THE THOUGHT BOOK OF THE YEAR, THE TIMESA GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR'Game of Thrones-style intra-elite conflict meets big data' TLS'Extraordinary. . . the culmination of many years of highly original and innovative work' BloombergOne of the most iconoclastic thinkers of our time offers a brilliant new theory of how society w...

**From the author of End TimesIn War and Peace and War, Peter Turchin uses his expertise in evolutionary biology to offer a bold new theory about the course of world history.**Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society’s capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off a common enemy, and that this kind of cooperation led to the formation of...

Cooperation is powerful.There aren't many highly cooperative species—but they nearly cover the planet. Ants alone account for a quarter of all animal matter. Yet the human capacity to work together leaves every other species standing.We organize ourselves into communities of hundreds of millions of individuals, inhabit every continent, and send people into space. Human beings are nature's greatest team players. And the truly astounding thing is, we only started our steep cl...

Many historical processes are dynamic. Populations grow and decline. Empires expand and collapse. Religions spread and wither. Natural scientists have made great strides in understanding dynamical processes in the physical and biological worlds using a synthetic approach that combines mathematical modeling with statistical analyses. Taking up the problem of territorial dynamics--why some polities at certain times expand and at other times contract--this book shows that a similar research p...

**Brought to you by Penguin.A brilliant new theory of how society works from one of the most iconoclastic thinkers of our time**What leads to political turbulence and social breakdown? How do elites maintain their dominant position? And why do ruling classes sometimes suddenly lose their grip on power?For decades, complexity scientist Peter Turchin has been studying world history like no one else. Assembling vast databases mined from 10,000 years of human activity, ...

**“Peter Turchin brings science to history. Some like it and some prefer their history plain. But everyone needs to pay attention to the well-informed, convincing and terrifying analysis in this book.” —Angus Deaton, winner of the Nobel Prize in EconomicsFrom the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames**Peter Turchin, one of the most int...

Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change. Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial loss. Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov explore the dynamics and causal connections between such demographic, economic, and political variab...

The numbers that tell the story of humanity'Vital ... If you're thinking about setting up a giant land empire in Asia, you cannot do so without this book ... If only the last Song emperor had had this book by his side, he might have avoided his appalling fate' Dan SnowWhat was history's biggest empire? Or the tallest building of the ancient world? What was the average life expectancy in medieval Byzantium? The average wage in Old Kingdom Eg...