Instructive but uneven book that pairs well with The Fourth Turning Is Here[*], as both books offer similar paradigms of wheels-within-wheels generational cycles turning inside longer-term civilizational cycles.
Readers get a rapid and mostly overwhelming review of world history, as author Peter Turchin gives various examples of how his "meta-ethnic frontier theory" drives the rise ("imperiogenesis") and decline ("imperiopathosis") of empires. We start with a tour of medieval Russia's evolution into a unified state, and then proceed through more and more and more examples from history, each involving explanatory whirlwind tours of massive historical eras.
This brings us to a problem with Turchin's attempt to "model" history. First, he has to explain his model, ideally using an interesting example: he does this successfully with medieval Russia. But before you can really prove that your model fits history, you have to discuss all the relevant history, which means racing pell-mell through centuries, even millennia, without grounding or context. Four-fifths of the way through the book, the author himself admits "it becomes tedious to read about one secular cycle after another." You can say that again.
So, if your book is geared to the lay reader, as this one is, this means loading that lay reader down with a "tedious" amount of ungrounded history, much of it superficial. This might still be tolerable for readers with a deep substrate of historical knowledge in place, but a lay reader lacking such a substrate will struggle to follow along. Two particularly painful examples here are Chapter 6, which gives a whirlwind tour of Roman history, followed by Chapter 7, which gives a downright cyclonic tour of eight centuries of medieval Europe--guaranteed to lose even the most historically grounded reader. Lay readers will find these chapters (and others) painstaking, overwhelming, or both.
Turchin could have drastically tightened all of the historical expository to make the book more readable, more organized, and a hundred pages shorter. But then it would be a short sociology book that assumes historical context most readers wouldn't have. I'm neither writer nor scholar enough to solve this problem.
Finally, to the extent that we can trust a rapidly hypocognizing Wikipedia, Turchin is apparently thought of as one of the founders of cliodynamics. But to this writer, "cliodynamics" looks and smells suspiciously like cliometrics, where cliometrics is an econometric domain founded by Robert Fogel (1926-2013). See for example Fogel's striking book on the economics of slavery, Without Consent or Contract.
Footnote:
[*] Turchin would almost certainly hate this pairing, as he considers the "Fourth Turning" paradigm unscientific and "Procrustean." There's a certain irony to his claim, however, as we will see Turchin perform his own rather crude Procrustean attempt to force-fit the decline of Rome to his model (see Chapter 11).
[Once again, a friendly warning: don't read any further. What follows are just my notes to the text. Life is short!]
Notes:
Introduction: "So Peace Brings Warre and Warre Brings Peace"
1-2: Reference here to Hari Selden from Asimov's Foundation trilogy, fortelling the decay and collapse of Empire via the fictional domain of psychohistory, but unable to account for self-referential participants in the model: "knowledge of the prediction must be withheld from the people whose collective behavior is predicted." "Can we design a theory for the collapse of mighty empires[?]" the author asks.
3: "This book focuses on empires. Why did some--initially small and insignificant--nations go on to build mighty empires, whereas other nations failed to do so? And why do the successful empire builders invariably, given enough time, lose their empires? Can we understand how imperial powers rise and why they fall?"
5: In agrarian societies a 1-2% elite typically holds most of the power and wealth.
5: "Meta-ethnic communities" like Western civilization or Islamic civilization, etc., but also broad groupings like Celts or Turco-Mongolian steppe nomads, etc. "Cultural difference is greatest between people belonging to different meta-ethnic communities" to the point that people deny the very humanity of those on the other side of the divide.
5-6: "Asabiya": 14th century historian Ibn Khaldun's word for "the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action," and a dynamic that can increase or decrease over time.
6-7: The meta-ethnic frontier concept: The frontier between meta-ethnic groups is an imperial boundary where there's a "fault-line": one meta-ethnic group may trade or raid to get access to imperial wealth; also the threat of violence or prospective gain are integrative forces that produce cooperation among ethnic groups on either side of the fault-line/boundary [cooperation to unify in opposition to the meta-ethnic group on the other side of that fault-line]. Gradually each side incorporates more and more ethnically similar groups, and there's of course another meta-ethnic group on the other side doing the same which helps further unify your team in response. The author's examples here are Russia and America (Chapters 1-2), Germans and Arabs on the Roman frontier (Chapters 3-4), the origins of Rome (Chapter 6) and the rise of the European great powers (Chapter 7).
7: On ultrasociality: humanity's ability to combine into cooperating groups of millions of unrelated individuals, this led to increasing the scale of human societies by huge leaps.
7: Part 1 covers imperiogenesis, the rise of empires; Part 2 covers imperiopathosis, the decline of empires.
8: A complete cycle, including "a benign integrative phase" and "the troubled disintegrative phase" is around 2-3 centuries; "secular cycles" the author calls them.
10: "Wheels within wheels within wheels" dynamics: the idea of empire cycles, civil war cycles, fathers-and-sons cycles, asabiya cycles, all of which interrelate and interact, further complicated by dynamic feedback.
Part I: Imperiogenesis: The Rise of Empires
Chapter 1: A Band Of Adventurers Defeats A Kingdom: Ermak's Conquering Cossacks
15ff: Extended story of a group of Cossacks defending a sort of neomercantile outpost for the Russian Tsar, run by the [unfortunately named] Stroganov family, they recruited Cossacks to attack Turko-Mongolic steppe raiders who were attacking Stroganov and Tsarist territory.
23ff: The author discusses previous engagements between steppe peoples and Russians prior to the unification of Russia, thus their peoples were picked off one by one as the Mongols were able to conquer much of Russia. In the 13th century, Mongols were better unified despite being themselves a wide range of different types of peoples. The author calls Mongol Army a "well-oiled social mechanism."
24ff: On the paradox of cooperation among violent or militarily organized people; see for example the so-called Oriental despotism of Genghis Khan. The context here is collective action for the purposes of the functioning of an Empire; per the author, the concept of Oriental despotism is "sociological nonsense" since one person can't run a regime that large against the wishes of all of his subjects; tyrants need the support of an elite, and at least your elites need to be internally cohesive. "In other words, oppression can only be accomplished from the basis of cooperation, paradoxical as it sounds."
25: On the false assumption held in Western societies that non-democratic societies are held together by force alone.
27ff: Note that the Golden Horde, the Mongolian peoples unified under Batu Khan, stayed unified for 200 years until the late 1400s, when it fragmented into a number of unstable principalities, this was during the Russian resurgence in the 1500s; the Tatar/Turko-Mongolian peoples fell into a state of dissolution, whereas now the Russian peoples (on the other side of the meta-ethnic fault-line) were "cooperating" much more effectively. The Russian peoples were consolidating, centralizing; the opposite of the disintegration of the Turko-Mongolian people.
28: Noting the rise and fall of these two societies, both large territorial empires alongside each other: in the 13th century Russia fragmented and "had no chance against the Mongol steamroller" but in the 16th century Russia was the monolith that rolled over "the squabbling Tatar khanates." "Why did the Tatars lose their social cohesion? How did the Russians acquire it?"
Chapter 2: Life On The Edge: The Transformation of Russia--and America
31: The author starts off with a nomad/farmer paradigm: the nomads saw themselves as riders and manly warriors; they saw the farmers as doing feminine work, "dirt grubbers" and terrible soldiers, but yet farmers had wealth and grain; the farmers saw the nomads as uncivilized, unlettered, barbarians, murderers, slavers; these antagonisms goes back to Cain with his fields and Abel with his flocks (the early Hebrews were herders, thus Cain in his fields was the bad guy); note also settled cultivators tended to adopt Christianity, nomads tended to adopt Islam.
32: "Steppe and forest" were a sort of fault line between these two very different civilizations; with quite a bit of violence, occasional peaceful trade, and periodically, genocide.
33ff: Note that in the 1500s Russia was under assault from nearly every direction, with its people being captured and enslaved, sold off to slave ships in the Black Sea, attacks from Tatars from different directions, also warring with the Lithuanian/Polish Kingdom as well. The author makes the argument that these external threats helped unify Russian society.
38ff: Discussion here of the various frontier strategies of Muscovy during this period; setting up forest barriers called abatis; other barriers to limit the raiders' mobility; fortified defensive lines via a chain of fortified towns; also a huge Great Wall-type barrier, completed with significant labor and investment. Here we can start to see the emergence of the nation of Russia which unified a range of different peoples: Cossacks patrolling the steppes, farmers and peasants on the frontier; nothing of this substrate was in place in the 13th century, but by the 16th century a solid substrate was in place.
41: Comments on Moscow. Russians behaving "in a collectively astute way, even though acting so cost individual hardship or worse... The sense of solidarity and willingness to sacrifice for the common good were not based on a rational calculation; they had much deeper foundations." Basically centuries of conflict with better-organized empires around them caused Russians to form their own empire with a strong sense of a collective (and primarily Christian) identity. [Obviously the reader can't help but think here of the apotheosis of this collective identity: Russia's performance against the Nazis in World War II]
45: On the "enserfment" of Russian peasantry, which happened later than people think, and by degrees, culminating in the Law Code of 1649, and then reached its peak of oppression toward the end of the 18th century.
46ff: The author started offering his "frontier hypothesis" with the example of Russia, he now extends it to other examples in history "to understand how large territorial empires can be assembled and held together." The forest-steppe fault line divided nomad and farming peoples, while the presence of "other" unified farming peoples and nomad peoples on opposite sides.
48: Interesting to learn of Ukraine defecting from the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom to go under Russia's protection in 1653 due to peasant oppression as well as for religious reasons (Orthodox Ukraine vs aggressively Catholic Poland).
48ff: Exemplar of the steppe/forest paradigm in the American prairie; note the Indian wars were more deadly in proportional terms than any other wars in American history. 30% casualty rates were common (see the very first day of the war between Virginia settlers and the Powhatan Confederacy in 1622, with 347 massacred out of a settler population of 1200) vs a 0.3% casualty rate in WWII. The atrocities were enough to unify both sides against each other. "...any society subjected to such pressures for generations would be transformed." European settlers would find common ground against a "red" other.
55: Concluding with a "macrohistorical generalization": "People originating on fault-line frontiers become characterized by cooperation and high capacity for collective action, which in turn allows them to build large and powerful territorial states."
Chapter 3: Slaughter in the Forest: At the Limites of the Roman Empire
57: Europe in the Mediterranean during the first millennium AD, dominated by Rome, thus relatively stationary imperial frontiers that we can examine to test the "fault-line frontier theory." Basically Turchin's theory says that "all large states in the post-Roman landscape should have been established by peoples originating from the Roman frontier."
57: Note that there were four primary frontier peoples: Germans (and later Slavs) on the north, African and Arabian peoples (Berbers and Arabs) on the south, Eurasian peoples (e.g., Huns) from the east, and also the Parthian Empire to the east.
59: 476 AD: the deposition of Romulus Augustus, the last Western Roman Emperor; this is thought of as the date of the collapse of Rome, which was replaced in Europe by a number of states. The seven largest that survived from 476 to 1000 AD included the Franks, the Ostrogoth Kingdom, the Visigoth Kingdom, the Avars, the Bulgars, the Kingdom of Hungary, and the Byzantine Empire: also note in the south in Africa the Arab Caliphate and the Fatimid Caliphate, and furthermore the kingdom of Burgundians and Langobards, smaller kingdoms later annexed by the Frankish Empire; see also the huge but very short-lived Empire of the Huns, which peaked in 440 AD, collapsing after the death of its founder, Attila. The author points out here that all of these empires match up with the hypothesis of Chapter 2, with the exception of the Byzantines--which he argues is only an apparent exception, to be discussed later in this chapter. [Note that there's a lot here, this by itself might overwhelm a reader new to post-Roman history.]
60: The Romans called their frontiers limites, the singular is limes, and this is where English gets the word "limit."
60: The Romans called the peoples living east of the Rhine "the Germans," but they had many different ethnic identities and did not (yet) see themselves as a single people.
62ff: On the attack against the Legate Varus and destruction of his army by the Germans in the Teutoberg Forest (AD 9); also the gradual unification/confederation of German tribes against Rome; whereas just a century before (100-ish BC) they were just small random marauding tribes of different German peoples, not organized in this way at all; note also that in the absence of a Roman threat, intra-German rivalry caused the Germans to turn back against one another. "As long as a powerful external force threatened the Germans, the tribes were capable of uniting and inflicting defeats on it. When the immediate threat went, however, so did the unity." Over the course of the next several decades Rome essentially conquered all of Germany, annexing some of its territory, and otherwise establishing forward defenses elsewhere in territory that they didn't think worth taking. "As a result, the Rhine frontier became stationary."
67: Ironically that stationary frontier turned out to be disastrous in the long run, over the next three or four centuries this frontier "transformed the social and political organization of the Germans," leading to powerful tribal confederations of the different German tribes as well as the Frank French tribes, eventually the Franks evolved into the only state that was able to unify most of Western Europe, the Carolingian Empire.
69: On military pressure obliterating the weak and strengthening the strong of society; also on the conflict-prone region of territory extending 100 miles from the frontier between Roman territory and Germanic territory in both directions, these unstable regions functioned as human "selection mechanisms" on steroids. Also transfer of prestige goods, trade, transfer of ideas, techniques and other cultural elements, for example military discipline, the value of keeping records in bureaucracy, etc.
72: Note also a sharpening ideological and religious divide between Romans and Germans as Rome Christianized and the Germans consolidated on the cult of Odin; a type of civilizational fault line to borrow the expression from Samuel Huntington's book The Clash of Civilizations.
74: Starting in the 3rd century AD we start to see many mentions of different German and Frankish tribes in the record: the Gauls, the Saxons, the Franks, the Vandals, the Alemanni, etc., during a period of political instability in Rome that followed the assassination of emperor Severus Alexander in 235 AD. This gave way to Rome's so-called Thirty Tyrants era, from 259-268; during this period Roman legions were pulled from the frontiers to be used in Roman civil conflicts, this led to many German and Frankish and Goth raids throughout Roman territory. The Goths actually wiped out a Roman army in 251 AD and killed Emperor Decius.
74: In 285 AD Diocletian reunited the empire; but then 378 AD was the Battle of Adrianople, between Rome and the Visigoths; the Visigoths defeated the Roman Army and slew the emperor. The Battle of Adrianople signaled the final decline of the Roman Empire in the West.
75: intriguing quote here. "It is interesting to note that the Romans were unable to subdue the Alemanni, despite repeatedly defeating them in battle. By contrast, after they were forcibly joined to the Frankish Empire, the Alemanni served it quite loyally. The most likely explanation is that the ethnic gap between the Franks and Alemanni was fairly trivial compared to that between the Alemanni and the Romans." [Similar dialects, similar religious practices, etc. You don't find common ground with another group until you both find a common enemy that unites you!]
75: Also some linguistic history for geeks here: the Frankish language has a direct descendant today, Flemish. And the Alemannic language has a direct descendant in the Alsatian dialect of German.
76: Here we wrap up the discussion of the Rhine frontier of the Roman Empire and the ethnogenesis and imperiogenesis that happened among the German and Frankish peoples at the interface with the Roman Empire. Now we move on to another frontier, the Danubian frontier, for more complex and more entangled interactions.
77: "What we can do here, however, is address one of the greatest puzzles of medieval European history: why the Eastern Roman Empire (which we call Byzantine), survived the fall of Rome by a thousand years." [The Eastern Empire collapsed in 1453 vs 476 for the Western Empire.] The author starts by saying the question is "ill-posed."
77-8: The intellectual tradition of dumping on the Byzantines began in the 18th century with Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where he raced through the cohesive and expansionary period of the Byzantine Empire in just one chapter and then devoted the rest of three volumes to the decadent/declining periods.
78ff: Per the author, a better way to phrase the ill-posed question is to ask how it was that a new imperial nation was born in the Balkans/Anatolia region while the old one collapsed; also notes that the Byzantines were an entirely separate people from the Romans of the Western Empire. Discussion here of very high-level differences between Byzantines and Romans; Latin- versus Greek-speaking, worldly and practical versus otherworldly and mystical, Roman versus Hellenistic, etc.
79-80: Note also that as Rome started to have more of its military conscripted from its peripheral tribute peoples, more power leaked from the center. [One truism of history: You can't depend quite as much on a military made up of people other than your own...]
81ff: Diocletian as one of a string of emperors basically put in power by Roman military; he retired and gave power to Constantine who took over in 305 AD. Constantine imposed Christianity and founded Constantinople in 324 AD, which played a major role in the survival and flowering of the Byzantine Empire. What followed in the western part of the Roman Empire, however, was a period of imperiopathosis as it was displaced by the East. "This period [the author means here the 4th through the 6th centuries AD] is a sort of transitional phase between Rome, which really fell in the third century, and Byzantium, which fully formed only after the shock of the Arabic conquests." [uh, which were when? He leaves the reader in the lurch, assuming knowledge that at the least I don't have...]
83: Back to the Battle of Adrianople (AD 378) where the Visigoths wiped out emperor Valens and his army [this is well told in the book The Day of the Barbarians by the way, recommend!], setting into motion a chain of events that led to weakening frontier defenses all over Roman territory and eventually the sack of Rome in 476.
84: On the dispute about the nature of Christ between the Nestorians, the Monophysites, and the Chalcedonians, religion as a symbolic marker used to distinguish "us" from "them."
85: Various attacks and sieges of Constantinople and its territory in the 7th and 8th centuries by the Arabs which "forged the Byzantine nation" after a period of secular decline. [This is what the author was referring to four pages ago on page 81, apparently.] "When the pressure abated at the end of the 8th century, the Byzantines resumed their empire building."
Chapter 4: Asabiya in the Desert: Ibn Khaldun Discovers the Key to History
89ff: Ibn Khaldun, the famous philospher, born in 1332 in Seville in Muslim Andalusia; lost his parents at age 17 to the Black Death; then when it was clear that Seville was about to fall to the Christian Reconquista, his extended family moved to northwest Africa. Ibn Khaldun plays various roles as advisors to different sultans and states in Africa, then on his way to a pilgrimage to Mecca he is retained by the ruler of Egypt to be a chief justice, then he finds himself in Damascus when it was besieged by Timur [Tamerlane]. Timur wanted to meet the world-famous philosopher, he had him as his guest for some seven weeks in his camp.
92: The desert as hostile environment, as a "natural selection mechanism" that forges internal solidarity in communities; or as Ibn Khaldun said; only tribes held together by asabiya can live in the desert." Also; nomadic peoples from the semi-arid regions of North Africa tended to produce excellent warriors.
93: On Ibn Khaldun's cycles of conquering, then decadence, then dissolution and a loss of asabiya, then replacement by another regime.
94ff: On the role of religion in creating coherent peoples. Islam offering stability to a war-torn region.
104: "Here then a powerful general principle of world history is uncovered: a close connection exists between fault-line frontiers and new, expansionist states."
Chapter 5: The Myth of Self-Interest: And the Science of Cooperation
107ff: On the amazing support of the European populace for the decision to go to war in 1914; England did not even need to do any conscription until 1916 (!)
108: The author criticizes "rational choice theory" of the 20th century which dominated social sciences during the century. [I didn't know it dominated sociology but it sure did dominate economics and finance.]
109ff: Contrasting the ideas of Machiavelli with the words of French King Louis IX who wanted his son to govern the kingdom with loyalty and fealty to his people; on Machiavelli's failed political career and how his book The Prince was "vehemently rejected" by his contemporaries, only gradually gaining ground in European thinking in the modern period. See also Thomas Hobbes and his work Leviathan, Bernard Mandeville's work The Fable of the Bees: Private Vices, Publick Benefits and of course Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and the "invisible hand" argument; per the author, all of these are now systematized into what is now known as the Theory of Rational Choice, where people are rational actors trying to maximize utility.
112ff: On the collective action problem in rational choice theory; "rational self-interested agents cannot join together in a functioning society" per the author; also on evolutionary fitness and natural selection, Darwin was puzzled on how sociology evolved [Note: as we know from Albert Costa's biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin had difficulty seeing the big picture with his own theory, he had difficulty applying it to various levels of the system, like on a cultural level, a societal level, etc]; the arrival of William D. Hamilton's theory of kin selection; also the "reciprocal altruism" concept from biologist Robert Trivers and political scientist Robert Axelrod; the problem however is none of these explain ultrasociality, or cooperation on societal level.
119ff: Society consists of a few types of people:
* "knaves": self-interested rational agents who will tend to free-ride unless forced to contribute to the common good
* "saints": unconditional cooperators
* "moralists": conditional cooperators who will contribute to the collective but in the absence of a mechanism to punish non-contributors they will withdraw their cooperation
The idea here per the author is the capacity for cooperation is hardwired into humans, although to varying degrees.
124: Thus in World War I, "The initial surge of volunteers must have been entirely saints and moralists." They then put pressure on knaves to do the same: see for example the white feather phenomenon in England where women actually would be enforcers, giving military age men not in uniform a white feather to indicate cowardice. [A disturbing thought here is how a society that can pull these strings and can manipulate "enforcement" using its own people (through persuasion and propaganda) will generally be "more fit" on a collective level]
125ff: On group selection rather than individual selection; also human cognitive abilities allow people to remember past behavior of others; also we can have a second-order here (more or less) of the ability to keep track of those who failed to punish cheaters, and punish them. [Moralize the moralizers, essentially] On the benefits of cooperative hunting, especially for large game; and then warfare as the most important force of group selection in human civilization; warfare is almost ubiquitous among small scale hunter-gatherer societies and former societies, see Lawrence Kelly and his evidence that 20-60% of males in these societies die in wars.
132: On Dunbar's number.
133ff: On human cognition and symbolic thinking; symbolic demarcation of a group; also on nested layers of demarcation/identity: in Indiana a person can think of himself as a Hoosier as well as a midwesterner, an American, a member of the West, etc.
Chapter 6: Born to Be Wolves: The Origins of Rome
139: The author uses Rome as a case study to test the theory that "imperial nations arise on meta-ethnic frontiers"; starting with a bird's-eye view of the emergence of Rome.
140: The author posits a zone of contact between civilization and barbarism along the Mediterranean coast of Europe, citing it as a typical meta-ethnic frontier, with conflict between an aggressive Celtic culture and a civilized coastal region; in the 4th century BC and in the centuries that followed, three great powers emerged in the Mediterranean: Carthage, Macedon and Rome, with Rome emerging as the dominant civilization by the first century BC.
142ff: Rome emerging on the frontier between Etruscan and Latin cultures; Decentralization and disintegration in the 5th century BC during the Roman aristocracy's revolt against the last king, Tarquin the Proud; then onto Rome's conversion to an oligarchic republic that would rule for five centuries; interesting discussion here about the increasing impoverishment of the people, how they borrowed increasingly from the wealthy and fell into a form of debt slavery across society; also note a sort of suspicious cooperation between the plebians and the patricians, as the plebs would periodically secede from society (this effectively prevented the upper classes from forming an army) as a sort of periodic blackmail to obtain concessions from the ruling classes.
146ff: Problems during the 5th century: plagues, wars with various regional peoples: the Volsci, the Etruscans/Veii; Rome managed to consolidate its territory and by the end of the 5th century BC had conquered and stabilized the Etruscan/Latin frontier.
147ff: However, then the Gallic sack of Rome happened in 390 BC. These were Celtic peoples, although the Romans called them "Gauls." "The intensity of the new frontier dwarfed ethnic divisions on the Italian peninsula, such as that between the Etruscans and the Latins." This then produced a much clearer fault line, this time unifying the Italian peninsula peoples against the culturally much different Gauls; the Gauls inspired "intense feelings of loathing and terror" in Romans; after Rome was sacked by the Gauls, the "experience left deep scars on the Roman's psyche." See how the frequent conflicts against the Gauls during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC basically robustified the Romans, forced them into collective cooperation, etc.
152: On Hannibal and the conflict between Rome and Carthage; also Hannibal's cooperation with Gallic troops that he recruited en route to Rome; because Hannibal used so many Gallic warriors the author argues this conflict could be thought of as yet another episode in the struggle of Rome against Gaul.
153: On the second-order effects of the war with the Gauls; Rome settled its socio-economic conflicts between the patricians and plebeians; the Etruscans, Veiians and other peninsular people warred with Rome instantly ceased fighting and joined the "collective" of Rome.
154: Interesting here to see how far the Celtic/Gallic peoples penetrated all over the region, throughout Iberia (forming a mixed race called Celtiberians), throughout France, along the Danube, all the way to the Black Sea, also into Macedon, Greece and Thrace, and even into Asian Minor and Anatolia which became known as Galatia (the land of Celts). Wild!
158: On the Romans' curious knack for losing battles but winning wars. On Rome's fascinating ability to recover from disasters like the defeat at Cannae during the second Punic War against Hannibal; note also that Rome lost one third of its Senate during this period, which is an indication of the flatness of their society in those days: clearly the senators were in there fighting too...
163: Interesting thoughts comparing and contrasting Spartan culture with peak early/middle-era Roman culture, both cultures abhorred excess and decadence; but the Romans were willing to assimilate and admit different peoples around them into their civilization and even into their elites; Spartans had tremendous levels of asabiya, but without the same assimilative tendencies: they tend to enslave or engage in constant conflict with nearby peoples: the Messenians were a perfect example of an enslaved people who were never integrated into Spartan civilization, and upon the first Spartan defeat in 371 BC, "the Messenians immediately seceded, and that was the end of Sparta as an important player in Greek politics."
167ff: The author likewise compares and contrasts Athenian behavior with the Delian League, contrasting that with Roman assimilation policies; where Athens tended to extract and exploit value from the Delian League peoples (although not to the extent Sparta did to the Messenians). The author also contrasts Athens and Sparta with the Macedonian Empire, which was more assimilative during its empire period as well as during its period as a buffer state with Rome. The concluding idea here is that throughout the first millennium BC and the first millennium AD we've seen many many examples of "meta-ethnic frontier theory" borne out; next we move on to the second millennium AD to see further examples.
Chapter 7: A Medieval Black Hole: The Rise of the Great European Powers on Carolingian Marches
171ff: On the three imperial ages of Europe:
1) The Roman Empire on the fault line between Mediterranean civilization and Celtic barbarism,
2) The Second Imperial Age: the Empire of the Franks (under Charlemagne and the Carolingians) and Germanic peoples (who created various empires with various cycles of alternating integration and disintegration
3) The Third Imperial Age: basically the last 500 years: note that no single empire dominated Europe during this period, there were always several great powers competing. See also the interesting claim that Europe never really unified beyond the level that the Frankish Empire managed to unify it.
172: The crowning of Charlemagne, Christmas Day AD 800, when the Carolinian Empire united the regions that today include modern France, Benelux, West Germany, Switzerland, Austria, north and central Italy, and part of the Iberian peninsula. After Charlemagne died in 814 AD the Frankish Empire started to experience various levels of disintegration across multiple regions: against Islam on the southwest, Vikings on the northwest, Slavs on the Northeast, and Magyars on the southeast; the author looks at each of these in turn. [Again, whirlwind tours of history!]
173ff: 732 AD: Battle of Tours in southern France by Charlemagne's grandfather Charles Martel, initiating a centuries-long retreat of the Muslim wave. This was a primary meta-ethnic frontier as well as a cultural and economic fault line: the "Iberian frontier," between Islam and Christianity.
177: [Interesting quick comment by the author about how during periods of peace social conditions and socioeconomic structures hardened, but during periods of war they are often were many opportunities for people to change social station dramatically through the conflict; the author gives simple examples of how a peasant could become a "caballero" just by unseating a Muslim cavalryman: you would be awarded his horse and his weapons, this is just a simple example but it brings to mind some more big-picture notions: such as during long periods of stability you get more of a calcified/ossified social system and much less social mobility, whereas during a war everything is up in the air, all bets are off and you or your family can leap into the aristocracy or get wiped out, dramatic shifts can happen.]
177ff: On various parallels between the Iberian peninsula and the Russian steppe: high cooperation among soldiers, high asabiya and collective unity, etc.
181ff: Moving on from the Iberian meta-ethnic frontier to the northern France meta-ethnic zone, the region of the Seine River to the Loire to the south and to the Somme in the North, this region was called Francia during the Carolingian period. The fault line had Germanic Odin worshipers on one side and Romance language-speaking Christians on the other (This was the territory held by Roman patrician Sagarius which fell to the Franks under Clovis in 486). The Merovingians under Clovis adopted Roman-style administration for their budding empire and thus Romano-Gallic patricians were incorporated into the Frankish ruling elite, which was already a mongrelized people with Celts, Germanic farmers, Roman legionnaires, all added to the Frankish peoples.
182-3: Note the idiosyncrasy of Brittany, where there were Celts who had left the British Isles after the collapse of Rome to escape raids and colonization by Picts, Irish, Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Frisians; The Celts here established a beachhead across the English Channel in Brittany, and the Franks could never establish control over them. Another idiosyncrasy: a sort of gap in North France between Brittany and Frankish territory left room for Vikings/Scandinavians to establish themselves in a buffer territory between them. This started in 790 AD roughly, and they began raiding on both these frontiers, ultimately in 911 AD the Viking chief of Rouen named Hrolfr (or Rollo to the Franks), extracted the lands that would become eventually Normandy (the Normans) from Charles III, one of the last Carolingians. The Britons and Brittany eventually collapsed and retreated back to the British isles. The Norse raiding in the Normandy region created a separate meta-ethnic frontier in north France.
185ff: On the concept of predatory kinship in Normandy: see examples among the Normans like the twelve sons of Tancred, quite literally a band of brothers, who were able to conquer Italy and Sicily; or William the Conqueror invading England in 1066 with a band of kinsman that crisscrossed the leadership of his army, creating a tremendous amount of Norman solidarity and high asabiya.
186ff: The meta-ethnic frontier in the British Isles between Christian Celts and pagan Germanic people until AD 70 when the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity; but with remaining meta-ethnic frontier conflicts during the 9th and 10th centuries when Britain was inundated by Viking raiders and colonizers from Scandinavia; by the 11th century AD these frontier pressures had forged a heterogeneous band of German Invaders "into a cohesive English nation." But this new nation was largely destroyed by William the Conqueror's army in a very close battle at Hastings in 1066, and the English leadership perished there; the Normans then killed and replaced all the remaining English nobility. This is basically the story of how Normandy was the first empire to emerge from "the meta-ethnic pressure cooker of North France," but it was not the only one to do so.
188: Instability and a meta-ethnic frontier between the Normans and the Angevin French; note also that Normans didn't start to think of themselves as "French" until the 16th century! And the Capetians took over from the Angevins and unified northern France; then to expand to both Normandy and Flanders, then Languedoc in the south, and by the 13th century AD France became the hegemonic power in Europe.
189: Now moving on to the northeastern frontier of Germanic tribes around the region of the river Elbe and the river Oder, this is roughly what used to be East Germany; the German people there began to abandon it with the advance of Slavic peoples expanding westward; this started during the 5th or 6th century AD, although nobody knows when or why exactly; ultimately the border between Germanic Saxons and Slavic Wends was located along the Elbe river, and this became the meta-ethnic frontier. The incursions in both directions eventually triggered the formation of the states of Czechs, Poles, later Lithuanians; other Slavic tribes that did not adopt Christianity weren't able to preserve their identity.
191: The emergence of the Teutonic order around AD 1226; an appeal from polish Duke Konrad of Masovia for aid against the pagan Prussians in the region, who were ultimately conquered and Christianized; now the author jumps across some 400 years to the Germanic Hohenzollerns who were eventually to become the core of a resurgent Germany. Note that modern Prussians are today actually Germans who appropriated the name of the people they conquered. The original "Prussians" were destroyed as a people.
193: Discussion of the Lithuanian Empire, which emerged as a counter reaction to the arrival of the rapacious knights of the Teutonic Order, and also assaulted from the other direction by the Mongols of the Golden Horde. Another meta-ethnic pressure cooker where the Lithuanians consolidated into a people from kind of a pan-Baltic set of peasant tribes. Lithuania-Poland came from the marriage of Grand Duke Algirdas and Polish Queen Jadwiga; during the 15th century Lithuania-Poland was the largest territorial state in Europe; the Teutonic Order became a vassal of the Polish crown and finally the Slavic-Baltic state triumphed over German conquerors. But then two centuries later, in the 18th century, the Russians, who started as vassals of the Polish crown, were busily carving up Poland. [Note the last few segments of this book, and this chapter in particular, have been so loose and so quick in going over so many complex geopolitical relationships that it kind of leaves the reader a little lost; the underlying history is too complex to really illustrate the authors' overall theme with much clarity.]
195ff: The formation of China into various States repeatedly across the ages, thanks to the meta-ethnic frontier between Mongolia and Northern China, where we had the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols all rampaging back and forth.
196: The establishment of the Magyars, a Hungarian state, thanks to pressure from east and west.
197: The establishment of an Austrian power that cohered around a similar meta-ethnic fault line; note also the arrival of Turks to the east added to this fault line as well, eventually the Habsburgs conquered Turkish Hungary and made Austria a great power in 1699, and then during the 18th century they took over Spanish possessions in Italy and in the Netherlands, and continued to expand at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. Note that the Austrian Empire contained unstable, distinct imperial nations: the Hungarians and the Austrians, and they were also an amalgamation of other ethnic groups also; Spain separated when Charles V abdicated in 1558; Spain then went under the control of Philip II. [This book is now getting lost in its own wreckage: it's all too complex and the author is jumping all around. See for example how the author mashes through Austro-Hungarian history with no real narrative gameplan]. Per the author, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was "too multi-ethnic" to survive, and it disintegrated with World War I, dismembered in 1918.
Part II: Imperiopathosis: The Fall of Empires
Chapter 8: The Other Side of the Wheel of Fortune: From the Glorious Thirteenth Century into the Abyss of the Fourteenth
[Chapter 8 is a weak chapter, the author's point here is to give an example of a declining empire, but this "example" would likely be interesting only to a true Dark Ages France geeks.]
205ff: France's incredible success between 1200 and 1300, where it came to dominate Western Europe. But the 14th century put France right back down again for 150 years of famine, pestilence, incessant war and political disintegration. "When the Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch visited France in 1360, he lamented, 'I could scarcely recognize anything I saw. The most opulent of kingdoms is a heap of ashes... Where is now Paris that was once such a great city?'"
207: On the metaphor and image of the wheel of fortune, representing the impermanence of power, riches and glory; 14th centuries troubles following 13th century successes, "The High Middle Ages were followed by the calamitous fourteenth century." Then Europe experienced the Renaissance, which was followed by the crisis of the 17th century, then followed by the Age of Enlightenment, 1789, leading into the age of revolution, 1849. Discussion here of secular cycles, roughly century-long periods of prosperity and crisis.
208: Taking the circle metaphor further, we have cycle after cycle of war bringing peace, peace bringing war, prosperity bringing poverty, etc, "The causation is not linear but circular."
209ff: The author traces the economic and social cycle in France to see how a powerful state collapsed. Starting with massive population growth from 1100-1300 AD from 6 million to 22 million people; this "put the productive means of the medieval Society under a colossal strain." More aggressive agriculture, Malthusian-type problems and a Malthusian trap; see also an indication of a Malthusian trap with inflation, as the price of wheat and other commodities more than doubled between 1200 and 1300 while during this period real wages declined by a third. [There are some problems here, possibly catastrophic problems, about how the author is deducing things from price increases: he is assuming implicitly that supply was stable and demand went up, yet he doesn't comment on (or know?) the monetary policy from this period, he doesn't know the starting and ending percent of land tilled, etc. I hate to be harsh, but this is pretty loose, sociologist-level math.]
211ff: By 1300 there was a vast and growing rural proletariat, not enough land for everyone to work, many of the landless peasants migrated to towns, and this population increase strained France and other Western European countries to the breaking point. Also 1315-1322 was a series of disastrous crop years and livestock pandemics that triggered major famines, reports of cannibalism, etc. Contemporaneous Chronicles claimed the third of the population perished although it was probably more like 10%. "The terrible famines of the fourteenth century left a deep imprint on the European psyche."
213ff: Next came the Black Death: 1348-49 AD, and then returning in 1361 and again in 1374, followed by smaller outbreaks roughly once every 10 years thereafter. "By the end of the fourteenth century, the population of France was less than half of what it had been in 1300." All of this had positive effects on wages, the availability of food, the availability of land etc., basically "Malthusianism in reverse" and conditions for the lower classes improved significantly by the end of the 14th century.
215ff: Interesting blurb here on Malthusian theory and how it should have resulted in an increase in population once conditions improved, but in reality population increase appeared only after 1450 (and in England not until nearly 1500). The author attributes the cause to the dynamics of the ruling class and its relations with the state; wealthy elites did very well during the 13th century as everyone else suffered.
216ff: Long discussion here of aspects of landed gentry, incomes, etc., ultimately making the case that there was an "overproduction" of nobility in the first half of the 14th century, which resulted in the division of noble lands into smaller and smaller pieces, not enough to support everyone. This led then to more resource extraction from the peasantry. The crown even "was sliding into financial insolvency," to be discussed later in the chapter.
222: Note that the death rate from the plague was much higher for the lowest classes but only as low as 8% for the elites; the only reigning monarch who died from it was the King Alfonso XI of Castile.
223ff: Post the Black Death the benefits to the lower classes hurt the elites: their rents fell, wages went up, note also various peasant uprisings in Wales, the famous Jacquerie uprisings of 1358 in both England and France; basically the surplus output from peasants shrank as their numbers went lower they were had more freedom to leave estates, their wages went up and thus the income of states (which were extracted from the working classes) went down, in some cases significantly. Further we started to see French elites clash with each other, feuding over houses and estates, private wars among lesser nobility, a civil War in Brittany when Duke John III died without heirs, etc.
225: See also the outright rebellion in Bruges that spread: this Flemish rebellion opened a route for an English invasion and led to the Battle of Crecy. [Again we have some very complicated history here that the author has to tell in very very broad and superficial brush strokes: I pity any reader that isn't already familiar with, say, the Hundred Years' War and the era of the Black Death if he actually intends to follow along.]
228: Significant Fourth Turning-type violence here among elites and across all levels of society with a tripling of the murder rate from 1300 to 1380, this rate didn't re-normalize until the end of the 15th century. The author blames this on a collapse of law and order due to a failure of the ruling class, many of whom were destitute, armed and dangerous families and clans with multi-generational feuds, murder followed by revenge etc., the nobles were really a sort of criminal underclass in the late Middle Ages.
230: Discussion here of prior centuries where the income of the king went up with population growth and territorial expansion, which created a self-fulfilling cycle. This cycle now running in reverse.
231: Interesting sidebar here on the order of the Templars, who created a tax-free, powerful, transnational corporation, lending money at rates lower than Italian or Jewish bankers, both to Popes as well as kings; in 1307 King Philip the Fair ordered all Templars in France arrested, seized their property, tortured and executed them, in order to fill his Treasury. See also "the legend of the Templar's curse" supposedly cursing the Pope and Philip IV that they would both die within the year.
231: Note the key point here, that the state is competing with the elites for a shrinking economic surplus from the peasant labor force. [It's always curious to me that so many historians simply assume that all state resources are definitionally extracted from the peasantry, when wealth has a highly consistent Pareto or 80-20 type distribution across history, which means the peasantry never has anything to extract in the first place!]
232ff: On the misconception that the Hundred Years' War was what created France's troubles: this is not a full-fledged conflict over the whole period, and in fact by that argument you could argue that there was a "thousand year war" between 1066 and 1815 between France and England! "Contemporaries were astonished by the repeated defeats that mighty France suffered at the hands of relatively puny England." Lack of cohesion of the French military, lots of landless lords looking to get money and loot via warring,
235: [Again the history here is getting very far afield and the author would do well and return to his general theme] On the capture of French King John the Good at Poitiers, 1356 AD; this triggered the collapse of the state into "urban revolution, aristocratic rebellion, and peasant uprising, all at once." Interesting discussion here of a technical coup d'etat which happened when representatives of the church and nobility as well as the merchant class ("the Council of Thirty-Six") elected representatives to run Paris while John II was in captivity; they attempted to arrest the chancellor and other financial officers to get a true account of all the funds that had been spent; these officials fled the country then this sort of pseudo-government took over the mint as well as the duty of raising and collecting taxes, and began creating new coinage. [All this is really reminiscent of the John Law controversy under Louis XV in the early 1700s.]
236ff: General collapse of order all over France; violence and counter-violence between classes, the king/dauphin was nearly killed by artisans and tradesmen who marched on the Royal Palace under Etienne Marcel, but he talked his way out of it; there were unpaid soldiers rampaging throughout the countryside, even attacking Pope Innocent VI who was running the papacy from Avignon in those days; also peasant violence etc., total breakdown of cooperation among the entire civilization. [You can get a feel here for what is likely to come in places like Ukraine as it undergoes its collapse right now. And in the next bullet point you can get a sense of how things get very quickly--and violently--put back under control...]
Chapter 9: A New Idea of Renaissance: Why Human Conflict Is Like a Forest Fire and an Epidemic
239ff: Continuing with the situation in 1300s-era France: The nobles finally start to unify and put down the peasant uprising, "the nobles again demonstrated that a peasant uprising has no chance against a prepared and organized nobility." The author describes an encounter between 120 men-at-arms versus 9,000 peasant insurgents in the town of Meaux, it was a total slaughter, and quickly the peasant rebellions ended; the elites quickly organized with the royalty and state and created a tax/fiscal framework that lasted basically until the French Revolution, again, with most of the tax burden borne by the poor/peasant classes. [Another helpful takeaway for the way things really work when there's a conflict between two regimes: that conflict may be the "ostensible" conflict and there actually may be a physical conflict among ruling elites, but in reality the true conflict is between the classes of these allegedly warring states--and that conflict typically resolves in the favor of the side that is better organized and better armed... and this typically is the elites, with the military and the next 10% of the society supporting them. The more I learn about geopolitics and intra-state conflict, the more I can see that when it really gets down to it, the elites usually "re-unite" against the people. Barring that they escape and retire to leisure outside of that country's borders. Further, it's the monetary/taxation system that really undergirds the power structure it seems: high taxes limit social mobility, ossify class structures, limit the creation of new elites who might threaten the old elites, etc. I think also a cheat code to all this is just get yourself quietly into the top decile (or higher) of your society and do your best to stay there.]
241: Also worth noting that thousands of French nobility were killed off in the battles of Crecy and Poitiers; this had certain interesting effects: there were fewer noble "thugs" to cause trouble by 1360, many were either killed off or got the property of slain relatives; there was a generally held desire for peace and stability; further, the new regular tax scheme enabled the building of a permanent army. [The author doesn't say this, but it looks like we can see see a mechanism from that era to dump the burdens of the military onto people other than the nobility, and further to use that standing military to reestablish state power by crushing any uprising anywhere. This is basically the power structure of the modern state right here. Very interesting and rather depressing.]
242: [Interesting to think through this author's concept of "elite overproduction"]: On the idea that there were too many nobles, the author refers to the problem continuing even after all the losses of the nobility due the bloodletting of battle of Crecy and other key battles during the Hundred Years' War; there were still new nobles coming up as their numbers "were replenished by vigorous upward mobility from the ranks of commoners." [This is an absolutely fascinating comment right here. First of all, wouldn't you want this kind of social mobility? You'd be against it only if you assumed that nobles produced nothing and only were extractive, it's basically fixed pie thinking. Isn't "social mobility" a positive? Obviously a permanently calcified class structure is not a good thing. And then just thinking from a dollar and cents standpoint: these people had to pay in order to receive "ennobeling patents" issued by the king, thus they theoretically could be paying tremendous amounts into the state treasury. So, again, how would this be extractive?]
243: Finally the author is arriving at the central theme of this chapter: the social psychology involved in the cycles of "integrative" and "disintegrative" phases of a country, in this case France, across the decline up to the mid=14th century, the recovery in the late 14th century, followed by another collapse, then a resurgence in the mid-15th century. The author describes internal warfare like an epidemic or a forest fire, getting worse, getting worse... and then finally it burns itself out and people seek stability and peace.
245: Now we're on to a new topic: the 30 years civil war in France in the early 15th century between the Burgundy faction and King Louis of Orleans. Also Henry V from England took advantage of this internal conflict and invaded in 1415, winning a major battle at Agincourt, and taking territory in Normandy while the forces of Burgundy besieged Paris. What a shitshow France was in these days!
248ff: The author attempts to explain why the population didn't recover after this early 15th century disintegrative phase until the second half of the 15th century; there was a lack of security across the entire country; there were family feuds, infrastructure was destroyed, brigandage and warring back and forth, ransacking of land, endemic famine, etc., throughout the first half of the 15th century.
250ff: Here the author talks about the various extinction events for the nobility in France through the 14th and first half of the 15th century: deaths due to various conflicts where tremendous numbers of nobles died at the hands of the British; then a selection event that happened with incomes of estates declining, the weakest estates basically went away, absorbed by the largest estates; owners of the smaller estates "left" the nobility by losing their lands and status. The author gives an example of nine fiefs in the county of Blois, where five remained within the hands of old nobility without interruption, but of the remaining four one was seized by the Duke of Orleans, another was sold to another family and the last two were acquired by new nobles. Another region where from 1313 to 1429 there were 40 fiefs that declined to 18, so there were fewer lords, but the ones that made it had way more land. [Sort of a consolidation across the nobility you could say]. Also interesting statistics that from the early 14th century until the mid 15th century, France's population fell by half, but the number of nobles declined by three quarters.
255ff: Circa 1450: now England falls into a period of instability, as France "hardens" against its neighbor, reclaims its territory and unifies. Interesting here that England goes through its phases kind of opposite to France; the author also uses this as evidence that "climate change" couldn't have been the cause of these various instabilities because these two countries would have been experiencing integration and disintegration in parallel, not in opposition.
Chapter 10: The Matthew Principle: Why the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer
[Also a weak chapter here: the author's central point is that as wealth gets too unequally distributed a state will enter a disintegrative phase.]
262: Discussion of inequality of land ownership, and how it develops; the author verbally describes mathematical models he has created (which sounds rather fixed-pie in their underlying assumptions), eventually arrives at the conclusion that as long as land is scarce, a vast gulf between the rich and poor is a structural element, a feature not a bug of any economic system, and ultimately you end up with "a tiny minority of wealthy landowners and a huge majority of landless proletarians." Unless, says the author, there's some sort of progressive inheritance tax or the abolishing of private property altogether. [Something bugs me about the way the author thinks through this: it's as if there's only farmers and rentiers in his mental model of an economy... and that's it: like a simple two element economy, when obviously there was a whole sophisticated economy going on with all kinds of services, all kinds of commerce and all kinds of ways to produce new wealth, etc. And then to trust the state--the recipient of any inheritance taxes, and of course the literal owner of everything if you abolish private property (!)--to somehow not keep these resources solely for the elites' use... Only a clueless academic could arrive at such a "solution."]
266ff: Extended hypothetical here of two family trajectories across generations. Note that the author draws a pretty straight trajectory for both families in opposite directions, when you would have mean reversion and variance in fortunes from one generation to the next; note also, a fortune just handed to the next generation is often a contraindicator: it produces inheritors without work ethic, hence the saying "from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations."
267: Note also that the Matthew effect was at work among the aristocracy. The really rich got richer.
270: On the question of why doesn't inequality reach the ultimate extreme where one person owns everything? What drives reductions in inequality like in the United States during the 20th century? During the 14th century, the reduction in population due to the plague and famine years drove a decrease in inequality; the author doesn't really answer this question directly but goes through various historical cycles of increasing and decreasing wealth among the elites across the centuries in England and in France, and then strange sidebar on The Three Musketeers.
Chapter 11: Wheels Within Wheels: The Many Declines of the Roman Empire
283: Dunking on Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall; debates on when actually was the collapse of Rome, 1453? 476? Or was it the third century AD, because of all the strife, civil war and barbarian invasions of that era? Or the first century BC when the Republican Rome ended and "empire" Rome began?
285-6: The author gives us a good page and a half long restatement of his general thesis right here: the idea of asabiya and collective capacity for action; the idea of a meta-ethnic frontier between civilizations which are crucibles within which high-asabiya societies are forged; the collective action leading to territorial expansion but then breeding its own failure as peace brings war and war brings peace; then within those long secular cycles, we see shorter cycles of integrative and disintegrative phases, and fathers-sons-grandsons cycles of violence and peace inside of those cycles, etc. These wheels-within-wheels cycles have different lengths: the asabiya cycle can be centuries to a millennium, secular integrative-disintegrative phases can take centuries (there can be three or four of these cycles during the life cycle of an imperial nation), and then inside of that there will be fathers-and-sons cycles of 40-60 years.
286ff: The author now maps Rome to his various cycles, citing the first cycle from the 7th century BC up to the 4th century BC and the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390, followed by an integrative cycle until 140 BC, this cycle was a typically long due in part to the Hannibalic/Punic Wars, which were major setbacks for the Romans; also the tremendous long-term success of their expansion (so the integrative phase for the third cycle which ran from 27 BC to AD 180 was also longer than typical). [So far all I'm seeing here is the idea that Rome doesn't really fit the author's time horizons and he really has to stretch them out and/or add epicycles to fit it to his model. And yet the Turchin claims that The Fourth Turning is "procrustean"? First cast the beam out of thine own eye...]
289ff: Various examples of ostentation and wealth in Rome: see Cicero's attack on Chrysogonus, contemporary historians like Livy and Sallust who lectured in their histories about the decadence of 1st century BC aristocracy in Rome, negatively comparing them to the character of Romans before then.
292ff: A big part of this author's model centers on economic inequality, and in particular conspicuous consumption: he sees it as both a structural and a self-evident driver of disintegrative forces, lessening asabiya in a state. Likewise, see slavery as a component of this inequality: the author considers it highly corrosive. The author goes through an interesting [although I'm not sure how rigorous] argument that the American South under slavery had less municipal life, fewer officials, less public infrastructure. [Unfortunately this doesn't come close to explaining how the South had such high "asabiya" and such collective unity that it was able to hold off a tremendously superior opponent for years longer than anybody thought it could. The author mentions nothing about this aspect of that conflict and this may indicate that the author hasn't really done his due diligence on 19th century American history. Oversights like this can be revealing: maybe the author doesn't know quite as much as he thinks he does in other historical eras... History is a very messy discipline and there is so little that we know.]
295: The Republic-Principate transition in Rome: first signs were slave revolts breaking out all over the Roman world, per the author: "Peasant rebellions rarely succeed in agrarian societies when the elites maintain their unity, and slave revolts in late Republican Rome were not an exception to this rule. A much more dangerous threat to the state arises when the elites become splintered, and certain factions begin to mobilize popular support to be used in their quest for power." See here the reign of Tiberius Simpronius Gracchus, 163-132 BC, who attempted to break up large private estates and distribute that land to landless citizens; this triggered a factional split in the Roman aristocracy, Tiberius was murdered along with 300 of his supporters by the wealthy faction of the elites; then followed a century or more of disequilibrium and civil conflict; then Pompeii vs Caesar etc., which resolved as Rome was established as an empire under Octavian/Augustus in 27 BC. This dictatorship (effectively) was greeted with relief and tremendous public popularity and a broad popular consensus; this was the end of the disintegrative phase of the Republican cycle which had many fathers-and-sons mini-cycles; the author further argues that this internal instability solved the "elite overproduction" problem just like in the 13th and 14th century French and English examples earlier in the book.
301: The author here actually admits "it becomes tedious to read about one secular cycle after another".. I'll say it does.
301ff: Rome, AD 100: resumption of population growth and a resumption of the Matthew principle/economic inequality all over again; note however from AD 96 to 180 (the five "good" emperors era) was a period of peace and stability and a golden age of the aristocracy; it began to show instability with the Antonine plague in 165 AD with an effect comparable to the Black Death; then "Things unraveled very rapidly in the wake of the epidemic." Germanic tribes invaded, finances collapsed, the denarius was debased again and again (also the legions were not under political control anymore because they couldn't be paid); Marcus Aurelius was able to hold things together for a little while, but then his heir Commodus essentially presided over the destruction and civil war of the regime; thus the "imperiopathosis" of the Roman Nation entered its acute phase; the author argues that AD 268 was when the Roman Empire "ended" as Danubian frontier officers took control of the Empire, producing a string of rulers known as the Illyrian soldier emperors; these included the very able Diocletian, as well as Constantine who moved the capital to Constantinople; these emperors continued to call themselves "Romans" but they were part of a new imperial nation that would become the Byzantine Empire. At this point the Italians/Romans "had clearly lost any remaining asabiya by this point." Rome became atomized, with extreme inequality and lack of solidarity [somewhat reminiscent of today's USA to be honest].
305: Interesting assertion here on page 305: the author definitively states that the increase in wealth of the aristocracy came at the expense of the commoners. "This increase in the wealth of the elites had to come at the expense of the pauperization of the commoners. Everything we know about the late empire supports this view." [See also my comments on wealth extraction on page 231 above: this does not appear to be borne out by wealth-building in other eras, and, again, it is fascinating to see this as an underlying assumption many historians use to explain many historical periods, particularly when wealth is almost always Pareto distributed to begin with: how can the minority which already holds 80% or more of the wealth "enrich" itself by taking the 20% or less that remains? That's not enough to move the needle.]
305: At this point barbarians were able to move freely throughout Italy without eliciting any collective response from the native Italians, even though these invading barbarians were outnumbered by orders of magnitude. Note also that the Roman State essentially left and moved to Constantinople, and even the leaders of the western part of the Roman Empire moved their headquarters closer to northern Italy, to Milan, Ravenna and the Apennine mountains (trans-Apennine Italy); this produced a different trajectory in northern Italy than in peninsular Italy which became an asabiya black hole ("to this very day" according to the author, ouch), while northern Italy was the seat of several cohesive medium-sized states across the centuries to come.
Part III: Cliodynamics: A New Kind of History
Chapter 12: War and Peace and Particles: The Science of History
311ff: On Tolstoy's view of history, that history is not made by great men, that the science of history can be constructed by integrating the actions of myriads of individuals; this is a concept modern sociologists accept; on Tolstoy's argument that Napoleon at Borodino was deluding himself that he directed anything, in actuality each army fought on its own under officers and soldiers who knew what to do "and orders arriving from Napoleon were outdated or simply wrong." The author actually tests Napoleon's impact using methods developed by military historians, he determine that Napoleon actually was a force multiplier equivalent to adding an extra 30% to the French troops. Interesting.
316: A defense here of clioynamics from the author. [I have to say that one self-evident problem with this domain is the GIGO problem, also what little "data" that you have from an era is only the (likely tiny) fraction that survived to today, not the actual data.]
317-8: Discussion of free will; the author believes we have free will, and he uses suicide as an interesting example of "the ultimate act of free will" of an individual; and yet reasonably he also argues that we can predict accurately the number of suicides in a large country, and we also can predict changes in that rate due to various factors. Thus this is "an example of how an exercise of free choice at the micro level can have a vanishingly small effect at the macro level."
322ff: Discussion of Trevor Dupuy and his book Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat; On the cliodynamic-type measures Dupuy uses to estimate battle performance of the military, the ratio of combat powers, the ratio of force strengths and the ratio of modifying factors like weather or fatigue; also an unknown which is the ratio of combat efficiencies. Note that in World War II German troops had far higher combat efficiencies than British and American troops. The next chapter asks if we can measure something like "combat efficiency" in the sense of non-military aspects of society like collective action.
Chapter 13: The Bowling Alley in History: Measuring the Decline of Social Capital
325ff: Discussion of Robert Putnam and his 1993 book Making Democracy work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy; on Putnam's concept of "social capital" (which the author calls asabiya) for modern democratic societies; Putnam did research on 1970s Italy when its political system was reformed, delegating unprecedented powers and resources to new regional governments; this offered sort of "political laboratory" where we could compare how well each government operates, comparing differences which should be due to the political culture of each region. [Okay, I see now why the author calls southern Italy "an asabiya black hole," this guy Putnam's research showed that northern Italy had much more social capital and southern Italy had much less]; see also Edward Banfield and his book The Moral Basis of the Backward Society, analyzing a southern Italian village in the 1950s and 60s, "amoral familism"; [It's interesting to see how these narratives about southern Italy would be easily and widely insta-accepted by centralized state proponents: such people would clearly want to "find" all kinds of reasons why a society based on a family or extended family unit size would be a dyscivic failure, thus implicitly suggesting the state should therefore step in and "fix" things; very very interesting]; the author cites the tremendous difference in wealth and industrialization between the north and south of Italy, people look at the country in aggregate and see the average, so it looks like Italy is in the middle of the pack in Europe; but in reality the northern regions are very high-ranking. "Yet only a century ago there was practically no wealth differential between the north and south."
328-9: Strangely unrigorous side-discussion here of modern corporations, tying in ideas from Francis Fukuyama's (now deeply discredited) books that corporations require a high-trust society like the Italian north in order to function well, and they cannot function well in low-trust regions like the Italian south; [This is kind of a strange adaptation of this idea to a domain that doesn't really appear to support it.]
330ff: On the north-south divide in Italy, according to the author, this divide arose a millennium ago in the Roman Empire: after the collapse, northern Italy was settled by Germanic immigrants from high-trust societies, whereas there was no attempt at state building in the south and also no meta-ethnic frontier in the south like the North had. "Two or three centuries on a very intense meta-ethnic frontier seems to be the minimum time needed to nurture high asabiya."
331ff: On David Hackett Fisher's book The Great Wave, which traces four secular waves of European history in the last millennium;
1) The High Middle Ages (an integrative phase), the 14th century crisis (a disintegrative phase);
2) The Renaissance (integrative) followed by the 17th century crisis (disintegrative)
3) The Enlightenment (integrative), followed by the age of revolution (disintegrative)--he must mean here the mid-1800s revolution period throughout Europe
4) Now: the fourth wave is what we are living through now, starting with an integrative phase beginning with the Victorian era in the second half of the 19th century, leading up to the first half of the 20th century, followed by a disintegrative phase from 1960 onwards.
The author also cites harsh criticism of Fisher's idea from [infamous contraindicator] Paul Krugman; the author goes through some of his own criticisms of Fisher's work as well [including a false example: Turchin talks about the rising trend in crime since 1960 when there's been a substantial decline in crime since the 1970s all across the Western world].
334-5: The author concludes the chapter with a discussion of Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone and claims it indicates a decline in asabiya in the USA.
Chapter 14: The End of Empire? How the Mobile Phone Is Changing Cliodynamics
337ff: On various discussions of "the end of empires" from the end of World War I where the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires collapsed, to the 1960s where the colonial empires of Western Europe collapsed, and to the 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed; of course leading to a discussion of whether the United States today is in fact an empire [it self-evidently is]. The author defines an empire as "a large multi-ethnic territorial state with complex power structure." Also you can have a democratically governed empire: see the Athenian Empire as well as the British Empire, and for at least some of its history, the Roman Empire.
339ff: "American asabiya might be on a decline, if recent trends in social capital are good indicators, but the U.S. still has an abundance when compared to other large contemporary countries." [The author cites 9/11 as an example of something that "united" the USA, but I think we could just as easily argue that 9/11 was a very brief outlier example that quickly broke down into total disunity over the USA's irrational military response to the attacks. Honestly the USA is looking more and more like the author's negative descriptions of southern Italy than anything else]; the author also writes about American integrative ideology, espousing liberty, democracy and the rule of law, and likening it to how the Byzantines had Orthodox Christianity, the Arabs had Islam, the Soviets had Marxism-Leninism... [I'm not sure to what extent these parallels work however.]
341ff: The EU as a type of empire, but not a very good example; whereas China "fits the definition of empire perfectly" according to this author, citing conquest of Tibet, the suppression of the Uighurs, regaining Hong Kong, bringing Taiwan into the fold, and extending economic influence all over the globe. On the former Soviet empire: Russia as a potential empire that's down but "not yet out" according to the author. Also an interesting discussion here of Russia and its conflict with Chechnya: the Russians basically asked Chechnya to go away and leave them alone, but then Chechnya devolved into lawlessness, began raiding other parts of the Russian Federation, then after a series of terrorist acts in Russia--including blowing up apartment buildings in Moscow--Russia decided enough was enough and basically reduced Chechnya to rubble, and fully incorporated it back under Moscow's control. [We can see here a fascinating example of how Russia works: they put up with all kinds of crap until they don't... and now, interestingly, Chechnya is sending volunteer soldiers to fight for Russia against Ukraine.]
345: Very interesting quote here. "Here then is why I consider Chechnya such an important indicator of the future trajectory of the Russian state--and an empirical test of the asabiya theory. If the Russians succeed in reincorporating the Chechens within the Russian Federation, my guess is that Russia will regain its status as world empire. If not, and a Caucasian caliphate expands to the Middle Volga, it will most likely mean the end of Russia as we know it." [Note that this book was written in 2006: by this time Russia had already subdued Chechnya militarily, and in 2017 the conflict was ended and Chechnya remains part of Russia.]
346ff: Anecdote here about a young jihadi from Yemen who was enraged by American behavior in the Middle East and with the encouragement of his wife went to war to fight in Fallujah, Iraq; he ultimately died in a suicide mission. This is the author's introduction to the meta-ethnic frontier of Islam with the West, with Orthodox Christianity, and also with Hindu and Sinic civilizations. Also on Jewish-Israeli power as an extension of American imperialism--at least as seen by the Muslim world; on the creation of a distinct Palestinian identity where there was none prior as "the asabiya of Palestinians has increased enormously." [Holy cow the if author could have known then what is happening right now with Israel's ongoing invasion of Palestine...]; On the Arab world's lack of unity during several conflicts with Israel in 1947-48, the 1960s and 1970s, the author notes that this is changing, citing how in 2000, Israel was forced to withdraw from Lebanon against Shiite and Hezbollah fighters.
349ff: On how the meta-ethnic frontier theory predicts that Western intrusion in the Middle East will produce a counter-response, the author thinks possibly in the form of a new theocratic caliphate. The author also notes that two centuries passed from the First Crusade to the end of the Crusades in 1291 when the Crusaders were expelled; note also that modern western pressure on Islamic societies of the Middle East dates back to the British occupation of Egypt in 1882.
350ff: On the book Pattern and Repertoire in History by Bertrand Roehner and Tony Syme, suggesting that human societies have memories [what a super interesting idea!], and when challenged they reach into their collective memories for a response that worked before in similar situations and then adapt it to the challenge today; see for example repetitions of civilizational behavior in France across the centuries from the 14th to the 18th century.
351ff: Discussion about media across the centuries, pre-industrial societies might have the king's face on a coin as a visual image, or a national or multinational church could instruct the priesthood to deliver sermons on certain topics, etc.; with modern media and then the internet as mediating force, lessening the media powers of the state: the author cites the Dan Rather Air National Guard hoax, which was exposed by bloggers; the author sees blogging and the modern media world as a heterarchy versus a hierarchy where information flows back and forth between nodes rather than solely from a center. On cell phones as the author says "will probably have the greatest impact on social dynamics." The author also cites the "smart mob" that toppled the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 2001. [It is interesting (and quite depressing) to place these non-predictive thoughts from 2006 next to the current year when we now know that governments infiltrated and heavily censored social media throughout the pandemic and pandemic response period.]
To Read:
Philip Ball: Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
David Christian: A History of Russia, Central Asia, and Mongolia
William McNeil: Plagues and Peoples
William McNeil: The Rise of the West
N.M. Karamzin: History of the Russian State (trans. Soloviev)
N.V. Riazanocsky: A History of Russia
R. Grousset: The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia
P.S. Wells: The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Armenius, and the Slaughter Of Legions In the Teutoburg Forest
H. Wolfram: The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples
Samuel P. Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations
***Warren Treadgold: A History of the Byzantine State and Society
Ramsey MacMullen: Corruption and Decline of Rome
F.M. Donner: The Early Islamic Conquests
T.J. Cornell: The Beginnings of Rome: From the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars
Polybius: The Histories
James Powers: A Society Organized for War: The Iberian Municipal Militias in the Central Middle Ages, 1000-1284
Henry Kamen: Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763
***Eleanor Searle: Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power, 840-1066
***Jonathan Sumption: The Hundred Years War: Trial by Battle
Trevor N. Dupuy: Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat
Edward Banfield: The Moral Basis of the Backward Society
David Hackett Fischer: The Great Wave
***Alexander Pushkin: The Prisoner of Caucuses