Journal ArticleDOI
A theory for formation of large empires
TLDR
This article proposed a mirror-empire model to explain the emergence of mega-empires in the steppe region of eastern Asia, and found that over 90% of the world's megaregions arose within or next to the arid belt running from the Sahara to the Gobi.Abstract:
Between 3000 BCE and 1800 CE there were more than sixty ‘mega-empires’ that, at the peak, controlled an area of at least one million square kilometres. What were the forces that kept together such huge pre-industrial states? I propose a model for one route to mega-empire, motivated by imperial dynamics in eastern Asia, the world region with the highest concentration of mega-empires. This ‘mirror-empires’ model proposes that antagonistic interactions between nomadic pastoralists and settled agriculturalists result in an autocatalytic process, which pressures both nomadic and farming polities to scale up polity size, and thus military power. The model suggests that location near a steppe frontier should correlate with the frequency of imperiogenesis. A worldwide survey supports this prediction: over 90% of mega-empires arose within or next to the Old World’s arid belt, running from the Sahara desert to the Gobi desert. Specific case studies are also plausibly explained by this model. There are, however, other possible mechanisms for generating empires, of which a few are discussed at the end of the article.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
The cultural evolution of prosocial religions.
Ara Norenzayan,Azim F. Shariff,Will M. Gervais,Aiyana K. Willard,Rita Anne McNamara,Edward Slingerland,Joseph Henrich +6 more
TL;DR: It is explained how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict.
Journal ArticleDOI
Cultural group selection plays an essential role in explaining human cooperation: A sketch of the evidence.
Peter J. Richerson,Ryan Baldini,Adrian Bell,Kathryn Demps,Karl Frost,Vicken Hillis,Sarah Mathew,Emily K. Newton,Nicole Naar,Lesley Newson,Cody T. Ross,Paul E. Smaldino,Timothy M. Waring,Matthew R. Zefferman +13 more
TL;DR: This target article sketches the evidence from five domains that bear on the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation and presents evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and argues that it is not clear that any extant alternative tocultural group selection can be a complete explanation.
Book
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
TL;DR: The "Four Horsemen" of leveling-mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues-have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies
TL;DR: A model that uses cultural evolution mechanisms to predict where and when the largest-scale complex societies should have arisen in human history supports theories that emphasize the role of institutions in state-building and suggests a possible explanation why a long history of statehood is positively correlated with political stability, institutional quality, and income per capita.
References
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Book
Foundations of Social Theory
TL;DR: In this article, a new approach to describing both stability and change in social systems by linking the behavior of individuals to organizational behavior is proposed. But the approach is not suitable for large-scale systems.
Book
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
TL;DR: In this paper, secondary sexual characters of fishes, amphibians and reptiles are presented. But the authors focus on the secondary sexual characteristics of fishes and amphibians rather than the primary sexual characters.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex
TL;DR: The Descent of Man, and Selection in relation to Sex as mentioned in this paper, by Charles Darwin, &c. In two volumes. Pp. 428, 475, as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Ethnic Origins of Nations
Richard Jenkins,Anthony D. Smith +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the Durability of ethnic communities in pre-modern and modern history, including the formation of small nations, and their formation in the modern era.
Book
The ethnic origins of nations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the Durability of ethnic communities in pre-modern and modern history, including the formation of small nations, and their formation in the modern era.