocked out of the valley, we call it a collapse. Sometimes a big shock might knock a ball out, but sometimes the valley is so shallow that just a small nudge might be enough to dislodge the ball. We call this a ‘tipping point’: a critical threshold where a small disturbance can change the entire state and future of the system.17 The more vulnerabilities a community possessed, the fewer mechanisms it had to control its subjects, and the more shocks it faced, the more likely it was to be knocked out of the valley and collapse.18 Figure 18: From societal resilience to vulnerability There is a consistent picture emerging of the collapse of the first Goliaths. Societies became fragile as they became more unequal and hierarchical. Discontent and elite conflict appeared. These societies lacked the mechanisms to control large and increasingly hostile groups of people.
Once this increasing stress was hit by a large enough shock, whether that be a drought or an invader, a crisis or even collapse ensued. It fits the details we have of the boom-bust cycles of the Puebloans and first farmers of Europe, the abandonment of many of the earliest cities and settlements, and the synchronized collapse of the pyramid cities of North America. It was often a social tipping point. As we see in the Puebloans and the first farmers of Europe, they were recovering more and more slowly from shocks, which suggests that their valley was getting shallower and shallower. Some could collapse just from this growing internal vulnerability. Many others fell apart once this growing fragility met a shock: such as a drought, disease, or invaders.19 Experts in disaster risk management often say that no disaster is ever natural. It always depends on the vulnerability of the community it hits, and how that community responds. Remember that risk is not just a matter of threats and vulnerability, but also of exposure and responses. More extractive arrangements also worsened a society’s capacity to respond quickly and effectively to a crisis.
SURVIVAL OF THE FAIREST Monte Albán fell apart amidst a drought, while settlements around it living under the same dry conditions expanded. Something was clearly different in their responses. We see this in examples across history.
Societies could experience similar climatic challenges and fare remarkably differently.
One example is the ‘Late Antique Little Ice Age’ (536–660 CE). Three different volcanic eruptions (536, 540, and 547 CE) led to several pulses of cooling temperatures across the northern hemisphere. While the exact effects varied (overall cooling may have been up to 1°C) across regions, this was generally a cold time for the north. Thirteen out of the twenty coldest winters in the last 2,000 years occurred during it.20 Not every society experienced the same amount of cooling or transformation. The Merovingian Dynasty that ruled over much of modern France after the fall of Rome experienced a temperature drop of 0.79°C, the pottery-producing hunter-gatherers of Ontario got 0.74°C colder, Jenne-Jeno cooled by 0.26°C, and Monte Albán got just 0.15°C chillier.
One study of twenty communities across five world regions and four continents during the Late Antique Little Ice Age found that climate did have some correlation with social change, but the effect varied. The hunter-gatherers of Ontario had the equal lowest amount of social change, despite experiencing the third greatest drop in temperature, while Monte Albán had the equal lowest amount of cooling and highest possible level of change (it both became a full-blown state and then collapsed). Some societies were simply more resilient to temperature swings than others.21 The biggest predictor of resilience was how democratic or extractive the society was.22 One study of the Late Antique Little Ice Age found that more inclusive societies had less famine, disease, and conflict, and less change in their rituals or how they were organized. Those results have been verified in another study of thirty-three societies covering twenty-two climate-related disasters over nine world regions, four continents, and a thousand years. More democratic groups tend to respond better to crises.23 The question is, why? Local people could respond more quickly and effectively to new challenges than distant elites who were often buffered from threats such as a drought. This meant that more dramatic changes (such as collapse) were needed. A second benefit is that shared decisionmaking means that people in a community had more social connections, which created more effective collaboration (what academics usually call ‘social capital’) during times of stress. This holds true today: acts such as voting, deliberating, and being meaningfully involved in civic institutions (whether that be a sports club or a political group) foster closer and wider social ties. Those ties keep communities together when catastrophe strikes.24 A plethora of studies on modern disasters support the idea that more politically inclusive societies are more resilient ones.25 As one group of disaster-risk experts concluded, ‘there is near-unanimous agreement that people’s participation is essential to reducing the impacts of disasters on society’.26 One indicative study used the Emergency Event Database, an international repository of information on disasters across the globe. This analysis of 150 countries over the period 1995–2009 found that more democratic countries, with more state capacity, had fewer fatalities and fewer people affected during disasters. This was true for a range of disasters, from floods to earthquakes. Strong states have more resources to deal with disasters, while democratic accountability ensures that aid is distributed wisely and not just concentrated on the rich and powerful.
Inclusive political institutions create more flexibility, effective responses, and unified societies, and they prevent abuses of power.
27 The opposite naturally holds true. Societies with more extractive institutions are likely to have fewer social bonds and respond more poorly to natural disasters, whether that be the droughts that plagued the Puebloans or the droughts and floods that hit Cahokia. There is, moreover, another reason that extractive institutions tend to be fragile and inclusive institutions resilient: more democracy means better decision-making.
THE WISDOM OF DEMOCRACY We have ample theoretical and empirical evidence that, over the long run, a large, diverse group of people sharing information leads to better choices being made on average than an ‘enlightened dictator’ or small cadre of technocrats. The logic behind this is the ‘wisdom of crowds’: the knowledge of the many outperforms the knowledge of the few. The wisdom of crowds was first posited by the statistician Francis Galton during a county fair. He observed 800 people guess the weight of an ox.
While most were off the mark, the median estimate of 1,207 pounds was, remarkably, less than 1 per cent off the true weight.
Since then, a variety of studies have shown that crowds outperform individuals when it comes to predicting the outcomes of sporting events and geopolitical events and even answering general knowledge questions.
Prediction markets, in which a large group of people bet on different outcomes, have also had significant success. The benefit of having large and diverse groups of people is at the cutting edge of forecasting (making numerical predictions about a future event), foresight (creating plausible pictures of the future), and studies of ‘collective intelligence’ in swarms of insects, flocks of birds, and groups of people. Even large, important scientific endeavours, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hinge on the group judgement of a large set of scientists from different backgrounds and disciplines. While most of our modern systems are built on a small number of overly powerful decision-makers making rushed choices – from CEOs to presidents – when it comes to trying to predict the future or reach the best judgements, scientists rely on large diverse groups.28 What is just as important as having large diverse groups is ensuring that individuals in those groups share information. Think of a complex problem as a jigsaw puzzle with numerous pieces. Everyone brings a different piece of the puzzle: different information, a different perspective. But it is only when they talk in an open-minded fashion and exchange information freely that they can put their different pieces together and complete the picture.
Deliberation works. When it comes to predicting future events the goldstandard approach is ‘superforecasters’. That is, creating teams of expert forecasters with unique traits and impressive track records (their past accuracy with prediction is calculated as a ‘Brier score’), letting them share information, taking the average of their guesses (weighted by their Brier score), and then ‘extremizing’ (for instance, an estimate below 50 per cent would be nudged further down, and one above 50 per cent would be pushed slightly higher with an algorithm). Despite the details, it really comes down to using the wisdom of democracy within a group of exceptional forecasters. Similar approaches have proved to be most effective at identifying long-term issues in areas such as healthcare and biodiversity conservation.
Experiments with ‘deliberative democracy’ in which a randomly selected group of citizens gather together, are briefed by experts, deliberate, and make policy (either in a small jury of nine to twelve members, or assemblies in the hundreds or thousands) have been shown to reduce political polarization and even aid reconciliation in war-torn countries such as Bosnia. A deliberative assembly even helped Ireland legalize and regulate abortion (2018–19), which had previously been an intractably fraught issue. And of course, the backbone of science, including peerreview publications, is built on open debate and discussion of findings. In both theory and practice, it’s becoming increasingly clear that inclusive institutions make better decisions (and promote social cohesion too).29 Making good decisions is paramount to ensure that a shock or a crisis doesn’t spiral into a collapse. Notably, most historical polities weren’t particularly democratic; nor are our modern democracies.
Modern parliamentary systems rely on aggregating votes to select a few homogeneous leaders (overwhelmingly old and rich) who then engage in little genuine deliberation (often due to being overburdened, time-poor, and lacking expertise). This is on top of the sheer impossibility of expecting just a few people to solve the myriad problems of transport, energy, defence, and welfare. In modern electoral parliaments, people consent to being ruled; ruling itself isn’t widely shared. In other words, most societies have seen only a sliver of the resilience benefits that inclusive institutions have to offer. The opposite holds true. An oligarchy with smaller, more homogeneous groups of elites who are cushioned from shocks is more likely to make bad decisions and delay necessary change. Writers of collapse history have often puzzled over why leaders and groups seem to make bad decisions in the face of disaster. There is a simple answer: oligarchy. As societies grow more unequal and extractive, decision-making becomes worse.
It’s not just that small groups of elites make poorer decisions; they tend to be overinvested in the status quo and buffered from disaster. Even when there is an impending threat, they are more likely to defend their own interests. During the late sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was struck by a prolonged drought; the government chose to alleviate tax burdens for local elites rather than for struggling farmers. The latter were more affected and vulnerable, but the former were central to imperial stability. This caused farmers to flee to the cities, eroding the tax base and stirring social conflict. The social burden of a crisis is rarely placed on elites. We don’t have enough data to see conclusively whether this was the case in the earliest Goliaths, but history is replete with cases of environmental degradation and climate change compounded by poor elite choices. It’s part of why inclusive institutions have tended to handle climatic swings better than extractive ones.30 More inequality and extractive institutions both increased the vulnerability of societies (through counter-dominance intuitions, inequality, and elite competition) while oligarchy and weak control mechanisms hindered their response to disasters. All it then took was exposure to a threat, such as a sufficiently bad drought, disease outbreak, war, or rebellion, to break the hollowed-out society apart. This increasing risk of collapse due to extractive institutions is Goliath’s Curse. Over time, as societies have changed, so has the curse.
Think of this first package of rising inequality, poor decision-making, counter-dominance intuitions, and weak institutions as the ‘Primal Curse’ that struck the earliest Goliaths. This first manifestation of the curse often meant swifter and deeper collapses (such as Cahokia, Tiwanaku, and San Lorenzo being permanently abandoned) because there were often still many exit options and the first Goliaths had not developed strong mechanisms to control their populace. Worse still, people were moving from egalitarianism into a new, perturbing environment. They were now surrounded by more people with bigger disparities in treasures and even kings who would behead, cut open, or bury alive others in front of them. It was an unequal, violent world.
Yet that violence could worsen once a Goliath broke apart.
Part Two IMPERIAL MARCH AND FALL 8 Gang Warfare The Warlord Beneath – History as a Story of Organized Crime – A War of the Few Against the Many – A Pyramid of Bodies – Selected by the Sword – The Authoritarian Impulse – The Darker Angels of Our Nature THE WARLORD BENEATH In the Egyptian Museum of Cairo sits the Palette of King Narmer, the first king of Egypt. It is over 5,000 years old, stands more than two feet tall, and is made of an eerie grey-green siltstone. It is the earliest depiction of the first known ruler of a unified Egypt – what many consider to be the first state of the world (Figure 19).1 Figure 19: A sketch of the Palette of Narmer While the artwork is beautiful, the scenes it depicts are not. The palette shows Narmer wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt and standing over a kneeling foe. In one hand he holds a raised mace and in the other he grasps the hair of his enemy. He is bludgeoning to death a ruler from the Western Delta: a final bloody victory that sealed his control of all Egypt. Another part of the palette shows Narmer wearing Lower Egypt’s red crown in a procession to view decapitated prisoners at Buto (in the Western Delta).
They are not only dead: their genitals have been severed and placed atop their heads in a final act of humiliation. These scenes, surrounded by images of approving gods, show Narmer uniting Lower and Upper Egypt, before going on to conquer Canaan. Narmer was a successful warlord, not a freely elected leader. It seems to be a common motif for state formation. Many of the earliest kings and emperors of Mesopotamia had artworks of themselves maiming and killing their enemies. The artists of Cahokia left a similar image on a flint-clay statue. It shows a warrior crouched over a naked enemy, holding the enemy’s hair with one hand and a stone axe or mace in the other. He’s just smashed his victim’s face in.2 Such scenes are unsettling. To paraphrase the German Chancellor Otto von Bismark: states are like sausages – it is best not to see them being made. Yet little has changed for much of history right through to the twentyfirst century.
In less than a decade Charles Taylor went from being president of Liberia to being sentenced to half a century in jail. A UN-backed special court in 2012 indicted him on eleven charges, including murder, sexual enslavement, and conscription of children under the age of fifteen. Just a few years earlier he had been a legitimate president recognized by the UN.
Before being a president or a prisoner, Taylor was a warlord. He supported Samuel Doe’s coup against the Liberian government in 1980 but fled the country after being indicted for embezzling $1 million. After a prison break in the US and militia training in Libya, he returned to Liberia.
He was now at the head of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), an armed militia group that promised revenge and a more favourable order to ethnic groups and wealthy individuals who had been mistreated by Doe’s regime.
A civil war lasting almost a decade (1989–97) was unleashed. Several factions fought over the control of Liberia’s natural resources such as diamonds and rubber. Taylor controlled a swathe of territory dubbed ‘Taylorland’, which crossed into neighbouring countries such as Sierra Leone, where he held monopolies over diamonds, timber, and rubber resources. Taylor’s forces were partly funded by the tyre company Firestone, which gave him over $2.3 million in food, cash, and cheques.
In return, Taylor’s cronies protected a rubber plantation that Firestone owned.
(Firestone has said that it did not have a collaborative relationship with Taylor at any time.) The civil war claimed as many as a quarter of a million lives.3 In 1997, Taylor won the post-war general election. His victory was a surprise, given his campaign’s motto of ‘He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him.’ While the election was judged to be fairly run by international observers, Taylor had an advantage in having captured most of the country’s radio stations, using them to warn the listeners that the civil war would resume if he lost. Once elected, Taylor aided the smuggling of blood diamonds and weapons and embezzled $100 million from the Liberian government.
The career trajectories of Narmer and Taylor are by no means unique.
There is a glut of leaders who went from warlord or general to head of state through violence. Most (perhaps all) of the original states besides Egypt were also based on military strongmen successfully conquering their neighbours. In China, there have been at least a dozen cases of dynastic transitions based on a warlord taking over. Chinggis Khan was originally a warlord who subdued and then allied with Mongol tribes to form an empire.
This is the main historical template of becoming a sovereign leader. Take power by force and negotiate with other elites to create a stable new order.
4 Despite the popular idea of countries being built on a ‘social contract’, there is no observed example of a state being created by a freely negotiated consensus contract between citizens.
The overlap between warlords and state executives should come as no surprise. Warlords are usually defined as individuals who control territory using force and patronage. Organized crime is often defined as the organization of unregulated markets into hierarchical, extractive monopolies ruled through violence. These definitions are, as one scholar put it, ‘virtually interchangeable’ with the description of a state.
Warlordism, statehood, and organized crime all have similar ingredients: a hierarchy that coercively extracts resources from a territory and population.5 Understanding how and why men like Narmer and Taylor came to power can help us understand both why collapse occurs and why it can involve so much bloodshed.
HISTORY AS A STORY OF ORGANIZED CRIME From 2009 through to 2012 Medellín, Colombia, was one of the most dangerous places on the planet. Two organized gangs (razones) vied for control of the streets. The almost 400 street gangs (combos) allied with one of the two razones, turning the city into a war zone. The costs were high, both for the public and for the gang leaders, whom the police began to target. Their profits declined as their customers’ fear of being shot overcame their need to buy drugs. In response, the razones declared a truce and started governing themselves: they set up a criminal council called La Oficina (The Office). To keep the peace and enforce rules they adopted El Pacto del Fusil – The Pact of the Machine Gun. The conflict was quelled as each razone started to act like a mini-state in its territory: managing borders, settling disputes between combos (with the threat of the machine gun), and helping to set high prices for drugs.6 A similar process occurred in Africa in 2000. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), located in central Africa, is the continent’s second largest country by area. It is rich in rare earth metals that have been a source of incessant conflict. Battles over the control of its diamond mines have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, hence the label ‘blood diamonds’. In 2000, the price of the rare earth mineral coltan shot up from $90 to $590 per kilogram. In response, armed criminals began making permanent bases around coltan mines, ‘taxing’ the miners in exchange for ‘protection’. There was a similar response to a price jump for gold, except the militias began to set up more sophisticated administrations, with a court system and refined tax systems (including poll taxes).
In both cases, armed groups in the DRC responded to a lootable resource becoming more valuable by establishing state-like functions around it, but in the case of gold the tax system and bureaucracy was more elaborate. The difference arises because a coltan miner can extract kilograms of product every day, while gold miners discover only small amounts, which can be easily hidden (even, sometimes, by swallowing them). This makes gold less lootable, meaning the Goliath needs to negotiate more with its citizens, provide more services (such as a court system), and use more bureaucracy to extract taxes (such as a poll tax).7 Mafias, warlords, and crime syndicates have a long track record of providing services and sometimes even becoming beloved by the communities they rule. Tajikistan warlords established rackets over lucrative smuggling routes after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.8 Despite presiding over worsening health, epidemics, and excessive taxation of local farmers, they often enjoyed popular support because they did protect citizens from crime.9 Both the razones and the militias of the DRC show the process of state creation in real time. They were criminal rackets, but as they gathered more lootable resources and were unified by external threats, they started to provide services to their citizens. It is, after all, in the interests of even the most self-centred despot to ensure that the people they are stealing from have a measure of welfare. A bigger, healthier population means more lootable resources, a bigger defence force, and more status. The basic services that the DRC militias and the razones provided are emblematic of what the first states under Narmer and others usually offered: protection, basic infrastructure (whether that be for mines or farms), and dispute settlement. Most of us are lucky enough to be experiencing a unique, recent period of human history where states provide far more and are far more accountable than they once were.
Seeing states as similar to criminal gangs running protection rackets can help explain what exactly happens during collapse. The best example of trying to do so is the brilliant 2015 book Gangster States by Katherine Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld, an associate professor in anthropology, marshals modern and ancient case studies to show that state formation and collapse are best understood as a criminal enterprise being established and then broken apart by infighting or pressure from competitor rackets.
Once there is enough of a stationary economic surplus, then establishing a predatory monopoly is a profitable strategy. As we’ve seen, lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and a lack of exit options all make it easier to create a racket or state.10 We see it in the origins of war and the state. War in Mesopotamia originated with the Halafians taking over obsidian trade routes by force.
Prior to Narmer, Canaan had been a trading partner of Egypt, undertaking a fair exchange of wine, metals, and olive oil. That changes towards more extractive arrangements after Narmer conquers them.11 Suddenly they were giving more, and in the form of tribute (probably in ‘exchange’ for protection and perhaps mystical services) instead of trade. Rather than a mutually beneficial negotiation, rackets had transformed fair-trading relationships into unequal exchanges.
The collapse of such rackets involves both their destruction and regeneration. The racket may break down, yet the lootable resources usually remain. That means there is an incentive for either neighbours or internal competitors to violently re-establish the scheme. Hirschfeld shows this occurring in a range of modern cases, such as Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Sierra Leone, Moldova, and Bosnia.12 It also matches what we saw in the long-term rise in warfare: it rose alongside higher levels of competition for lootable resources. A WAR OF THE FEW AGAINST THE MANY Creating states, establishing a racket, is bloody work. The Palette of Narmer is just the tip of the spear. Figure 20 is taken from the systematic study of violence across almost 12,000 years (12,000–400 BCE). The researchers drew on a set of 3,539 skeletons and examined the frequency of cranial trauma and weapon-related wounds such as embedded arrowheads. The story it tells is clear: violence was low throughout the Neolithic; it then spiked drastically during the building of the first states such as Uruk and the First Dynasty of Egypt (4500–3300 BCE, known as the ‘Chalcolithic’). At this high point, somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent of skeletons have signs of conflict on them.
That figure then drops throughout the period of empire (the Early and Middle Bronze Age). Violence then spikes back up as the last empires of the Bronze Age come to an end. This rising tide of bloodshed continues during the Iron Age while new empires, such as the Neo-Assyrian Empire, are being forged. We see it elsewhere: increased levels of violence mark the formation of states in the Americas (such as Monte Albán) too.13 The pattern is that violence peaks when states are being formed. It is not the absence of authority per se that spurs violence, but the frantic efforts of a few to create structures of authority and monopolize lootable resources. In the case of collapse, this would often be accompanied by ‘score-settling’, with previously oppressed peoples seeking vengeance on their erstwhile masters. In any case, this involved only a peculiar sliver of society.
14 Violence, including during collapse, is a gendered phenomenon.
Soldiers, mercenaries, brigands, and other violent actors have almost invariably been men. In 2001 99.9 per cent of armed combat forces were men. A conservative estimate is that across history 99 per cent of soldiers have been men.15 Figure 20: Violence in the Near East: 12,500 to 400 BCE It’s not just men, but also a particular demographic of men: fighting-age men. The Romans conscripted men aged sixteen to forty-six. The levée en masse, a policy of mass conscription during the French Revolutionary Wars from 1793, focused on men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six.
Even among fighting-age men, perpetrators of violence are usually a select group. In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, court convictions suggest that less than 3 per cent of the population at the time committed violent crimes. Over 90 per cent of those involved were male, with a median age of thirty-one.16 It is a common finding in criminology that just a minor fraction of people are responsible for a high proportion of violent crimes.17 During collapse and crisis, most of the combatants tend not to be random young men. They are those who have already been trained.
They are soldiers and mercenaries either of foreign powers or of the previous government. This is not a Hobbesian war of all against all. It is a war of the few against the many. It is a concerted effort by a small portion of the population – young-to-middle-aged men, usually with previous training – to take advantage of the situation and establish a new racket. Violence during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was dominated by both Germanic soldiers previously employed by the empire and the invading Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. Violence in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was driven mainly by paramilitary groups previously part of his security forces, as well as by the US Army. The recurring image of violence during collapse is one of young, trained, armed men fighting.
This war of the few against the many can explain why so many people die and disappear during a collapse.
A PYRAMID OF BODIES The Wari (600–1000 CE) were the first empire of the Andes, and they endured a bloody breakdown. The collapse of the Wari saw the incidence of non-lethal head injuries triple from 20 per cent to 60 per cent. The situation becomes more dire centuries later. Fatal head injuries during the collapse were 10 per cent and this quadrupled to 40 per cent among adults and 44 per cent in children in the post-collapse period.
Skeletons begin to show peculiar cut marks. These marks suggest that rather than victims having been stabbed or slashed, the blade had sliced close to the bone. It’s a telltale sign of cannibalism, with survivors carving up the flesh of the deceased (tellingly, this occurred during a drought).18 We don’t need to look back a millennium to the Wari to see the dangers posed by a state collapse. Iraq during the 2003–6 invasion saw around 600,000 deaths and the emergence of ISIS. The overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011 led to the re-emergence of the slave trade. Recurring civil conflict in Congo, after the atrocities of Belgian colonization, have claimed somewhere in the range of 900,000 to 5.4 million lives. Gang warfare during a power vacuum can take a toll.
Behind the dilapidated temples of the Maya or the charred remains of cities from the Bronze Age lay the masses of faces who died or fled.
Their names are often lost but their suffering was real. While the numbers are highly uncertain, many collapse events may have led to enormous population declines. Table 3 summarizes the high-end estimates of some of the worst cases from across the world. Each one involves staggering amounts of displacement and death, with losses ranging between 30 and over 95 per cent of the entire population.19 While the numbers may seem horrifying, they are exaggerations, or at least misleading. Most of the population losses result from people moving away rather than dying – it’s often difficult to distinguish between the two historically. People who move into more rural areas or melt into a non-state territory often become less archaeologically visible. Their remains and signs of their activities become smaller, more dispersed, and relegated to rural areas that archaeologists don’t excavate as often.20 Collapse is more a story of movement than of an ancient apocalypse.
When we look at modern examples, the number of people displaced from their homes vastly outnumbers those lying lifeless in streets and morgues.
Take the case of the recent Syrian civil war. Since 2011, 14 million people have left their homes. 6.9 million of these are displaced within Syria while the remainder have fled to other countries. In contrast, estimates of the death toll from the war range from around 500,000 to 600,000, almost thirty times lower than the number of people displaced.
Syria is indicative of the norm: most people make the difficult decision to move out of harm’s way before facing the threat of death. Historical collapses involved the same dynamic, with most of these massive declines in population reflecting migration rather than deaths. People usually used the old ways of mobility and fission-fusion rather than face a grisly fate at the end of an arrow.
Table 3: Worst-case population decline during collapse Case study Timeframe Population loss estimate LBA collapse 1200 – 1000 BCE 30 – 75 per cent Mayan Lowlands 800 – 1000 CE Up to 90 per cent Invasion of the Americas 1500 – 1600 Up to 90 per cent Case study Timeframe Population loss estimate CE The late Roman imperial system 400 – 600 CE Up to 50 per cent in some regions. Over 95 per cent for the city of Rome Rapa Nui 1722 – 1877 CE Over 95 per cent Estimates of the number of deaths from collapse are also inflated owing to inaccurate record-keeping. For most of history we have poor, highly uncertain estimates of how many people were alive at any given time.
The most reliable data comes from the occasional state censuses taken by large administrations, such as Rome and the Tang Dynasty in China, and even these usually surveyed far below half of the population. The Roman and Tang examples are also exceptional: none of the other cases we’ve covered, from Cahokia to Tiwanaku, conducted censuses.
Even when these numbers exist, they often reflect the bureaucratic capacity of the state, rather than the actual number of people living on the land. This makes them particularly untrustworthy during a collapse.
The priority of a state that is falling apart is not to count its citizens. This can lead to enormous problems with trying to tally the lives lost during a period of turmoil. The An Lushan Rebellion was estimated in The Better Angels of Our Nature as having cost 36 million lives, a sixth of the world’s population at the time. Because of the problems with relying on census information, this estimate was later cut by almost two-thirds, to 13 million.21 Nonetheless, many did die and entire cities of people moved. Why? The most recurrent culprits are conflict, disease, famine, malnutrition, and the break-up of trade. The loss of a centralized authority frequently involves war or civil strife as groups battle to recreate some version of the state. A review of ten cases studies of collapse I organized with a group of archaeologists and historians found that every case involved some kind of war. In the Crisis Database around three-quarters involve civil wars or revolutions (or both). One-fifth of these are protracted affairs that last a century or longer. Yet the bigger killer was not from axes or arrows, but rather germs.22 Throughout history, disease has been the most dangerous foe on the battlefield.
Deaths from disease regularly outstrip direct casualties in a war.
About three times more people died from the influenza pandemic of 1918 than were killed in the First World War, and twice as many from disease than war wounds during the American Civil War. The squalid conditions of warfare, the splattering of blood and flesh from one soldier onto another, and the weakened immune systems of frequently malnourished and injured fighters living in close quarters, all make the battlefield a dangerous petri dish. In our review of ten case studies of collapse, eight involved diseases and seven involved signs of starvation and malnourishment. This echoes the findings of the Crisis Database in that a third of cases are marked by disease outbreaks. Disease could act as a trigger for a collapse, such as with the invasion of the Aztec Empire by Spanish conquistadors, or simply be spread alongside moving troops or migrants during a crisis. Often it was both.23 SELECTED BY THE SWORD Violence lurks beneath the first Goliaths. Across different world regions, more unequal, dense, hierarchical communities were associated with more violence and eventually the onset of warfare. The introduction of new weapons, such as hand-held bronze swords and axes in China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia, were pivotal in the creation of centralized states. The hilltop city of Monte Albán in Mesoamerica seems to be partly a creation of migrants fleeing raided cities and seeking a more defensible location.
Monte Albán’s transformation into a more organized state (known as the Zapotec) roughly coincides with a major regional conquest (of Cuicatlán), the construction of its first fortress (in Quiotepec), and the building of a skull rack containing the skulls of sixty-one people.24 Then there is the Palette of Narmer and similar records and artwork.
Mesopotamian steles (large slabs used as monuments) regularly show great processions of captured prisoners and lines of slain bodies. The inscriptions are usually just as brutal. The Neo-Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II (910– 859 BCE) described his gory celebrations of one of his victories: ‘I erected a pile [and] flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me [and] draped their skins over the pile; some I spread out within the pile, some I erected on stakes upon the pile, [and] some I placed on stakes around about the pile.
I flayed many right through my land [and] draped their skins over the walls.’ Using human skin for decoration is usually the domain of serial killers, but in this case it was a useful way of sending a message: obey and do not rebel.25 Whether it be in politics or religion, violence was central to Mesopotamia where kings promised to win wars abroad and prevent bloodshed at home (well, except when they spilled it). In art and writing they were even given the same weapons and killed their enemies in the same way as the gods. Most early leaders flaunted and deified rather than hid their warlord nature.26 War drove state formation. Every single one of the cases of original state formation involves some kind of conquest.27 We even see it in recent states being formed, such as the creation of the Zulu by Shaka (1816 CE), Madagascar by Andrianampoinimerina (1787 CE), and the unification of Hawaii by Kamehameha (1810 CE) after the introduction of firearms by European traders.28 ‘War made the state and the state made war’, the political scientist Charles Tilly wrote.29 He was referring to states in early modern Europe, a hypothesis that has been supported by studies decades later.
30 His theory was too modest. War wasn’t just a central contributor to Europe during that period; it was the key driver of state formation throughout history. Communities rarely give up their autonomy willingly.
It’s when they are conquered, or facing conquest by another enemy, that they cede it to a greater power.
Studies using Seshat, the world’s largest historical database, have also pointed to agricultural productivity and military innovations as being the key drivers of bigger, more hierarchical societies. The adoption of bronze weapons paved the way for the first states in the Near East, while iron weapons and cavalry laid the foundation for far larger empires such as the Western Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty, and the Achaemenid Empire (the first Persian Empire). Groups that were located closer to the Steppe – the grassy plains separating Europe from Asia that were full of mounted warriors – were also more likely to adopt big dominance hierarchies. If you had lootable resources and felt under threat, you were more likely to band together and adopt kings and generals or be conquered by someone who did.31 Unsurprisingly, war-making has until recently been the biggest item on a state’s budget. The Roman Empire spent half to three-quarters of its budget on the military, the Song Dynasty in 1065 directed around five-sixths of its resources towards the military, in early modern Britain between 1685 and 1813 it was about 75 per cent, and in early modern France in 1630–59 it was around 89–93 per cent. Countries spending more on healthcare and welfare than the military is a recent phenomenon limited to the last century or so. Even then there are exceptions: a plethora of countries spent half or more of their budget on bullets and bombs during the First World War.
32 The fact that kingdoms were often created through conquest explains why kings often appeared to be foreigners to those they were ruling. The ruler claims to be different from the masses, whether that be due to a connection with God, or a different, special ethnicity. Many early kings were ‘stranger-kings’. We see this in Mesopotamia; the names of early citystates such as Ur, Uruk, and Eridu are all not from the native tongue of Sumerian. These Mesopotamian cities were more likely agricultural communities conquered by outsiders.33 Enslavement, especially of war captives, was a by-product of conquest.
Goliaths refined slavery into an industrial-style project. Some records from ancient Mesopotamia claim that up to 36,000 prisoners were taken as captives of war. These are almost certainly an exaggeration but do show the value placed on captured humans. Even in 1800 up to three-quarters of the global population was in some form of bondage.34 Some became slaves not because they were captured during war, but rather to work off a debt.35 Debt slavery is, in many ways, a perversion of the ancient instinct of reciprocity: to repay the actions of others. In this case, payment is by any means necessary, including by owning another person and having them serve for every moment of every day.
36 Slavery wasn’t the only form of dominance that accompanied Goliath states. The first states often amplified male dominance and over time led to more patriarchal structures.37 This doesn’t mean that participation in early Goliaths was always done at the point of a blade. Opportunities for trade and work, bigger social networks, religious rituals, and awe-inspiring monuments may have also made people gravitate towards living under a Goliath. Many of the first Goliath-building projects, such as Cahokia and the Puebloans, appear to have begun as ceremonial centres that linked people together. Not everyone living in early states did so in chains; for many it may have been enticing.38 Importantly, most states were relatively authoritarian, but some offered more benefits than others. One study of state formation across thirty cases found significant differences in the number of public goods produced.39 Many states did settle disputes, hand out grain during famines, and coordinate labour to construct roads, bridges, and irrigation canals, although most of this infrastructure was mainly built for moving troops and goods around, not for public welfare. These greater amounts of coordinated action were often better for the people living under a state.40 They also tend to correlate with states that had more difficulty in extracting resources from their citizens and had to rely more on negotiating with them. We see this in many cases from the Americas, such as the more egalitarian beginnings of Teotihuacan and Monte Albán. That’s probably because they didn’t have domesticated animals or bronze weapons. Less Goliath fuel often meant rulers had to resort to more inclusive arrangements.41 Not all leaders were rapacious pirate-kings. Some pre-modern polities were far more democratic and had far more benevolent leaders than others.
The early cities of Jenne-Jeno, Tiwanaku, and Monte Albán, as well as later Teotihuacan, were more egalitarian in how they were governed and how riches were distributed. Similarly, Athens had its famous deliberative democracy, Rome had a republic with some democratic representation (although this was often a thin veil for oligarchy), and the Venetians had a leader (doge) who was chosen by a council of leading families and closely monitored for corruption. Notably, all these examples had representation restricted to free men; and the wealthy and powerful maintained disproportionate influence. Unsurprisingly, it was adult men, especially elites, who were the ones using violence to set up states. In short, the gang members who built the racket ensured that they maintained some control, leading to a more inclusive touch. Well, inclusive as long as you weren’t a slave or a woman.42 As with militias in the DRC trying to build a racket around gold mines, a more sophisticated and benevolent approach was usually needed when subjects had more exit options and less easily lootable resources.43 Tellingly, early statehood is one of the best predictors of how autocratic a state is today. Areas with more Goliath fuel created states sooner and they have left a long dictatorial legacy: just think of China, Egypt, and the Near East.44 Even the autocratic rackets could offer numerous benefits to at least a portion of the populace. The free adult males of Athens not only were given a political voice, but also benefited from slavery and patriarchy. Conquests, whether it be in Monte Albán or Rome, meant more booty, plunder, and slaves not just for elites, but also for much of the general populace. Some of the populace was complicit in building Goliaths and putting them back together once they fell apart.45 States can and did offer benefits, and some were more inclusive than others, but this shouldn’t hide the fact that most were deeply extractive arrangements. Ones that needed to be propped up by armed forces and elaborate ideologies. Gang warfare is still the most apt analogy. Even those that started from more democratic and egalitarian origins tended to drift towards oligarchy, greater concentrations of power, and greater extraction of resources by elites over time.
We’ve already seen some of the reasons as to why early states were Goliaths. Lootable resources usually resulted in growing wealth inequality over time, which tended eventually to spill over into politics and other forms of power. A second reason is Goliath evolution: societies that were more successful at conquest outcompeted those that were less effective.
They grew larger and more persistent over time. And those conquering polities were usually Goliaths. The reason why is rooted in basic human psychology.
46 THE AUTHORITARIAN IMPULSE Conflict isn’t a completely destructive force. It can spur cooperation, at least within a group. Data from sixteen studies covering forty countries all suggest that exposure to violence from war increases local cooperation within groups.47 Groups who have suffered an external attack tend to develop symbols, stories, and behaviours that bond them together, such as a shared sense of patriotism. We saw that in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. The day after the attacks, Walmart sold 250,000 US flags; it had only sold 10,000 the same day the previous year. The supermarket chain was almost running out of flags by the end of the week.48 Unfortunately, that increased coordination within a group does seem to come at a cost. It requires having an ‘other’ group or enemy to rally against.
Across the world the best predictor of levels of prejudice and ‘cultural tightness’ (tighter cultures have stricter norms, harsher punishments, and less tolerance for deviant behaviour) globally is how much a society has been exposed to threats such as war, disease, and scarcity. A people under threat stand together but apart from others.49 Conflict, or even just the threat of an external enemy, changes our brains.
One study scanned the brains of ninety Chinese students while they read about a potential threat from Japan. Remarkably, their brainwaves started to synchronize. This led to better coordination and completing group tasks more quickly.
50 It makes sense: if your group is in trouble then the ability to cooperate intensely and survive is critical. It’s a finding backed up by decades of research on terrorist cells, revolutionary groups, and squads of soldiers, all of whom develop strong emotional ties and a willingness to sacrifice themselves for each other (hence phrases like ‘esprit de corps’ and ‘brothers in arms’). It’s a phenomenon that militaries capitalize on, by training small units under duress to break down the individuals and rebuild them into a single team that is both more organized and more willing to kill.
An external threat supercharges cooperation within groups and the capacity for violence against outsiders.51 External threats change our brains in another way. They make us more open to being dominated.
Authoritarianism – obedience to high-status authorities and the desire to punish rule-breakers – increases when individuals face a threat to their safety and security. Some percentage of a population appears always to harbour stronger authoritarianism, and studies of twins suggest that it may be largely genetic. Surveys across eight modern high-income countries found that around 10–25 per cent ranked as highly authoritarian (with the US scoring the highest).52 These authoritarians tend to become more politically active and aggressive when they are activated by a social change, most commonly the emergence of a threat.53 Threats triggering authoritarian behaviour don’t just happen to those with underlying authoritarian tendencies. They happen to those who generally see the world as a dangerous place and affect even the most devoted peacenik (albeit to a lesser extent).54 This authoritarian impulse during crisis is so primal that it changes who we prefer as our leaders. Studies show that people want taller leaders with more masculine features during wartime. The old trope that fearful people will turn towards a ‘strongman’ leader turns out to be true.55 There is no shortage of modern-day examples. Vladimir Putin soared into power on the back of a heavy-handed response to a series of unexplained bombings (usually blamed on Chechen rebels). Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu experienced a resurgence in popularity after invading Gaza. Leaders like Bolsonaro in Brazil and Trump in the US have made a fine art of gaining votes by blaming foreigners for a country’s woes. The rise of authoritarian regimes prior to the Second World War was similarly littered with politicians using a dangerous ‘other’ to activate the authoritarian impulse. Even in democracies, during emergencies, whether it be a war or a pandemic, people are far more likely to (sometimes eagerly) accept less government transparency and more draconian measures. The normal response is to invoke martial law or national emergencies that give sweeping powers to an executive and tend to involve more surveillance and armed enforcement (through the police and military), despite the fact that people usually respond well to disasters and the idea of mass panic is a myth. After 9/11, increased flag sales wasn’t the only change: the US government also adopted the ‘Patriot Act’ that allowed for the indefinite detaining of migrants without charge and permitted the FBI to search email, financial, and telephone records without a warrant.56 The threat of violence allowed some groups to become more inwardly cooperative, murderous, and willing to accept authoritarian structures. In other words, simply the shadow of war helped to build Goliaths. More than that, Goliaths then became viral. Once one group becomes a conquering dominance hierarchy, the others who are threatened become more likely to imitate it. We see it in ancient Egypt.
Under Narmer’s rule Egypt begins to expand and conquer surrounding territories, such as in Canaan; the settlements in these areas begin to erect walls, build fortifications, and arm themselves.57 The Germanic tribes on the frontiers of the Roman Empire, or the nomadic Xiongnu and Xianbei on the edge of China, became more regimented and hierarchically organized in response to conflict with Rome and China.58 It can also help explain the patterns we have seen when it comes to war driving state formation: threats triggered people to start to adopt more top-down, authoritarian structures. More aggressive, conquering polities not only had an evolutionary advantage but were also contagious.
Violence also selected for certain types of leaders.
THE DARKER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE Psychologically, not everyone has an equal desire for status or openness to aggression. Those with high rankings in the triad of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism are more predisposed to dominating others and are forceful status seekers. Today roughly one in a hundred people or fewer is a psychopath. The most common place to find psychopaths is in prison, where they make up around 25 per cent of the population.59 The second most common place is the executive suite.
Among CEOs, the rate of psychopaths rises from 1 per cent to 3–21 per cent (the numbers are uncertain, especially as all the dark-triad traits exist on a spectrum).60 Psychologists tend to distinguish between ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ psychopaths. The successful ones end up in boardrooms and parliaments, while the unsuccessful end up in prison.61 Those ranking highly in the dark triad are the most probable candidates for those who broke the fragile peace of the Palaeolithic and started cycles of violence. The authors of the most recent survey of pre-agricultural violence speculate that violence in the pre-agricultural period may have been driven by a few psychopaths.62 Psychopaths are not only strong dominance status seekers, but are also predisposed towards aggression with little empathy holding them back.63 Such individuals, not the average forager, would have been the most likely to break the norms of peace between groups, sparking reprisals and escalation. Once these cycles of conflict began, they were hard to stop.
Psychological phenomena such as the authoritarian impulse and the dark triad are not recent. Like our egalitarianism or love of status, they are ancient, evolved behavioural patterns. Counter-dominance measures and a lack of Goliath fuel both kept a check on dominance-based status-seeking behaviour and the dark triad. That is, until the world warmed, the environment changed, and Goliath fuel became available.
Place yourself back in the body of a forager in the early Holocene.
You’ve started settling down every summer to harvest stands of wild cereal throughout a forest. They are nourishing but leave you stationary and vulnerable. One brash young man begins warning you and your family that he overheard strangers were planning a raid to take the crops. Your group may have good fighters, but humans are fragile, especially when sleeping.
There is always an advantage to striking first and using the element of surprise. The usual channels of communication are not open with these new groups and the young upstart continues his warnings and offers to lead a pre-emptive attack. One summer a drought strikes. Your wild stands of grass are low; sharing with your neighbours is becoming increasingly difficult, and those neighbours are growing increasingly anxious.
Eventually, you give in and agree to the attack.
The dawn ambush on your new neighbours is hurried and panicked, but successful. Unfortunately, you leave many survivors. A month later, they strike back, launching spears through your camp in the middle of the night.
The proud young upstart begins to present himself as a war chief. He is fearless, charismatic, and an excellent tactician. The others listen and begin to shower him with gifts after every victory.
Little do you know that he is a sociopath who had planned this the entire time. The other group never intended to attack you. That doesn’t matter now; the slow and bloody spiral towards Goliaths has begun.
Today, many countries have checks and balances on leaders, a media that watches and critiques them, well-established electoral procedures, and, of course, a knowledge of psychological issues such as narcissism and psychopathy. Yet even with that we still end up with world leaders who seem to be steeped in the dark triad. It is difficult to look at some of the most powerful men in recent times and not see signs of narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellian politicking, or just grandiose ambition. This is a feature of our political systems, not a bug. Politics doesn’t select for those who are the most virtuous or most competent, or those who would wield power best. It selects primarily for those who are the best manipulators and negotiators and are willing to invest the enormous amounts of time and effort (and often relax their morals) necessary to achieve status.
The selection mechanism would have been even worse in the past. The time of the first states lacked many of these accountability mechanisms, and pre-modern leaders tended to be overwhelmingly successful warlords, like Narmer.
Upon taking power, the need to go to battle and the threat of being the victim of a counter-dominance revolution also would have selected for only the strongest status seekers. All of this means that those who were selected – those comfortable with violence, capable of activating the authoritarian impulse in their followers, and ambitious enough to risk death – would have been far more likely to rank high in the dark triad and have stronger status desires. The proportion of psychopaths among the first leaders was probably even higher than it is in boardrooms and parliaments today.
Even those who were more benevolent and ended up in power would probably have become corrupted by it over time. Holding a position high up in a hierarchy leads to marked changes in behaviour, and even in the brain.
In one study, college students who had been primed to feel powerful were placed under a brain scanner. The researchers found that a neural process in the students called ‘mirroring’ had been impaired. Mirroring is a kind of neurological mimicry whereby when we see an action performed our brain lights up the same pathways required for that action.
Mirroring is a cornerstone of empathy.
64 Numerous studies, experiments, and laboratory games have repeatedly shown that powerful people tend to have less empathy and less compassion, take more risks, have more affairs, act more impulsively, are more hypocritical, and lie and cheat more frequently.
65 As summarized by Brian Klaas in his book Corruptible: ‘all the available evidence points in one direction. Becoming powerful makes you more selfish, reduces enpathy, increases hypocrisy, and makes you more likely to commit abuse.’66 Or as Lord Acton once put it: ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Think of this collection of traits – status seeking through dominance, the dark triad, the authoritarian impulse, and power corrupting – as the ‘darker angels of our nature’. They had been kept in check by counter-dominance measures previously, but were unleashed by Goliath fuel – lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and caged land – all allowing for the few to dominate the many. It wasn’t just about the leaders who were selected for but also about a devoted group of authoritarian followers. The environmental upheaval of the Holocene, growing populations, and the development of Goliaths all provided external threats that made much of the populace more willing to accept authoritarian arrangements.
We’ll never fully know what happened during these thousands of years when warfare and Goliaths emerged. We certainly can’t run psychology tests on the long-dead leaders and warriors of the time. Yet this explanation – the availability of Goliath fuel meeting the darker angels of our nature and gang warfare ensuing – fits the historical record and what we know of human psychology.
It also helps to explain why early states tended to be so unequal and extractive. A usual explanation for state formation is that big projects (roads, bridges, irrigation, and granaries) and populations needed big rulers to organize them. Yet, irrigation schemes and urban centres often preceded hierarchy. Most importantly, even if a ruler provided decent coordination or military command, why did they need to be worshipped as a god and be given hundreds of times more wealth than the average person? Why didn’t we coordinate through democratic coalitions of workers? It’s not because we needed big coordinators who demanded even bigger rewards or incentives. It’s because of violence, power, the drive for status, and the fear of losing it.67 Of course, not all early elites were megalomaniacs, psychopaths, or power-drunk. Many could have been well-meaning and well-behaved leaders. Yet even a few rogue rulers would have created a system in which aggression, cheating, and self-aggrandizing were more acceptable (at least among certain classes). And once a few bad precedents were set, it became easier for others to respond and establish similar dynamics. One bellicose city-state could have easily triggered others to devote more resources to walls and spears, and less to growing food and building roads. Those who did not were conquered. It created a new evolutionary pressure, and arms races were born. One egotistical ruler who centralized power and built up a cult of personality provided both a blueprint and justification for others to do the same. Those who didn’t had less of a claim to being leader. It became a race to the bottom. Arms races, races to the bottom, and status races using conspicuous consumption (such as feasts and great monuments) all became competitive traps. Those who chose not to play (pacifists, those who had little desire to rule, or animists who refused to exploit the environment for better weaponry) were either outcompeted or had to change their mind. Think of these as ‘Goliath traps’: destructive competitive dynamics that dominance hierarchies are prone to fall into. They might be good for a few individuals in the short term but are not in the long-term interest of the majority.
The darker angels of our nature – status competition through dominance, the dark triad, the authoritarian impulse, and power corrupting – all combined to help create systems in which one group exploits the rest. The violence of collapse and state formation is just the collateral damage of trying to set up an effective racket. Many were successful in creating vast systems of interconnected states and empires. Like the first Goliaths, these rackets would also eventually break down owing largely to inequality, albeit at a larger scale with far more serious consequences.68
9 Broken Bronze In Sargon’s Footsteps – The Blurry Line Between State and Empire – The Early Bronze Age Collapse – The Beginnings of the West and Capitalism – The Late Bronze Age Systems Collapse – Collapse as a Blessing – The Bright Side of Dark Ages IN SARGON’S FOOTSTEPS We do not know the birth name of the world’s first emperor. We simply know him as Sargon: ‘the true king’.
As with Narmer, we have an engraving that depicts his ascent to power.
It’s known as the Sargon Victory Stele (from the third millennium BCE) and is held in the Louvre in Paris. It looks unsettlingly similar to the Palette of Narmer. Sargon is shown holding a net of captured enemies in front of the goddess Ishtar while smashing a slave’s head with a club (Figure 21).1 It is partly a claim to divinity, with the image closely resembling an earlier stele of the god Ninĝirsu (tellingly, a god of farming who later also became a god of war) holding a net of enemies in a similar fashion.2 Sargon’s origins are shrouded in myth. In the legend, Sargon is said to have been the illegitimate child of a high priestess. She secretly birthed him and then placed him in a basket to float down the river, a story that would later be echoed by the tale of baby Moses floating in a basket on the Nile. Sargon was adopted by a humble gardener, Akki. In this telling, Sargon is a self-made man who rose to be a cupbearer to the king of Kish, Ur-Zababa. He overthrew his boss and mobilized Kish for war. He first marched south to conquer the great city of Uruk. He didn’t stop there. He conquered cities throughout southern Mesopotamia and then northern Mesopotamia. He founded a new capital called Akkad, the centrepiece of the Akkadian Empire, and changed the official script of the region from Sumerian to Akkadian. The exact date of his reign is unclear, but would have been around 2334–2279 BCE.
Figure 21: Victory Stele SB2 of Sargon of Akkad Sargon was a ‘marcher king’. He would lead his small army from city to city, conquering, demanding tribute, and installing a puppet leader to rule in his absence. Those leaders often didn’t share Sargon’s culture and weren’t monitored, hence were liable to revolt. It was a tenuous affair, with Sargon frequently needing to revisit cities to quell rebellions and reinstate his authority.
The Akkadian Empire lasted a century after Sargon’s death – an impressive length of time, given how difficult the work of maintaining an empire is.
Sargon faced clear limits to his ambitions, as has every emperor since.
There were two key problems that plagued any attempt to create lasting social control. First, people abhorred domination. Cities didn’t want to remain conquered, and the foragers and herders outside them were reluctant to give up their resources or independence. Ideology and external threats could help people to accept dominance hierarchies, but it wasn’t a stable affair. Second was status competition. A ruler could not be everywhere at once, and Sargon’s strategy of constantly marching from community to community was not sustainable. Instead, the rulers had to rely on local elites, governors, and eventually bureaucrats to impose rules and extract resources. These elites had their own aspirations for greater status and wealth, and the state had created a hierarchy with a throne and positions of power: the ultimate visible ladder of status. Status competition through dominance was now legitimate, and the stakes were far higher with entire swathes of cities, temples, and armies up for grabs. Elite competition became endemic.
Dominance aversion and status competition made empire-building the equivalent of trying to construct a human pyramid from hostile strangers. Most wanted to be on top, and no one wanted to be shouldering the burden at the bottom. Enormous empires were still eventually built, but only after millennia of struggle and innovation.
We can see it in numbers. For the first 3,600 years after Narmer (3000 BCE to 600 CE) empires varied in size between 0.15 and 1.3 million square kilometres. To put that in perspective, the country of Egypt today is around 1 million square kilometres and 3,600 years is about the same amount of time separating us from the times of Socrates and Classical Greece plus more than another 1,000 years. (Those area estimates are generous, since empires rarely effectively controlled much of their territory.
3 ) Scholars often liken empires to a rimless wheel: an original homeland (the core) conquered lands and cities outside it (the periphery) but kept them separated to ensure they couldn’t coordinate against the conqueror. That wheel was usually unstable. Conquerors usually had little control over far-flung territories, with little to no full-time bureaucracy and poor communication technologies (the horse wasn’t even introduced into the Near East until 2000 BCE). Conquerors like Narmer and Sargon had to rely on vulgar displays of brute force and punishment – whether that be public monuments showing them smashing people’s heads in or hanging flayed skins from city walls – not because they were powerful, but because they were weak. They governed through intimidation.
Over time this changed. Empires found ways to shorten the distance between rulers and the ruled by developing better bureaucracies and quicker transportation and communication technologies, and making the landscape more easily traversed by chopping down forests, draining swamps, channelling rivers, and laying down roads. It was a long process, but empires evolved and grew in size. As rulers became more powerful and logistically organized they came to rely more and more on bureaucracy, propaganda, and religion to assert their power. It was a move over thousands of years from intimidation to administration.4 Throughout history empires have been the default setting for any largescale state.5 China’s history is one of empire for over 2,000 years, from the reign of the Qin (221 BCE) until today, punctuated by periods of fragmentation. Empires drove colonization and drew the current borders of the world. Most stories of collapse are stories of empire. Most of what we consider history is just the stories and actions of a few dozen empires.6 THE BLURRY LINE BETWEEN STATE AND EMPIRE While Sargon is usually remembered as the first emperor, he wasn’t.
Narmer is closer to claiming that title. That’s because all states are empires.
Empires are systems of political control in which one group dominates and assimilates others. This control can be either direct conquest and rule (formal) or the effective control of resources (informal).7 Sargon’s Akkadian Empire is a paradigmatic example of the former: the empire would conquer a city, install a puppet ruler, and then demand tribute (such as gold and slaves). Some claim that the modern US is an example of the latter. It uses unfair ‘free-trade’ agreements that result in it getting cheaper imports and selling its products at a premium. Empires require violence, or at least the threat of it, to create a system of unequal exchange. The Akkadians ruled through military prowess. The US is a superpower in large part because it has the most advanced military force and arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. Whether it be through the sword, or negotiations conducted in the shadow of that sword, empires are about domination. In the simplest terms, empire is just the quest of one society to control the resources and people of another.
8 The borders separating hierarchical hunter-gatherers, states, and empires are blurry. There were frequently enormous differences in the size of the territory and the population they covered, but the way they operated was often similar. The Calusa were one small, concentrated group of fisherfolk violently extracting resources from the communities around them. The earliest city-states were usually a core of palaces and temples dominating a wider hinterland. Archaeologists in general look for a small number of large sites and many small sites as one sign of ‘settlement hierarchy’. Rome was just a city that grew by conquering its neighbours. The British Empire began with the conquest of what we now call England by the Normans.
They then slowly subdued the Irish and Welsh. Centuries later, this English empire expanded across the seas, invading India, Australia, the Caribbean, Africa, and North America. The Calusa, Rome, and the British Empire all involved one group dominating and extracting resources from others. Some grew far bigger in size and bureaucracy than others, but the fundamental approach of unequal exchange was the same. All of them were rimless wheels with a core homeland dominating a periphery: the Calusa capital of Calos dominated the surrounding lands and farmers; Rome dominated much of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East; London dominated Britain, then its neighbours, then the world.
Scholars have tied themselves into knots trying to define empire, separate empire from colonization, and decide whether England/Britain was an empire before it began its overseas colonies. It had, after all, already conquered the Irish before it took India.9 The reason why empire is so hard to define is because of the unsettling truth that all states are essentially empires. It’s a spectrum, a matter of degree. For simplicity, we can still call states that conquer other states ‘empires’, but the difference is minor.
10 Empires vary in size and rule.11 The Assyrian Empire ruled over 1.4 million square kilometres of land and obsessed over ensuring that its subjects all prioritized the god Assur. The Western Roman Empire covered 5 million square kilometres and cared little about the gods its citizens worshipped, as long as they paid their taxes and didn’t rebel.12 Many empires would link together in webs of trade and diplomacy, like the ancient beginnings of the modern hyper-connected, globalized world.
The Early and Late Bronze Age of the Mediterranean are both examples of these great Goliath systems of competing and cooperating empires.
Both would undergo a systems collapse: a collapse not just of one city or empire, but of an entire interconnected system of them. If we want to understand how a collapse could unfold in the modern world, then these are some of the more instructive examples.
THE EARLY BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE Sargon’s Akkadian Empire was not alone in the world. To the south was the Old Egyptian Kingdom. Thousands of kilometres to the east was the Indus Valley Civilization: those egalitarian cities full of plumbing and public bathhouses. To the north, in Malta, we have the ‘Temple Period’. It was not an empire or state, but a time when thirty gigantic stone buildings were erected across the islands (perhaps by hierarchical early farmers). All of these groups eventually failed. The Akkadian Empire that had begun with Sargon in around 2334 BCE had fallen apart by 2150 BCE.
The Old Egyptian Kingdom decentralized. There was no longer a single pharaoh, but rather multiple competing claimants to different regions.
Numerous settlements throughout Mesopotamia, the Levant, and the Mediterranean were abandoned. The Indus Valley Civilization, which traded with Mesopotamia, reorganized many of its metropolises. The people slowly began to leak from the cities into the surrounding countryside. In Malta, the Temple Period came to an end.
These polities are grouped under what we call the Early Bronze Age, and they all appear to have experienced transformations, even collapses, around 2200–2000 BCE.
It is unclear what caused the collapse of the Early Bronze Age systems.
The most widely cited culprit is climate change, in particular a ‘megadrought’ that appears to have struck the region. Evidence of drought stretches from the Nile to Spain and coincides with the shrinkage of cities and the abandonment of settlements across the area (Figure 22).13 While there is a clear correlation between the drought and the collapses, it is difficult to establish direct causation. We also know that there was significant regional climatic variation. Different areas responded differently and some, such as western Syria, seem to have barely been affected.14 Some dried abruptly, while for others the reduction in rainfall occurred over centuries and there was little significant change.15 Figure 22: A timeline of Early Bronze Age polities None of this signalled a fatal end for these populations. Instead, it meant a decentralization of power. Emperors, pharaohs, and kings lost centralized authority, while local leaders and assemblies gained it. Like the fissionfusion processes of the past, it was a disaggregation. In this case a disaggregation into the building blocks of an empire. In Syria’s Euphrates Valley, the Bronze Age had seen a combination of kings ruling alongside popular assemblies and councils of elders. As the region decentralized, the assemblies and councils became more prominent.
They even appear to have been a source of resilience, cushioning the fall.16 Egypt had a similar democratization of both religion and politics.
The First Dynasty was, like its monuments, pyramidal in structure. There was a rigid class system, centralized government, and the veneration of leaders, including the ritualistic sacrifice of hundreds at royal funerals.
The collapse period is marked by tombs and jewellery becoming more widely available, alongside other signs of greater collective access to religion. While a new pharaoh eventually regained control, the Middle Kingdom was marked by a blurring of class boundaries with new rulers who portrayed themselves as modest shepherds of their people.17 For Mesopotamia, collapses of empires and kingdoms, such as Sargon’s Akkad or the Babylonian Empire (c.1880–1595 BCE), often just meant a switch back to more autonomous city-states and localized forms of collective governance. Emperors usually had little interest in local matters such as resolving disputes and organizing the day-to-day running of the city, leaving these to local government. This was far from a dreadful outcome.
The Akkadian Empire was a predatory, militaristic juggernaut that many would have been delighted to see fall apart.18 In the Indus Valley, the collapse was more of a slow transformation as people moved from cities into a more village-dominant economy. Over centuries people moved east, began to plant more hardy crops like droughttolerant millet, and became less reliant on trade between cities and with Mesopotamia.19 While the drought may have been a catalyst for collapse across the Early Bronze Age, the responses of different regions and polities varied dramatically. None of this constituted an ancient apocalypse. While it was not an overly negative outcome, it was still a systems collapse. It was also not the last time this would happen in the Bronze Age Mediterranean.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE WEST AND CAPITALISM A few centuries later, the eastern Mediterranean, south-west Asia, and Aegean was home to a web of interconnected Goliaths (1700 to 1200 BCE).
Among them we can count the Mycenaeans of Greece, Minoans, the Hittites of Anatolia (modern Turkey), Cypriots (in Cyprus), the Canaanites of the southern Levant, Egyptians, the Mitanni and Assyrians in Mesopotamia, and the Kassites of Babylon. The Mycenaeans were the original ruthless warrior kings of Greece, residing in multiple palaces across the islands. They received animals and grain from the rural populace in exchange for protection and hosting great feasts. The New Egyptian Kingdom was home to some of the most well-known pharaohs such as Tutankhamun and Ramesses II. It even saw the first possible monotheistic religion in Atenism, the worship of Aten, originally a god who was depicted as a sun disc. The Minoans covered numerous port cities across the Aegean that had no depictions of male rulers. This Bronze Age network included the fabled city of Troy.
It was a time that also saw the earliest glimpses of capitalism. When capitalism begins depends on how you define it. Most dictionaries give us the rough definition of an economic system where industry has private owners. Academics tend to define capitalism by a list of certain traits: private property, enforceable contracts, wage labour, markets with responsive prices, and supportive governments. We can see most of these traits thousands of years ago in the Bronze Age.20 In Assyria, around 4,000–3,000 years ago, we have ample evidence of the basic features of capitalism. Over 1,000 recovered cuneiform documents record the use of credit and debt as virtual money, the use of ‘joint-stock’ agreements, interest-bearing debts, and an autonomous merchant class.
These were not state-run endeavours overseen by a king. They were privately governed by an assembly of elite merchant families. These families held a monopoly on the trade of certain goods, guaranteed contracts, undertook diplomacy, and regulated the weighing and measurement of precious metals.21 It is during this time that we see the first signs of multinational corporations as well. In Assyria, different businesses set up shop around the trading city of Kanesh (in modern-day Turkey), a midway point for trading tin from Afghanistan into the Assyrian Empire. These companies had all the hallmarks of what we would call today a multinational corporation: common stock ownership, an organizational hierarchy, and a drive for profit, as well as foreign activities and employees. It’s also in the Bronze Age Assyrian business community of Kanesh that we see the first evidence of businesswomen (and investors), who even penned their own cuneiform letters.22 States were highly supportive of such arrangements. In one of the first instances of financial deregulation, royal inscriptions from Assur record generous tax breaks given to merchants to encourage commerce in the city.
Even the famed ‘Code of Hammurabi’ has rules for granting credit and places taxes and tariffs on commerce. Whether it be capitalism, multinationals, Greek culture, or monotheistic religion, this system was, in short, the root of what many would now call ‘the West’.23 By 1500 BCE, this Bronze Age network was one of interconnected trade.
Each state relied on exchange with others. Most of the gold came from Egypt (Nubia and Sudan), the silver from Greece (the Laurion mines), copper from Cyprus, and tin from modern-day Afghanistan. Tin and copper were vital as they made the alloy bronze.24 There is a reason the Bronze Age was so called, with some comparing the role of bronze to that of oil in the modern world.25 (Well, at least for elites: bronze was primarily a luxury item for weapons, buildings, and decorations – and less used by commoners.) There is an unfortunate penchant for labelling historical periods after metals (such as bronze and iron) that tend to characterize elite life in cities. If we are to name periods after the most used and vital resource, then most of human history should be called the wood age.
Regardless, bronze and trade were central to empire in the Bronze Age.26 If one state wasn’t directly trading or bargaining with another then it had indirect contact through one of its neighbours. Tonnes of raw materials and finished goods, as well as dowries, were exchanged across the leaders of Egypt, Mitanni, Assyria, and Babylonia, usually under the guise of giftgiving.27 For instance, one letter detailing gifts from the pharaoh Akhenaten to the Kassite king Burnaburiash II includes gold, copper, silver, bronze, bracelets, necklaces, perfume, mirrors, and ebony boxes.28 The exchange and benefits were limited to the upper echelons of the Bronze Age with little trickling down.
The elite Late Bronze Age trade network happened across cities and was controlled by urban aristocrats who built fortunes off conquest, forced labour, and taxing farmers and client states. Like today, there were tax breaks for the wealthiest. One rich Ugarit trader boasted in a letter of not having to pay import tax when returning from Greece with a ship loaded with beer, grain, and olive oil.29 It wasn’t necessarily a pleasant life for the average commoner. Estimates of inequality in the Near East using house sizes suggest that inequality rose with the first cities and states. It continued to increase throughout the Bronze Age in both cities and rural areas.30 The oppression and inequality are reflected in the skeletons of the Bronze Age people. For instance, pharaohs were taller than the rest of the male population. That’s because they had access not only to more food but also to medical services and they lived longer, more leisurely lives. By contrast, Egyptian peasants appear to have suffered regularly from tuberculosis and hernias – the effects of heavy labour. In the Greek Mycenae, kings and elites averaged a height of 172.5cm compared with 166.1cm for the average male population. High-status women were also taller than their poorer peers by around 6cm. This system of bronze Goliaths was deeply unequal.31 By 1100 BCE this system had disintegrated. It was a swift unravelling: within two or three generations the small world elite network had collapsed; many of the individual states had ceased to exist, and dozens of cities had been abandoned or burned to the ground. In some cases, even writing was lost, such as the disappearance of the script of Ugarit and the Linear B script from Mycenaean Greece.
THE LATE BRONZE AGE SYSTEMS COLLAPSE Around 1185 BCE a merchant called Banniya hurriedly penned a letter to his boss. It read, ‘There is famine in your house; we will all die of hunger.
If you do not quickly arrive here, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land.’ Banniya was working in the outpost of a commercial company in the city of Emar, located inland in Syria, and messaging his superior in Ugarit, a trading hub on the coast around 250 kilometres away.
Ugarit seems to have been gripped by drought around the same time as Banniya’s letter. In response to a plea from the king of Ugarit the Egyptian pharaoh sent gold, fish, and textiles as aid, yet it was to no avail. Both Emar and Ugarit were destroyed shortly thereafter. The debris left from the razing of Ugarit was two metres high. We do not know who burned the city down.32 This was the death knell of the Late Bronze Age (Figure 23).
The Late Bronze Age was hit by a variety of shocks. Perhaps the most decisive was a drought that struck the region around 3,200 years ago and lasted 150 to 300 years.33 The drought extended from northern Italy down through Greece and Turkey to Cyprus, the Levant, and Egypt, and east to Iran and Iraq. The arid conditions appear to have caused crop yield shortages and famine. In Egypt, grain prices rose. Some areas appear to have been particularly hard hit as we can see in the letter of Banniya.34 Figure 23: A timeline of Late Bronze Age polities As with the earlier Bronze Age, the drought was not universal. Some areas do not seem to have experienced a drought at all. Climatic data from a stalagmite near the Pylos palace in Greece suggests that there were wetter conditions before the collapse of the palace, and drier conditions after. The Bronze Age people were also not placid targets.
They adapted. During the drought the Egyptians bred more tolerant cattle in Canaan and extended dry farming in the southern and eastern fringes of the Levant to make up for the lower grain production in the north. The drought contributed to the collapse, but its effects differed greatly across regions.35 Alongside the drought came a series of earthquakes. The entire region is riven with fault lines, including the Anatolian Faultline across northern Turkey. Maps of the areas most affected by earthquakes in the twentieth century show an overlap with many sites that were destroyed during the Late Bronze Age.
Earthquakes in the region often come in groups, or earthquake ‘storms’, and can be of 6.5 or greater magnitudes, enough to destroy even modern buildings.36 There is evidence of a storm of earthquakes across Mycenaean Greece, Troy, and settlements across Canaan (modern Israel and Jordan). Earthquakes alone, however, seem insufficient to account for such a broad systems collapse. In both Ugarit and Mycenaean Greece there is evidence of sites being rebuilt after earthquakes around 1250 BCE.
37 These natural disasters may have also been accompanied by pestilence.
We now know that the pharaoh Ramesses V died of smallpox, while the entire royal Hittite family was eliminated by an epidemic c.1350 BCE.
Yet, there is otherwise little evidence: we’ve yet to discover any mass graves, or texts that mention an outbreak.38 These environmental hazards were accompanied by threats with a human face. Perhaps the most well-known and maligned are the ‘Sea Peoples’.
These were purportedly invaders who swept through the Mediterranean razing cities to the ground. The idea of marauding Sea Peoples comes from inscriptions by the pharaohs Merneptah and Ramesses III recounting battles in 1207 and 1177 BCE. Ramesses casts himself as the last heroic bastion of civilization holding out against a tide of barbarians: ‘They laid their hands upon the lands, as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts were trusting and confident as they thought ‘“our plans will succeed”.’According to Ramesses, their schemes came to nought, for once they met him they were ‘slain and made into heaps from head to tail’.
It’s a rousing tale but there are a few reasons to not trust Ramesses III.
His records aggrandize him as a military genius, but there is essentially no evidence to support his account. Some of the cities Ramesses claimed were destroyed were not, and for other cases much of the destruction occurred before the arrival of the Sea Peoples. In most cases we know it wasn’t Sea Peoples who invaded. The Elamites conquered the Hittites, and the Hittites appear to have conquered Cyprus. Some areas, such as Mycenaean Greece, show no signs of external attackers. The more likely culprit is rebellion or conflict between the different palaces within Greece rather than foreign invaders.
There was also no single invading force. Instead, this was more likely to have been a mixed group of refugees, migrants, pirates, and just savvy mobile people from the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean who were moving because of drought, warfare, oppression, and economic hardship. In many cases they would have settled with little conflict, bringing new culture with them (such as Philistine migrants settling in what is modernday Israel and bringing Aegean-style pottery and architecture). There is, if anything, an odd double standard in how the migrants of the Late Bronze Age have often been portrayed. When the elites of the Bronze Age traded or warred it was a sign of a thriving culture; but when commoners moved, they are seen as mysterious, apocalyptic invaders.39 A clearer contributor to the systems collapse is civil strife. Rising inequality and conquest empires were not the most stable basis for a social system. Conquered subjects actively resisted and undermined their imperial overlords. There is evidence of rebellion – such as burned settlements and arrowheads from battles but without signs of foreign invasions or a marching army – in Greece, Hazor in Canaan, and many other sites throughout the levant.40 Whether it be rebels or invaders, a swathe of cities across the Bronze Age system were razed, as seen in Figure 24.
41 Figure 24: A map of the Late Bronze Age collapse This map shows the rough extent of key empires and cultures preceding the Late Bronze Age collapse, as well as some of the major sites destroyed during the collapse. My colleague Eric Cline, one of the leading archaeologists of the Late Bronze Age collapse, has suggested that it was caused by no one factor, but by the interaction of many. It was a perfect storm of drought, famine, earthquakes, disease, invasions, and rebellions. More than that, each of these factors created ripple effects that worsened the situation. Revolts spread as commoners stormed palaces and grain stores. The supply of gold from Egypt, silver from Greece, and tin and copper from Afghanistan would have been disrupted. Bronze came in increasingly short supply.
42 The very way that the Bronze Age system was structured could have contributed to its swift fall.43 Multiple different stressors cause one system to enter a crisis, which triggers another one to do the same. This can worsen the initial crisis, creating a ‘systems death spiral’.44 Two key potential death spirals drove the disintegration of the Bronze Age system. First, drought and rising inequality created more rebellions and interstate wars. Those revolts and invasions destroyed cities, including key trading hubs, destabilizing the trade network. As the trade network frayed and fewer goods were moved around, there was even more resource scarcity, fuelling further conflict. The sheer drop in trade made trading cities less profitable and more vulnerable, making abandonment or external invasion more likely (see Figure 25). Compounding matters was the impact of the earthquake storm. Pirates emerging from the broken cities, as well as driven by climate change into the area, could have made trade even more dangerous, further unsettling the Bronze Age network. The key behind it all is that the interdependence of the Bronze Age Goliaths was a weakness.
Once enough cities were lost it destabilized the network, encouraging more cities to fall apart, slowly unknitting the Late Bronze Age system.45 The interdependence of the Bronze Age was a blessing for Goliaths in the good times, but a liability during a time of multiple shocks. One study that mapped the trade and diplomatic networks of the Late Bronze Age found that while it was usually robust, it may have taken just the loss of an empire or two to throw it into disarray. Their model suggests that just the loss of Ugarit and the Hittite Empire could have been enough to upend the Late Bronze Age system. It’s a plausible scenario given that the two seem to have collapsed at roughly the same time.46 Figure 25: Death spirals in the Bronze Age collapse COLLAPSE AS A BLESSING The Late Bronze Age collapse was no apocalypse. Each polity changed and recovered in different ways. The Hittite Empire fell apart, and its capital of Hattusa was abandoned and then razed. Just a few cities and smaller kingdoms across south-eastern Anatolia and northern Syria were left behind. Egypt broke into rival factions and competing pharaohs, yet its culture and population remained relatively stable. The Assyrians were resilient, with one expert perhaps over-optimistically describing it as a ‘recession’. The palaces of Mycenaean Greece were utterly levelled and used by squatters and herders. Cities and trading hubs such as Ugarit were burned to the ground. From a wide lens the Late Bronze Age collapse looks like a single systems collapse, but a closer look shows it to be a kaleidoscope of different processes of collapse, resilience, and recovery occurring differently across the region.47 We have little idea how this systems collapse impacted people living in rural areas that would have made up 95 per cent of the population. The end of the Hittite Empire and the palace economies of Greece would have meant relief from tax and corvée labour (unpaid, forced labour for a certain period of time, usually for state projects) for most subjects.
The few bits of evidence we do have suggest that the collapse may have been a boon for most people. Inequality estimates based on housing sizes suggest that rural areas became more equal. In contrast, urban settlements continued to become more unequal from the Late Bronze Age into the Iron Age. This is because empires could no longer effectively extract wealth from the countryside.48 Tellingly, those who lived under the empires that experienced little change during the collapse did poorly. The Assyrian Empire had a relatively (compared to the Hittites or Mycenaeans) smooth transition into the NeoAssyrian military juggernaut. It’s also one of the few areas where we have data on how people’s wealth varied over time, thanks to buried grave goods.
In Assyria we see inequality grow from the Late Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Commoners in the Iron Age get buried with fewer and lower-quality grave goods such as pieces of pottery and jewellery. That decrease is probably due to a greater reliance on migrant labour and the Assyrian crown demanding more tax and corvée labour. We don’t know if the rich were getting richer, but the poor were clearly getting poorer. 49 In Greece, more egalitarian regions without palaces didn’t even appear to experience a collapse. Areas such as Corinthia, Achaea, and the Euboean Gulf didn’t undergo a collapse, and seem to have prospered after the palaces elsewhere fell apart. Unlike the situation with the Assyrians, the poor didn’t get poorer. The more egalitarian communities were both more resilient to external shocks and better for those living within them. And the collapse was largely an elite phenomenon driven by inequality. Without palaces and elites there was no conflict and no collapse.50 We don’t have a sharp, high-resolution image of life during the Late Bronze Age collapse for peasant farmers.
Did they really worry much about their previous Hittite overlords no longer receiving gold and ostrich eggs from overseas? Or did they simply shrug and continue ploughing and enjoy the less frequent visits from the tax collector? We can easily see Mycenaean Greece as a case of ‘escape’ from an unsustainable system of competing palaces extracting wealth from the lands and people around them. Their end was brought about by war and revolt, and the ensuing drought helped to ensure they were never rebuilt. You were better off as a pastoralist grazing your sheep in the ruined palaces of Greece than as a peasant under the extractive dictatorship of the Assyrians.51 One Bronze Age expert suggested that, rather than think of it as a civilizational collapse, we should view it as a time ‘during which a few large imperial polities succumbed to their structural weaknesses and corruption’, which allowed repressed groups and communities to reorganize and flourish.52 While we shouldn’t turn away from the lives lost or the smoke of the burned cities, it is an apt interpretation of the collapse.
Perhaps the very idea of civilizational catastrophe followed by a dark age in the Late Bronze Age is ‘imperial rhetoric from beyond the grave’.53 Perhaps we shouldn’t mourn the Egyptians, Hittites, and Mycenaeans.
There may even be grounds for celebrating the ‘dark age’ that followed.
THE BRIGHT SIDE OF DARK AGES What followed the Late Bronze Age collapse is what was once called a ‘dark age’. It is a common trope in the rise-and-fall vision of history that collapses were followed by dark ages.
It’s a difficult position to hold once you look at what happened in the wake of the Late Bronze Age. Homer, author of the Odyssey and the Iliad, was a poet of these Greek dark ages.54 As was Hesiod, the poet of Theogony and Work and Days. They are almost certainly part of a wider set of heroic poetry developed during the dark age. Without collapse the world would be bereft of Homer and reams of epic literature.55 Collapse could also provide space for more democratic arrangements.
The collapse of Mycenae levelled wealth inequality. In the long run, this left emerging aristocrats even after the early iron age (750–480 BCE) weak and divided. The initial law codes (from around 620 BCE) the Greeks crafted aimed to limit the ability of an individual to dominate the rest. By 525 BCE, many adult males had decided to make collective decisions via mass assemblies. These practices and norms were the foundations for later Athenian democracy.
56 Athens was a limited democracy that permitted slavery and had political representation for only 10–15 per cent of the population (just free, male, adult citizens). It was nonetheless a significant step beyond the previous autocracy of Mycenaean Greece. With their random selection of representatives and emphasis on deliberation, it may well have been a more advanced and intense form of democracy than the practice of modern, rich countries of simply voting once every four or so years.
Many other benefits accompanied the collapse. New groups formed and prospered. In Canaan, the late-thirteenth- to eleventh-century highlands saw the emergence of village dwellers who were the precursors of the Israelites.
Other independent cities such as Tyre and Byblos rose up and took over the trading routes previously serviced by Ugarit. They became the pioneering Phoenicians, who would eventually form a Carthage-based empire. The Phoenicians introduced a new alphabet to the world.
Alphabetic scripts had existed before, with Ugarit possessing two of them, but these were elitist scripts with hundreds of symbols that were difficult to learn. In contrast, the Phoenician alphabet was short, simple, and easy to master. Because of that, it spread widely, becoming the basis of the Greek alphabet as well as the Latin alphabet that underpins many languages used across the world today, including English, French, and Spanish.
We see a similar pattern with technology. Most of the key technological breakthroughs of the Bronze Age, such as the alphabet and ironworking, occurred on the peripheries of empire, and/or after the Bronze Age collapse.57 Other technologies and practices such as animal husbandry, the plough, irrigation through canals and ditches, the sailing boat, and pottery all preceded the first states of the Bronze Age and were often developed by stateless hunter-gatherers. The idea of golden ages of empire leading to technological and cultural progress, and the fall of empires leading to regression, is at best mistaken.
The term ‘dark age’ has fallen out of favour among historians and archaeologists for good reason. Far from being the beginning of a period of gloom, the end of the Late Bronze Age led to healthier, wealthier people in many regions, gave us the Latin alphabet and new technology, and made room for the democratic model and culture of Classical Greece.58 The systems collapses of the Early and Late Bronze Age are not the only ones to have occurred in world history. Around two millennia later and 11,000 kilometres away a similar phenomenon unfolded across the Atlantic Ocean. There, another Goliath system of numerous states faced drought, war, rebellion, and their own interdependence turning against them.
10 Shattered Obsidian Collapse in the Yucatán – From Drought and Warfare to Alien Invaders – When Does the Collapse End? – When Writing Becomes Obsolete – Collapse in East and West Africa – Systems Collapses Across the World COLLAPSE IN THE YUCATáN In 1696 the Spanish friar Andrés de Avendaño was one of the first Europeans to encounter the Mayan city-state of Tikal – or what was left of it. His surprise was clear, as he and his companions emerged from thick jungle and stumbled upon a ‘great variety of buildings … it seemed to us that these buildings must be near a settlement, but we found ourselves, as we saw afterwards, very far from a settlement’. Cities resplendent with great stone pyramids jutted above the canopy, yet they were completely empty. Tikal had largely been abandoned five hundred years earlier. It was one of many Mayan cities that littered the Yucatán peninsula before the arrival of the Spanish.
The Classic Lowland Maya (150–900 CE) followed the same blueprint that we see in the earliest cities of North and Central America, from Monte Albán up to Cahokia. Stone ballcourts and great plazas were enclosed by towering flat-topped pyramid-temples. The deep black volcanic glass of obsidian was an analogue to bronze: it was traded over long distances and used in weapons, jewellery, and tools, mainly by elites (at least initially).
The Maya also developed a complicated cosmic calendar replete with rituals to celebrate royal ancestors, and a glyphic writing system that was regularly used to memorialize the deeds of dead kings.
The Classic Lowland Maya did not comprise a single empire; rather it was a collection of around sixty to seventy different city-states spread across a territory encompassing Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador. Each city varied in size and power, but all shared a culture, much like the Greek or Sumerian city-states. Some of the cities were vast, holding up to 120,000 people, not including the network of farms and villages that surrounded them. They dwarfed most of the cities of Europe at the time. The Lowlands were a dense metropolis of 7–11 million people. One airborne laser scan of a 2,144-square-kilometre swathe of Guatemala found 61,480 ancient structures (or twenty-nine for every square kilometre) connected by 106 kilometres of canals.1 It’s difficult to tell how extensive this tropical urban maze was. As recently as October 2024 another previously unexcavated city that would have once housed tens of thousands – nicknamed Valeriana – was found.2 The Lowlands were a teeming, sophisticated web of jungle metropolises.
It was also a warring political ecosystem, with cities frequently raiding and conquering each other. This led to a series of cycles in which one polity would expand, often conquering others nearby and becoming an empire, before the conquered would break away and become their own states. For instance, the city-state of Copán expanded to dominate a territory of 10,000 square kilometres from eastern Guatemala to Belize around 500–600 CE.
Within 140 years, Quiriguá on its eastern border broke away, celebrating their independence in hieroglyphic texts and expanding. This cycle of rise and fall, expansion and contraction, continued for decades. These cycles are seen periodically, each lasting around 300 years, with the centre of power shifting between different kingdoms and their capitals. In the Classic period it was the Kaanul kingdom centred at Dzibanche, then Calakmul and its rival Tikal. It’s hard not to see similarities with the boom-bust/fission-fusion cycles in the Puebloans, first farmers of Europe, and others. As with them, such regular cycles cannot be easily explained by fluctuations in the climate (which tend to lack such regularity).3 The collapse of the southern Lowland Maya (known as the ‘Terminal Classical Period’, approximately 800–1100 CE) saw multiple cities emptied out. Some cities, such as Tikal, lost nine out of ten residents. The production of monuments was choked off. The creation of luxury goods and the use of the calendar and glyphic writing system all plummeted. The longcount calendar (an astronomical calendar used to keep track of longer periods of time) was lost altogether. In many cases it’s unclear what exactly happened to cause such a collapse.
In others, what happened is all too clear. In about 800 CE the city of Cancuén was attacked suddenly. Unfinished stone and wooden palisades surround the site; spearheads are scattered within it, as are numerous skeletons displaying wounds from axes and spears. The elite were slaughtered and discarded into water storage tanks, along with their sceptres and regalia. The ruling family was dumped into shallow graves outside the city. Whether it was an invasion, peasant rebellion, or coup by noble families is unknown. In other cases, the picture is murkier.
But during this period, the Lowlands were a site of war, strife, and flight.
By the end of the period, the Goliath of the southern Lowlands – the systems of religious and economic domination we previously would have called Mayan ‘civilization’ – had vanished. The ruling class had, in the words of one expert, ‘gone with the wind’ (Figure 26).4 Figure 26: A timeline of the Lowland Maya collapse FROM DROUGHT AND WARFARE TO ALIEN INVADERS As in the Late Bronze Age, the Maya faced a storm of challenges during this terminal period. Among the different failing states, we frequently see massacres of rulers and aristocratic families and targeted destruction of elite monuments and insignia. People, whether they be nobles or peasants, appear to be rejecting the Mayan holy lords, the k’uhul ajaw, who previously ruled. What triggered this conflict? Most of the southern Lowlands appear to have faced an unprecedented drought during this period. The Maya had extensively reshaped the land to produce large amounts of corn, beans, and squash. These were cultivated on terraced hills, forming a cascade of farms down the slope. Unfortunately, corns, beans, and squash are all particularly vulnerable to drought. Even minor reductions in rainfall can have severe effects on both crop harvests and how many people could be fed. Worse, this wasn’t just a period of drought. During 700–800 CE rainfall in the area became far less predictable and far more volatile.
Most Mayan cities had experienced periods of drought before, even growing and expanding during them. Most people also farmed far more drought-tolerant crops such as manioc and chaya (tree spinach), drew on forest gardens rich with fruit, and kept extensive home gardens. Even corn could be stored for years, so they weren’t entirely vulnerable to climate change. The depopulation of the cities may have been due not only to war and famine, but also to people departing to regional areas to depend on more reliable crops during a period of drought.
Drought was also not uniform for the southern Lowland Maya. The timing and severity varied across the region. For instance, the city-state of Peten appears to have collapsed before any drought occurred. While some cities like Tikal and Cancuén were abandoned in a bloody fashion, these events are spaced out over centuries, and some settlements were never abandoned at all. The western part of the southern Maya Lowlands shows little to no environmental stress, but high levels of warfare. The emerging picture is one of drought playing a role in triggering breakdown, but it was a role that was heavy in some cities and light or even absent in others.
When a failure in rain and crops met already fragile states, the result was usually chaotic, but others that were more robust could weather the change.5 A key factor here appears to be environmental degradation. In many of the areas of the Maya Lowlands we see increased soil deposited in lakes before the collapse period. It suggests that deforestation was increasing, and soils were being washed away.
Similarly, there are often few animal bones discovered in many archaeological sites during this period, suggesting a depletion of forests and animals. This may be one more reason why the Lowland Maya more easily navigated earlier droughts but suffered during later ones.6 We can think of environmental degradation as one way in which societies create energy problems. Societies are in some ways a big marketplace, with energy as the universal currency. Every building, every calorie, is captured solar energy. Taking energy from the environment requires expending energy. That could be the labour required to till, sow, and harvest a field. It could be the rigs, mines, and pipes needed to pull up coal and oil from underground and shuttle it across the world. The ratio of the energy used to extract a resource relative to how much it provides is called the ‘Energy Return on Investment’ (or, EROI). For simplicity, let’s just call it the energy ratio. If I get ten barrels of oil from the ground by using just one barrel to power the machinery used to dig it up, then the energy ratio is 10:1. The energy ratio can, of course, drop, whether that be due to exhausting mines that provide precious metals, or exhausting soils until their yields decline.
The energy ratio for the Maya was dropping as they faced drought.
We’ve seen this in other cases too. The Indus Valley Civilization switched to drought-tolerant crops as an adaptation to climate change.7 This unfortunately meant lower yields and a lower energy ratio. The first farmers of Europe had to contend with poorer harvests and declining soil quality. Again, their energy ratio suffered, making droughts worse.
While environmental degradation is a favoured explanation for the Lowland Maya collapse and other cases, it is rarely the sole or primary culprit, as the archaeologist Guy Middleton has shown extensively.
8 The few cases where it plays a larger role involved bungled responses from rulers in fragile environments.9 For example, the Abbasid Caliphate (750– 1258 CE) inherited a vast irrigation network across the dry lands of Mesopotamia. Yet the fall of the caliphate was marked by wasteful expenditure, elite competition, and exploitative tax-farming, all of which led to the slow deterioration of the irrigation system. Not only did the caliphate fall apart, but so did the irrigation system. By 1258, as little as only 5 per cent of the population that had resided there during Sassanid times remained. The land had become the wasteland that nineteenth-century European travellers chronicled. Lower Mesopotamia was a unique case: the landscape was especially dry, fragile, and dependent on human infrastructure. The Yucatán too is a fragile ecosystem. In contrast, mainland Europe, with its varied and temperate climate, never experienced such a catastrophic environmental disruption of a similar scale. Ecocide can happen, but it is thankfully rare.10 Even taking the fragile environment of the Yucatán into account, collapse there was clearly not just about drought or a declining energy ratio. The environments of the southern Lowlands had bounced back within a century after the collapse, with archaeological digs showing an abundance of animals, including high-canopy animals such as the pig-like tapir. In some sites archaeologists report that a four-square-metre patch of land 10–20cm deep will fill a gallon bag with the bones of animals from this period. This was a time of abundance, yet people didn’t move back. If it was purely for environmental reasons we would expect a return to such productive land.11 The most overlooked and perhaps critical source of the collapse was a seemingly innocent one: a movement in trade. Southern Lowland kingdoms were dependent on trade, and their competitors on the coast were booming.
People moved from the interior Lowlands to the north, as well as the east and west coasts. It’s during this time that states in the north, among them the famed Chichén Itzá, reached their peak in size and prestige.
The rise of these areas and the lack of resettlement after the drought ended both support the idea that people were moving to avoid war and seek better economic prospects rather than to escape complete environmental breakdown, although all these factors would probably have contributed: Mayan kingdoms relied most on trade during times of drought, and with less trade available were more likely to turn to war instead.
A final factor is a now familiar one: inequality. Housing sizes suggest that wealth inequality rose steadily throughout the Classical Period and worsened going into the Terminal Period. The great leveller of collapse struck, destroying elite fortunes, and wealth inequality finally declined.12 The most autocratic kingdoms had the highest levels of inequality, a sign of the link between inequality and extractive institutions.13 The cities to the north and the coastal ports that people migrated to were also more equal than the Lowlands they escaped.
The southern Lowland Maya were an increasingly unequal set of kingdoms with a degraded environment and a dependency on trade. As drought struck and trade dried up, the kingdoms turned to war instead.
People, predictably, died or moved. Like the Bronze Age collapse, this one was multicausal, with many threats and vulnerabilities, but the underlying driver was once again a group of polities becoming increasingly top-heavy and extractive.14 WHEN DOES THE COLLAPSE END? The Maya did not disappear. While the southern Lowland Maya collapsed, glyphic writing and trade continued. There were hundreds of towns and city-states in the north that grew. The story of the Maya appears to be partly one of people in the south giving up more oppressive religious leaders for more commercial, seafaring societies, particularly in the east, west, and north. Chichén Itzá in the north became a new dominant centre as the imperial cycle restarted. Although these northern settlements also eventually fell apart during a period of drought.15 Yet even after this period, new cities sprang up and grew.
There were still numerous interconnected towns as well as cities resplendent with pyramids and populations of 10,000–20,000. The rebound of the population and regeneration of the Goliath was impressive. The imperial cycle turned once more as power shifted from Chichén Itzá to the city-state of Mayapan (1200–1450) in the Lowlands.
It grew to 15,000–20,000 people during this ‘post-Classic’ period. The Mayapan state then collapsed decades before the arrival of the Spanish.16 The end of the Mayapan polity seems to be a familiar cocktail of drought, inequality, and elite infighting. The period recorded in the Maya K’atun calendar (and evident in a range of archaeological data) includes a time of ‘terror and war’ (1302–23 CE), an inquisition across the noble Xiu family (1361–81 CE), population decline (1381–1401 CE), a massacre of the Cocom noble family (1440–61 CE), and then the eventual abandonment of the city after 1450 CE. These events left behind a series of mass graves. One example from 1302–62 (a likely period of terror and war) contained twentyfive skeletons of people who appear to have been killed by blows to the head and then dismembered after death. Shortly thereafter is another massacre of around twenty individuals who were butchered and burned.
This was during a time when one elite faction began to persecute and torture their rivals. The final massacre of the ruling Cocom noble family and abandonment of the city coincides with a drought. Mayapan had a strong reliance on rain-fed agriculture and lacked centralized grain storage.
Rulers who were supposed to be a conduit to the gods could easily be blamed for failed harvests, hence drought could have been used as a way for competing elites to sow discontent.17 The collapses, including the dramatic southern Lowland collapse, were not wholly negative affairs. Chichén Itzá and Mayapan had greater wealth equality and more open hierarchies than previous polities such as Tikal.
While more inclusive, they were still conquest states that venerated priests and rulers in similar ways to those that had occurred in the southern Lowlands.18 The Mayan story is one not just of collapse but also of resilience and resistance. When the Spanish arrived, they found a prosperous people trading across a vast network of smaller towns and settlements, with different currencies such as cacao beans, shells, stone beads, copper, and cotton. They still wrote in their glyphic script, lived in cities, and warred with each other. Around fifteen states remained. Some had kings while others had ranked noble families. It was a world with fewer people, smaller cities and smaller, less powerful kings. That doesn’t mean a worse world.
Its size and decentralization might have even been advantageous when they faced European invaders.19 The Spanish struggled to defeat the Maya. In some battles the Spanish were even defeated by them. In the 1533 Battle of Chichén Itzá the Mayan cities joined together in a force of tens of thousands to repel a Spanish siege. They killed many of the invaders, forcing them to retreat. This was one among several Mayan victories. It is little wonder that it took the colonizers around 170 years to conquer their lands. The dispersed regional population would also have blunted the effects of disease imported by the invading Europeans.
Cities like Tikal would have been a demographic time bomb for smallpox, while scattered townships were less vulnerable.
The Mayan people continue to this day, with 6 million speaking different Mayan dialects across countries such as Belize, Mexico, and Guatemala.
While the Mayan language and much of their culture persist, other traditions including their glyphic writing system fell into disuse during colonization. Mayan became a dead script. WHEN WRITING BECOMES OBSOLETE Both the Maya and Mycenaean Greece are (in)famous for losing their scripts. The Indus Valley Civilization script and the Linear A script of the Minoans on Crete also expired during collapses. The loss of writing is central to the story of collapse. What is true about the ‘dark ages’ is that they often leave historians and archaeologists in the dark about what happened during them. That is because writing dwindles or is lost entirely.
Writing has historically been about power, and writing systems have often been linked to a specific state. Mayan glyphs may have been an original script (or it may have been inspired by the Olmecs), and all the original forms of script such as Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Shang Dynasty oracle bones, and the Olmec script (and the later Zapotec script) were associated with states.20 Similarly, Brāhmī relates to the Mauryan Empire in India, and Kharoṣṭhī to the Kushan Empire that stretched across southern and south-eastern Asia.21 Their initial purposes tended to be limited to propaganda, accounting, and administration: tools to stabilize a Goliath. Writing is a recent invention used by very few for most of history for specific elite purposes. This was its weakness.
When power changes, so too do scripts and writing. Use of the Mayan script plummeted during the collapse since the elite class who used it fell apart. Yet it survived. It didn’t die until it was intentionally and systematically exterminated by the Spanish in order to impose their own regime. They banned the use of glyphs, burned hundreds of books and scrolls, enforced the use of Spanish, and prosecuted, tortured, and murdered Mayan writers. Nonetheless, the Maya defiantly continued to write in Yucatec (using Spanish script) and record their traditional texts (such as the Chilam Balam books). We see similar cases elsewhere.
Egyptian hieroglyphs and other indigenous writing systems were connected to the state. Once Egypt became a Roman province, the use of these writing systems was restricted to temples, which were reliant on state support. This support failed during the early first century CE and Egyptian writing systems were slowly lost in favour of Greek ones (Figure 27).22 Writing was often easier to kill because it was practised by a small, elite class. The exclusivity of writing and scripts made them fragile. Mayan was used mainly by a small section of the populace whom the Spanish could effectively target. Similarly, Linear B of the Mycenaeans (mainly used for documenting commercial transactions and the palace production of wool and linen) appears to have been used only in palaces and only by a few dozen writers. In Pylos (southern Greece) there were only some forty-five writers of Linear B and sixty-six in Knossos (Crete). It should be little surprise that Linear B was lost once the palaces were abandoned. Few if any outside of the citadels knew it and the scribes had little use for it (or employment) once the kings were gone.23 Figure 27: The original scripts of the world These four scripts are the most widely accepted original scripts in the world. Each was connected to the emergence of a Goliath and an original state. Each eventually led to more developed writing systems.
Languages also tend to reflect power. Mayan still exists, but the lands it once spread over now all have Spanish or, in Belize, English as their official tongue. Latin, the official language of the Western Roman Empire, also reflected power in the way it changed. It became restricted to powerful networks such as the Church, while local peoples transformed it into dialects, resulting in the Romance languages of today: French, Spanish, Italian, Catalan, and Portuguese.
Collapse rearranges power structures, and the obsolescence of scripts, writing, and language is often just collateral damage.
COLLAPSE IN EAST AND WEST AFRICA Latin wasn’t the only language to become obsolete and restricted to a tiny elite class after a collapse. Another example is Ge’ez, a script created in the Horn of Africa. It is now largely a liturgical language used primarily in Orthodox and Catholic churches throughout Ethiopia, with no one using it as a first language. Once, it was far more widely used, for Ge’ez rose and fell alongside a powerful African empire.
Ge’ez was once the main language and script of the Aksumite Empire (c.150–900 CE). The Aksumite Empire was a trading empire centred on the east coast, stretching across the Red Sea as well as into the modern-day Sudans, Djibouti, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. Its two key cities were Adulis and Axum on the Eritrean coast, both perfectly placed to control the bottleneck of the Red Sea where it meets the Indian Ocean.
The Aksumite Empire grew in size and stature as it used its strategic location to dominate the trade network through the Red Sea, establishing a near-monopoly (and, in the process, creating an abundant source of lootable resources, much like a chokepoint of salmon running through a river). It grew rich through controlling the trade in luxury goods including gold, cattle, ivory, and incense. Its power was also built on good environmental luck: from around 100–350 CE there was a shift in the climate towards wetter conditions. The rainy season may have almost doubled in length from about three and a half months to six months.24 The good fortune was not to last. The rains must have seemed like a blessing, but every drop had a cost. The dry soil became increasingly dislocated. Soil erosion was a particular problem since farms were often built on hills. Environmental degradation was causing an energy ratio problem for the empire that would soon be exacerbated by another even bigger one.25 Regional politics began to drain the Aksumite Empire of its lifeblood: trade. Wars between the Byzantine and Persian empires (540–561 and 602–632 CE) both slowly sapped the demand for luxury goods. Then things went from bad to worse. The Umayyad Caliphate expanded south and destroyed both Adulis and the Aksumite fleet (702–15 CE). With the loss of its trade networks the Aksumite needed to farm even more intensely, leading to increasingly disastrous soil erosion after 650 CE. The energy ratio of the empire plummeted owing to a combination of soil erosion and the breakdown of trade. The empire stopped minting its own coins and the capital was abandoned within a few generations, becoming a loose cluster of villages. In the tenth century the remnants of the empire were conquered by Queen Gudit, a marauding Jewish-Ethiopian monarch. The language of Ge’ez fell alongside it. The future empires of Ethiopia emerged further south, away from the now barren soils of the land where the Aksumite had once dwelled.26 The Aksumite Empire was not alone in its fate.
Africa was the birthplace of numerous indigenous empires, many of which declined or broke down even prior to European invasion.
Five and a half thousand kilometres away on the other side of the continent a different empire rose: the Ghana Empire (around 300–1203 CE).
Both Ghana and the Aksumite Empire have a similar origin story: they were both creations of the Sahara Desert. From around 12,500–3000 BCE the Sahara was not an endless expanse of rolling dunes. It was full of lush forests, woodlands, and grassland savannah, home to antelopes, giraffes, gazelles, hyenas, hippos, rhinos, and zebras. We even have cave art in the Sahara depicting cattle and boats. This has been called the African Humid Period, a climatic age that birthed a ‘Green Sahara’.
When the climate changed and the area began to desiccate into the sandy waves we know today, the inhabitants were largely pushed to its fringes; the eastern edge was where the Aksumite and Egyptian empires emerged while the western frontier was where the Ghana Empire would eventually take root (Figure 28). (A third exodus was to the north-east, where Egypt emerged.) The Ghana Empire rose thanks to the introduction of lootable resources and monopolizable weapons. Camels were introduced in the third century, allowing for more effective trade networks across the Sahara, especially the export of gold, salt, and slaves. The widespread production of iron weapons allowed for an army that was up to 200,000 strong. And there was ongoing conflict with Berber raiders (a group of indigenous pastoralists in northwestern Africa).
Figure 28: A timeline of key west African empires Like Sargon’s Akkadian Empire, Ghana’s was built on one group dominating many others, in this case several other city-states and kingdoms such as the Sosso, Jolof, and Mali. While the exact reasons are unclear, the Ghana Empire eventually fragmented, giving way to the Mali Empire (c.1230–1650 CE).27 The Mali Empire proved to be even larger and more powerful than its predecessor, growing to cover over 1 million square kilometres. The empire reached its zenith during the reign of Mansa Musa. Mansa Musa was renowned for his great wealth (he may have been the richest individual ever to have lived), his face even appearing on a medieval map.
After Musa’s reign the Mali Empire began to slowly deteriorate. Musa’s successor was deposed by his uncle, Sulayman, after four years. After Sulayman’s lengthy reign of nineteen years, things got worse. There was a series of succession crises and short-lived leaders, with the reigns of the next seven kings lasting four, nineteen, less than one, fourteen, eleven, two, and one year respectively. In the late fourteenth century two leaders were assassinated in just three years. With the empire riven by infighting, Berber raiders to the north began their plunder, cutting off its economic umbilical cord: trans-Saharan trade. Other cities began to break away, including Gao.
The city of Gao would slowly take over the empire from Mali, re-establish the cross-desert trade route and entrench in place the Songhai Empire (c.
1376–1591).28 The Songhai suffered much the same fate as Mali. They grew even larger than Mali but were plagued with succession disputes and civil wars. The sheer amount of elite infighting meant that the hold of the empire on its subjects was minimal. It mainly claimed tribute and did little else to contribute to the kingdoms it ruled.29 Like the Aksumite and Ghana empires, it also suffered from a decline in trade. In this case it was due to Portuguese ships using the west African coast as a new supply line for gold from Africa to Europe, diverting goods away from the trans-Saharan trade.30 Eventually, Morocco, a new regional power armed with Portuguese guns and cannons, defeated the Songhai. The raiding Berbers redoubled their efforts; the empire fractured once again.
The feuding kingdoms and cities began to raid each other for slaves as the Songhai Empire fell into decay. It was finally conquered by European colonizers. Its capital, Gao, was slowly abandoned and had become just a cluster of a few hundred huts when the German explorer Heinrich Barth visited it in 1854.31 The rise and fall of west African kingdoms in many ways resembles the problems that Sargon encountered: the difficulty of one kingdom trying to control many. It was a constant vulnerability, an original wound that threatened to burst open whenever there was a large enough shock such as a loss of trade or a succession crisis. It also looks like the Maya, with a cycle of one city or kingdom growing strong before being eclipsed by another. It was a cycle of capture and then fracture.
Yet, there was also an additional problem. The kings of west Africa practised polygyny, taking multiple wives. Under medieval laws kings could take up to four wives, a rule they seemingly made ample use of.
One king, Askiya Muhammad, had somewhere between thirty and five hundred children (depending on which source you trust). This was compounded by a second problem: the rules for succession were often unclear, leading to frequent disputes over the throne. These plagued the west African kingdoms, often leaving the regimes weak and distracted.
The Goliaths of the Yucatán and west Africa may have been separated by over 9,000 kilometres and the Atlantic Ocean, yet both learned that interdependence and status competition was deadly. SYSTEMS COLLAPSES ACROSS THE WORLD Groups of closely located cities and empires tended to become connected into larger systems. Some, like the Lowland Maya, were highly decentralized and no city or kingdom could ever develop a lasting largescale empire. Others, like the Early and Late Bronze Age systems, were still more decentralized but had a few larger empires knitted together into one extractive quilt. West Africa had a sequence of three lasting empires (Ghana, Mali, and Songhai), but each struggled to keep hold of its constituent kingdoms. Like the Lowland Maya it was an imperial cycle of one power capturing the others before fracturing and the cycle restarting (much like the fission-fusion processes of early Goliaths). The Aksumite Empire was unified but dependent on the larger system of trade into Egypt and Eurasia. Each represents a different step on the spectrum from more or less integrated Goliath systems. And each had similarities in the way they collapsed.
System collapses across the world varied across time and space. The Hittite Empire collapsed during the Late Bronze Age, but the Phoenicians expanded; most cities in the Mayan Lowlands were abandoned, but others in the north grew. The end of the Mali Empire was a boon for the city of Gao, just as the end of the Ghana Empire had been for Mali.
We see the same variation in the modern world. Talk of the ‘failed state’ of Somalia hides the fact that Somalia broke down into four different regions with four different arrangements and outcomes: there is Ogaden (ruled by an authoritarian single party with little power to tax); Somaliland (an independent republic built on multiparty clan democracy); Puntland (an autonomous region full of warlords); and the southern part of Somalia (an internationally recognized and supported government that has essentially no ability to tax or deliver services and is riven by conflict). Collapse is not a uniform phenomenon.32 There were also differences in how quickly individual cities and empires collapsed, and how long it took for the overarching system to fall apart. The former could happen in months, while the latter took a century or more.
When a change takes centuries, it is almost imperceptible to the people living through it. Individuals rarely recognize that they are living through a collapse. Instead, they sensibly perceive the discrete disasters unfolding in front of them. They feel the pang of hunger when a grain shipment doesn’t arrive. They feel the fear coursing through a city under siege. They smell the smoke and feel the broken rubble under foot as they inspect a house burned in a rebellion. The historian sees the collapse across generations, but those generations experience it very differently. Many would have felt it more as an unfortunate series of wars, crises, and famines, or perhaps not at all. Systems collapses in Africa, the Americas, and the Mediterranean can be seen as another kind of failed experiment. Large-scale empires in the Mediterranean were a relatively recent invention that had been cobbled together from previous city-states. Think of it as a reversal of Sargon’s conquests: an empire was decomposed into its building blocks of independent cities and territories. What followed was often a reversion to more egalitarian city-states, such as those of Classical Greece and the Phoenicians. These proved to be more innovative and resilient in the face of climatic change. Among the Maya, shifts towards more democratic, seafaring polities in the north, and more rural living, can also be seen as a reasonable response to drought and rampant oppression in the Lowlands.
It was also an example of failed interdependence. The Aksumite Empire and other African kingdoms were partly founded on favourable trade monopolies. Both the Late Bronze Age and the Mayan Lowlands were exceptionally interdependent. Those links, especially in the Late Bronze Age, allowed for the intense exchange of letters, goods, and people, including for diplomacy and alliances through intermarriage. These elite networks helped foster thriving empires and city-states, but eventually became a liability. It meant that shocks – whether in the form of disease, aggressive neighbours, or the loss of trading partners – were more easily spread during a period of tumult. Breaking those elite links and dispersing, including to new areas whether it be commoners migrating to northern Mayan cities or the Philistines arriving into Palestine, may have once again been a sensible adjustment.33 We can see ancient roots behind these systems collapses. Early leaders would use long-distance trade to acquire scarce, distant goods (primarily for status). Similarly, even among hierarchical hunter-gatherers, feasts, alliances, and marriages were all used as tools to bolster power. This had been intensified and scaled up into an entire network of trade in the Bronze Age, as well as among the Maya and the west African kingdoms.
Inequality, status competition, numerous shocks, and the very structure of elite networks proved to be the downfall of these systems. The capture and fracture of the Maya or west African kingdoms is not entirely different from the fission and fusion of early Goliaths, but these Goliath systems had managed to grow far larger and more unequal owing to better systems of control. That growth in scale and interdependence ended up being another vulnerability. Collapse could now occur over a much larger area.
In eastern Asia, collapse looked different. Rather than there being a norm of multiple competing cities and states, China was usually covered by one unified empire. While the Mycenaeans and the Maya lost their scripts, China never did. Yet this empire of eastern Asia wa
11 The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Goliath Bronze, Bones, and Betrayal: The Beginnings of Chinese Empire – Cycling in China – Elite Competition, Cooperation, and Corruption – Elite Flight and Eating the Rich – Why Collapse Never Seems to Last BRONZE, BONES, AND BETRAYAL: THE BEGINNINGS OF CHINESE EMPIRE China has had over 2,000 years of near-continuous imperial reign. Yet this masks more tentative beginnings.
Sometime between 2200 and 1850 BCE, the Xia Dynasty was established in the north of China, near the Yellow River. It appears at the same time as bronze weapons (another case of monopolizable weapons at work). We know little about the end of the Xia aside from myth.
Legend has it that the ruling family grew tyrannical and were eventually overthrown by new rulers: the Shang Dynasty (Figure 29).
The Shang ruled from 1600 to 1046 BCE, their reign marked by mass sacrifices and Asia’s first form of writing. The king, royal family, and special diviners would heat bones (usually from an ox shoulder or tortoise shell) and interpret the heat-induced cracks to predict the future.
Despite the purported prophetic power of the ‘oracle bones’, the Shang did not foresee their own end. The dynasty fell in the same way it had risen, being overthrown by the Zhou. The Zhou were the first to introduce the Mandate of Heaven: the idea that virtuous rulers were divinely sanctioned by the heavens to oversee the populace. Conversely, a ruler who reigned over a time of drought, flood, famine, and conflict was seen to have lost favour with the heavens. They were no longer fit to rule and their ousting would be entirely legitimate. The Zhou clearly used this to justify their overthrow of the Shang. One of China’s oldest, most central ideas is a relic of rebel propaganda. It is also an ideological time bomb: when things go wrong any regime can be accused of having lost the Mandate of Heaven.
Figure 29: A timeline of early imperial China (Xia to Jin) After around three centuries the Zhou began to decline. We don’t know exactly why but hymns from the time hint at factional infighting, and feudal lords appear to have become increasingly autonomous over time.1 By 481 BCE, these feudal lords had fallen into a state of perpetual war. China’s first collapse, known as the Warring States period, had begun.2 It was one of the bloodiest periods of Chinese history. The eventual victors, the Qin Dynasty, slaughtered an estimated 1.5 million soldiers and civilians in their quest to unify China. That included enormous mass murders, such as in 293 BCE when the Qin killed around 240,000 troops.
After occupying a territory, the Qin would systematically execute any adult males they found. It was a terror tactic used to minimize the chance of future rebellions.3 One of the Qin’s most prolific generals, Bo Qi, would later be branded by some as the ‘super butcher’. That butchery laid the gruesome foundations for a continuous period of empire over China.4 The Warring States period was also a period of new thinking. Dozens of new ideas and philosophies arose during this time, including two that we associate with China today: legalism and Confucianism. These were among many doctrines that flourished during this period, an era that would later become known as the time of a ‘Hundred Schools of Thought’.5 The Qin (221–206 BCE) brought that time of philosophical innovation to an end. They systematically tried to purge China of these other philosophies, burning countless books. Their aim was to leave no alternative to their preferred philosophy of legalism.
This was just one part of a strategy to centralize Chinese society.
The Qin created the first unified large-scale empire across northern China and ushered in a new era. The first emperor, Qin Shihuang, enshrined himself not as a king or an oracle, but as a truly divine being: a manifestation of heaven on earth.6 This new godly leader imposed a simplified script, enforced standardized weight, length, and volume measurements, standardized the currency, and ordered the construction of a 6,840-kilometre imperial highway system (mainly for shuttling troops). He moved elite families to the capital so they could be closely monitored. The empire also began construction of a vast wall of packed earth to the north, to help keep invaders out, taxpayers in, and to better control trade. This was the precursor to the Great Wall of China.7 Creating such a vast, new bureaucratic and religious system of authority would usually have taken centuries; the Qin accomplished it within two decades. However, that accomplishment came at a cost. Elites and commoners alike rebelled, labour gangs mutinied, and ‘even many of the Qin state’s own officers and people turned against their rulers’.8 Once again, counter-dominance, and conflict between elites, had torn apart a fledgling new Goliath. China’s first large, unified empire had been hoisted up and then burned down in less than fifteen years.
While the Qin’s rule was brief, their project of a divine empire was enduring. Four years later, after a brief civil war, the Han Dynasty was established. The Han is usually portrayed as a golden age for China.
They oversaw the invention of paper and the sundial. People in modern China still refer to themselves as ‘Han Chinese’ and to written Chinese as ‘Han characters’. These achievements were built on crushing inequality, which grew over time.
The empire supported a small number of exorbitantly wealthy families of officials, landlords, and merchants. Rich merchants bought land and joined the ranks of government despite bans against them doing so, often amassing riches that were as great as those held by the highest-ranked imperial officials.9 Twenty sub-kings of the Han had fiefs containing 1.35 million households in 2 CE. Just over a century later, in 140 CE, this had swollen to 2 million (a growth from 11 to 20 per cent of the population). During that time the registered households under the Eastern Han fell from 12 million to 10 million, despite the empire expanding. That is because these sub-kings were dodging taxes by hiding their peasants away from government tax collectors. At least a few million peasants were being taxed by their private overlords rather than by the government. The growing elite persuaded the government to abolish conscription and began to grow their own private armies.10 This was the beginning of the end for the Han. Two million rebelled against a combination of high taxes, corruption, disasters, and disease in a revolution led by a faith ruler (the Yellow Turban Rebellion: 184–205 CE). Eventually, a warlord captured the throne (establishing the Jin Dynasty) before corruption and bickering between elites led to its end.11 Unlike in systems collapses across the world, imperial China always regenerated, and periods of fracture were ultimately brief. China is a story of both how a Goliath can persist despite collapse, as well as of the role of corruption and elite competition in collapse.
CYCLING IN CHINA The fall of the Han and Jin set in motion a series of imperial cycles in China. After a civil war China saw five periods of unified empire: the Tang (618–907 CE), the Song (960–1276 CE), the Yuan (a foreign occupation by raiders from the Steppe that lasted from 1276 to 1368 CE), the Ming (1368– 1644 CE), and the Qing (1644–1912 CE).12 The interruption during the first millennium from 907 to 960 CE was due to a series of battles among kingdoms called the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period; the second millennium was a time of stable empire.
There were still rebellions and disasters that could cost millions of lives, and these often occurred at the end of a dynasty, but the imperial architecture of China never truly lapsed.
Historians of China may talk about the collapse of a particular dynasty or regime, but rarely of a societal collapse.13 This is because while a regime might be overthrown and thousands might die, the bureaucracy, writing, and overall system of government were never lost.
While imperial rule was stable, being a ruler was a perilous affair. From the first empire of the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE) to the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912 CE) China had almost 300 emperors, each reigning on average between six and seven years. That average hides great variation: Emperor Mo of Jin (1234) was on the throne for less than a day, while Emperor Kangxi, the third head of the Qing Dynasty, lasted sixty-two years. Sixtytwo was a ripe old age for that time, let alone for an imperial reign. Perhaps the most peculiar trend is that the longest-lasting emperors tended to rule the weakest empires and vice versa. For instance, the Tang Dynasty is renowned as a high point for China, yet the late Tang emperors had a one in two chance of being killed in office.
Conversely, Kangxi’s extended reign occurred during the Qing Dynasty, an exceptionally weak empire that taxed less than 1 per cent of its economy. The early Song a millennium earlier had taxed around 15 per cent of economic output.14 Why did weak Chinese empires have long-lived rulers? Yuhua Wang, a professor of government at Harvard University, has used a complex dataset of 282 emperors and 50,000 genealogies to craft a simple answer: elite competition. China faced ‘the sovereign’s dilemma’: a strong, coherent elite that can bolster the state by providing more taxes and resources can also overthrow it. And it did, regularly. The Tang Dynasty shared power more equally between the emperor and other leading aristocratic families and officials. It was a golden age for trade across the silk roads into Europe and the Near East, and a time when China heavily influenced the culture of Japan. Yet five out of a dozen emperors during the late Tang period were ousted through coups.
China was also under consistent threat from horseback warriors from the eastern Steppe (modern Mongolia), including the Xianbei and Xiongnu, and needed a unified elite to defend itself.15 In one telling example, Emperor Shenzong (1067–1085 CE) of the Northern Song kept his elites so divided to avoid a coup that it weakened the military until the Steppe raiders swept in, conquered the Song, and established the Jin Dynasty.
A unified elite meant that the imperial government tended to be eroded by corruption, tax evasion, and coups, while a divided elite meant that the state often lacked the resources and unity to defend against invaders.16 Status competition between aristocrats and government officials was accompanied by regular popular uprisings, whether it be the Yellow Turban Rebellion (around 184 CE), the Sun En Rebellion (399–403 CE), the Red Turban Rebellions (1351–68 CE), the Nian Rebellion (1851–68 CE), the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64 CE), or the 1899–1901 Boxer Rebellion.
Climate change, when it met elite conflict and rebellion, could trigger collapse. The Qing Dynasty (1644–1912 CE) is one instructive case.
Droughts and famines triggered rebellions throughout the Qing Dynasty, including the Nian Rebellion and the Taiping Rebellion. The Taiping Rebellion was the bloodiest civil war in human history, potentially carrying off 20 million human souls. It was also an example of elite infighting, having been instigated by budding young bureaucrats who passed their exams but couldn’t achieve prestigious positions in the Chinese government. Droughts and floods in the Yellow River region triggered the Boxer Rebellion, which led to the loss of 100,000 lives and temporarily split the Qing government. All these uprisings took a toll on the Qing, until this last (formally) imperial dynasty of China came to an end. Fittingly it was through another rebellion, in 1911–12.17 The Qing were not alone in being plagued by droughts and floods catalysing slaughter. One study comparing a 1,062-year reconstruction of Chinese warfare against documented periods of cooling caused by volcanic eruptions found a strong correlation between the two. Another drew on millennia of climate data and compared it to a catalogue of 789 rebellions and 2,214 external wars, again finding a significant correlation.
While correlation isn’t causation, the pattern is difficult to ignore. There are also some compelling explanations. The Mandate of Heaven meant that the moral authority of the emperor could be called into question when natural disasters struck, the weather turned, and harvests shrank.
With the Mandate of Heaven lost, rebellion and elite infighting often followed.18 As with the first farmers of Europe or the Maya, climate alone cannot explain the cycles of dynastic collapse that China experienced. There are numerous cases of crisis where climate played no role. For instance, the Tang Dynasty collapsed without any major environmental stress.
Throughout Chinese history there were also many droughts and floods that were handled with little issue. The severity of the drought or flood mattered, and the vulnerability of the dynasty mattered even more.
Environmental shocks triggered a collapse usually only when accompanied by inequality and elite competition. Corruption also seems to have played a recurring starring role.19 ELITE COMPETITION, COOPERATION, AND CORRUPTION Dynastic cycles in China demonstrate how elite infighting tears societies apart. The fate of different dynasties depended not just on the intensity of elite infighting, but also on the very structure of elite networks.20 The dynamic is simple: as elite numbers grow, so too do status-seeking aspirants. The powerful are rarely happy to have just one form of power.
As we see throughout Chinese history, wealthy merchants try to buy their way into the political system (as with the Han); learned bureaucrats and princes use their positions to amass fortunes; generals regularly use their swords and axes to take a throne; and religious leaders aren’t content to sit in God’s good grace, but also need to sit in a palace (the Taiping Rebellion was led by Hong Xiuquan, a disgruntled school teacher who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ). A more unequal society with a larger number of elites tended to mean more infighting and more potential demagogues looking to capitalize on peasant uprisings. Power politics and status competition are ever-present but tend to escalate as the numbers of those with both the means and desire to seek thrones climb, and as they begin to outpace the number of high-status positions that are available.21 Such elite competition can be seen in cases of crisis and collapse well beyond China. Lenin was a lawyer, Fidel Castro was a lawyer and a son of wealthy sugarcane planters, and the men who warred over control of Rome were sons of senators, magistrates, and generals from elite families.
Increased elite competition tends to happen alongside rising popular immiseration: as inequality rises elite competition intensifies and the rest of society is left poorer and sicker (creating ample opportunity for warring elites to foment rebellion). Researchers, led by Seshat database curators Peter Turchin and Dan Hoyer, have shown that increasing inequality, popular immiseration, and elite competition appear to have played a key role in a range of collapses throughout history, from the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE to the Qing Dynasty in the twentieth (this is commonly referred to as Structural-Demographic Theory).22 It may have even played a role in the collapse of many of the earliest Goliaths, although more evidence is needed.
The driver behind this common story of feuding nobles is, of course, status. We even see it today. Donald Trump’s quest to become president intensified after being humiliated by Barack Obama at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. Just five years later he won the US presidential election. The right-wing firebrand Tucker Carlson refashioned himself as an anti-elite populist after being publicly savaged by comedian Jon Stewart and subsequently fired from CNN. The public loss of status is a great motivator. While both use anti-elite rhetoric, they clearly are elites.
They were born into wealth: Trump was a millionaire by age eight thanks to his father, while Carlson’s step-mother was an heiress to the Swanson frozen food giant. Both are famous figures and have no material need to work tirelessly to amass even more influence. Yet they do. Status is inexhaustible, especially when you are surrounded by other ambitious competitors.23 There are two caveats to be aware of when it comes to elite infighting. First, this tends to be a competition between the powerful, seen as much in the billionaires of today as in the princes, wealthy families, and generals of Chinese history. We see that in the largest collapses throughout Chinese history, whether it be the leading general Zhu Wen overthrowing the Tang or the Zhou being carved up by feudal lords. The most common pattern is that it is elites who struggle to transform their wealth into another form of power (usually the power form which is most valued in that society). In China, information power was particularly prized, and hence a surprising number of rebels were individuals who failed to pass their civil service examination, such as Hong Xiuquan, the instigator of the Taiping Rebellion.
We see something similar today: it’s billionaires such as Donald Trump and Elon Musk trying to weaponize popular discontent and transform their economic power into political power by capturing the US government.24 Second, it’s not just a matter of elite competition. It is also about cooperation. Remember the razones gangs of Colombia: they would have shoot-outs in the streets over territory but came together and forged pacts once they jointly faced a larger threat from the police.
Similarly, Chinese princes would regularly work together to oust an unwanted emperor such as Wang Mang before turning back to competing with each other. We see the same pattern today with big tech and fossil-fuel companies commercially in competition while jointly lobbying in politics to block legislation that would regulate them. A common part of racketeering is not just that powerful actors will compete to extract resources from those below, but also that they will regularly band together if it’s in their own interests, whether that be to quell an uprising or combat an external foe. This is a kind of shifting elite factionalism.
Alongside this competition and cooperation also tends to come corruption. Corruption (the misuse of positions of authority for private gain) has been rife throughout history – from Bronze Age traders and Chinese princes dodging taxes to politicians lowering taxes and regulations to benefit their rich donors (and potential future employers).
While beneficial for the individual or industry, such gain comes at the cost of trust and shrinking revenues for the state. In the worst cases, it could lead directly to a crisis. The Yellow Turban Rebellion brought about the deaths of hundreds of thousands and left the Han Dynasty in disarray. It was a rebellion fed by the belief that the ruling dynasty had become too corrupt, losing its Mandate of Heaven and causing floods and plagues. It is a repeated grievance in Chinese history: a regime had lost the Mandate of Heaven owing to fraud and mismanagement. (We also see it in the Old and New Egyptian Kingdoms, along with multiple regimes in Mesopotamia.) Across these cases a common, fundamental cause of societal breakdown was institutional failure, especially through incompetence and corruption.
Corruption robs the state of its revenue and legitimacy.
25 Corruption tends to increase over time, alongside wealth inequality.
Today, we have ample evidence that inequality and corruption accelerate one another. The greater the discrepancy in power, the more opportunity there is to abuse it. Likewise, corruption can help the rich get richer. In the pre-modern world, with less-advanced bureaucracies and weaker accountability mechanisms, there would have been even more opportunities to exploit the system.26 China is revealing not just of the role of elite factionalism and corruption, but also of how collapse can affect inequality and elites. ELITE FLIGHT AND EATING THE RICH In China, rebellions and coups often meant not only a new regime or breakdown of government but also the intentional culling of the old. We see this during the end of the Tang Dynasty in China. This period witnessed a series of atrocities that ‘effectively wiped out the metropolitan elite’. One of the best-known occurred in 900 CE, when the court eunuchs systematically murdered elites and government officials who were close to the emperor. It was a pre-emptive strike against those who were plotting to eliminate them.
It didn’t work, and they were promptly killed in response. A few years later seven of the most powerful remaining ministers were thrown into the Yellow River.
27 In older case studies, such as Tiwanaku and Taosi, we see some evidence of targeting the upper classes, mainly through the defacement of elite monuments and residences. Even without focused assault, elites could often lose more. Their wealth and power were dependent on the status quo; and as the world fractured, much of their fortunes could slip away into the cracks of the social order. Their wealth was either burned, plundered, or meant little in the new, post-collapse world. Being rich can be a liability in a crisis. It’s a trend not restricted to China or the Americas. In the Crisis Database around a third of the cases involve assassinations. That includes seven in China alone (including the Qin and Han) as well as a host of others, such as the end of the Mali Empire in Western Africa and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In about 10 per cent of the cases there was an attempt to systematically target and kill off elites. China alone has five of these elite ‘extermination’ events, including the ends of the Tang and Qing, as do many others we’ve encountered, including the Neo-Assyrian Empire that made it through the Late Bronze Age collapse.28 Being an elite in the time of a crisis is risky. It can be incredibly dangerous, yet when elites are not directly targeted during a collapse, and the collapse isn’t too deep, the rich can often escape the worst effects of collapse and even benefit from them. Bureaucrats and wealthy merchants in China often just changed their loyalties when a new regime came into power, which is a key reason why many of the basic structures of Chinese bureaucracy and writing showed such continuity across dozens of centuries and regimes.29 Middling elites of the Western Roman Empire that were less affected by the collapse often continued to hold a great degree of property and power. The same happened after the fall of their competitors in the Persian Sasanian Empire. Many Byzantine (the Eastern Roman Empire) elites simply adopted Muslim names and emigrated with much of their wealth after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (1453 CE). Powerful individuals usually had more means to escape a crisis and were of great use to lazy conquerors, who could use their cultural knowledge and connections to easily administer and tax their newly acquired territory. Elites frequently escaped the worst effects of collapse by moving or by blending in with the new ruling class.
This is often referred to as ‘elite migration’: the powerful and wealthy either changing location or simply shifting their allegiances to stay in high-status positions despite a crisis or collapse.30 Whether elites successfully escape collapse or are swallowed up in the tumult depends on a few factors. Rebellions and revolutions with an antielite fervour will usually result in landlords, masters, and royals losing their wealth and their lives via confiscation and executions. It’s a dynamic we see in crises that didn’t even reach the level of collapse, such as the 1793–4 ‘Reign of Terror’ in the wake of the French Revolution and the effects of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Collapses that are significantly deep will also cost elites more. The ruling priests of Cahokia and the Huhugam probably had nowhere to run and their previous power meant little in the new world born from the collapse.
Yet elites, especially in China, almost always had another empire or kingdom to migrate to. That is because collapse rarely lasts for long.
Despite the talk and fear of dark ages, Goliaths, especially in China, are persistent and are almost always reborn.
WHY COLLAPSE NEVER SEEMS TO LAST We are often enamoured with the question of what causes collapse, yet we ignore the perhaps more interesting question: Why are Goliath societies almost always resurrected?
That question is most pertinent for the case of China. Ever since the Qin, China has tended to be unified by a large-scale empire. Historians don’t speak of ‘dark ages’ in China since writing, bureaucracy, and empire were never lost.31 There are surprisingly few cases of a Goliath-building project failing in a region and not being emulated or reanimated within a century or two. In all five regions of the world where Goliaths first emerged – China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and the Andes – empires would eventually take over. Collapses are rarely permanent or even long-lasting in these regions. Even the deepest collapses, which entirely wipe away the elite class, their culture, and writing – such as in Mycenaean Greece – still led, after a few centuries of more democratic rule, to more kings and militant emperors. The consistent trend is that wherever states reigned and fell, they returned and expanded. The Shang Dynasty was replaced by the Zhou in China, the Wari by the Inca in the Andes, and Egypt had pharaoh after pharaoh for almost three thousand years, interspersed with three periods of more decentralized rule. While early experiments with Goliaths were often abandoned, those that progressed far enough seemed to be surprisingly easy to reboot.
There are a few exceptions where Goliaths either never emerged, or fell and never rose again. People in both North America and Zomia dispersed into smaller groups, sowed less grain and did more foraging (or relied on escape crops), and told tales that warned of the perils of corrupt rulers. Yet, these are rare and peculiar cases: Zomia is an incredibly mountainous and inhospitable terrain; while Cahokia and the Huhugam were novel experiments in areas with low population density and ample exit options, which had entered a prolonged cold spell that depressed crop growth. This geography and the novelty of unequal kingdoms made it easier to avoid Goliath.
Goliath fuel – lootable resources, monopolizable weapons, and caged land – can explain why Goliaths persisted in places like China and the Near East but could be lost elsewhere. Wherever Goliath fuel remained, there was always a decent probability that someone could start and grow another centralized polity. Lootable resources tend not to disappear even if an individual state or Goliath does. There’s a reason why the Kwakwaka’wakw (north-west coast Native Americans) remained as hierarchical slave-owners for centuries: the salmon kept coming.
Similarly, once a landscape is tilled into fixed fields and the people are dependent on farming, then there is an ongoing supply of lootable resources. A landscape with few exit options is also not going to change spontaneously. Population growth will, if anything, reduce exit options as the land becomes more crowded. Similarly, if there were new weapons that allowed one group to dominate another, then they had to be entirely forgotten or intentionally destroyed to avoid being reused.
Goliath fuel tends to be sticky, making Goliaths persistent.
The recurring trend is that the longer Goliaths had been around, the more likely it was that one would be reincarnated. A land that has been transformed into tilled fields of wheat or rice paddies cannot easily or quickly be made suitable for hunting and gathering. Nor can farmers quickly learn and adopt an entirely different lifestyle. After a few generations of intensive agriculture, the land is tilted towards a dominance hierarchy.
This is also true of weapons. The longer weapons circulate among a population, and the more people who know about how to build them, the harder it is to dislodge them from the collective memory. If most families have iron weapons and most blacksmiths know how to smelt iron, then it will be difficult to lose iron axes and swords completely from the arsenal of different groups.32 One of the hardest things to permanently kill is not swords or crops but ideas. Once a legitimized hierarchy is deeply rooted in a culture, it becomes hard to remove. Entire systems for justifying inequality are carried forward for thousands of years. The Mandate of Heaven began with the Zhou around 3,000 years ago yet was still invoked during rebellions against the Qing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Genetic evidence suggests that the caste system of India began around 1,500 years ago with little mixing and births across castes. Once stories of distinction and hierarchy become prevalent, they can easily be picked up again and reused by future leaders after a collapse. An appeal to old symbols and stories is often powerful.33 Culture can also plant Goliath fuel deeply, making lootable resources seem indispensable. Sierra Leone lies on the Upper Guinea Coast, an area of West Africa known as the ‘Grain Coast’ or ‘Rice Coast’. Declining soil fertility has made rice farming more and more difficult, forcing many farmers to take rice loans (loans of rice seeds to plant). These usually lead to the farmers getting trapped in debt owing to their inability to grow enough rice to pay back the loan. They continue to grow rice despite the land being better suited for growing alternatives such as potatoes and cassava. Why? School fees are traditionally paid in rice. Many now simply identify as rice farmers and refuse to change or claim that they can’t feel ‘full’ without rice. As one local exclaimed, the problem isn’t the land but that ‘Sierra Leoneans can only dream of rice!’And of course, grain is central to many modern cultures today whether it be throwing rice at weddings, reaping what you sow, or praying to God to ‘give us our daily bread’ (a line from the Lord’s Prayer). Lootable resources tend to be deeply culturally ingrained.34 Culture played a critical role in the persistence of empire in China. The Qin were successful in establishing a larger-scale bureaucracy as well as standardizing and spreading a single language and writing system across China. Widespread literacy, lengthy historical records, and a tradition of bureaucracy all made it easy to regenerate empire after it fell. Especially after the even more organized Tang Dynasty, rulers always had an easy template to emulate and a workforce to administrate it. Goliath was enshrined into the culture.35 That stronger foundation of bureaucracy and writing was not just a random coincidence. Geography influenced it. China was closely placed to the Steppe and its horseback raiders. The constant threat of invasion helped hasten the construction of empires as farmers had their authoritarian impulse kick in and turned towards hierarchy. All unifications of China, except for one, started in the north or north-east of the country, an area particularly exposed to Steppe raiders. Some have referred to these as ‘shadow’ or ‘mirror’ empires: China organized itself more hierarchically in response to mounted warriors from the Steppe, who also adopted more organized hierarchies and formed their own empires (including over China during the Yuan Dynasty). China has few high mountain ranges east of Tibet. Most of the ‘core’ area of imperial China is relatively flat, lying mainly below 300m and with few areas above 1,500m. It’s criss-crossed by rivers that encouraged large-scale farming, supported dense populations, and helped with the shuttling of goods and troops via ships. The geography allowed for an easier expansion of Goliaths with few refuges where people could practise the art of not being governed.36 Modifying the landscape to grow lootable resources, creating stockpiles of monopolizable weapons, spreading ideologies that justify subjugation, and using bureaucracy and writing to create templates for creating Goliaths made it easy to resurrect them.
Every Goliath leaves its bootprints on the land and people, and the Chinese Goliath left remarkably deep ones. There is perhaps only one other Goliath that rivals the legacy of the Chinese: the Roman Goliath.
12 The Falls of Rome Born from War – The Three Falls of Rome – Imperial Overstretch – Diminishing Returns on Extraction – Learning from the Oldest Empire – Shrinking Houses and Fractured Trade – Why Crises Can Be Good for You – Eat or Be Eaten BORN FROM WAR In the second century CE, as the Han Dynasty reigned over eastern Asia, the Roman Empire had become the pinnacle of power in the west.
It had aqueducts collectively spanning more than 800 kilometres, public baths supplied with plumbing and insulated with double-glazing, and imported goods from over 6,000 kilometres away. Rome, its epicentre, was the first city in human history to reach a population of a million. The influence of Rome stretched north to Germany, east to Mesopotamia, north-west to Britain, and south across parts of northern Africa, including Egypt. In 390 CE the empire covered 4.4 million square kilometres, an area greater than the European Union today.
1 Within a century the reach of the western half of the Empire was effectively nil. It had splintered into several competing kingdoms. And around another century later the city of Rome had dwindled to a mere 30,000 people. It would not reach a million citizens again for more than a thousand years. Europe has never had a lasting empire stretch across it since Rome. Napoleon came closest, establishing a French Empire that spanned from Spain to Poland in 1812. But the French Empire lasted just ten years.
The Western Roman Empire lasted over five hundred. Rome retains an almost mythical status among people of the West today.
2 Despite its fabled reputation, Rome began as just one among hundreds of city-states dotting the Mediterranean. The legend is that it was founded in 753 BCE by the twin brothers Romulus and Remus. The two had a human mother and a god for a father: Mars, the god of war.
3 It’s unsurprising that the Romans imagined their founders to be sons of the god of war, since warriors were the creators of Rome. During the sixth and fifth centuries BCE Italy was a land of budding settlements and roving aristocratic raiders who left behind rich burials replete with weapons.
Coalitions of mobile warriors began to slowly settle down in these early city-states. Ruling over a people and continuously taking their resources, rather than occasionally attacking them for plunder, was a more sustainable strategy.
4 Rome slowly began to scale up and dominate the region from the sixth century BCE onwards. The neighbouring city-states that it did not conquer it controlled through bilateral treaties (150 of them). These ‘allies’ were forbidden from speaking to one another, lest they band together against Rome. Allies provided military levies while those who were conquered became citizens but had to pay tax to fund military operations. Rome adopted and adapted the culture of those it conquered. The Greek pantheon became the Roman pantheon, with Ares, the god of war, becoming Mars.
Yet while the Greeks disliked Ares, Rome celebrated Mars, a god who was literally the legendary father of Rome.5 Rome mobilized enormous numbers of young men for battle. From the fourth to the first centuries BCE, 10–25 per cent of men above the age of seventeen were deployed for combat in the Roman Republic. At its peak Rome had an army of around 400,000–500,000. In contrast, most of the armies in Europe during the Middle Ages that followed Rome tended to have just 10,000–20,000 troops. This enormous military juggernaut was the centrepiece of the Roman strategy of expanding quickly, governing lightly, and using conquest to subsidize even more military campaigns. Taxes were kept low for everyone, especially elites, and Rome interfered little with the governance of its subjects. It thoroughly integrated conquered elites, having them adopt Latin and Roman customs. It was essentially a pyramid scheme: conquering neighbours and then enlisting them to conquer lands even further abroad.6 Rome depended on the fruits of conquest. Gold, silver, slaves (used as both house and farm workers, as well as gladiators for entertainment), booty, and even exotic animals from newly conquered territories were paraded in the city of Rome, enriched its citizens, and placated their allies.
These invasions could often be highly lucrative. The capture of the treasury of Macedonia in 167 BCE allowed the republic to eliminate taxes back in Rome. The conquered province of Egypt became the breadbasket of the empire, with Rome receiving over half of its subsidized grain (around 200,000 tonnes per annum) from harvests watered by the Nile. Most of the benefits of empire were channelled to the capital, which remained as its ‘core’. By the end of the Republic, those living in Rome received free grain, a provision called the cura annonae. The Roman poet Juvenal suggested that the citizens were distracted by the superficial attraction of ‘bread and circuses’.7 Rome thrived owing to the swords, shields, and spears of its legionaries.
THE THREE FALLS OF ROME During this expansion Rome was a Republic (beginning in 509 BCE, Figure 30) with some semblance of democracy, including assemblies and voting held in the city of Rome and open to all citizens. This was a thin façade for oligarchy. A few dozen elite families dominated the higher offices of the Senate and the magistrates.8 As inequality and the power of the rich and the military grew, the Republic famously fell into empire with a coup by Julius Caesar. This was, in many ways, the first fall of Rome. Rome had always been historically exceptional as a large-scale republic. Now it was just another military dictatorship ruled by a monarch: the Roman Empire (although Rome had effectively been an empire for centuries, having conquered dozens of city-states). Figure 30: A timeline of Rome Despite its success in war, Rome was constantly threatened. To the north were the Germanic tribes that it frequently warred with; to the east was its rival the Parthian Empire (and the last Sassanid Empire), while others such as Carthage recurred throughout Roman history.
Nonetheless, the Roman Empire persisted and grew, bringing great wealth, especially to its highest classes.
Rome tends to be associated with its famous and infamous emperors, such as Julius Caesar, Augustus, Nero, and Marcus Aurelius. This overlooks the fact that Rome was as much about a land-owning aristocracy as it was about decorated commanders and mad kings. Two of the most important classes were the Senate (around 300–600 individuals who were elected from the patrician aristocracy and acted as public servants) and the governors who oversaw the different provinces.
The bureaucracy too was staffed with leading families and local elites.
The emperor could not survive without the support of these elites, as Julius Caesar discovered with every blade that was pushed into him.
This elite class distinguished themselves from the common folk, whom they branded as vulgus, from which we now derive the word ‘vulgar’.
Even the expansion of the empire was a matter of distinction: a display of the superiority of Rome over its neighbours.
The power of the elite over the empire meant that they could act with a great degree of autonomy. Since taxes were low and oversight was minimal, governors, senators, and the rich were prone to corruption, rule-breaking, and tax evasion. Despite the occasional exception, they were rarely held responsible for crimes and corruption, with one historian observing that ‘as a general rule a rapacious governor might never expect to be held to account’. This led to gratuitous exploitation of the populace. One governor of southern Spain boasted in private letters of extorting 4 million sesterces (bronze Roman coins; to put that into perspective, to qualify for the Senate at the end of the Roman Republic you needed a fortune worth 1 million sesterces) from his subjects and then selling some into slavery. Local elites would also shield peasants under their control from taxes and conscription.
This was a form of tax evasion, hiding peasants from the imperial tax collector and privately taxing them instead.
Such practices made Rome more economically and politically lopsided. The inequality of Rome had always caused problems. Three Jewish revolts took place between 66 and 135 CE, while uprisings in Gaul and Spain attracted participation from both peasants and the middle class.
Slave revolts occurred periodically, including the famous doomed rebellion of exgladiator Spartacus. Approximately 6,000 of the surviving rebels were crucified.
The inequality worsened over time. By the peak of the empire one conservative estimate suggests that around a third of economic output was owned by just the top 1.5 per cent of households. Despite the striking villas, bathhouses, and aqueducts, only about a tenth of Rome’s people beyond the wealthiest elite were living significantly above subsistence. Most of the population didn’t have much beyond what was needed to survive and reproduce.9 At least early in the Empire, what was lost in low taxes and corruption was made up for through revenue from conquest which was also used to placate the masses.10 This arrangement was not sustainable. Rome’s invasions further afield became more and more expensive. Ever-longer supply chains of grain and equipment to support armies and fortresses hundreds of kilometres away meant higher costs. At the same time, the most lucrative silver mines of the empire located in Spain began to dry up. Corruption, a costly military, less plunder and booty, and lower silver yields created a fiscal crisis. During times of crisis and war, the denarius – the silver coin of the Romans – was debased to increase the supply of precious metals.
This became a common tactic for emperors, who increasingly depleted the amount of gold and silver in the currency. The amount of silver in the denarius fell from 3.5 grams per coin in 50 CE to approximately zero by 269 CE.
11 This devaluation of the currency meant that the empire struggled to pay its soldiers. A large, underpaid group of young, trained and armed men is usually a liability – as Rome soon discovered. The third century saw almost fifty years of civil war from 235 to 284 CE, a period that became known as the ‘Third Century Crisis’. Competing generals turned on the empire with the support of disgruntled Roman armies, whom they promised to pay in coin and plunder. Eventually, the crisis was brought under control by Diocletian (284–305 CE) who vanquished the other claimants to the throne.
Yet, it came at a cost. Diocletian introduced a set of reforms, including a significant expansion of the bureaucracy and a doubling of both the empire’s military and land taxes (between 324 and 364 CE).12 Hereditary occupations, conscription, and assessment of all lands for tax purposes were introduced. The reforms shifted power away from local elites towards the bureaucracy and transformed the empire. But it was only a temporary solution, and it never resolved the underlying problem of the wealth pump. Inequality and oligarchy continued to grow across the empire.13 The combination of crippling inequality, low returns from conquests, and over-taxation led to the abandonment of land by farmers and an inability to raise large families. This meant that the empire had to rely increasingly on Germanic mercenaries rather than the traditional approach of using conscripted farmer-soldiers. In 476 CE the Germanic troops enacted a coup on the last emperor, Romulus Augustus, when they could no longer be paid.
It wasn’t just the lack of pay. Germanic migrants were chronically marginalized and mistreated. Military officials who were supposed to dispense grain to them hoarded it for themselves, leading to starvation among the migrants and some purportedly selling their children into slavery to pay for dog meat.
This was the second fall of Rome: the end of the Western Roman Empire.
Its woes did not end there. Volcanic eruptions in 536 CE cooled and dried out much of the Mediterranean, while the Plague of Justinian took even more lives. While the effect of this ‘one-two punch’ of climate and disease is contested, it undoubtedly acted as an additional stressor to an already fragile situation. The Byzantines sought to reclaim Rome and reunite the western and eastern halves of the empire. They succeeded, but not for long, and the capital was lost once again. Their military escapades left the city of Rome and much of Italy depopulated and devastated.14 Politically the fall was swift. At the beginning of 395 CE, the Western Roman Empire was ruled by a single emperor. Within seventy years, Roman Britain had been abandoned, the emperor had been deposed, and the city of Rome had been sacked twice. During the fifth century many urban centres were abandoned and much of the empire was depopulated, by almost half in some regions. Other changes were far slower and subtler. Latin slowly over centuries became a secondary language, restricted to elites and monks, and literacy dropped. The eastern half of the empire continued on for centuries until it was defeated by the Ottomans in 1453, marking the third and final fall of Rome. For the Western Roman Empire, many elites simply merged with new Germanic rulers. The Germanic rulers themselves were Roman: they continued on with Roman customs and culture, combining them with their own. With the fall of Rome over the fifth century CE, the Christian Church grew in power, becoming the connective tissue across the new fractured political body of Europe.15 IMPERIAL OVERSTRETCH There is … one nation that at its own cost, through its own exertions, at its own risk has gone to war on behalf of the liberty of others. It renders this service not to those across its frontiers, or to the peoples of neighbouring States or to those who dwell on the same mainland, but it crosses the seas in order that nowhere in the wide world may injustice and tyranny exist, but that right and equity and law may be everywhere supreme.
This statement was penned by the historian Livy, referring to the Roman Republic. Rome never saw itself as the imperial aggressor. Its wars were either (sometimes pre-emptive) self-defence, or in defence of its allies. In the view of some of its members, it created an empire almost accidentally by pursuing noble goals.
This is difficult to believe, given the scale of Rome’s growth. In 500 BCE Rome was just one city-state with around 60,000 people and 1,000 square kilometres in territory. It would eventually increase 5,000-fold in size, reaching a peak of about 5 million square kilometres. That is the rough equivalent of the people of a medium-sized American city conquering the entire continental USA. Rome and many of the post Qin-dynasties of China seemed to push the boundaries of size for Iron Age empires. Others, such as the Mongol empires from the Steppe and different Islamic caliphates, would sometimes surpass this size, but not for long. The Mongol Empire led by Chinggis Khan reached a peak area of 24 million square kilometres but had fractured into four competing khanates within two decades or so.16 All empires, whether it be Rome, the Qin, or the Mongols, followed expansionist policies. They often depicted their reign not just as legitimate but also as a divine mission to rule all humanity. The British and other colonizing powers believed that they were bringing civilization to savages.
Islamic rulers were required to expand their own moral community of believers (the umma). Jihad translates to ‘struggle’: the struggle to expand the umma. The Islamic caliphate was meant to be (eventually) universal.
Similarly, Chinggis Khan and the empires that directly followed from the Mongol Empire were all supposed to conquer the entire world.17 Conquest didn’t just provide growth, status, and legitimacy; it could also offer many practical benefits. It could neutralize hostile neighbours, provide a new source of revenue, offer new lands that could be gifted to competing elites, gift fresh plunder and slaves to placate the masses at home, and allow for low taxes.
As we’ve seen with Rome, the problem is that universal conquest has never been achieved and the benefits of conquest tend to dry up over time.
New territories require maintenance. Invasions further away from home cost more and more. New borders and interventions create new enemies.
The Germanic tribes on Rome’s borders began to organize themselves more hierarchically in response to Roman expansion. Eventually the costs of maintaining, let alone growing, an empire begin to outstrip the benefits.
This is the idea of ‘imperial overstretch’.
Modern empires, such as the Spanish, Ottoman, and British, all overextended the capacity of their militaries. Their vast navies stretched across numerous oceans required more and more resources to run, slowly draining their domestic budgets. Their debts grew and they struggled to procure more money for further wars and military spending, let alone to finance the rest of the economy. Eventually a new competitor less encumbered by an overstretched military rose up and took their spot, much as the US did with the British.18 While Cahokia and Tiwanaku had to deal more with a lack of mechanisms for controlling a populace, this wasn’t as large a problem for later Goliaths. Rome introduced the first census (counting of citizens) in Europe, while the Han were the first to do so in China. At its height, Rome had a civil service of around 34,000 people. To put that into perspective, the current European Commission employs only 32,000. Large administrations with better tools acted as watchdogs over elites and unwieldy groups (like the rebelling city-states conquered by Sargon) that were far away from the capital. Rome and the Han were far better equipped than Cahokia or Tiwanaku but had to deal with new problems like corruption and imperial overexpansion. As Goliaths grew bigger and more organized, the Curse transformed accordingly.
19 DIMINISHING RETURNS ON EXTRACTION We see a pattern re-emerging across case studies. Societies grow more fragile over time and more prone to collapse. Threats that they had always faced such as invaders, disease, and drought seem to take a heavier toll. In the first iteration of Goliath’s Curse – the Primal Curse – the primary issue was incompetence and resisted hierarchy. An aversion to dominance, the negative effects of inequality, and different threats collided with states that had little capacity to control their citizens.
Because there were so few other Goliaths, collapse could sometimes mean permanent abandonment, as was the case with Cahokia.
Over millennia societies grew bigger – whether it be into systems of interconnected states (such as the Maya and Late Bronze Age) or enormous overarching empires (like Rome or the Han Dynasty) – and more organized.
They used administration, innovation, and new sources of Goliath fuel to overcome the Primal Curse and control far larger groups for longer. They no longer faced the same constraints as the earliest Goliaths. As Goliaths transformed, so too did their curse.
They still faced the underlying (and ongoing) problem of rising inequality creating societies where power was more concentrated and institutions more extractive. This had several knock-on effects, some of which were novel for these larger imperial systems. Inequality tends to exacerbate social problems, whether it be violent crime or the mental health of the populace.20 A swelling number of elites increases inequality by finding ways to transfer wealth from the poorest to the richest, impoverishing the masses. Elites with increasing influence find more ways to siphon money and power away from the state, including through corruption and tax evasion. It’s a relationship that multiple studies confirm in the modern world and a pattern we see, whether it be through the princes of China, the governors of Rome, or tax-dodging traders in the Late Bronze Age.21 A growing pool of elites competing for status, power, and a limited number of high-status positions turn towards more extreme measures, whether it be starting coups, civil wars, or rebellions (or simply hijacking existing ones). We see it most clearly through feuding nobles and emperors in China conducting coups and rebellions, elite-led coups and civil wars in Rome, a constant ‘game of thrones’ in West Africa, as well as the city-states of the Maya and the Mycenaean palaces turning on each other. These are just a few examples among a wealth of evidence that shows the importance of elite factionalism to crisis and collapse across the millennia.22 To appease a disenfranchised populace, and to calm growing elite strife, the state will often push for increasingly expensive conquests or intensifying agricultural and mining production. This degrades the environment, making a society more vulnerable to drought, as we’ve seen most clearly in the cases of Rome and the Maya. A society that is increasingly top-heavy with a larger class of powerful elites will be less likely to make effective decisions, especially when they involve changing the status quo that they benefit from.23 One review of sustainability throughout history that I was part of found that responses to environmental disasters – whether it be floods, droughts, or soil erosion – tended to be worse when the decisions were co-opted by elites and prioritized their short-term interests.24 Many have lamented that past societies seem to have suffered paralysis when asked to address obvious problems.25 Oligarchy is why.
The result is more extractive institutions creating growing instability, internal conflict, a drain of resources away from government, state capture by private elites, and worse decision-making. Society – especially the state – becomes more fragile. Private elites tend to take a larger share of extractive benefits. The state, and many of the power structures it helps prop up, then usually falls apart once a shock hits: for Rome it was climate change, disease, and rebelling Germanic mercenaries; for China it was often floods, droughts, disease, and horseback raiders; for the west African kingdoms it was invaders and a loss of trade; for the Maya it was drought and a loss of trade; and for the Bronze Age it was drought, a disruption of trade, and an earthquake storm. I call this ‘diminishing returns on extraction’. States seek to extract more resources by becoming more bureaucratic to closely control citizens, intensifying production (whether it be from mines or fields), and expanding through conquest. Elites seek to extract more resources through tax evasion, corruption, private armies, and other means to compete with each other and capture the state. Whether wealth is extracted from the populace, the land, or neighbours, there are eventually diminishing returns. Conquests become more costly over time until they provide more trouble and problems than benefits. More intensive agriculture and mining can mean more productivity, until deforestation, soil erosion, and lowered mine yields set in. An expanding bureaucracy can result in more control at first, but can eventually drain the government coffers. Elites extracting wealth from a populace – and even the state through corruption and oligarchy – can be good for them initially, but eventually they impoverish and deplete the people and government they are dependent on. Similarly, large trade networks primarily used for elite trade can bring prosperity and cultural exchange, but eventually become a liability as they transfer shocks or as a society becomes overly reliant upon them (as was the case for the Aksumite Empire and west African kingdoms). This is why societies appear to become more fragile over time and why there is this repeated cycle of fission and fusion among early Goliaths or capture and fracture among larger empires. It is due to diminishing returns on extraction.26 Table 4: Diminishing returns on extraction Contributor Benefits Diminishing returns Consequences Conquest Benefits from legitimacy, Benefits dwindle over time as conquering and Large-scale debt, creation of new enemies, Contributor Benefits Diminishing returns Consequences plunder, and slaves.
maintaining territories further from home cost more and new enemies are created by expansion. overstretched state capacity, diversion of resources from productive sectors.
Corruption Initial benefits for elites.
Tends to increase as both inequality and the number of elites increase.
Loss of revenue, loss of legitimacy, and loss of trust in the state.
Declining energy ratio More intensive production can aid economic growth initially.
Eventually depletion and environmental degradation can weaken the resource base of a society.
Loss of revenue, and lower agricultural and mining productivity.
Elite factionalism Beneficial for the swelling class of elites initially.
As the number of elites and their power grow (the society becomes top-heavy) they intensify competition for scarce high-status positions.
Polarization, coups, civil war, and rebellion.
Inequality and popular immiseration Benefits initially for elites who reap the reward of unequal exchange The benefits eventually fall away as the populace begins to rebel.
Lower government revenue, populace more susceptible to disease, state Contributor Benefits Diminishing returns Consequences between the rich and poor.
capture, and rebellion.
Oligarchy Hierarchy can initially be quicker, more efficient, and helpful in unifying a populace through an imposed identity.
A growing concentration of decision-making among elites leads to worse decisions and an inability to reform the status quo.
Poor decisionmaking and maladaptive responses to disasters.
We see this process embodied in the case of Rome. To begin with, Rome was a republic with at least some limited political enfranchisement.
Inequality was lower, and power was more balanced. Over time, it became more unequal, overexpanded, and fell into autocracy. Rome developed a surplus of disenfranchised citizens and ambitious elites.
Then there was ample corruption, with Roman governors who would swindle their subjects and sell them into slavery. It also appeared to be suffering from declining yields from both mining and agriculture. The supply of silver from mines in Spain began to dwindle, while deforestation across Italy may have led to eroding soils and lower crop yields in different areas. Like the Maya, they had a dwindling energy ratio.27 Corruption, inequality, oligarchy, and elite factionalism were the key culprits that hollowed out the Roman Empire.
These created a predicament in that the populace had become impoverished and hostile, the military was largely privatized, the government had racked up an enormous debt, it was crippled internally owing to elite capture of the highest offices, and had a bloated military and bureaucracy. It had become a brittle shell that was sundered by invaders, civil war, droughts, and disease.
There is a rough consensus on what factors led to Rome’s fall, such as corruption, decaying institutions, invaders, climate change, plague, and power struggles over the surplus lootable resources and high-status positions. Historians now mainly argue about which ones were the most important.28 Diminishing returns on extraction combines all of them into one process. The pre-eminent historian of empire Walter Scheidel has already labelled the collapse of both the Han (and Jin) and the Western Roman Empire as cases of diminishing returns on extraction. Growing inequality along with corruption, elite factionalism, and oligarchic decisionmaking drained the world’s two largest ancient empires.29 Across all the cases of collapse, from the systems collapses in the Mediterranean and Yucatán, to China and Rome, we see similarities. In every case prior to the collapse there is a slow growth in inequality, oligarchy, corruption, and factionalism between elites over the surplus of lootable resources. Diminishing returns on extraction set in. This eventually collides with a set of shocks, usually drought, disease, invaders, floods, or earthquakes. Then things fall apart (Figure 31).
Figure 31: Diminishing returns on extraction The first Goliaths and their Primal Curse had some similar elements. For instance, we see some evidence of elite factionalism in cases such as Teotihuacan. They in all likelihood also suffered from poorer decisionmaking due to oligarchy. Some, such as the first farmers of Europe and the Puebloans, were also facing a declining energy ratio. Yet the bigger problem for the earliest Goliaths was stronger counter-dominance intuitions meeting weak control mechanisms. Other factors – such as imperial overstretch and corruption – began only with large imperial systems. The stronger control mechanisms of empires like Rome and the Han also meant there was more time for diminishing returns to set in. The commonality across the Primal Curse and diminishing returns on extraction is that more inequality and more extractive institutions made societies more fragile.30 These trends transcend such examples. One review I led looked at ten case studies including the Late Bronze Age collapse, the fall of Rome and several others, such as the Tang Dynasty, the Achaemenid Empire, and the first Arab-Islamic Empire. In almost all of them there was growing inequality and fiercer battles between elites over the surplus wealth and positions of status. Collapse in each case coincided with shocks such as disease, drought, and warfare. The result was that the state fractured, elites and soldiers became more regional, the beliefs justifying hierarchy transformed, and the population dispersed or died.31 Behind each of these contributors to imperial collapse we can glimpse cold, ice-age roots. Inequality clashed with our ingrained aversion to dominance. That aversion could be overcome by shared fictions, particularly those that justify hierarchy, such as the Mandate of Heaven. Yet it was a delicate affair, and our allergic reaction to oppression never fully left us. Elite factionalism is principally a battle for higher status, especially given that these elites typically had more than enough riches and security compared with the rest of the population.32 Yet, some empires seemed to defy the curse for a surprisingly long period of time.
LEARNING FROM THE OLDEST EMPIRE In the Mortality of States (MOROS) dataset (a compilation of states throughout history) one state stands out: the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine. It is exceptionally long-lived, having lasted over a thousand years. It was, in the words of the historian John Haldon, ‘the empire that would not die’.33 The Byzantine period began in 330 CE when Rome was split into Western and Eastern empires. Despite the western half falling, the eastern half persisted, even expanding after the fall of Rome to take back most of Italy and northern Africa by 541 CE. It was then hit by both bubonic plague and the Late Antique Little Ice Age.
It struggled with Avars (nomadic raiders) and Slavs invading its eastern front across the Balkans, and a war with the Sasanian Empire across northern Africa and the Near East. Then things got even worse. The Rashidun Caliphate exploded out of the Near East, taking the wealthiest provinces of the Byzantine Empire: Syria, Egypt, and Palestine. The Byzantine capital of Constantinople was besieged every year from 674 to 678. The empire lost around two-thirds of its territory and three-quarters of its income. All seemed lost. Yet somehow it survived and even recovered. Within two centuries the empire had pushed back the Arab forces and regained much of its territory, nearly doubling in size.
What explains the resilience and longevity of the Byzantine Empire?
First, it had a strong shared religion in its Orthodox Christian beliefs.
These bonds were strengthened by the looming religious enemy of Islam on the borders. This helped to unite the elites as well as the broader populace during the times of crisis. Second, elites at the provincial level became dependent on the empire as the civil administration and military were combined and they were given military titles. Third, it was flexible in its response and willingness to decentralize. After losing so much territory, the empire could barely pay its troops and had to cut military pay by half in 616 and again in 659. As a substitute, soldiers were given land in exchange for military service. The bureaucracy was simplified and the troops, now defending their own land and families, fought more fiercely and came to identify with the empire more strongly. Fourth, the Late Antique Little Ice Age created cooler, wetter conditions that favoured keeping cattle and growing cereals. This meant more food, a healthier population, and less chance of famine. Fifth, the empire was lucky enough to have an easily defended geography, with the Taurus mountain range in the south acting as a natural barrier to the expansion of the caliphate (this became part of the border between the two).34 Geography and climate were largely matters of luck, but the other three factors were not. They were all responses that helped to unify the populace and quell elite competition. The shared ideology and interests of the empire and local elites reduced status competition, while the more decentralized arrangements bolstered local belief in the empire. The shared religion of Orthodox Christianity across elites and local peasant-soldiers made for a more effective fighting machine while reducing the threats of rebellion and elite infighting. While the Byzantines were eventually defeated by the Ottoman Empire they managed to reach an unparalleled longevity. Despite their longevity, the fall of the western half of the empire had enormous consequences for Europe.
SHRINKING HOUSES AND FRACTURED TRADE Collapse destroys wealth and flattens its distribution. As a state falls, stateprotected merchants and trade also decline. Luxury goods fall away, and trade becomes more localized.
For much of the former territory of the Roman Empire, especially Roman Britain, the end of the empire meant smaller houses and less wealth. In Britain the median house size went from approximately 150 square metres, prior to Roman occupation, to a high point of around 200 square metres during the empire, before shrinking to under 100 square metres after the Romans left.35 Losses in wealth can also empty cities and may be responsible for much of the displacement we see during collapse.
Rome lost over 95 per cent of its population but this was unlikely to have been due primarily to war or disease. Rome had weathered sieges and outbreaks for centuries. What it could not withstand was the cutting of the cura annonae, the shipment of subsidized grain from northern Africa into the city. Free grain had artificially inflated the city’s population; once its life-support system was severed, it shrank to a few tens of thousands.
There was little point staying in a city that was a target for invaders and pathogens if you no longer had free grain, free entertainment, and reliable protection.36 Settlements and cities were often dependent on such imperial support from far-flung territories. Once those fell away, these places lost their lustre and purpose.
We see this from the earliest settlements across Mesopotamia through to the movement of the Maya to coastal areas, and even in the modern ‘rust-belt’ cities of the Midwest and north-eastern US. People naturally move to follow opportunity.
37 The fall of a Goliath was not always as economically devastating as with Rome, and less overall wealth does not mean that everyone was worse off.
It meant greater wealth equality and sometimes even a rise in living standards. Remarkably, collapse, even of the economy, is often beneficial for the health of the populace.
WHY CRISES CAN BE GOOD FOR YOU The skeletons of Europeans tell a very different story of the Roman Empire from the one most of us have heard. The rise of Rome in the first century CE saw a deterioration in height: Romans were 8cm shorter than they should have been according to projections based on trends prior to its rise. While Roman heights stagnated over the following centuries, areas that were not occupied by the empire, such as eastern Europe, continued to grow in stature. There is a reason why the Germanic ‘barbarians’ were remembered as hulking giants. People in the Roman Empire (with the odd exception of Roman Britain), particularly around the Mediterranean, didn’t start to get taller again until the fifth and sixth centuries, after the empire fell apart.
Dental caries and bone lesions decreased, also indicating improved health after the fall. From the point of view of human health, the Roman Empire was the dark age, and the medieval period was the Golden Age.38 We see a similar pattern in the people of the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age. Height decreases over centuries as people turn increasingly towards urban living. The height of men increases slightly during the early Bronze Age and then stagnates for centuries, while the height of women falls and then slowly starts to rise.
The Late Bronze Age collapse reinvigorates health. The height of men begins to increase again, and the growth in women’s height accelerates.
The fall of empires often meant a rise in human stature.39 There are a few contributors to this surprising trend. First, people shifted towards increasingly grain-heavy diets. Most Goliaths relied on grain as a tax crop and feeding larger amounts of people crammed together in cities usually meant eating more wheat, barley, corn, or rice. Crowding also often meant more disease, which would have taken its toll on human health and height. Diets heavier in animal protein tend to result in taller, healthier populations. Most people in a ‘dark age’ took on more diverse diets with more herding and hunting, less agriculture and less exposure to infectious disease.40 Second, the destruction of overarching economic systems can often lead to more free time and healthier habits.
Economic recessions and depressions over the last century have often unexpectedly increased life expectancy owing to less air pollution (from less traffic), less drinking and smoking (because people have less money), fewer fatal accidents in the workplace or on the roads, and more leisure and social time (one of the few benefits of losing a job). We see this in the 2008 recession in Europe: the regions with the biggest economic slowdown also experienced the biggest increase in life expectancy. While economic downturns can worsen other health outcomes – such as mental health and rates of suicide – they can also save lives.41 Third, collapse often resulted in far greater equality.
Collapse is a great leveller. If you were to look for one consistent, unwavering commonality across case studies – the Lowland Maya, Rome, the Han, the Late Bronze Age, and the first Goliaths – it would be the simple rule of the deeper the collapse, the greater the wealth equality it produced. This is for a few simple reasons. The destruction of capital – temples, palaces, manors, monuments, bathhouses, and wealthy properties – all disproportionately hurt the rich. The powerful also lost their usual ways of accumulating more riches as centralized institutions fragmented. The dispersal of people, and in some cases loss of life, meant that there were fewer labourers. Those who remained had more bargaining power with bosses and landlords, resulting in higher wages and taller people.
EAT OR BE EATEN Both antiquity and medieval Europe had the idea of the translatio imperii: the handing down (or, often, brutal grabbing) of authority from one empire to another. Empires may fall, but they usually pass the baton, creating a running lineage. The idea dates back to at least the ancient Greek historian Herodotus detailing how the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the direct successor of the Assyrian and Median empires.
Rome is the ultimate example of translatio imperii. Many European kingdoms have claimed to be carrying the mantle of Rome ever since its fall. As Voltaire quipped, the Holy Roman Empire of the European Middle Ages was famously not holy, Roman, or an empire. Instead, it was trying to make itself legitimate by invoking the Roman legacy, as did most European empires. Many within the British Empire saw themselves as the inheritors of a Roman tradition. And there is no shortage of comparisons between the US and Rome.
Rome has left a particularly deep legacy beyond the translatio imperii.
The emergency powers we use during crises (such as the introduction of martial law and states of emergency) were inspired by the Roman practice of selecting a dictator to run things temporarily when facing an immediate threat. Modern notions of property are also rooted in Roman law. We still conceive of property in terms of usus (the right to use), fructus (the right to enjoy the products of a property, for instance the fruit of a tree), and abusus (the right to damage or destroy).42 We have been indelibly moulded by Rome, yet the Etruscans and the Celts whom they conquered left little imprint on the modern world. It’s not because they were inferior to Rome. Rather it’s because Rome was an unusually large and persistent empire. Evolution is often framed as ‘survival of the fittest’: those who are best adapted to a particular environment survive and reproduce. Selection of the fittest is caused by competition. In the case of Goliath evolution, it’s not the most benevolent groups that leave a lasting mark, but those that are the most successful at conquering others and controlling larger swathes of territory and masses of people.
The empires that were the best at doing so tended to have more of their ideas, technology, and culture carried into the future, even through collapses. The world of today is built on that evolutionary process.
Yet when we look back with a more sober gaze, it’s clear that evolution does not always select for the wisest or fairest. Rome wasn’t just deeply unbalanced and oligarchic, and it wasn’t just bad for the health and height of most of its populace. It was also spectacularly savage. Armed gangs of young men selling women into slavery and the public execution of thousands by nailing them to crosses were hallmarks of Roman rule.
And we can still see such things in the modern world. Just look at the actions of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.43 Yet, across the fog of history and through the lens of the 1 per cent we view Rome far differently from how we see the Islamic State.
Try peering beyond that foggy lens and feeling what the victims of empire must have felt. Try to imagine what it must have been like to be crucified. Crucifixion was designed to be the most public and torturous form of capital punishment.44 Every full inhalation would have been excruciating as you dragged your flayed back up the splintered wood and increased the pressure of the ropes and nails on your flesh. Death, when it came, was usually not from dehydration or starvation but from asphyxiation.45 You slowly suffocate as you become too exhausted to take another breath. That was, for many, the experience of a golden age.
Our fascination with the power of Rome also tends to make us enraptured by its collapse and forget all those that it absorbed or destroyed on its way to glory. Take the case of ancient Carthage, once a prosperous trading empire centred in modern Tunisia. In 146 BCE, at the end of the third and final Punic War, Rome razed the city of Carthage to the ground. Roman soldiers went house to house, systematically killing the inhabitants before setting fire to the buildings behind them. The surviving 50,000 citizens were sold into slavery.
46 History has often been a case of eat or be eaten. Either organize into a conquering dominance hierarchy that will suffer from Goliath’s Curse or be consumed by someone else who does. We are the inheritors of that process, not of a linear stepladder of progress.
Underlying this evolutionary race of eat or be eaten are, once again, our old, Palaeolithic roots. Warfare between states and empires is an extension of status competition, no longer between individuals or groups but between entire polities. People commonly think that countries go to war for resources or security. That is a mistaken view, or at least overly narrow. It’s increasingly clear that states often go to war for reputation and status.
Vladimir Putin has been outspoken in his desire to regain Ukraine in order to restore Russia’s status as a great imperial power (and undoubtedly to add to his own legacy). For Rome too, war was often not just about booty or revenge, but also for the glory and prestige of rulers and their empire.
Scholars have now amassed a wealth of data showing how concerns for status, honour, and reputation have shaped both war and peace. The general and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz remarked that ‘war is nothing but the continuation of policy by other means’. War is also nothing but the continuation of status competition by other means.47 Our basic human drivers of dominance aversion and status competition didn’t change, but the way they were expressed did. They were scaled up as empires grew and technology developed. Collapse too would eventually change as empires devised new weapons and began to cross oceans.
Exploration by colonial ships and the beginning of the modern world would not have occurred without the falls of Rome. Our world is built on collapse.
13 Fear the Rise Petrarch’s Mistakes – Forgetting Technology – Progress and Collapse – Blessed by the Black Death – How the Fall of Rome Led to the Rise of Colonial Europe – The Origins of Colonial Capitalism – Global Decimation PETRARCH’S MISTAKES The term ‘dark age’ was coined by the fourteenth-century Italian scholar Petrarch. Travelling across Europe, he collected manuscripts, particularly the literature and philosophy of antiquity. Petrarch was such a lover of the Greco-Roman world that he even penned letters to the long-deceased Roman writers Virgil and Cicero.
As much as he was impressed by the writers and art of Classical Greece and Rome, Petrarch was appalled by what he saw as the dearth of good literature and the death of good culture that followed the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He disdained the ‘dark’ ignorance of his post-Roman time and admired the ‘light’ of Greece and Rome. In his eyes, the eight centuries from 500 to 1300 were a time of stunted cultural achievement and outright barbarism.
The irony is that the Classical Greece Petrarch longed for was the product of a ‘dark age’. The very alphabet that Petrarch wrote in emerged during the Late Bronze Age collapse.
Petrarch made another critical mistake: he saw the end of Rome as a purely catastrophic outcome. When we look at Europe in the wake of Rome it becomes clear that Petrarch and this ‘rise and fall’ vision of history is spectacularly wrong.
FORGETTING TECHNOLOGY The history of collapse is tied to the story of progress. The ‘rise and fall’ usually refers not just to the heights of a society’s walls and monuments, but also to the heights and well-being of its people, the dynamism of its culture, and the sophistication of its technology. History is often painted as a long arc of improvement, punctuated by the occasional collapse-induced dark age (such as the medieval ages after Rome).
This isn’t just baked into the outdated notion of dark ages. Even the official chronologies by historians and archaeologists centre and praise state power. The time before the rise of the pharaohs in Egypt is labelled the ‘Pre-Dynastic’ period. In Cambodia, the adoption of indigenous writing and the expansion of the first kingdom is the ‘Pre-Angkorian’, and the height of empire is the ‘Mature Angkorian’ period. For the Maya, their peak of urbanism and elite power is designated as the ‘Classic’ period, bookended by the ‘Pre-Classic’ and ‘Post-Classic’. It is as if people were waiting for empire, fleetingly enjoying its rich fruits, and then lapsing back into obscurity.
1 This progress narrative is often attached to the belief that progress is driven by technological change. It’s best summarized by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who declared that ‘Innovation is the real driver of progress.’ OpenAI’s Sam Altman put it less elegantly when saying ‘the default state of the world is that things decay and get worse and worse, and the only way that not only do we make life better, but even push against that, like, decay, and all like kill each, destroy each other, is with progress and increasing quality of life. And the only way we get that is through technology.’ Gates and Altman represent a common view: that progress is a train moving forward across history and its engine is technological improvement.
For many, this is why Rome and other peaks in empire are seen to be golden ages: their roads, aqueducts, bathhouses, amphitheatres, and towering monuments all reflect a richer, more technologically advanced society. That technological ability, it is assumed, spilled over into the welfare and livelihoods of the populace. Neither of these assumptions is true.
Technological change was slow under the Western Roman Empire. Most key productive technologies such as glassblowing and the use of watermills and water-lifting devices were developed in the first three centuries BCE in the Hellenistic east. Rome simply dispersed and further modified these innovations.2 There is even a famous story of an inventor who proposed a labour-saving device that could transport heavy columns cheaply. It was rejected by Emperor Vespasian, who preferred to keep his people busy and employed. As we’ve seen, the virtue of Rome lay in war-making and administration, not in innovation.3 Just as we tend to overestimate the ingenuity of Roman technology, we also underestimate the inventiveness of the period that followed its fall.
Medieval England, after the fall of Rome, was not mired in a technological dark age but was genuinely innovative and productive.
This period saw the introduction of mechanical clocks, better mirrors, and tidal mills, as well as improved windmills and watermills and the heavy plough, which were deeply helpful for agriculture. In England in the three centuries between 1000 and 1300, agricultural productivity per person looks to have increased by roughly 15 per cent and yields per hectare doubled.
Technologies were lost during collapses. One of the best-known losses is Roman concrete – a unique blend that had been used across Roman architecture since the time of the Republic. It was low-emissions and unusually durable. It can still be seen in some of the empire’s surviving bridges, aqueducts, and even the Pantheon. None of the preserved texts after Rome’s fall describe how it was made. Only today are scientists discovering its secrets. Another prominent example is the plumbing and underground drainage systems of the Indus Valley Civilization. These were ahead of their time, but they were abandoned alongside the cities they lay under.
4 Yet we need to bear in mind that technological development is not a straight, rising line across history. Nor is the loss of innovation innately tied to collapse. Even the most basic tools have sometimes been forgotten.
When Europeans arrived in Australia the indigenous people didn’t have a single bow or arrow, despite both having been invented up to 70,000 years ago in Africa. Instead, they had invented and relied on the boomerang rather than the bow (alongside spears and throwing clubs).
Somehow during the migration from Africa to Australia the technology had been lost. Something similar happened across Oceania, not just for bows and arrows, but also pottery and ocean-going canoes. Some forager groups even lost the ability to make fire.5 This collective forgetting was often caused by a catastrophe. In the 1820s the Polar Inuit were struck by an unknown epidemic. Many of the oldest, most learned individuals perished, and their knowledge passed away with them. The group lost basic, critical technologies such as kayaks and bows and arrows. It had taken generations to craft and refine these instruments and, once those who knew how to make them had gone without passing on those skills, they were lost. Technology is a product of cultural learning, and if an event is sufficiently catastrophic it can disrupt the intergenerational chain of learning.6 Loss of technology is generally rarer among large societies. That’s simply because a larger number of more interconnected people means that knowledge tends to be more widely shared. Writing too helped with this, acting as a source of information storage outside the human brain.
A number of factors could lead to the loss of technology during a collapse. The knowledge behind the technology may have been limited to a small class. As we saw with the Inuit, relying on a small group to carry collective knowledge is a shaky strategy. If the class died, became unemployed, or simply fell out of favour, the techniques were forgotten.
This was especially true of technologies that were kept secret, such as Greek Fire: a petroleum-based chemical weapon used by the Byzantines to burn enemy ships. It was tossed in grenades or even sprayed through a pressure-pump like a kind of flamethrower. It was so potent that it could burn on water and may have even led to entire Byzantine naval victories.
Yet it was lost, probably in the late twelfth century as the Byzantines’ oil supplies were cut off by invaders. Thereafter the fire-projector used on ships disappears and its use in catapults slowly dwindles. The likely reason is that the recipe for Greek Fire was a tightly guarded state secret that only a handful of imperial agents knew. Once the empire lost resources and power, it was no longer made and eventually passed into history. If knowledge is closely tied to a power structure, then it can fall alongside it.7 Another cause is that the technology loses its utility. For instance, there was less need for Indus or Roman plumbing after people had moved from cities to rural communities, where they could rely on simpler, cheaper cesspits. Roman concrete was of little use if grand monuments to celebrate the empire were no longer being built. A further reason is deliberate rejection and abandonment. Native Americans in the aftermath of Cahokia stopped building pyramids throughout much of the Mississippi basin.
Rather than being the result of social regression or barbarism, lost technology is – like lost scripts and writing – a matter of technologies becoming obsolescent or rejected during a reshuffling of power. It was, if anything, an adaptation: people dropped and adopted technologies that better suited their circumstances. As we’ve seen in both post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean after the Late Bronze Age collapse, technological regression due to collapse is also often an exaggeration.
Large empires did not necessarily mean more innovation and their fall was not necessarily accompanied by a loss of inventive ingenuity. And even when technology was lost it did not automatically mean that people led worse lives.
PROGRESS AND COLLAPSE Across history, neither improved technology nor bigger, wealthier empires have resulted in better lives for most of the populace. Let’s look at three things that many would broadly agree are vital to a flourishing life: welfare, health, and happiness (or, as the ancient Egyptians would have said, ‘life, prosperity, and happiness’).8 Welfare and standards of living can be roughly measured and compared across ancient studies using real income (often expressed as kilograms of grain received per year). One of the few studies to do so found fairly small differences in the welfare of most labourers between sixth- and secondcentury BCE Babylon, the Han Dynasty, and the Roman Empire. There was not a big difference even when comparing them to thirteenth-century England, almost 2,000 years later. Another more systematic study found the same trend. There may have been minor fluctuations and some exceptions such as Athenian Greece. Yet even here, the wealth of Athens was built on the backs of slaves and on the exacting of tribute. In other words, the average citizen living under a state would have seen little improvement in welfare in the 6,000 years between around 3600 BCE and 1700 CE.
An eighteenth-century European peasant was about as well off as an Egyptian peasant 7,000 years earlier. GDP per capita (in real, priceadjusted terms) essentially plateaued during the first millennium CE. These years saw enormous technological change, particularly in agriculture.9 The overall trend is that living standards for most people did not improve dramatically over the long run of history. In terms of quality of life, history largely stood still between the transition to agriculture and the end of the Industrial Revolution. This is astounding, given the thousands of years of technological improvements that occurred.
A similar pattern occurs with human height. We’ve already seen that average height dropped with the move from hunting and gathering to intensified agriculture. Heights also became more variable. In the modern world, differences in wealth both within and between countries are echoed in differences in height. The poor are shorter and the rich taller. This is a historically consistent trend over thousands of years. It wasn’t just pharaohs and Mycenaean kings who were taller than their peasants: in the antebellum American South, enslaved women were 6.5cm shorter than southern white women, while the gap for men was 4cm. In contrast, Native American hunter-gatherers were fairly equal in height for both men and women. This is simply a reflection of economic inequality’s impact on health.10 Across the world, height has hovered around 170cm for the past 2,000 years. There were fluctuations, but no lasting increases until the nineteenth century. Peculiarly, as we’ve seen with both Rome and the Late Bronze Age, height tended to fall under empire and increase during periods of collapse. For human health, the idea of progress rising and falling with empire isn’t supported by the evidence.11 Is the same true for happiness? Happiness is perhaps the most important and most difficult to measure variable of progress. We unfortunately have little idea how happy the average citizen was in the Roman Empire or Han Dynasty. What we do have are studies comparing the happiness of modern peoples and hunter-gatherers. One of the few studies to do so focused on the modern Hadza people of northern Tanzania. They were found to be, on average, happier than the inhabitants of over a dozen industrialized countries for which there was comparable data, including the US and Spain. Other studies have reached similar conclusions. Perhaps most tellingly, ethnographies of hunter-gatherers are replete with reflections on how carefree and happy they are, with close-knit communities and a propensity to spontaneously burst into song and dance.12 The historical data is patchy and often hard to measure, but it points towards a surprising and grim conclusion.
Despite 11,000 years since the transition towards domesticated crops and animals, most people are sadder and smaller than their Palaeolithic ancestors.13 Why was progress painfully slow and new technology not a benefit to most people? Most of the surplus created by technology and economic growth was taken by elites. One estimate from medieval France (1100– 1250) suggests that 20 per cent of output went to the construction of cathedrals and churches. Essentially, everything that was not being used to feed people went to building churches and expanding monasteries.14 As we’ve seen already, most pre-modern states were staggeringly unequal.
In general, across history, the poorest half of the population would hold less than 5 per cent of the wealth while the top 1 to 10 per cent, comprising merchants, soldiers, priests, and rulers, owned 60–90 per cent.15 This minority elite extracted essentially all the surplus from the masses of impoverished farmers working the land.16 That’s why thousands of years of technological advances didn’t improve the lives of most and why kings stood taller than workers. Technology and wealth can, of course, help immensely (as we see in the modern world), but only when the benefits are widely dispersed.
A more reliable way to boost heights and welfare has been to redistribute power. Sometimes, that has been via collapse, and sometimes in more sinister ways. We can glimpse both in Latin Europe in the wake of Rome.
BLESSED BY THE BLACK DEATH Alas, this mortality devoured such a multitude of both sexes that no one could be found to carry the bodies of the dead to burial, but men and women carried the bodies of their own little ones to church on their shoulders and threw them into mass graves, from which arose such a stink that it was barely possible for anyone to go past a churchyard.
This is an extract from the chronicles of one observer of the Black Death in the cathedral priory of Rochester in Kent. The repeated bouts of the Black Death ravaged Europe between 1346 and 1353 CE, killing between a third and over half of the population.17 It was incredibly traumatic, yet a boon for the lucky survivors. Halving the population meant that, on average, everyone now had twice as much of everything, from ships to land to grain. Because labour had become scarce and land was now abundant, peasants had more bargaining power. And they used it. Uprisings and rebellions occurred across Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England, led by Wat Tyler, was inspired by the preacher John Ball’s famous rallying cry of ‘Now the time is come in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage and recover liberty.’ Ball was executed, but the push for equality he called for was successful. Peasants were now valuable enough to force concessions out of the landlords and barons.
Wages doubled or tripled in many regions, and the pay gap between men and women decreased. People grew taller and healthier. Life expectancy increased and heights grew from a low of 168cm during the Black Death to a high of around 174 cm.18 While the Black Death was a blessing for the survivors and their descendants, these positive effects were not evenly distributed.19 Regions that already had inclusive institutions benefited in the long term from the Black Death, while those without them did not. North-western Europe had the strongest presence of guilds, village communities, fraternities, and groups for managing the commons. In these regions the plague acted as a leveller, slashing wealth inequality and potentially helping to hasten the overthrow of feudalism. In contrast, eastern Europe, Russia, the Baltic, Castile, and north and central Italy lacked these inclusive networks and ended up more unequal after the Black Death. Eastern Europe and Russia were also far slower to exit feudalism. In north-western Europe inclusive networks mobilized to ensure elites didn’t use the crisis to further their
power.
20 The blessings of the Black Death arose not only from the loss of life but also because of the way it shifted power. Mexico in the sixteenth century provides a useful case study of how power stifled widespread prosperity.
Recurrent waves of disease killed off large numbers of workers. This in theory should have given them greater negotiating power and wages, just as the Black Death did in Europe, but the Spanish colonizers suppressed the bargaining power of labourers and wages stagnated. A century later, when these controls were relaxed, real wages shot up.21 The fall of Rome and the Black Death not only give us an insight into the surprising relationship between collapse and prosperity, but they can also help us to understand how petty European kingdoms became colonial conquerors.
HOW THE FALL OF ROME LED TO THE RISE OF COLONIAL EUROPE In the 1480s, Christopher Columbus dreamed of finding a western route to Asia from Europe. He pitched his idea to rulers in England, France, and Portugal, and was promptly rejected. They correctly identified that Columbus massively underestimated the circumference of the earth and size of the oceans. Then, in 1492, he finally received support for his expedition from Spain’s Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand.
Columbus got lucky and wandered into the unknown continent of the Americas. He was also fortunate in that he did not live in a unified empire in which a single rejection would have ruined his prospects. He lived in a competitive marketplace of states, and was able to pitch his proposition more widely. This decentralized landscape of competing states was due to the fall of Rome, following which Europe became a chessboard of warring kingdoms with a common Christian culture. These conditions created a fertile environment for new thinkers to develop and sell their ideas, however crazy they may have been. The relentless competition between European elites also drove a need to innovate, especially in warfare. The advance of science accelerated, resulting in a host of new technologies, including the compass, oceangoing ships, muskets, and cannons.22 Together, these technologies, and competition to find new lands and trade routes, fuelled the rise of European colonial powers such as Spain and England.
Competing European powers were incessantly at war and strapped for cash. This drove even further innovations. For instance, England’s empire created elaborate financial mechanisms to finance bigger overseas conquests, including central banks and joint-stock exchanges in the late seventeenth century. The private sector was combined with the state in new ways to help aid conquest. Private trading companies (such as the Dutch East India Company) were given monopoly rights over newly conquered territories and then jealously defended with vast navies. They became company-states with the ability to raise taxes, punish crimes, and enact treaties with local rulers. Even the conquistadors who invaded the Americas – such as Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro – were not soldiers of Spain.
They were armed entrepreneurs who led private expeditions.
Scholars have argued for decades over why the West took over the world.
The answers have ranged from geography and better weapons to a better culture for science and invention. Yet, as Walter Scheidel has shown, underpinning all these was an intense competition that wouldn’t have existed if Rome hadn’t fallen. What did the Romans ever do for us?
Well, for future European power, they got out of the way.
23 THE ORIGINS OF COLONIAL CAPITALISM Colonialism is neither recent nor uniquely European. Colonization, the act of planting settlements of one’s own citizens into foreign lands, pre-dates the colonial empires of Spain, Britain, and Portugal. Invaders displacing locals was done by the first farmers of Europe and the Romans.
What was new in post-Roman Europe was that colonization was combined with capitalism, and both accelerated. Capitalism, as we’ve seen in Assyria, is also ancient. Classical Greece, Rome, Song China, and the Venetian Empire all had the ingredients of capitalism such as wage labour, private property, and profit-orientated entrepreneurs. Yet something changed in the sixteenth century. In this case, a key spur was not the collapse of Rome but the demographic collapse caused by the Black Death.24 The economic boon for the survivors of the plague meant that they had more disposable income, and a newfound ability to move up the social ladder. Because of this, the demand for luxury items such as gold, furs, silk, sugar, and spices increased. These were goods that needed to be imported from faraway lands, stimulating the demand for colonial ventures to the Caribbean and the Americas.25 A lack of labour meant a higher demand for machines, including a boom in the construction of watermills and windmills. Similarly, the deaths of so many scribes during the plague hastened the mass production of books.26 It wasn’t just about the impacts of the plague, but also the eventual response of the rulers. Peasants were getting taller and wealthier – until the rich reacted. As one writer put it in the early 1500s, ‘The peasants are too rich … and do not know what obedience means; they don’t take law into any account, they wish there were no nobles … and they would like to decide what rent we should get for our lands.’ The means for putting the peasants in their place was enclosure: the wealthy kicked peasants off their collectively managed lands and commons. Words such as ‘pauper’ and ‘poverty’ came into common usage, despite having barely been used in earlier periods. The eighteenth-century protest song ‘The Goose and the Common’ summarized enclosure in one verse: The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But turns the bigger robber loose Who steals the common from off the goose.
Much of the land that had been unowned was seized by nobles, who then demanded rent. It was the artificial manufacture of poverty through theft.
The peasants became a dispossessed, cheap source of labour for factories in urban areas in the north of England.27 There they were combined with a cheap source of energy in coal. Coal-fired steam engines were less reliable than wind and water power at this time, but had some unique benefits. First, watermills required cooperation between competing owners of mills that drew from the same watercourse, while coal-powered factories could be operated by an independent capitalist. Second, watermills were located in upland river valleys, while coal-powered factories could be placed in cities to make use of the cheap, excess labour that had been created by enclosure.
Factories became the new engines of this European Goliath.28 These factories were supplied by overseas colonies built on stolen land.
In 1492 Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas (he was searching for Asia, and died in 1499, convinced he had found it). A year later Spanish settlers began to arrive. Within half a century they had invaded much of the Caribbean and the Americas. A century later, the British had joined.
This wasn’t just a typical case of conquest. They systematically killed or enslaved the indigenous population, transforming the lands into plantations full of cash crops such as cotton, sugar, and tobacco, or stripped for gold and silver. Lootable resources bloomed. The violent fruits of these plantations were then shipped back to the imperial homelands at low prices, or as gifts to the monarchs. These were new empires built on cash crops, slave-manned plantations, and unequal trade rather than the simpler approach of conquer and demand tribute (or conquer and tax).29 It led to unprecedented imperial expansion. The British Empire became the largest empire to have existed. In 1925 the British Empire controlled 35 million square kilometres, or around a quarter of the world’s total land area (approximately seven times the size of the Roman Empire). Sargon’s Akkad was stuck in one time zone, while the British just over 4,000 years later had become an empire upon which the sun never set.30 This was an extension of the long-running trend of empires getting bigger and bigger over time (see Figure 32).31 Figure 32: The maximum territorial extent of the largest empires throughout history These unfathomably large empires required new technology and governance to remain intact. Colonial empires delegated power to formal bureaucracies, local indigenous elites, and state-owned companies to help manage the overseas colonies, while overseas administrators would often settle on informal measures such as taking a local mistress to learn the country’s language, customs, and culture. Technology was perhaps even more pivotal. The British used the telegraph and railways to oversee their colonies, rather than runners and horses. In India alone, the British laid down 84,000 kilometres of telegraph lines between 1853 and 1900.32 These proved decisive in allowing the British to react rapidly to rebellions.
After the British successfully quelled the 1857 Indian rebellion, one colonial official exclaimed ‘The Electric Telegraph has saved India’ (saved it for British occupation, that is).33 Goliath continued to evolve and began to cross oceans.
This new form of Goliath was all built on the fall of Rome. Not only that, but the rise of the new empires would prove to be far worse than any imperial collapse had been. GLOBAL DECIMATION The emergence of these colonial Goliaths was one of the most violent processes of human history. The colonization of the Americas itself may have claimed up to 10–11 per cent of the world’s people at the time.
While the numbers are highly uncertain, only one other event seems to come close to this: the waves of the Black Death in the fourteenth century (see Table 5).34 We can think of these as ‘global decimations’.
Decimation means ‘removal of one tenth’, derived from the Roman military punishment for insubordination in which a cohort (around 480 soldiers) was forced to murder a randomly selected tenth of their comrades.35 Table 5: Historical global decimation Event Timeframe % of global population lost Black Death 1345–1353 ~9.7–10 Invasion of the Americas 1492–1600 ~10–11 Global decimation is rare and isn’t about collapse. Instead, it is about disease and the rise of empires. The invasion of the Americas didn’t cause such an enormous body count by collapsing the Inca and Aztec empires. It was due to the actions of European invaders, as well as the diseases they introduced.
Collapse is also rarely the culprit for the worst atrocities that fail to meet global decimation criteria. Mass killings tend to be Goliath-organized affairs. Take, for instance, the case of the Züngharian Empire (1634–1755 CE), the last nomadic, Mongolian empire to threaten China. A combination of elite fracture and conquest by the nearby Qing Dynasty led to its devastation. The Qianlong emperor ordered, ‘Show no mercy at all to these rebels.’ The result was not just the destruction of the state but the genocide of a people. One estimate suggests that 30 per cent of Zünghars were killed, 40 per cent died of disease, 20 per cent fled to Russia, and just 10 per cent remained as a small minority in Xinjiang province. The Han Chinese then resettled the emptied territory with forced relocations, primarily by ethnic Han Chinese.36 The transatlantic slave trade was also a matter of imperial ‘success’ rather than collapse.
And it wasn’t just Europe. The Ottoman Empire took in (including from African slavers) around 2 million slaves from sub-Saharan Africa over the course of its existence. Europeans tapped into pre-existing slave markets in Africa, which were usually run by local Goliaths.37 The driver behind these horrors is not a lack of authority structures, but rather organized brutality. As professor of sociology Siniša Malešević has demonstrated, large-scale violence needs highly organized authority structures such as an empire like the British, Spanish, or Qing.
Systematically killing, enslaving, or oppressing millions relies on ideology, organization, and creating tight groups unified against an external enemy.
Most people do not have a natural proclivity for mutilation, murder, torture, and subjugating others. We do have the capacity for it, but that usually requires a strict chain of command (even the most egregious crimes are often defended as ‘just following orders’), extensive training, and rewiring the brains of soldiers. You need highly organized dominance hierarchies to do this.38 In some cases, state collapse could even prevent such atrocities. One large data analysis found that failed and failing states are far less likely or able to conduct genocide than a functioning government. That is for the obvious reason that systematic identification and murder require a strong centralized institution.39 Societal collapse can still carry a heavy toll. Yet its costs are usually due to the quest to create a new racket, such as in the gory rise of the Qin.
Historically, collapse has not been the source of the greatest mass killings or atrocities. That we owe, instead, to the creation and expansion of Goliaths.
And the creation of the Global Goliath carried the highest price in human life. 14 Colonization and Collapse Why Did Cortés Win and Córdoba Fail? – Guns, Germs, Steel, Revolt, and Elite Conflict – Indigenous Allies and Rebellion – Local Apocalypses – The Shatterzone – When Indigenous Elites Helped Europe Eat the World – Babies, Bacteria, Bombs, and Barbarism – Is Colonization Collapse?
WHY DID CORTéS WIN AND CóRDOBA FAIL?
The Spanish slaver Francisco Hernández de Córdoba led the first European expedition to the mainland of the Americas in 1517.1 He headed a group of 110 Spaniards from Cuba to Isla Mujeres, off the coast of the modern resort city of Cancún. There they spotted the pyramids of the Mayan city El Meco, which they nicknamed ‘El Gran Cairo’ (Great Cairo) because of its resemblance to the Egyptian pyramids. On 5 March 1517, the crew were beckoned ashore by a group of Maya and given an unwelcome surprise.
They were met with a hail of arrows, spears, and stones. Over a dozen Spaniards were injured and the group quickly retreated. They continued to circle the Yucatán coast, going further north and then east towards what is now Mexico City. They grew dehydrated and made the mistake of stopping at the Mayan land of Chakanputún, which they named Champoton, for water. They soon found themselves surrounded by around a thousand Mayan soldiers. The next day, the Mayans closed in on them. Spanish steel blades clashed with wood and obsidian swords.
Despite their technological advantage, the Spaniards were soundly defeated. Two were captured, over fifty were killed, and more succumbed to their wounds while retreating.
They eventually made it back to their base in Cuba, where Córdoba died of his injuries. This initial Spanish invasion attempt of Mesoamerica was a disaster.
Two years later, in 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived on the Yucatán coast with an unauthorized expedition of a hundred sailors, eleven ships, 508 soldiers, and sixteen horses. Within two years the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán was captured and the Aztec Empire had collapsed (Figure 33). Colonization resulted in a new wave of collapses across the world. As we’ll see, many cases of colonization were collapses, while others were not.
Understanding how colonization could cause collapse – and why sometimes it did not – can in part be unravelled by exploring why the Maya soundly defeated Córdoba, while Cortés seemed to swiftly conquer the larger and better organized Aztecs two years later.
Figure 33: A timeline of the Incan and Aztec empires GUNS, GERMS, STEEL, REVOLT, AND ELITE CONFLICT Jared Diamond famously summarized the reasons why Cortés won in three words: guns, germs, and steel. Crossbows and muskets could cut through cotton armour at a distance, while metal armour was largely impervious to arrows and obsidian blades. Indigenous Americans could shoot arrows at six times the rate of a Spanish blunderbuss, but to no avail. The Europeans also carried a more silent but deadly weapon: disease. The immune systems of the indigenous Americans were completely unprepared for the diseases the Europeans brought with them: smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, mumps, chickenpox, scarlet fever, typhus, cholera, and pneumonic plague.
It became part of what’s called the Columbian Exchange: the widespread transfer of plants, people, pathogens, and culture across the Atlantic Ocean in both directions (with the Europeans taking such crops as corn, tomatoes, and potatoes back with them).2 These reasons alone can’t account for why empires such as the Aztec and Incan collapsed.
Córdoba had the same military advantages yet was easily crushed by the Maya. There is another critical reason why colonization efforts succeeded: indigenous allies.
The Aztec Empire had inherent vulnerabilities that the Spanish exploited.
After the fall of Teotihuacan (c.550 CE), numerous city-states competed, rose, and fell across the Basin of Mexico. Then, an alliance of three Nahua cities – Tenochtitlán, Tetzcoco, and Tlacopan – managed to subdue the others and craft an enduring empire (1428–1521). They became known as the ‘Triple Alliance’ or the Aztec Empire. This was the largest pre-Hispanic empire in Central America, covering over 200,000 square kilometres. They had their own novel number system, a calendar, aqueducts, a taxation system (with taxes paid by provinces in maize, amaranth, textiles, and even warrior costumes), and their capital of Tenochtitlán was built on an island surrounded by floating gardens.
Despite this sophistication, it was still a loose empire based on the recent subjugation of many cities by just three.
Like Rome, the Aztecs dominated through their military might. They arose after the introduction of new weapons such as stone swords into the region. The Aztecs believed that humans had a debt to the gods, one that could be repaid through sacrifice and blood offerings. Newly conquered territories didn’t just provide sacrificial victims; they also gave tribute to the Aztecs before they were eventually incorporated and graduated to paying tax. It was highly unequal, with the top 1 per cent taking around 41.8 per cent of total income (their share of wealth would have been even higher).
Those who resisted the imperial expansion of the Aztecs faced higher taxes and harsher working conditions.3 Many of the conquered territories resented such domination, while unconquered neighbours such as the Tlaxcalans (a confederation of four oligarchic republics) were in a state of near perpetual war with the Aztecs.4 Rebellion or total war, however, was not advisable. The Aztecs had mass conscription and could reportedly field an army of 200,000. Imagine a small city of soldiers sporting obsidian swords, looking to gain status by capturing as many enemies as possible to sacrifice. It was obvious why many, despite despising Aztec rule, acquiesced.
The arrival of the Spanish changed this calculus. At first, the conquistadors fought against the Tlaxcalans. Thanks to their guns, steel, and horses, the Spanish won these battles against the far larger Tlaxcalan forces.
It was not all good news for the Spanish, as their numbers dwindled after each fight. Technological advantages could not overcome being massively outnumbered. Cortés and his conquistadors were on the verge of being defeated. Then, the Tlaxcalans changed their minds.
They decided that while they could destroy the Spanish, it would cost them too many of their own. Instead, impressed by the Spaniards’ prowess in battle, they offered an alliance. The Aztecs would spare Cortés and his men if they would join the Tlaxcalans in attacking the Aztec Triple Alliance. The Spanish wisely agreed.5 The Spaniards became one part of a far larger army. A group of 10,000 marched on the Aztec stronghold of Tenochtitlán. Indigenous troops from the Totonac of the Gulf Coast and the Tlaxcalans of the highlands outnumbered their Spanish allies fifty to one and Cortés was by no means the sole head of the army. When they arrived, they were unexpectedly invited into the capital. The emperor, Motecuhzoma II (sometimes known as Montezuma), was a ruthless conqueror, but he was also curious. He wanted to observe these strange Spaniards up close. Motecuhzoma had made a fatal mistake.6 Cortés took Motecuhzoma hostage on 14 November 1519 and held him captive inside his own city for over six months. During the months without a leader, the Aztec Empire was largely paralysed and tensions mounted between the occupying Spaniards and the Aztecs. Later, following a massacre by the Spanish of dozens of Aztec nobles and warriors after misinterpreting a ritual as preparation for war, fighting broke out and on 29 June 1520 Motecuhzoma was killed. Spanish accounts blame the Aztec people, claiming they stoned Motecuhzoma to death. The more likely scenario is that the Spanish killed him. As soon as he was dead, the Aztecs elected a new king and ejected the Spanish from Tenochtitlán within days.
The retreat of the alliance from Tenochtitlán proved costly for the Spaniards and their allies. While estimates vary, it seems that hundreds of Spaniards and thousands of indigenous allies were lost. They called it La Noche Triste: The Night of Sorrows.7 The Spanish–indigenous alliance returned just under a year later, now with a force of 100,000–200,000. Again, the vast majority were indigenous rebels, not conquistadors. The city-states of Tetzcoco and Tlacopan, two of the original members of the Aztec Triple Alliance, had also defected, swelling the numbers of the anti-Aztec force. To make things worse for the Aztecs, there was an outbreak of smallpox (introduced by the Spanish) in the city of Tenochtitlán.
The second siege of Tenochtitlán was successful. The superior numbers and devastating effects of smallpox were too much for the Aztec capital.
Even so, the small Spanish force is unlikely to have been capable of taking Tenochtitlán (or simply to have survived up till that point). They needed the assistance of indigenous allies.8 INDIGENOUS ALLIES AND REBELLION The key role of indigenous allies can also be seen in the exploits of a relative of Cortés: Francisco Pizarro. Pizarro arrived on the borders of the Incan Empire with 168 soldiers in 1528. Within a decade the Incan Empire had collapsed.9 As with Cortés and the Aztecs, Pizarro was not the first European to encounter the Incans. Three years earlier, the Portuguese explorer Aleixo Garcia had led an expedition (including a small army of native allies) against the Incans and was easily defeated.
It was such a disaster that the natives turned on Garcia and killed him during the retreat from the Incans.
Garcia’s struggles should be unsurprising, given the power of the Incan Empire.
The Incan Empire was the largest empire the Americas had ever seen. It encompassed Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, and parts of Argentina with 40,000 kilometres of roads. An ethnic group (the Inca) of just 100,000 people ruled over between 9 and 11.7 million subjects in a centralized-command economy. It had no traders and the necessities of life were distributed to subjects through state warehouses. With no horses to speed up communication and transport, they had to rely on less orthodox approaches to administer the empire. Relay runners (chasquis) could use the road network to cover an astonishing 200 kilometres per day (four times faster than Spaniards on horseback).10 They would run with rolled messages, held like a baton, or deliver them by word of mouth, repeating them while running so as not to forget.11 The Incan Empire was also unstable: it had doubled in size in less than a century and maintained a tenuous grip over dozens of different ethnic groups and communities with hundreds of languages.12 Like most empires, it also suffered from disputes over who should rule. Aleixo Garcia had mistimed his attack; just two years later the Incan Empire would descend into civil war.
13 In 1527 the Incan emperor Huayna Capac died from a mysterious disease (most likely smallpox introduced by the Spanish). The empire was quickly engulfed by infighting over which of Capac’s sons would inherit the throne: Huáscar, who was favoured by the nobility, or Atahualpa, who was backed by the military. The two battled for five years until 1532, when Atahualpa emerged victorious and Huáscar was defeated. Pizarro and his conquistadors walked into the middle of a civil war and made the most of it. They cobbled together an army of disaffected indigenous groups previously oppressed by the Inca, including the Huancas, Chankas, Cañaris, and Chachapoya.
Pizarro confronted the victorious Atahualpa on his return. As with the Aztecs, the element of surprise was key: Atahualpa went with an unarmed contingent to greet the Spanish and was captured. In 1533, Atahualpa was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. Then, in the main square of Cuzco, he was strangled to death. It was not just a victory due to superior weapons or deadlier bugs; it was, like the defeat of the Aztecs, centrally about conflict between elites and resistance from local elites and commoners against empire.14 The collapse of the Aztecs and the Incas were not clear-cut cases of ‘conquest’. Both can easily be seen as successful rebellions rather than signs of Spanish superiority. Indeed, that’s how the Aztec and Incan locals saw them. The allies of Cortés viewed it as a battle against Aztec imperialism with foreign assistance, rather than a foreign invasion. They saw themselves as successful revolutionaries who overthrew the oppressive Triple Alliance, not as losers against the Spanish.15 It was only afterwards that the self-aggrandizing accounts penned by conquistadors reframed the conflicts. Suddenly they became legendary stories of a few exceptional Spaniards defeating empires of millions through guile and superior arms.
During that time, other more pernicious myths crept in. One is that the Aztecs were overawed by the arrival of Cortés and his conquistadors, mistaking them for gods, particularly the feathered-serpent god Quetzalcoatl. The historian Camilla Townsend has thoroughly debunked this as a myth created in 1552 by Francisco López de Gómara, a chaplain-biographer of Cortés who had never visited Mexico.
The Aztecs instead fought bitterly against the invaders, saw them as vile and bizarre beings, and after the conquest frequently refused to adopt their customs, such as Spanish schools and Catholic marriage. Not exactly how one would treat gods. Quetzalcoatl was not even normally depicted as having white skin: he was called the ‘white god’ because it was the colour associated with him, not because it was his ethnicity.
16 Guns, germs (especially), steel, and horses played a role, but elite conflict and local resistance were key. Cortés and his conquistadors were almost defeated by the Tlaxcalans and certainly wouldn’t have managed to beat them and the Aztecs without help. Pizarro would have met the same fate as Aleixo Garcia if he had walked into a unified Incan Empire. And the oligarchic structure of both the Aztecs and the Incans hindered their response: the Aztecs were paralysed when Motecuhzoma was captured, and the Incans were distracted by petty squabbles over the throne.
The critical role of indigenous allies is evident when we look further north. After the conquest of Central America, the Spanish invasion strangely halted. They didn’t move much further north of the present US– Mexico border. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. There were numerous attempts by conquistadors to invade North America, but they failed. Juan Ponce de León attempted to plant a Spanish colony in Florida in 1521.
The Calusa (the kingdom of slaving fishers) vehemently disagreed and repelled the Spanish. De León died of wounds received in battle against the Calusa.
Several years later Pánfilo de Narváez attempted to lead a conquering Spanish force of 400 inland from Florida. They were constantly attacked by Mississippians and struggled in the terrain. Only four of the original group survived. Another conquistador, Hernando de Soto, led a group of around 600 Spaniards from Florida to the Mississippi River during 1539–42. The Mississippians constantly harried and ambushed the Spanish, while burning crops to ensure that de Soto’s force had nothing to eat. De Soto died of disease on the banks of the Mississippi. Only around half of his force limped back to Mexico.
The English didn’t do much better. There were over a dozen attempts to settle the North Atlantic seaboard during the sixteenth century. They all were abandoned, either because of an inability to grow crops and live in the foreign environment or because they were destroyed by Native Americans.
The few that did survive, such as the famous first settlement of Jamestown, did so because of support from Native Americans. The colonization of North America took centuries to play out and the colonizers once again had to rely on exploiting pre-existing divisions.
The conquest of North America is replete with tales of French and English forces facing off against each other while allied with rival tribes.
The importance of weapons, novel diseases, and native allies varies case by case. Australia was more clearly a matter of guns, germs, and steel. The Aboriginal people had far smaller, dispersed populations that were not well organized for war. This was more a story of newly introduced disease and superior technology leading to a devastated population. In some cases, such as Tasmania, it was simple, brutal colonial genocide.
In contrast, the collapse of the Incan and Aztec empires doesn’t look all that different from the cases of Rome or the Han: status competition among elites and counter-dominance across the masses were underlying drivers.
All of them faced invaders: the Spanish for the Aztecs and Incans, the Xiongnu for the Chinese, and Germanic tribes and the Sassanids for the Romans. The Spanish had a greater advantage in technology, disease, and surprise, but it was not an entirely different situation. These collapses all had similar root causes.
LOCAL APOCALYPSES The story of so many kingdoms and empires ends abruptly with these simple words: ‘and then the Spanish arrived’. Or the British. Or the Portuguese. Or the Dutch. There is a long list of states subjugated by European powers. It’s easy to forget that Africa was already covered with a litany of different indigenous empires prior to colonization, including the Songhai Empire, the Bamana Kingdom, the Kingdom of Burundi, the Kingdom of Mutapa, the Kingdom of Kongo, the Luba Empire, and the Zulu Kingdom. This map of indigenous African empires would soon be wiped away and redrawn by colonial powers.
Apart from empires and kingdoms, countless indigenous communities, cities, and peoples were lost to colonial expansion. It would take a book thousands of pages long to do justice to the myriad cultures and groups across Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Americas who were hunted, enslaved, and dispossessed. Millions of lives, thousands of cultures, and hundreds of languages were sacrificed for millions of tonnes of gold, silver, sugar, cotton, cardamon, and slaves.
Some of the most tragic examples are the most misunderstood. One such is the Rapa Nui (the natives of what we know as Easter Island).
The island off the coast of Chile is renowned for its mysterious moai – vast carved stone statues that each weigh up to 270 tons. These dot the coasts and landscapes like eerie sentinels. The Rapa Nui were victims of colonization. A community of 3,000–4,000 had sustainably inhabited the islands for centuries. Then the Europeans arrived. They unintentionally introduced deadly disease, such as smallpox, which ravaged the island. Once discovered, the island became a target. Slavers from Peru carried off hundreds, perhaps as much as half the population, as domestic servants or to work in guano mines. By 1877, only 111 islanders remained.17 The Rapa Nui are often mistakenly portrayed as a legendary case of selfinflicted environmental collapse. The common story is that they (or imported rats) deforested the island,18 causing massive soil erosion, leading to a decline in agriculture and eventually famine, warfare, and cannibalism before Europeans arrived. This account doesn’t withstand scrutiny. There’s little evidence of population collapse or warfare prior to the arrival of Europeans. The spears that the Rapa Nui used against each other during their supposed civil war do not appear to be spears, but rather general-purpose tools. While the Rapa Nui did significantly deforest the island, there is little evidence of a mass dying until contact with the Europeans. One DNA analysis of the remains of fifteen Rapa Nui individuals found no evidence of a large drop in population in the 1600s.
Satellite imaging of the island to create estimates of food production produced the same results: there was no collapse prior to European contact.
Instead, it appears that their population consistently and gradually increased until the Europeans arrived in the 1860s. The best-known case of collapse is an example of genocide, not ecocide.19 The mountains of bodies produced by colonization make most other historical collapses pale by comparison. That is not just because the population had grown since the Bronze Age. The proportion of the population killed was also astounding. In the Basin of Mexico, in the century after the conquest of the Aztec Empire, around 55–95 per cent of the population perished. It’s easy to brush over those numbers, but pause and ponder it. Imagine your closest friend or partner dying from an unknown disease.
They lie writhing in pain, as small blisters form and burst across their body. There is nothing you can do as they take their final rattling breath.
Within your lifetime, you lose half or more of the people you are closest to. This was the reality for many communities. In terms of sheer human suffering, these were some of the worst events in history. 20 And it wasn’t due only to disease. After the Black Death, which killed up to a third or even half of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century, Europe recovered in less than a century. In the Basin of Mexico, and many more areas of the Americas, it took two, three, or more centuries to recover.
Partly that was because there were multiple waves of different diseases.
Yet calculations suggest that if this was due only to disease, the population should have bounced back more quickly, within a few generations. What explains the difference between the Black Death and colonization is oppression. Indigenous groups were frequently starved, brutally overworked, and forced into crowded camps and settlements with poor sanitation and unsafe drinking water. Weakened people died more easily and the camps were superspreaders for imported germs.21 This happened around the world, and not just in the Americas. Hawaii and Australia seem to have suffered similar mass death rates of up to 90 per cent over a century or two. Europeans arriving on previously isolated continents would turn ‘virgin soils’ into bloody fields. In Australia, one official report in the state of Victoria read: ‘the most extensive ravages … will render them extinct within a few years’. Again, diseases were not the sole culprit. In Australia, the land was treated as terra nullius (an empty land, or ‘a territory without a master’) and the indigenous population was forcibly displaced and either detained or killed when they resisted.22 THE SHATTERZONE The pustules of smallpox and chickenpox, and the black swellings of the plague, even extended into lands that had not been conquered. The disastrous expeditions of de Soto and other Spaniards into the Mississippi might have failed to claim the land for Spain, but they did succeed in causing numerous societies to collapse. When they had arrived in 1539–40, there were dozens of mound-based chiefdoms and kingdoms with towns of up to 5,000 people. When the French paddled up the Mississippi roughly 135 years later, there were only around three (the Quapaw, the Tunica, and the Natchez). De Soto and other Spaniards had left an unwelcome and fatal legacy. Disease, war, and incessant slave raids were the hammers that shattered these regions, which scholars refer to as the ‘shatterzone’: a realm of instability in which tribes and communities were broken down and new ones were created from the pieces.23 The shatterzone is essentially a systems collapse of non-state societies. A large group of interconnected, mainly foraging-based groups all fell apart, creating waves of movement and social change. The effects were often hard to predict. Some communities went entirely extinct, their numbers destroyed by outbreaks of disease, slave raids, or attacks from Europeans or other native groups. Some dispersed into smaller egalitarian towns that were more mobile and more easily hidden. In Zomia, huge movements of people fleeing disease and states created a changing mosaic of new groups, identities, and cultures. We see the same occur in the shatterzone of the colonial US. Many of the nations we are familiar with today, such as the Cherokee, were created by people coalescing in the shatterzone.
Others chose a darker path.24 Some groups, such as the Westo, Savannah (Shawnee), and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), became slavers, incessantly kidnapping their neighbours to sell to the colonists. For the Westo and Savannah, it was good business: they traded slaves for guns, ammunition, and metal tools, which they could use to catch more people.25 Slave raids by both colonizers and indigenous slavers over the space of a century or two would have chained and dragged away tens of thousands of Native Americans, perhaps over 100,000. In one particularly intense period in Florida (1704–7), native slavers snatched up to 12,000 people from their homes.26 The indigenous groups within the shatterzone became increasingly aggressive, which was an outcome that the colonizers welcomed. In 1680 Governor of South Carolina John Archdale remarked that ‘the Hand of God was eminently seen in thinning the Indians, to make room for the English’ as he watched a civil war unfold between the Westo and the Savannah. The Savannah wiped out the Westo and became the main trading partner of the Carolinian colonists. The Creek (also known as the Muscogee Creek Confederacy), another key slave raider and colonist trader, were later compensated by being recognized as the first Native American group to be ‘civilized’ by the American government. For the Creek and other groups, slaving and aggression was handsomely rewarded.27 The shatterzone was a zone of intermittent collapse. Of the minikingdoms or chiefdoms then in existence, few survived. New groups emerged, but into a different world.
War and slavery had already existed for centuries, but the shatterzone put these on steroids. Suddenly slavery became a large-scale, commercial endeavour; armed groups would rove over long distances to capture women and children. An arms race developed as new communities competed to sell furs and people in exchange for new iron tools and weapons. Some practices continued: people still hunted, gathered, grew corn, cooperated through reciprocity, had matrilineal kin systems, and organized themselves through clans. Despite these threads connecting them to the past, they suffered a kind of local apocalypse, the end of a world.28 WHEN INDIGENOUS ELITES HELPED EUROPE EAT THE WORLD Two strange statues flank the entrance of the Royal Palace of Madrid.
Both are noticeably different from the other statues of the palace. They don’t look European, and are wearing a radically different garb, replete with leg bands and feathered crowns. They are the vanquished Aztec and Incan rulers Motecuhzoma and Atahualpa (Figure 34). They’re not just there to commemorate the conquest of the two empires. Instead, Spanish kings saw themselves as the legal inheritors of the Aztec and Incan crowns. By taking on the crown of the King of the West Indies they were also making themselves the new emperor of the Aztecs and Sapa Inca (the ruler, Sapa Inca meaning ‘the one true Inca’). This also meant that the new Incan nobility would become Spanish nobility too under law.
It is just another example of translatio imperii; even for colonial powers, empire was hereditary.
Figure 34: Statues of Atahualpa (left) and Motecuhzoma (right) at the Royal Palace, Madrid The Spanish didn’t see the Incan and Aztec empires as having collapsed per se. Instead, they had transformed and come under colonial rule. There is a truth to this. There was, at least initially, often little change in the hierarchies of colonized areas. When the Spanish took over the Aztec Empire, they largely adopted the existing taxation system. For the Incans, they simply repurposed the mita system of mandatory labour that was already in place. It became the repartimiento system, in which Spanish colonists could use indigenous people for forced labour (essentially what was temporary slavery). Similarly, the British initially used the Mughal Empire’s taxation system in India and reinforced the caste system.
This was a common approach. European rulers lacked the means, language, or knowledge to govern vast tracts of land and negotiate across myriad groups and dialects. They had to bargain with and rely on indigenous elites. Colonization was not just a matter of subjugation and opposition, but also collusion. In exchange, native elites would get preferential treatment or riches. As noted, Incan and Aztec nobles legally became Spanish nobles, this in return for their assistance in both administering the empire and helping avoid rebellion. Local rulers kept their status by funnelling tax and tribute to the invaders while keeping the peace. It is yet another example of elite migration during a collapse.
European colonialism had non-European assistance.29 Like the slavers of the shatterzone, many local elites and groups became complicit in the subjugation of their own people. Their cooperation was often not out of a fear of death: indigenous slavers such as the Westo had other options and the local elites of the Incan and Aztec empires still significantly outnumbered their European invaders. Indigenous peoples often allied with invaders out of the allure of benefits, such as guns and tools in exchange for slaves, or the continuation of their high-status noble positions.
That is how remarkably a small group of men managed to take over and run these empires: they relied on striking deals with local elites until more Spaniards arrived. This collaboration meant that the existing culture and systems were often slow to change. It took well over a century for the Spanish to recraft indigenous institutions and impose their language and writing.
Politically and culturally, farmers and peasants would have noticed little change. These were collapses of the pre-existing states – the Aztec and Incan – and an often slower transformation of much of the rest of the society.
30 The economy of colonized lands was melted down and reforged. The Spanish demanded tribute mainly in the form of gold and silver, much of which was then shipped back to Spain. Over the period 1500–1650 around 180 tons of gold, and a staggering 16,000 tons of silver crossed the Atlantic from the Americas to Europe. In agriculture, the exact commodity that was grown varied across colonized lands: in the Caribbean the main exports were ‘cash crops’ such as sugar and tobacco, in the US it was cotton, and in Congo it was ivory and rubber.
What this meant was often a simplification of the economy as it became focused on frenetically growing and shipping off luxury commodities to Europe. Energy capture (and often overall economic activity) decreased initially with the large-scale loss of life caused by conquest, but tended to increase over time as more sophisticated tools were introduced to aid the production and distribution of exports.31 Some colonized countries did not collapse,32 but nonetheless experienced terrible hardship. In India, GDP growth (a rough proxy for energy capture) increased up to nine-fold during the reign of the British Raj, as did the population and urbanization. It was still a horrifying process. The gutting of India’s manufacturing industry, the introduction of exploitative labour conditions, and a forced shift towards cotton and opium production led to a decline in real wages and an increase in extreme poverty from 23 per cent in 1810 (under the Mughal Empire) to more than 50 per cent in the mid-twentieth century. Life expectancy declined from 26.7 years to 21.9 years. Famines became more frequent and severe, and India experienced somewhere between 50 million and 165 million premature deaths during 1891–1920. Comparing India to Tiwanaku, or many of the other ancient cases we have discussed, is a reminder that there are fates worse than collapse.33 Perhaps because of cases like India, colonization is often strangely absent from most discussions of societal collapse. Apart from the few cases where an empire quickly unravelled – such as the Aztec and Incan – it is conspicuously missing in most coverage. That is because colonization perversely boosted economic growth and urbanization, even while it ate away the culture, simplified the economy, and murdered millions. Colonization wasn’t just a matter of collapse and genocide; it also marked the global triumph of Goliath.
BABIES, BACTERIA, BOMBS, AND BARBARISM Five thousand years ago, Uruk and Egypt were fledgling polities covering just a pixel or two of the world map. Despite systems collapses and setbacks, Goliath came to rule the world. While European colonization was the most decisive step in the march of Goliath, empires were already spreading across South and Central America well before the conquistadors arrived. The dominance of Goliath is due to a few basic reasons: bigger populations, more disease, and stronger militaries.
The strongest factor is simple: groups with lootable resources tended to have far more people to stock their armies and economies with. Dense, lootable resources, especially agriculture, allow for far larger, denser populations. It also encourages greater fertility. A carbohydrate-rich, grainbased diet means that children can be weaned onto softer foods earlier, ovulation is encouraged, and a woman’s reproductive period is lengthened.
Farmers also needed more children to help work the fields.34 Modern studies suggest that, despite significant variation, farmers do seem to be more fertile than foragers.35 Foragers also need far more land.
Depending on the environment, a hunter-gatherer may need somewhere between 0.4 and 140 square kilometres. In contrast, Italy has a population density of around 200 people for every square kilometre, while India has 475.36 Agriculture tended to lead to Goliaths with big populations.
Grain states didn’t just have higher fertility rates. They also had an obsession with encouraging reproduction. In 18 BCE Emperor Augustus passed a series of laws to increase marriage and children. The Qin of China gave tax breaks to women and their families if they had more kids.
And there’s no shortage of modern examples of pro-natalist policies that try to boost reproduction. Japan and South Korea both pay people to have babies (about $2,000 per child). Australia also provides such a subsidy, aptly named the ‘baby bonus’, and France has had a similar subsidy for years. Hungary spends 5 per cent of its GDP on trying to stimulate population growth with a slew of loans, grants, and tax-breaks for parents and wouldbe parents.37 The world’s most prominent religions have also promoted patriarchal norms and encouraged fertility.
One study of 141 countries found that religiosity was the factor with the strongest correlation to fertility.
38 More people living closely together gifted Goliaths with advantages in avoiding disease and winning wars. The barrage of zoonotic infections that developed alongside the first states was initially a curse. Epidemics controlled population levels and tens of thousands died. But the survivors had natural resistances that they passed on. Subsequent generations, especially those living in densely populated urban areas, inherited this biological resilience. Stateless foragers remained vulnerable to these density-dependent diseases; hence first contact, and the first transmissions of tuberculosis, smallpox, syphilis, gonorrhoea, and influenza, proved deadly. 39 We see the effects of novel diseases through the mass graves across the Americas and Australia. It may have also been true of earlier forager groups: their mass deaths are just invisible in the archaeological record.
Weapons too made an enormous difference. Steppe-based horseback groups, such as those from the Mongol Empire, periodically invaded and conquered Europe and China because of their mastery of the horse as a tool of war. Their skill as mounted archers and their shrewd tactics made them difficult to defeat. (That is, until military technology outpaced them.
Their recurve bows had a longer range than most early guns, but were no match for cannons and rifled breech-loaders.)40 Even when non-hierarchical groups did successfully fight back, they usually ended up imitating their enemies. We’ve seen this repeatedly, such as the Germanic tribes to the north of Rome becoming more state-like. The authoritarian impulse made people more likely to accept a new hierarchy and invading states provided a model to emulate. Even traders introducing new military technology could lead to dominance hierarchies emerging, as with Native American groups turning into militaristic slavers after the introduction of guns. If military innovations didn’t lead to the direct conquest of a non-state society, that society would typically convert into a Goliath. If they didn’t change willingly, they were often forced to. The British, when they invaded Burma, preferred to work with autocratic tribes. They had a leader they could directly negotiate with (and bribe) and local elites who could work on their behalf. In contrast, egalitarian groups were a headache to control. To manage the more democratic Chin area of Burma, the British tried to create a Goliath from scratch. They started funding opulent community feasts to help create a high-status chief. In this case it didn’t work: the Chins’ culture and history proved too powerful and they rejected the chiefly feasts. But for every such failure there are multiple examples where the colonizers got their way and managed at least partly to enforce a new hierarchical structure.41 The final and most overlooked cause for a Goliath’s domination is its willingness to exploit land, animals, and people. Bronze requires tin and copper; iron needs iron ore and smelting; muskets require gunpowder; and the nuclear weapons of today require uranium.
All of these involve difficult and often undesirable work such as logging, mining, and smelting. They are usually unscrupulous arrangements involving low pay, gruelling hours, and conditions that will steal years from a worker’s life.42 As with sugar and cotton plantations, the answer was often to rely on slaves or exploitatively underpaid labourers. That also required an extractive attitude towards the environment and animals. Animist groups who tried to tread lightly on the earth and forbade slavery (like most nomadic egalitarian foragers) were at an evolutionary disadvantage. Without being able to make bronze or steel weapons, or innovate towards guns and bombs, they were likely to be conquered in the long term.
Four key factors led to the global conquest of the world by Goliaths: large populations, better military technology, pandemics, and an eagerness to exploit people and places. In other words: babies, bombs, bacteria, and barbarism. High fertility and large populations protected against disease, allowed for more economic exploitation, and helped maintain stronger militaries. The selection pressure was never for those societies that were the best at maximizing the welfare of their citizens.
Rather, it was for who was the best equipped for war. In Mesoamerica that was the Aztecs, until the Spanish arrived. In India it was the Mughal Empire, until the British arrived. European colonizers were just one particularly barbaric and successful example of a long evolutionary process. An evolutionary process that has always been uniquely tied to collapse. As with Rome, it was eat or be eaten.43 IS COLONIZATION COLLAPSE?
Colonization meant a new age of collapse. While it paints a complicated picture, there are some general patterns in the relationship between collapse and colonization. When it involved the colonizers meeting a previously separate population, there was almost invariably a demographic collapse owing to the lethal combination of disease and oppression. Where there was already an empire in place, the colonizers would simply hijack the existing arrangements while more slowly destroying and transforming the culture and the economy. When there was no empire, colonization tended to create shatterzones of smashed non-state peoples owing to disease, warfare, or divide-and-conquer tactics. Whether colonization led to collapse, and what the impacts were, depended on geography and the pre-existing polities.
Was colonization collapse? In most cases yes, but colonization was not a single homogeneous force. Instead, colonization was responsible for a mosaic of different collapses across the world. In the Americas entire empires fell apart in years, but the underlying culture took far longer to change. In Australia and elsewhere in the Americas there were shatterzones of transforming indigenous groups that unfolded over centuries. These were far more brutal and horrific than most of the other cases of collapse but tended to involve both hierarchy and energy capture swelling in these newly conquered territories. In places such as India there was extreme hardship yet no collapse. Across the world not all cases of colonization led to collapse, but many did, and, worse, some even resulted in the annihilation of entire peoples and ways of life.
The societies of colonizers themselves never seemed to face a similarly debilitating societal collapse, but there were nonetheless more subdued declines. In the sixteenth century Spain was the most powerful state on the planet with a worldwide empire. Two centuries later it was a second-rate power that had been eclipsed by England and the Netherlands. That decline was largely due to more extractive institutions.
The royal fifth – 20 per cent of commodities, including gold and silver, from colonial conquests – was funnelled straight to the royal treasury. As power was concentrated in the Habsburg monarchy, arrangements became more extractive in general. The monarchs failed to tax the nobility, granted monopolies to preferred guilds, and confiscated property from marginalized groups. The inflow of precious metals from the Americas triggered inflation and led to the Spanish failing to properly allocate resources to productive sectors. They became overstretched and began to fall behind more inclusive and innovative competitors like England.44 We see a similar trend take place among European powers even before colonization. In the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, prior to the Black Death, Venice, Florence, and some other Italian city-states became autonomous and began growing rapidly. They still eventually declined, and none became a globe-spanning colonial power. Extractive intuitions were again the cause.
In Venice, elites used their power to restrict access to the ruling council and long-distance trade. Eventually, the previously open council became a set of hereditary positions filled by the nobility, who took control of the Venetian navy and used it to monopolize trade. In Florence, elites began to tax the poor heavily and control who could access key markets. The banking sector became monopolized until a few families owned most of it; then one – the Medicis – took political control of the city. Both city-states declined owing to extractive institutions.45 While diminishing returns on extraction led to the decline of Spain, Venice, and Florence among others, there were no full-blown societal collapses in the core of Europe. Collapse is a systems-level phenomenon, whether that be of a single unified imperial system like Rome or of a system of states like the Maya or Late Bronze Age. Even if one power (Spain, for example) began to decline, another (England, for example) simply took its place, and the entire system continued to grow. There were crises, but the overall Goliath system ensured that these didn’t spiral into collapse. Europe had found a way to subdue Goliath’s Curse through technological change, economic development, and more inclusive institutions (in general), and by extracting cheap materials (and later fossil fuels) from abroad.
Collapse was something colonizers inflicted on faraway others, not something they suffered themselves.46 Some fates were even worse than societal collapse. Working on colonial plantations involved long, intense hours in hot climates in abysmal conditions rife with tropical disease. For the colonizers, the cost of paying free people a fair wage would have been too high and the huge loss of life in the Americas had made labour scarce and expensive. The easiest alternative was to use slaves. Millions of Africans were captured and transported across the Atlantic to work on sugar, cotton, and other commodity plantations across the Caribbean and the Americas. By the 1780s, almost a million souls were being shipped from Africa every year, accounting for 90 per cent of the trade between Europe and Africa.
Europeans also imported malaria into many plantation areas, especially across the southern US, making plantation work even more dangerous.
This fed the demand for more malaria-resistant African slaves. There evolved a worldwide military-industrial-slavery complex for producing cheap commodities.47 It is hard to overstate the cruelty involved in the transatlantic slave trade.
At times the price of slaves was so low that it was simply cheaper for their profit-obsessed owners to work them to death. The conditions were so horrific that the average field hand working on a Caribbean sugar slave plantation would usually only survive for about seven years. The Caribbean became, in the words of one pre-eminent expert on slavery, ‘a slaughterhouse’.48 While living, slaves were also subject to humiliation. Slaves under British control were sometimes branded with ‘DY’ (Duke of York) to designate ownership by the British monarchy.
The influx of cheap labour from disposed farms and cheap, often slaveproduced raw materials from overseas colonies meant windfall profits for factory owners in Europe, especially England. These enormous sums were reinvested into more equipment and factories, or into the British Navy to help procure more colonies, and hence more slaves and goods. Britain became a machine for accumulating wealth.
Capitalism and colonization were combined in slave plantations and crowded factories, beginning around half a millennium ago. This grisly steamroller passing through the colonies also wreaked destruction closer to home, causing the deterioration of the masses of farmers, peasants, and workers back in the European heartland.
Height, wages, health, and life expectancy all fell in England and much of Europe as colonial capitalism rose. Real incomes plummeted as capitalism became ascendant during the ‘long sixteenth century’ (1450– 1640) and enclosure pushed people from the land into towns. In England, life expectancy declined from a high of forty-three in the 1500s to the low twenties during the 1700s. Men shrank from their peak of around 174cm in the wake of the Black Death to around 168cm in 1800.
Industrialization and colonial capitalism didn’t just usher in a new age of collapse; they also impoverished the ordinary subjects at the core of empire.49 Collapse and catastrophe looked different in each region of the world, whether it be imperial collapse in the Americas, shatterzones in Mississippi and Australia, or plummeting health in England. Yet when we zoom out and look at the world across centuries there is one coherent picture. All these collapses and transformation were the labour pains of birthing a new Goliath.
Violence had accompanied the creation of the very first Goliaths across the world. In this case, however, it was not a single state like Uruk or the Xia Dynasty being born; it was a new world system – a global Goliath.
*
This long and bloody genesis is carved into the city of Madrid. Just 900 metres from the statues of Motecuhzoma and Atahualpa is the Kilómetro Zero, the point from which distances from the capital are measured and from which six great highways snake out across Spain. To stand on the Kilómetro Zero is to stand on the physical representation of the rimless wheel of empire, six roads radiating out from one core, one capital. Many capitals have such a monument. Rome’s Milliarium Aureum (Golden Milestone) is believed to be the origin of the phrase ‘All roads lead to Rome’. The rail networks of the UK and France look alike: rimless wheels leading to London and Paris, respectively. Even Cahokia was structured similarly, with paths across the Mississippi converging on the now desolate collection of earthen pyramids.
The rimless wheel no longer stops at the oceans. In Ghana the railway lines from the interior to key ports on the coast continue as shipping lanes, along which goods such as cocoa from the plantations are sent to Britain.
Colonization created a global set of such rimless wheels whose spokes led back to European capitals.
Colonization brought about a new age of collapse, but underlying it are the same old root causes of status competition and dominance aversion.
Colonization was underpinned by a search for luxury commodities such as tea, sugar, tobacco, and coffee – all of which were initially status goods.
The empires of the Aztecs and the Incas, as well as many not covered here, were weakened by elite infighting and popular rebellion, which the colonizers then exploited. The Spanish monarchs who approved expeditions into the Americas were searching not just for gold and silver, but ultimately for power and status. Conquistadors such as Cortés and Pizarro were also searching for riches and fame. Their pursuits were successful.
Just over a kilometre away from Kilómetro Zero are streets named Calle De Hernán Cortés and Calle De Pizarro. The two conquistadors received the fame and status they craved. Back at the Royal Palace, beyond the statues of Motecuhzoma and Atahualpa, are vast rooms full of golden chandeliers, ornaments coated in gold and silver from the Americas, walls plastered in ceramics from Paris, the finest fabrics from weavers from Brussels, feasting tables, and marble statues of Spanish kings posing as Caesar. The Royal Palace is not unique; you can see similar opulence in the castles and palaces of Paris and Vienna. They are greats acts of conspicuous consumption, physical embodiments of status competition. But if we dig beneath the palaces and plantations we find ice-age roots.
It took just a few psychological features to reshape the world into a system ruled by a few empires and a single, global Goliath.
15 Collapse in the Modern World The End of Empire? – Goliath Goes Global – How to Kill a Modern State – A Failed Order – Becoming Anti-Fragile – Earned Through Struggle – A World Without Collapse?
THE END OF EMPIRE?
At the start of the First World War, European empires controlled around 84 per cent of the world’s land surface. The Austro-Hungarian Empire covered over 600,000 square kilometres of central Europe, the Ottoman Empire stretched over most of the Near East, the French ruled most of western and northern Africa, while Britain still possessed Australia, Canada, and India.
The US was also a colonial power. It had acquired what presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt unashamedly called colonies: Hawaii, Guam, the Wake Islands, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Philippines. Together these accounted for around a fifth of the land area of US territory and 19 million people.1 At least officially, there are no empires left. Over the course of the twentieth century the last land empires fell apart, the maritime empires fragmented, the colonies became independent, and everyone started calling themselves nation-states instead of empires.
As we’ll see, collapse today appears to be slowly becoming less common.
Yet it would be unwise to assume that Goliath’s Curse is disappearing.
The two world wars were the primary spurs to imperial disintegration.
The first marked the loss of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and German empires. While Germany contracted into a smaller nation-state, the AustroHungarians lost their empire and became the smaller states of Austria and Hungary (alongside a host of smaller states), and the Ottoman Empire was abolished and eventually divided into countries including Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, and Palestine. The second war saw the end of the short-lived German Third Reich and the Japanese Empire.
The next few decades saw the break-up of the former colonial empires of the British, Spanish, and Portuguese.2 These failures and the contraction of empires were not, however, caused by the external shock of the world wars. Instead, the world wars were battles for empire. While the Second World War is often framed as an epic clash between democracies and fascism, it was primarily a conflict over land and people (and thus an extension of its predecessor). In 1939, Britain, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, China, the USSR, and the US all had empires. Together they held about a quarter of the global population at the time (some 600 million people) in colonial shackles. They controlled around fifteen times as much land as the Axis powers of Italy, Japan, and Germany combined.
The Axis powers were all growing economies that had largely missed out on the colonial scramble for Africa, the Pacific, and South America. They had increasing power, but few colonies. This was at a time when shipping raw materials from distant colonies was a key driver of economic growth.
Hitler’s obsession with Lebensraum (which roughly translates to living room or space) was forged in the colonial spirit of the day. The Allies were happy with the world order, while the Axis powers wanted to redistribute the spoils. As Hitler himself said, ‘What India was for England the spaces of the East will be for us,’ adding that the German conquerors would ‘look upon the natives as Redskins’. He was mainly referring to eastern Europe.
The Axis empires were unsuccessful imperial upstarts thirsting for colonies.3 It clearly wasn’t mainly a war of ideals for the Allies either.
The US, despite its apparent hatred of fascism, only reluctantly joined the war in December 1941 once it was attacked by Japan.4 The allies of the US, Britain, France and the Netherlands – despite their claim to be the defenders of freedom – still didn’t allow their colonies to operate democratically or independently. Just over a year before the beginning of the war, British troops at Vidurashwatha massacred thirty Indians and wounded another hundred for the crime of trying to hoist the flag of the Indian National Congress. The British also showed little concern for their colonies once the war started. During 1943 in Bengal, they seized 40,000 tons of rice and 65,000 boats to deny the advancing Japanese army food and resources; up to 3 million people died during the ensuing famine. Many in India still refer to it as the ‘Bengal Holocaust’. Churchill attributed the disaster to the Indians ‘breeding like rabbits’ and asked why the shortages hadn’t killed Gandhi. Such actions are those of empires exploiting their colonial assets to defend their power, not democratic ideals.5 The world wars laid the basis for decolonization in the decades that followed. At home, governments struggled to convince citizens who were still recovering from a war to retain possession of their overseas assets.
Colonies became a luxury too expensive to keep. Internationally, it seemed hypocritical to keep hold of foreign lands after ostensibly fighting a war in the name of democracy and basic human rights. In the colonies, the wars left populations that were armed and not eager to return to European powers. The indigenous elites who had once collaborated in colonial rule began to turn on their former masters. They joined anti-colonial nationalists and overturned European rule. Importantly, the US and USSR actively supported different independence movements to win them over to their side.
The colonial administrators exited in a panicked hurry, often leaving broken and divided countries in their wake.6 These were not societal collapses but imperial contractions. There were no large-scale or enduring losses of energy capture or population, and often little change in the rulers, elites, culture, government, or tax system. What did happen is that the empires shrank back to their core homelands.
They shrank, but they didn’t disappear. Most countries are the direct progeny of empires. Even in 1948, inhabitants of the UK were still referred to as ‘subjects’ of the Crown, not citizens. Despite now using the term ‘citizens’, the country is still built on the past subjugation of many nations.
Similarly, France may have lost its overseas colonies, but it was created by the kings of the Île-de-France (where modern-day Paris sits), expanding their rule over surrounding principalities such as Burgundy and Brittany. The borders of Russia, Germany, and Italy represent previous Russian, Prussian, and Piedmontese aggression. China is the direct descendant of the Qin and in its annexation of Tibet still acts like an empire. The US has 750 military bases scattered across eighty countries around the world and spends $849 billion annually on defence: around 40 per cent of all government spending on defence globally, and more than the next nine countries combined.7 Between 1776 and 2023 it conducted roughly 400 military interventions, with about half of those since 1950.8 That long list includes Korea (1950–53), Guatemala (1954), the Congo (1960), Laos (1962), Ecuador (1963), Panama (1964), Brazil (1964), Vietnam (1965–73), Ghana (1966), Cambodia (1969), Chile (1973), and Grenada (1983). The US uses its economic clout, subtly backed by its military might, to shape international policy and acquire favourable trade arrangements. It also still has its overseas territories such as Puerto Rico. Many other former colonial empires still maintain island possessions, with the UK alone having fourteen overseas territories.9 Occasionally the mask slips and empire is spoken of clearly.
As a senior advisor to President George W. Bush said, ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality … we’ll act again, creating other new realities … We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’10 We tend to think of the world as being made up of ‘nation-states’. A nation is a group with a claim to a common ancestry – derived from the Latin nascor, meaning to be born – yet those rarely exist. Most nations are recent, artificial creations while others with a shared language and history, such as the Kurds (15 million), the Catalans (over 7 million), and the Scots (over 5 million), don’t have their own state. We are closer to living in a world of united empires than united nations.11 Empire in the twenty-first century has also taken a new, subtler form.
Demanding tribute as did the Assyrians or tax like the Romans has been phased out in favour of unequal trade. After the end of the Second World War, both of the new superpowers – the US and the Soviet Union – flexed their newfound status. The US would have the more prominent legacy of the two. It helped to shape the global institutions that order the world’s finances today: the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Since then, the decolonized countries have been saddled with onerous debt and an unbalanced trade system. For instance, the EU heavily subsidizes its agricultural products, which are then imported into Africa at low costs, undermining local producers who don’t have the benefit of government support. It’s easier, cheaper, and now more politically acceptable to take resources through loans, debt, unfair agreements, and infrastructure projects than to send out an army to a distant land.12 The result is a new global system of extraction. Industrialized countries, including all the former colonial empires, extract cheap labour and materials from poorer countries. Researchers in 2022 tallied up the costs and benefits of this unequal international trade. They found that over the period 1990–2015 $10 trillion was transferred every year from the global south to the global north. That is thirty times what poorer countries receive in aid each year. Overall, $242 trillion was moved during that twenty-fiveyear period, enough to eliminate extreme poverty seventy times in a row.
13 A more recent study just looking at labour over the period found that there was a net flow of $17.6 trillion. This is largely due to differences in wages: labourers in the global south are paid 87–95 per cent less than their northern counterparts even when equally skilled.14 Unequal trade isn’t the only reason these countries are rich, but it is one key contributor. The more autocratic institutions left by some colonizers in former colonial countries also contribute to large differences in economic growth today.
15 Empire never truly came to an end. The world is still covered with empires operating under a single Goliath system.
GOLIATH GOES GLOBAL We can use the different sources of power to understand the Goliath we live under today. Economically, every country is now capitalist.16 They all abide by similar rules and agreements, with many enforced by a few international bureaucracies such as the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization. The flow of capital is dictated by shared blueprints of collateral law, property law, trust law, and corporate law. It’s why money and capital can flow so easily across borders. Most of these legal systems are modelled on English common law and New York state law.
Information power is increasingly concentrated. A small network of surveillance capitalist firms – such as Google, Amazon, and Meta – gather, direct and monetize data. This network of surveillance capitalists is accompanied by emerging mass surveillance states – especially in the UK, the US and China – that unblinkingly monitor these streams of data.
Many of the world’s elite, tyrants and progressives alike, have had a similar cultural upbringing and education. Monarchs, oligarchs, and the megarich tend to be educated at a handful of elite schools and universities in the UK, US, and Switzerland. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was schooled in Bern, Switzerland. The former kings and princes of Belgium, Burundi, Iran, and Yugoslavia all attended the Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland, sharing the playground with members of dynastic families such as the Rockefellers and Rothschilds.
Even the practice of shaping the world through law is clustered. All the world’s top hundred law firms are headquartered in just two cities: London and New York. Politically, every polity is now a nation-state. To be part of the UN (headquartered in New York) you need to have a state and be recognized by other major powers.
Violence is still mainly (although not always successfully) controlled by a few key powers, namely the US and, to a lesser extent, China and Russia.
Yet violence is no longer the main source of control. Why launch a missile or a battleship when you can rely on the law to enforce extractive arrangements? We now all live in a single capitalist system pioneered by the British and then moulded by the US.17 The creation of that single Goliath has also changed the nature of collapse itself.
HOW TO KILL A MODERN STATE Modern states die regularly. Since 1816, 202 states have existed. Fifty of those no longer exist, including imperial powerhouses such as the Ottoman Empire as well as the lesser-known Kingdom of Hawaii.18 Thirty-five of them came to violent ends.
Academics usually call these examples ‘state death’. State death can be something of a misnomer. It is not that the government entirely disappears, or everyone dies. Rather it is simply the loss of sovereignty.
The state formally loses its ability to make foreign policy and is no longer recognized as independent. It usually means one state conquering another or breaking up into multiple smaller ones. A violent (albeit temporary) example would be that of Poland being invaded by Germany at the outset of the Second World War. A less bloody case would be Bavaria joining the Prussian Kingdom in 1871.19 The two most common causes of sovereignty loss are being a ‘buffer state’ trapped between two great powers and getting caught in a territorial dispute. One review of hundreds of cases during the period 1816 to 2004 found that being a buffer state, like Poland caught between Germany and the Soviet Union, was the leading cause of sovereignty loss.20 An updated analysis found that conflict over territory is 40 per cent more likely to contribute to a loss of sovereignty than being a buffer state.21 Small states with little power over the international system have been the biggest victims. While great powers like the US have proved robust, small states tend to lose their sovereignty frequently. We currently have around 150 small states in the world, but there were fewer than forty in 1900, and almost 200 in 1648.22 That is a lot of state births and many losses in sovereignty. The key reason seems to be the actions of great powers. For instance, the explosion in state numbers during the twentieth century was largely down to the break-up of imperial powers and competitive decolonization between the US and the Soviet Union.
Today sovereignty loss appears to be disappearing from the world. Only nine states have lost their sovereignty since the end of the Second World War. States today are 94 per cent more likely to survive in any given year than states prior to 1945.
Again, the actions of the most powerful are the reason for the slow vanishing of sovereignty loss. Since 1945 a strong norm of ‘territorial integrity’ has reigned over the world order. International outrage follows any intervention or invasion into a sovereign country.
23 This regard for sovereignty has been largely enforced by the nuclear-armed US to protect the world order it built. In the twenty-first century we still have the hypocritical invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and the brutal campaign of Israel in Gaza. While this is still far less than what was experienced in the twentieth century or earlier, they are signs that the protection of sovereignty may be eroding.24 Most cases of sovereignty loss were transfers of power, not societal collapses. Even the few examples where a state did entirely fall apart follow a peculiar pattern.
A FAILED ORDER The modern world has seen many cases not only of sovereignty loss but also of ‘state failure’. These are what most of us think of as modern collapses: Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and many others.
There is no single universal definition of state failure, which has made analysis of modern collapse difficult. One of the few systematic investigations of state failure tried to address this by providing a clear, operational definition.25 Failed states were defined as those that had lost their capacity to make laws, extract taxes, and control violence within their borders. Indicators were made for each of these and then searched for case studies, and then applied to seventeen cases of potential state collapse over the period 1946 to 2014. The study found five cases that met all these criteria, five that met two, and four that met only one. Yet not one of these cases lasted longer than six months.
Within half a year, each one had a government that was able to collect taxes, make laws, or enforce some control over violence.26 Fragile and failed states too are largely a legacy of colonial empires. Both colonization and the hurried, muddled process of decolonization left a patchwork of scarred countries with nonsensical borders. About 40 per cent of the world’s borders today were drawn up by France or Britain.
These borders were usually imposed for the convenience of colonial administrators and rarely reflect the different political and ethnic groups they encompass. It’s entirely unsurprising that artificial borders drawn by foreigners with a history of stripping the land for slaves and resources left many countries fragile.27 Not all colonizers were equally brutal. The British and the Spanish, despite their atrocities, were more light-handed than the French and Portuguese. We see this in rates of modern state failure today. One study of 118 states found that those with more European intervention, especially the more extractive French or Portuguese empires, had a higher risk of state failure. The actions of colonial administrators, including the judicial systems they put in place, the ethnic divides they deepened, and the groups they empowered, all left weak, divided, unaccountable governments that were more prone to falling apart.28 As the English writer and correspondent Robert Fisk reflected, After the Allied victory of 1918, at the end of my father’s war, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career – in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad – watching the people within those borders burn.29 We can also see the legacy of colonialism when we contrast different kinds of colonized countries. Compare the settler colony of Australia to the non-settler colony of Sudan. Both were colonized by the British, but while settler Australians were given stable property rights and relatively inclusive governmental institutions modelled on Britain’s, Sudan got neither. Those differences in institutions made for large changes in their long-term trajectories. (Notably, even in the case of Australia, Britain actively demolished the property rights and inclusive institutions of the indigenous Australians.)30 The corrosive effect of extractive institutions isn’t just an economic or political phenomenon. It is also gendered. The more strongly states subjugate women, the more likely they are to be both autocratic and prone to failure.31 Given their colonial origins as extractive constructs, it is difficult to call most of these ‘failed states’.
Afghanistan, Congo, and Somalia were never ‘successful’ and robust modern welfare states. They were the haphazard constructs built from the last dying gasp of colonialism. The failure here is more the international order, rather than the states that were born from it. And there is the genuine problem that thinking of them as ‘failed’ can justify military interventions rather than humane policy.
32 There was more to it than just colonization. Colonial institutions were a key vulnerability, but other factors such as environmental degradation and population pressure may have played a role. These varied across cases and don’t appear to be as common or strong a contributor as colonial institutions.33 State failure, when it happens in our modern world, seems to be briefer (usually less than six months) and more quickly recovered from. Look at the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989–91.
GDP was halved within a few years but it had tripled above pre-fall levels within two decades.34 The ruling elites changed, but not dramatically.
Putin was, after all, already a highranking lieutenant colonel in the KGB before the Soviet Union fell apart and he switched to politics. We can talk about the collapse of the Communist regime, but not of societal collapse.
There’s a clear trend here: societal collapse, or anything remotely close to it, like state collapse, is happening more quickly, as is recovery. This is part of a longer-term process of the world accelerating, and both people and Goliaths getting better at dealing with collapse.
BECOMING ANTI-FRAGILE The history of humanity is one long story of resilience. Global population has grown steadily over the past 12,000 years. Despite plague, earthquakes, societal collapses, world wars, and volcanic eruptions, our numbers climbed from around 4 million at the beginning of the Holocene 11,700 years ago to around 600 million by 1700 (Figure 35). From there it exploded to the 8 billion souls living today.
35 Figure 35: World population 10,000 BCE to 1700 CE We see that same resilience at a more zoomed-in level in the most extreme scenarios – even a nuclear attack. In August 1945, Hiroshima was struck by a sixteen-kiloton atomic bomb, reducing 40 per cent of the city to ash, destroying 90 per cent of the buildings, and extinguishing 140,000 souls. Yet, within a day 30 per cent of homes had electricity restored, within two days the local Bank of Japan was running again, and within a week some telephone lines were working again. Today Hiroshima is a thriving city with over 1 million inhabitants.36 Resilience is the flipside of collapse. It is the ability of a system to experience disturbances without changing its fundamental functions or identity.
Imagine a tree being buffeted by a hurricane but never breaking, or a blade of grass being stepped on but springing back up. Both are displaying resilience.37 Societies can be something even stronger than resilient: they can be antifragile. That is, they gain and improve from disturbances and disorder.
Think of the human body. Lifting a heavy object will temporarily shred your muscle fibres, but they will grow back stronger. A healthy amount of stress makes us stronger. It appears that this may hold true not just for human bodies, but for entire human populations.38 Populations that have experienced more downturns in the past tend to be more resilient and more likely to recover from later downturns. One study covering sixteen world regions (including China, Europe, Australia, North America, South America, South Africa, and the Near East) over 30,000 years found that populations that had experienced more frequent downturns became more resilient to later ones. The effect appeared to be more pronounced in herders and farmers than in hunter-gatherers.
Farmers and herders faced far more demographic busts but became more resilient in the long term. In other words, their populations are anti-fragile.39 The reason for this anti-fragility is cultural evolution. Over time, people develop technologies and cultural practices that allow them to survive and prosper in hostile environments. Indigenous Australians have developed cooking methods to detoxify local foods and the Inuit built kayaks and specialized harpoons to prosper in the Arctic.40 This is not a matter of individual intelligence, but rather methods to deal with adversity that are refined and passed on down numerous generations.41 When societies encounter frequent hardships, such as climate change or disease, they tend to learn from experience and develop better ways of coping and even benefiting from shocks. Learning from disasters has been the trigger for a range of innovations, including quarantine for managing the spread of disease, buildings that can sway and buckle without breaking during earthquakes, and the use of back-burning to prevent bush-fires.
Communities that experienced these shocks more frequently were more likely to develop the technologies and practices to survive and even thrive.42 This effect is even stronger among farming societies across the world because their reliance on agriculture meant they faced more shocks. While hunter-gatherers could move and switch to other food sources, farmers were often tied to their lands and particular crops. They were forced to experiment more. Technologies such as writing then enabled the largerscale storage of information. This helped ensure that more successful adaptations were identified and passed down to the next generation.43 Goliath evolution is an extension of this. Bigger, longer-living empires tended to pass on their ideas, not only to their own citizens, but also to those they conquered. Those that were bigger tended to have technology and practices that allowed them to control more people, more tightly, and field larger, better-equipped armies. The growing size of empires over time is a sign of their anti-fragility.
Individual empires like Rome may have fallen apart, but the project of empire became more effective over time.
We see this in the increasing maximum size of empires over the course of history. Between 3000 and 600 BCE empires varied in size between 0.15 and 1.3 million square kilometres. Then there was a burst in growth between 600 BCE and 1600 CE, to between 2.3 and 24 million square kilometres.
While the Mongol Empire reached 24 million, it couldn’t hold it for long; instead, most lasting empires, such as Rome or the longest Chinese dynasties, tended to be 5–6 million square kilometres. The maximum size advanced again after 1600 with the ascent of maritime colonial powers.
Then, empires became enmeshed to create the Global Goliath we have today. 44 This slow change in the size (in both territory and population) of empires and Goliaths represents a slow accumulation of new forms of Goliath fuel.
The most obvious was monopolizable weapons. Hand-held bronze weapons provided the bloodied bricks for building the original states in Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia. Later, larger empires like the Achaemenid, Roman, and Han all came to rely on horses and iron weapons. The spread of colonial maritime empires was similarly in part due to their advanced guns, ships, cannons, and steel weaponry.
Lootable resources have also changed and scaled up over time. Grain has been a perennial example of a lootable resource. Not only is it highly stealable, but it also favours fertility and bigger populations. For most of history, this didn’t change much.45 The biggest change came with colonization, when slavery-based mines and plantations allowed for the far greater production of lootable resources. Ways to cage land also transformed over time. While many of the earliest states erected walls, others had to settle for smaller palisades (as was the case for Cahokia).
Later empires made a fine art of wall building. One only needs to look at the Great Wall of China or the Romans’ Hadrian’s Wall.
Modern empires established far clearer borders with customs, passports, and hawkishly guarded points of entry (and exit).
Goliath fuel didn’t just change; Goliaths also developed better ways of governing. The Iron Age didn’t just see the formation of larger empires like Rome and the Han; it also saw the creation of far bigger bureaucracies and the first censuses.46 New transportation and communication tools enabled rulers to send orders and troops more quickly across vast distances. For thousands of years Goliaths could not cross the ocean. Then, European caravels allowed for it, while the telegraph and rail allowed for the control of distant colonies.
That process of Goliath evolution – developing new fuel, as well as better governance and technology – was driven by competition. The collapse, or at least decline, of some states, was a requirement for a Goliath to evolve.
Some states have even proved to be anti-fragile during a systems collapse.
This can be seen during the Late Bronze Age collapse. The Phoenicians profited immensely from taking over the trade routes that had previously been run by the now destroyed city of Ugarit as well as by the Egyptians and the Hittites. They pushed their trade south and west, becoming a key regional player in the wake of the collapse. By contrast, the Neo-Assyrians (911–609 BCE) opted for a more sinister approach. They began to conquer the weakened states that surrounded them in the post-collapse region. They slowly annexed the remains of the Hittite Empire (the ‘Neo-Hittite’ states), defeated the Armenian Kingdom of Urartu (in modern Turkey), and marched all the way to the Egyptian border. They became the largest empire the world had seen until then.
Both the Phoenicians and the Neo-Assyrians were anti-fragile, but in dramatically different ways. Yet the most persistent and anti-fragile project is the 5,000-year-long process of Goliath, not any individual empire.47 The quicker recovery from state failures in the modern world may partly reflect this long history of anti-fragility. States have developed police forces, full-time militaries, and administrations that make it easier to regain control after a disaster – or even a civil war – has struck.
Similarly, emergency-response and risk-management professionals can draw on decades of studies and accumulated practices to deal better with new crises.
It doesn’t mean they always get it right, but it may help explain why state failures today are usually so brief.
The brevity may also simply be due to technology. Military, police, peacekeepers, diplomats, and aid workers can now be quickly deployed by air and closely coordinated using the internet. Whatever the reasons, collapse is certainly shortening and disappearing while many areas of life are improving.
EARNED THROUGH STRUGGLE The modern world has undoubtedly experienced enormous improvements that should be celebrated. It is a lengthy list that includes eliminating smallpox, increasing literacy from 12 per cent in 1820 to 87 per cent in 2022, and, over the past 120 years, cutting infant mortality from 43 per cent to 4.5 per cent, and doubling average life expectancy.
As a testament to our burgeoning health, we are also now taller. Since around the nineteenth century, global average height has increased by around 8cm for women and 9cm for men, although men today are still shorter than their Palaeolithic forefathers. These are momentous achievements that we should appreciate.48 The catch is that all these trends are recent, usually within the last century or two. The long-run history of progress is something more akin to a Ucurve. Happiness, health, peace, and prosperity start relatively high, fall during the adoption of Goliaths, stagnate for about 5,000 years, and then begin to rise again (at least in some areas). That rise is primarily for two reasons: massive increases in energy capture and collective action.
In the last two centuries, humankind has tapped into a geological gift.
Fossil fuels have bequeathed us a previously unimaginable source of energy. Measured in calories, the average modern European captures over fifty times more than the average European ice-age hunter-gatherer. This enormous increase is largely recent: global energy consumption increased over thirty-five-fold from 1800 to 2022. We tend to forget that fossil fuels come primarily from long-dead plants and animals. These organisms died between 360 and 286 million years ago during the Carboniferous period, after capturing sunlight through photosynthesis or other means. It is that fossilized energy that we are consuming. According to one estimate, it would take 400 years of global photosynthesis to power the modern world for one year. It takes ninetyeight tons of organic matter buried during the Carboniferous to become just five litres of petrol. We are now a high-energy Goliath, powered by dead matter.
49 With such gargantuan increases in energy, it would be surprising if we did not see significant bursts of human progress. It’s easy to assume that the rise of capitalism around 1600 CE, and then industrialization about 150 years later, led to improvements in the human condition. But this isn’t the case. In fact, the opposite occurred.
As we’ve seen, even the vast releases of power and energy during industrialization in the mid-eighteenth to nineteenth centuries did not automatically lead to better living conditions for most. Early on it was a period of exploitation and deterioration, with both heights and real wages falling. In England, the pioneer of industrialization, reports by Parliament in 1833 detailed children working twelve- to fifteen-hour days in overheated and cramped coal mines, who were beaten near daily, and had little in the way of compensation or rights. Reliable figures are hard to come by, but fatalities must have numbered in the thousands per year and injuries in the tens of thousands. Many were caused by unguarded machinery and children fitted with loose clothing, leading to truly grisly reports of children being pulverized in machines. One 1892 memoir recounts the death of Mary Richards, who was caught in a malfunctioning drawing frame before being dashed to the ground and when ‘she was extricated, every bone was found broken – her head dreadfully crushed’. The average height of men enlisting in the army in the 1890s through to the First World War was 168cm, still below their peak before capitalism. There is a reason why the poet William Blake referred to factories at the time as ‘dark Satanic Mills’.50 What eventually caused industrialization to translate into shared prosperity was shared struggle. Improvements in health and welfare occurred during the 1880s in northern Europe and the mid-twentieth century in Latin America, south Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. In Europe this coincided with the rise of unions, public health movements, and the expansion of the vote. Elsewhere it was anti-colonial movements and public pressure for improved services that turned the wheels of progress.
The biggest single measure to lengthen life expectancy – the gift of sanitation – was rolled out following public protests, especially from unions. Innovation and invention are important: vaccines and sanitation needed technological breakthroughs. Energy and technology are vital: they are necessary conditions for the improvements we’ve seen in the past two centuries. But they weren’t enough in and of themselves.
Improvements needed to be demanded and fought for.
51 It needs the right social structures and sharing of power. As Frederick Douglass once said, ‘If there is no struggle, there is no progress.’ If power structures remain exploitative, human welfare can even worsen while technology improves. It is visible across history and even today.
The US has the most well-funded and advanced biotechnology sector in the world. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds around $9 billion in biotech research every year, while tens of billions are invested in the private sector. Despite this, the US has the highest rate of maternal and infant mortality, the highest death rates for avoidable conditions, and the lowest life expectancy at birth among rich countries. The US may have far more start-ups and investment, but what it lacks is universal healthcare. Having the government negotiate with big pharma on behalf of people would make a bigger difference to people’s lives (and premature deaths) than the next innovation breakthrough.52 Progress is also always a matter of perspective. We forever need to ask: progress of what? The advances we usually talk about and plot onto graphs are improvements in health and material comfort. But if we begin to talk about improvement in our inner lives – happiness and social connection – or treatment of the environment, suddenly it appears that most societies have regressed since egalitarian hunter-gatherers. As we’ve already seen, happiness studies of nomadic egalitarian groups suggest that they are happier than their industrial counterparts in over a dozen countries examined. The average life today is, though, not that of a middle-class Dane, but closer to a far less happy Chinese factory worker or Indian peasant farmer.
53 We also need to ask: progress for whom? The rise and expansion of the Global Goliath has been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species. Countless unique pieces of life trampled under an industrial boot. In the eyes of the dodo or the passenger pigeon, our recent advances don’t seem particularly admirable. The over 100 billion animals that are tortured and killed every year in factory farms might not find our increasing heights or health to be a sufficient excuse for their unimaginable suffering.
The same can be said for the ways of life that have been devastated and sidelined at the barrel of a gun. Today there are a maximum of only 5 million hunter-gatherers across the globe and their numbers dwindle every decade, alongside hundreds of languages and cultures.54 A WORLD WITHOUT COLLAPSE?
Since at least 1945, enduring societal collapse has been absent from the world. The decades have been scarred by civil wars, genocide, losses of sovereignty, and state failure, but none has resulted in a lasting societal collapse.55 This suppression of collapse is caused by a globalized, state-based, capitalist system underpinned by US supremacy. Whenever a state is even close to falling apart, the international community tends to mobilize. The US, desiring stability and seeking to prevent any potential wellspring for terrorism, has deterred most territorial conquests and subtly interfered to prevent (and sometimes induce) state failure. It even had its own government-sponsored and CIA-commissioned taskforce on political instability and state failure.56 Fossil-fuelled capitalist growth has similarly ensured that losses in energy capture are not long-lasting. As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, natural disasters, coups, and state failures were instead often seen as a commercial opportunity. These ruptures were capitalized on by outside forces to open new markets and force in ‘free-market’ policies. These were often a thin veil for economic exploitation and unequal exchange.57 For instance, US economists and international institutions pushed for privatization in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. The result was the rise of Russian oligarchs who picked up former government enterprises at bargain prices, often promising favourable deals with the US and others.58 It may seem that Goliath is on an arc towards defeating the curse. Goliath first faced the Primal Curse of a rebellious populace and weak ways to control them. Larger empires overcame these challenges but faced diminishing returns on extraction. More advanced colonial empires appeared to find a way of avoiding the curse: rapid technological change and overseas extraction allowed them to spread globally without a societal collapse in Europe. States still eventually fell apart during the world wars and decolonization, but it was more of a transformation than a collapse.
True collapse appears to be slowly disappearing from the modern world.
That ‘disappearance’ is, however, an illusion. Over the long run, collapse appears to have, if anything, accelerated from hunter-gatherer cultures which endured for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, through the longlived earliest settlements and cities, fragile empires, to often short-lived and quick-collapsing modern regimes. While states have taken over the world, they are not particularly long-lived.59 Collapse just seems to have temporarily slowed, but has been accelerating ever since the Holocene and the creation of Goliaths. Yet the threat of collapse still hangs overhead and, if it comes, it will be far worse than anything that has gone before. The curse is now global and more dangerous than ever.