About the Book
In 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 the Roman and Russian empires, and the United States. But as empires grow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, conflict replaces cooperation, and dissolution inevitably follows. Eloquently argued and rich with historical examples, War and Peace and War offers a bold new theory about the course of world history with implications for nations today.
Review Highlights
"History has had a long, and on the whole fruitful, relationship with adjacent subjects such as archaeology and anthropology, and is just emerging from a testing (and largely negative) cohabitation with literary and cultural theory. Turchin’s view of our subject from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist, versed in the hard language of mathematics, promises a great deal. He may not have invented a new science or rewritten the history of the world, but he might encourage others in the history profession to think differently and to consider whether they should take down their disciplinary scaffolding from time to time to share their ideas more effectively with a popular readership." - Gordon Johnson (president of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and general editor, The New Cambridge History of India): "Are there ‘laws of history’, patterns or regularities that would let us make predictions? Karl Marx thought he saw a steady progression in history, leading inevitably to a future of world government by the workers. British historian Arnold Toynbee saw cyclic patterns in the rise and fall of civilisations. But most historians today think that Marx and Toynbee were deluded, and that the pursuit of historical laws is, in general, a fool’s errand. Refreshingly, Peter Turchin doesn’t agree." - Mark Buchanan,The New Scientist "With the science of psychohistory we can predict the future. We can map out the next thousand years in detail, and the next 30,000 in outline. Equipped with mathematical models of mass behaviour, psychohistorians such as Hari Seldon of Streeling University can predict the fate of nations. But neither psychohistory nor Hari Seldon are real: they were invented by Isaac Asimov in his famous Foundation series, which describes the fluctuating fortunes of the Galactic Empire. Now, however, a real-life Hari Seldon has developed his own form of psychohistory. In September, ecologist Peter Turchin of the University of Connecticut publishes War and Peace and War, a book in which he explains much of pre-industrial world history with his bold and controversial theory of the rise and fall of empires, using the same kind of maths that Turchin has used previously to study ecosystems." - Philip Ball, The Guardian
Connections
Related work
Panicking about societal collapse? Plunder the bookshelves
Peter Turchin, author of the 2006 War and Peace and War, suggests that collapse is what happens when a society stops being able to deal with the strains caused by population growth, leading to inequality and strife.…
Cliodynamics, the rise & fall of empires and asabiya
Yesterday assman recommended Peter Turchin's oeuvre as a nice theoretical overview of world history, in particular Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall. Unfortunately it was checked out at the library, so I've ordered it, but his more popularly oriented War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires was available and I read it last night.…
War and Peace and War
“Are there ‘laws of history’, patterns or regularities that would let us make predictions? Karl Marx thought he saw a steady progression in history, leading inevitably to a future of world government by the workers. British historian Arnold Toynbee saw cyclic patterns in the rise and fall of civilisations.…
The Forecast I Made about Russia in 2004
In the previous post, Russia: Geography and Empire , I summarized my thoughts on how geography shaped Russian history, which came out in my popular book War and Peace and War .…
A Retrospective on War and Peace and War
Penguin Random House, which published my book War and Peace and War (henceforward, WPW) in 2005 decided that now is a good time to promote it. For a short time, the e-book version, sold on all different platforms, is priced at $1.99 .…
War and Peace and War: Two Decades Later
Recently there has been a lot of interest in translating my books into non-English languages, a development that I heartily welcome (I touched upon it in my previous post and in this one ).…