The Rise and Fall of Empires Why do large territorial states tend to arise on steppe frontiers?

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The Rise and Fall of EmpiresWhy do large
territorial states tend to arise on steppe
frontiers?

• Peter Turchin
• University of Connecticut
• Binghamton, November 2007

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The Puzzle of Empire

• We are fascinated with why empires decline and
  fall
• But a much more challenging question is how large
  territorial states are possible in the first
  place
• Preindustrial world was one of many small-scale
  societies and few large empires
• Even in regions where large states repeatedly
  arose fragmentation was the rule
• What were the social forces that kept together
  huge states controlling 106 km2 of territory and
  108 people?

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A strong empirical pattern Spatial distribution
of "imperiogenesis"

• Database largest territorial polities
• excluding modern sea-based empires
• Source Taagepera, supplemented
• Cut-off point territory 1 Mm2 (106 km2) at
  peak
• More than 60 such polities are known
• only 1 (Inca) outside Afroeurasia

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Largest territorial polities tend to arise at
interfaces between settled and nomadic societies

• Not a strict "law", but rather a statistical
  correlation
• Several "hotspots" of imperiogenesis and upsweeps
  in max. territorial size
• Mesopotamia and Iran
• Northern India
• Northern China

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How can we explain this pattern?

• Karl Wittfogel Oriental despotism in
  hydraulic empires
• But irrigation played no significant role in the
  rise of Chinese empires
• an even stronger counterexample is Russia
• Futhermore, an explanation relying on coercion
  (despotism) as the glue that holds together
  societies and states does not make sociological
  sense
• in fact, no rational choice explanation works
  (rewards, punishments)

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Theories of social evolutionWhat is the basis
of social life?

• Coercion (by a sovereign)
• Social contract
• Reciprocity
• Kin selection
• The theory of multilevel selection
• D.S. Wilson, Boyd, Richerson, Bowles

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Key adaptations enabled the evolution of human
ultrasociality

• The moralist strategy
• cooperate when enough members in the group are
  also cooperating
• punish those who dont cooperate
• Symbolic markers for defining cooperating groups
• enabled evolution to break through the limits of
  face-to-face interactions

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Groups in sociology

• The key to understanding social life lies with
  the analysis of groups rather than individuals
• (Hechter 1987)
• Historical dynamics can be understood as a result
  of competition and conflict between groups
• The winners are those groups that are better
  integrated at the micro level by cooperation
  among their members
• Paradoxically, within-group cooperation is the
  basis of intergroup conflict (up to genocide)

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Cooperation is the glue of society

• The nonobvious sociological insight
• (Collins 1992)
• Emile Durkheim
• Ibn Khaldun
• Asabiya
• capacity of a group for collective action
• need a theory for the dynamics of asabiya
• why it increases and why decreases

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Insights from the theory of multilevel selection

• Evolution of cooperation is favored
• where intergroup conflict is very intense
• where intragroup competition is muted
• where cultural variation is high
• Historically, such conditions were prevalent at
  metaethnic frontiers
• areas where an imperial boundary coincides with a
  fault line between two metaethnic communities
  (civilizations)

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Metaethnic frontiers as pressure cookers of
asabiya

• External threat military pressure from the
  empire
• The attraction of imperial wealth
• Continuous conflict gt low population density,
  low intragroup competition
• Integration of ethnically similar groups on the
  same side of the faultline
• Scaling-up structures and techniques
• the key role of symbolic markers
• the stairway effect (V.F. Turchin 1977)

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The "Mirror Empires" Model

• A steppe frontier between settled
  agriculturalists and nomadic pastoralists
• Starting point small-scale polities on
  both sides of the frontier
• Pastoralists enjoy preponderance of military
  power need the products of agriculture

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Outcome

• An agrarian empire and a nomadic imperial
  confederation arise simultaneously in a mirror
  fashion
• The process occurs in a series of steps of
  increasing territorial size and social complexity
• A positive feedback loop (self-feeding process)
• Runaway territorial growth is eventually stopped
  by space or logistic limits

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The East Asian Imperiogenesis Hotspot Empirical
Patterns

• 14 unifications of China from the Shang to
  Communist eras (some partial)
• (E.N. Anderson, supplemented)
• Summary
• 8 unifications from NW (usually, Wei RV)
• 3 unifications from NE (Liao, Manchuria)
• 2 unifications from NC (Huang He)
• 1 unification from SC (Nanjing)

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Unifications of EgyptAlexander Nemirovsky
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The metaethnic frontier theory a more
quantitative test

• Focus on Europe, 11900 BCE
• Approach discretize space into 50 regions and
  time into 19 centuries
• Determine whether the presence of frontier is
  associated with a subsequent rise of a large
  state in the region or not

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Results Europe, 11000 CE
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Results Europe, 1000-2000 CE
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Main ideas of the talk

• Cooperation is the basis of society
• Asabiya the capacity for collective action
• Metaethnic frontiers asabiya grows
• Imperial cores asabiya declines
• Steppe frontiers where we see recurrent
  formation of large imperial states (and nomadic
  imperial confederations)