War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

Peter Turchin

Penguin, Feb 27, 2007 - History - 416 pages

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. 

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Urquhart - LibraryThing

War and Peace and War –The Life Cycle of Imperial Nations by Peter Turchin This wonderful book receives four out of five stars. It is wonderful in its breadth and depth of material covered, and ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - abuannie - LibraryThing

Great Britain was arguably the largest empire ever created, but Turchin doesn't discuss it at all (1 sentence). Why? It doesn't conform to his thesis of empire formation along metaethnic boundaries.

About the author

Peter Turchin is an evolutionary anthropologist and one of the founders of the new field of historical social science, Cliodynamics (peterturchin.com/cliodynamics/). His research interests lie at the intersection of social and cultural evolution, historical macrosociology, economic history and cliometrics, mathematical modeling of long-term social processes, and the construction and analysis of historical databases. Peter Turchin is a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, a research associate in the School of Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and the vice president of the Evolution Institute. More information is available at peterturchin.com.

Bibliographic information

• Title: War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires
• Author: Peter Turchin
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Penguin, 2007
• ISBN: 1101126914, 9781101126912
• Length: 416 pages
• Subjects: History / Military / Ancient; History / World; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social