Economist
Figuring Out the Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics That Explain World History
Key Metrics
- Peter Turchin
- Economist
- Paperback
- 9781541762688
- 8.2 X 5.4 X 0.7 inches
- 0.65 pounds
- Reference > Trivia
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
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 through data: cast arrays of statistics that reveal the workings of our societies. In Figuring Out the Past, radical historians Peter Turchin and Dan Hoyer dive into the numbers that reveal the true shape of the past, drawing on their own Seshat project, a staggeringly ambitious attempt to log every data point that can be gathered for every society that has ever existed. This book does more than tell the story of humanity: it shows you the big picture, by the numbers.
Author Bio
Peter Turchin is a complexity scientist who works in the field of historical social science that he and his colleagues call Cliodynamics. His research interests lie at the intersection of social and cultural evolution, historical macrosociology, economic history, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases.
Currently he investigates a set of broad and interrelated questions: How do human societies evolve? In particular, what processes explain the evolution of ultrasociality—our capacity to cooperate in huge anonymous societies of millions? Why do we see such a staggering degree of inequality in effectiveness of governance and economic performance among nations?
Peter has published two hundred articles, including a dozen in such top journals as Nature, Science, and PNAS (see Academic Publications). His publications are frequently cited and in 2004 he was designated as “Highly Cited Researcher” by ISIHighlyCited.com.
He has authored eight books (see Books), including
- Secular Cycles (with Sergey Nefedov, Princeton, 2009), War and Peace and War (Penguin, 2005),
- Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth and
- Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History.
Source: PeterTurchin.com
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