The long-term development of political systems over extended time periods has been somewhat neglected. More People, Fewer States examines world history through population explosion and empire size changes across 5000 years of socio-technological development, revealing three distinct phases: Runner, Rider, and Engineer empires. A careful comparative approach reveals that Old Egypt, Achaemenid, Caliphate, Mongol, and Britain each achieved remarkable yet rarely acknowledged expansions, leading to their successive record empire sizes. If identified past trends persist, a potential single world state could emerge by 4600, although environmental concerns may intervene. Focusing on population dynamics and area metrics of states, this book provides a novel framework for evaluating the growth, structure, and decline of empires. It not only illuminates ancient historical space but also ventures into future projections, making it an essential read for scholars interested in the long-term evolution of political systems.
Delve into an exploration of 5000 years of global history, meticulously examining the growth, structure, and decline of empires and states amidst world population boom and socio-technological progress. this book offers a non-western periodization of world history, providing insights into the past while projecting visions for the future.
Arvustused
'Rein Taagepera and Miroslav Nemok present, document, and discuss an extremely important historical trend: the enlarging size of political communities. In addition, they cautiously present intriguing extrapolations for future developments. The topic is fascinating, and the authors' treatment is superior to everything written before. This should become a reference book with long-term validity.' Josep M. Colomer, Georgetown University 'Taagepera and Nemok have produced a masterful synthesis of history, anthropology, political science, geography, and applied mathematics that spans the globe and millennia of human existence to generalize about how population size and the number (and nature) of polities are systematically related. The book is chock-full of findings that will enlighten and often surprise, along with important cautions about what the uncovered trends may portend for humanity's future.' Matthew S. Shugart, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, Davis 'This book summarizes and extends Rein Taagepera's earlier prodigious quantitative comparative studies of the territorial sizes of empires and puts his results in a larger anthropological comparative framework that also considers primate groups, tribes, and chiefdoms. The methodological approach combines careful estimations of quantitative measures that make it possible to compare the scales and temporal changes in scale across cultures and civilizations over a very long period up to the present. This volume also adds the study of populations of polities and the sizes of cities which provides new insights into the timing and location of the upsweeps and down-sweeps of scale. This produces original insights about the nature of sociocultural evolution that have important implications for the future.' Christopher Chase-Dunn, University of California, Riverside
Muu info
Explore 5000 years of human history, shaped by population surges and empires' rise and fall, both driven by socio-technological advancements.
1. More People and yet Fewer States;
2. Two Phases in World Population
Growth: A Novel Visualization and a Logical Model;
3. Did Written Records
Give a New Boost to Population Growth?
4. From Populations to Empires and The
Role of Technology;
5. Empires: Definitions, Measurements, and Growth-Decline
Curves;
6. Talkers, Doers, Regulators, and Followers: A Conceptual Framework
for States;
7. From Pecking Order to Political Order;
8. Runner Empires
(-3000 to -600);
9. Early Rider Empires (-600 to +600);
10. An Apparent
Dead-End: Republics;
11. Stirrup Empires (600 to 1200);
12. The Last Rider
Empires (1200 to 1800);
13. Engineer Empires (from 1800 on);
14. How Top
States Have Become Larger;
15. How the Number of States Has Decreased and
What's Ahead;
16. Population Density, and Connecting World and Top State
Populations;
17. Growth-Decline Patterns and Durations of Empires;
18. Empire
Shapes, Languages, and Reigns;
19. Cities and Empires;
20. How History Fades
and Expands;
21. The Future of the Super-Cancer of the of Biosphere.
Rein Taagepera, Ph.D. in physics, received in 2008 the Johan Skytte Prize, the largest in political science worldwide. His books include Predicting Party Sizes (2007), Making Social Sciences More Scientific (2008), and (with Matthew Shugart) Votes from Seats: Logical Models of Electoral Systems (2017). Miroslav Nemok is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science, University of Oslo. His research addresses a variety of topics ranging from comparative political institutions and party politics to the people's experiences with political systems which all tackle the question: why people support democratic systems?
