Media
Cliodynamics explains history scientifically: an interview with Peter Turchin
Seshat overall coordinator Peter Turchin explains that Seshat: Global History Databank is an integral part of an exciting new scientific approach to historical research—Cliodynamics. The job of Cliodynamics, according to Peter, is to use the scientific method to produce the data necessary to empirically test competing theories.
Load media from YouTube
The provider may receive technical information and set cookies when this media is loaded.
Outlet
Seshat: Global History Databank
Format
Video
Connections
Related work
Figuring Out the Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History
Discover the world records that define our history and jump headfirst into the past using scientific data that reveals accurate and insightful answers to life’s biggest questions.
What was history's biggest empire? Or the tallest building of the ancient world? What was the plumbing like in medieval Byzantium? The average wage in the Mughal Empire? Where did scientific writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ever ritual human sacrifice? We are used to thinking about history in terms of stories. Yet we understand our own world…
War and Peace and War
Empires rise and fall, populations and economies boom and bust, world religions spread or wither…
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…
Historical Dynamics
A Synthetic Approach to Historical Expansions and Contractions through Mathematical Modeling and Empirical Analysis
Why States Rise and Fall 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…
The Equinox2020 Seshat Data Release
This report describes the current canonical time-series dataset named “Equinox2020,” a subset of Seshat: Global History Databank data for a well-curated list of polities and variables available on the Seshat Data Browser. The report provides an introduction to the methods and procedures of the Seshat project relating to the curation and release of the Equinox2020 dataset.
Translating Knowledge about Past Societies into Seshat Data
The Seshat: Global History Databank was founded in 2011 with the goal of systematically collecting data about social, political, and economic organization of human societies and how they have evolved over time. From the beginning the first guiding principle of the Seshat project was to reflect the current state of knowledge about past societies as accurately as possible within practical constraints (I’ll discuss practical limitations later on). Second, and equally important, our aim for the database was to reflect not only what is known, but what is unknown, or poorly known.
Fitting Dynamic Regression Models to Seshat Data
This article presents a general statistical approach suitable for the analysis of time-resolved (time-series) cross-cultural data. The goal is to test theories about the evolutionary processes that generate cultural change. This approach allows us to investigate the effects of predictor variables (proxying for theory-suggested mechanisms), while controlling for spatial diffusion and autocorrelations due to shared cultural history (known as Galton’s Problem). It also fits autoregressive terms to account for serial correlations in the data and tests for nonlinear effects. I illustrate these ideas and methods with an analysis of processes that may influence the evolution of one component of social complexity, information systems, using the Seshat: Global History Databank.