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War and Peace and War

The Rise and Fall of Empires

Author Peter Turchin

Paperback

$18.00 US

Penguin Adult HC/TR | Plume

On sale Feb 27, 2007 | 416 Pages | 9780452288195

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From the author of End Times

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.

War And Peace And WarList of Maps

Introduction
"So Peace Brings Warre and Warre Brings Peace"

Part I. Imperiogenesis—The Rise of Empires

1. A Band of Adventurers Defeats a Kingdom
Ermak's Conquering Cossacks

2. Life on the Edge
The Transformation of Russia—and America

3. Slaughter in the Forest
At the Limites of the Roman Empire

4. Asabiya in the Desert
Ibn Khaldun Discovers the Key to History

5. The Myth of Self-Interest
And the Science of Cooperation

6. Born to Be Wolves
The Origins of Rome

7. A Medieval Black Hole
The Rise of the Great European Powers on Carolingian Marches

Part II. Imperiopathosis—The Fall of Empires

8. The Other Side of the Wheel of Fortune
From the Glorious Thirteenth Century into the Abyss of the Fourteenth

9. A New Idea of Renaissance
Why Human Conflict Is Like a Forest Fire and an Epidemic

10. The Matthew Principle
Why the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Poorer

11. Wheels Within Wheels
The Many Declines of the Roman Empire

Part III. Cliodynamics—A New Kind of History

12. War and Peace and Particles
The Science of History

13. The Bowling Alley in History
Measuring the Decline of Social Capital

14. The End of Empire?
How the Mobile Phone Is Changing Cliodynamics

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Peter Turchin is Project Leader at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, Research Associate at University of Oxford, and Emeritus Professor at the University of Connecticut. Trained as a theoretical biologist, he is now working in the field of historical social science that he and his colleagues call Cliodynamics. Currently his main research effort is directed at coordinating CrisisDB, a massive historical database of societies sliding into a crisis—and then emerging from it. His books include Ultrasociety and Ages of Discord. View titles by Peter Turchin