Cliodynamics

This essay relates Peter Turchin’s The Great Holocene Transformation (2025) (GHT) to the development of “universal history” as a genre of scholarship. It identifies a paradox: while unprecedented datasets and computational methods now make systematic planetary history possible, academic historians remain disengaged from complexity science approaches. Citation analysis documents detachment rooted in methodological divides. This mutual isolation deprives historians of much-needed theoretical frameworks and limits complexity science’s influence on historical scholarship. Meanwhile, it may finally have become possible to develop a new form of “universal history” that draws on standardized datasets and computational analysis. In order to succeed, this would require the lowering of barriers to engagement across fields, a process in which AI may have an important role to play