Cliodynamics

Abstract

Olsson and Hibbs (2005) and Comin, Easterly, and Gong (2010) make persuasive theoretical and empirical cases for the persistence of early biogeographical and technological advantages in predicting the distribution of national economic wealth. However, these results are challenged with an examination of sixteen observations on economic complexity, GDP per capita, and city size spanning as much as ten millennia and eight to eleven regions. The regional complexity/wealth hierarchies are relatively stable only for finite intervals. Early advantages, thus, have some persistence but do not linger indefinitely. The rich do not always get richer or even stay rich, and the poor sometimes improve their standings in the world pecking order dramatically. Early advantages are important but need to be balanced with the periodic potential for over-riding them.

This paper contrasts the historical significance of the Indo-European to the non-Indo-European nomads. The impact of such nomadic peoples as the Scythians, Sogdians, Turks, and Huns never came close to the deep and lasting changes associated with the ‘Indo-Europeanization’ of the Occident. While Indo-Europeans were not the only people of the steppes organized as war bands bound together by oaths of aristocratic loyalty and fraternity, they thoroughly colonized Europe with their original pastoral package of wheel vehicles, horse-riding, and chariots, combined with the ‘secondary-products revolution.’ In contrast, the relationship between the non-Indo-European nomads with their more advanced sedentary neighbours was one of ‘symbiosis,’ ‘conflict,’ ‘trade,’ and ‘conquest,’ rather than dominion and cultural colonization.

Ricardo Duchesne’s reply to Martin Hewson’s review of his book, The Uniqueness of Western Civilization (2011), focuses on a number of important points concerning the impact of peoples speaking Indo-European languages in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. However, several of Duchesne’s key assertions need to be modified to accord with the data.

This is a commentary on Ricardo Duchesne's Forum article

There is now a huge literature attempting to explain the ‘Great Divergence’ between Europe and the rest of the world during the early modern period. The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne follows a distinct route in both framing the question and proposing an answer to it. I see two serious problems with Duchesne’s work. The first one is how he resolves the intrinsic tension between his ideological goals and the requirements of the scientific method. The second problematic aspect, which is shared by most of the broader literature on this topic, is that there are serious methodological difficulties in explaining unique historical events. This article discusses general approaches to the study of unique events, such as the Great Divergence. It also critiques two myths of European exceptionalism that are discussed by Duchesne and, even more importantly, still have broad currency in the historical literature: the supposed geographic uniqueness of Europe and the so-called Western Way of War.

This paper defends the ‘Kurgan hypothesis,’ the uniqueness of the epic heroic poetry of Indo-Europeans, and the uniqueness of Western civilization generally. The term ‘uniqueness’ is defined and associated with cultural creativity rather than with global economic and military dominance only.

The question of whether a given trait qualifies as an adaptation must be answered on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, a strong case can be made for species as primarily adapted to their environments. A similar argument can be made for human cultures as primarily adapted to their environments at the group level. The reason that human cultures are primarily adaptive at the group level is because the capacity for culture is itself a group-level adaptation. Establishing a consensus on human cultures as primarily adapted at the group level will enable human cultural diversity to be studied in the same way as biological diversity.

Recent debates on the SEF and in Steven Pinker’s Edge essay The false allure of group selection, and commentaries thereupon, seem to underplay one of the most important points about human societies, the interaction of, and often synergy between two major structural principles for organizing cooperation in human societies.

A Review Essay on Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (Random House, 2012)

A Review Essay on Hierarchy, History, and Human Nature: The Social Origins of Historical Consciousness by Donald E. Brown (University of Arizona Press, 1988)

A Review Essay on Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880 by Lance R. Blyth (University of Nebraska Press, 2012)