End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration To be published on June 13, 2023 by Penguin Random House “History is not just one damn thing after another,” British historian Arnold Toynbee once quipped in response to a critic. For a long time, Toynbee’s op

The publisher of the Japanese translation of Ages of Discord (about to be published) requested a foreword, which presented me with a welcome opportunity to review how this book has fared, and to place it within my overall—long-term—research program attempting to understand the causes

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). Earlier this month, Warsaw Enterprise Institute published a Polish translation of War and Peace

Readers of this blog have, no doubt, noticed that over the past year, or more, my posts here have been few and far in between. I have also been turning down 99% of requests for interviews and public lectures. The reason is that I have taken on too many projects—more than I can deal wi

Almuzara is about to publish a Spanish translation of my book Historical Dynamics. When they asked for a foreword to the Spanish edition, I realized that it has already been 20 years since I wrote Historical Dynamics. So this foreword serves as a kind of retrospective. Here’s th

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. If you haven’t read it, get it now while the promot

Philosophers, historians, and social scientists have proposed a multitude of different theories trying to explain the rise of huge complex human societies over the past few millennia. Was the primary driver the invention of agriculture, which seems to be the default explanation held b

Earlier this year I was asked to serve on a Cultural Evolution Society committee tasked with developing a strategy for the Society’s publications. The most important issue is whether the Society should publish its own academic journal, and if yes, how. Generally speaking launching a j

It’s been a long haul. Six years ago we launched the project that we eventually named Seshat: Global History Databank. Three years ago, following a series of workshops that designed the overall structure of the databank, we started collecting data. By January 2015 we had 30,000 record

A senior colleague from my ecology days wrote to me with a request for a PDF reprint of an article I published in 1991. The article came out in Ecology, the flagship journal of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). When I published it, Ecology was an independent journal produced by