Luke Kemp
Feature, BBC contributors
An analysis of hundreds of pre-modern states shows that civilization usually has a "shelf life"—a pattern that teaches a lesson to today's aging world powers.
The rise and fall of great powers is a cliché in history.
The idea that civilizations, states or societies develop and fall apart is a common one.
But is it true?
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As a group of archaeologists, historians and complexity scientists, we decided to put this idea to the test.
We have conducted the largest study to date to see if the aging of society can be seen in a historical context.
Our results, published in PNAS, the official journal of the US National Academy of Sciences, suggest that states do indeed age, gradually becoming more prone to shut down after some time.
Could there be some lessons hidden there for today?
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Mortality state
Defining civilizations and societies is difficult, and the latter often carries with it an unpleasant burden.
Instead, we have limited our analysis to pre-modern "states": centralized organizations that enforce rules over a given territory and population (much like nation-states such as the United States and China today).
We applied a statistical approach to two different databases.
We created our own "state mortality" data set (Moros, named after the Greek god of doom) containing 324 states over a period of 3.000 years (from 2.000 BC to 1800 AD).
It is compiled from numerous other databases, encyclopedias of empires and many other sources.
We also used the Sehat data bank, the world's largest online repository of historical information maintained by archaeologists and historians, which contained 291 polis.
Our approach used a technique called "survival analysis".
We collected the life expectancy of those countries and analyzed the expansion of their life expectancy.
If there is no aging effect, then we can expect a "timeless" distribution in which the probability of a state's death is the same in the first as in the 100th year.
One previous study of 42 empires came to exactly the same conclusion.
In our largest data set, however, we observed a different pattern.
In both databases, the risk of death increased in the first two centuries and then plateaued at a high level thereafter.
Our findings mirror another recent analysis of more than 168 cases of historical crises.
The average policy duration in their crisis database was approximately 201 years.
This aging trend was present even when we excluded dynasties.
Dynasties are built on family lines and are usually short-lived, often disintegrating due to succession disputes or when family lines lose power.
Our findings support the promising studies on "critical deceleration".
Before a complex system undergoes a massive structural change or "tipping point," it often begins to recover from crises more slowly.
The aging human body is very much like that: injuries leave a bigger mark when you're older.
We now have evidence of such critical decelerations for two distinct historical groups: the first agriculturalists of Neolithic Europe, and the pueblo societies of the American Northwest.
About 4.000-8.000 years ago, Neolithic farmers spread through present-day Turkey through Europe.
They went through periodic crises in which conflicts and wars broke out, accompanied by declines in population and agricultural locations, and a shift away from grain cultivation.
Pueblo societies were the corn farmers who erected the largest non-earthen structures in the US and Canada before the steel-framed skyscrapers of 19th-century Chicago.
The inhabitants of the pueblos also went through several cycles of growth and decline, all of which ended with crisis events around 700, 890, 1145 and 1285 AD.
During all these events, population, corn and urbanism declined, while violence increased.
On average, these cycles took two centuries to play out, consistent with the broader patterns we found.
In both Europe's first agriculturalists and pueblos, populations recovered more slowly from shocks such as droughts immediately preceding their decline.
There are a number of fences we need to be aware of.
First, the dying of states takes many forms.
There, a change in the ruling elite can simply occur, such as a coup d'état by a warlord.
Or there may be a disintegration of society, which includes the permanent loss of government, writings, monumental buildings, or population decline, as happened with Mycenaean Greece.
Even among those that suffered complete decline, many communities survived and even flourished.
These deaths are not necessarily a bad thing.
Many pre-modern states were extremely unequal and aggressive.
By one estimate, the late Western Roman Empire was three-quarters of the way to the maximum level of wealth inequality theoretically possible (with one individual holding all the excess wealth).
Second, our figures are based on widely accepted start and end dates in the historical and archaeological records.
They are often contested.
For example, did the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) end in 1453 with the fall of its capital Constantinople, or the sacking of Constantinople and its territories by the Crusaders in 1204, or the massive loss of territory to the Islamic Caliphates during the 7th century?
In order to resolve this more easily, we used both upper and lower estimates, both for the beginning and for the end of a country.
Despite such limitations, this is the largest study to date, and the findings from the two large data sets were very similar.
That is, for now, the most comprehensive answer we have.
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The next steps will be to investigate what promotes the longevity of society, and what causes its increasing vulnerability.
States could lose resilience over time due to various factors.
Growing inequality, extractive institutions and conflicts between elites could intensify social frictions over time.
Environmental degradation can undermine the ecosystems on which polities depend.
Perhaps the risk of disease and conflict increases as urban areas become more densely populated?
Or the reason for the loss of resistance could be a mixture of different causes.
Is our modern world getting old?
Do aging patterns in pre-modern states have any relevance to the present moment?
We think they could have.
It is not clear whether the entire system of the world today is a victim of the same patterns that we have identified.
However, the world is certainly not immune to increasing inequality, environmental degradation and elite competition - all factors suggested as precursors to decline earlier in human history.
Globally, the richest one percent own almost half of the world's wealth, while the bottom half owns about 0,75 percent of it.
Climate change has never been seen before and is happening faster than the warming that caused the worst mass extinction in the history of the planet.
Six of the nine key Earth systems that the world relies on have been brought into the high-risk zone.
At the same time, the conflict between the economic elites helped lead to a deeper polarization of mistrust among many countries.
Unlike the countries we studied, the world is now hyper-connected and globalized - but that should not be a reason for comfort.
And while the weakening and death of a state is not usually reflected in the wider world, the instability of a superpower, such as the US, can trigger a domino effect beyond its borders.
And covid-19 and the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. XNUMX have shown that interconnectedness can amplify shocks during periods of crisis.
We see this in many other complex systems.
Densely interconnected ecosystems such as coral reefs are better at absorbing minor shocks, but they usually prepare and spread out enough for big shocks.
Most of today's states are markedly different from the empires of the past.
Industrial production, vast technological capabilities, as well as professional bureaucracies and police forces are likely to create more stable, resilient states.
However, our technology also brings new threats and sources of vulnerability, such as nuclear weapons and the faster spread of pathogens.
We must also refrain from celebrating or encouraging the establishment of authoritarian or malevolent regimes.
Resilience and longevity are not de facto positive qualities.
However, we hope that understanding the long-term history can help to avoid the mistakes of the past, among them a potential source of aging society.
*Luke Kemp is a research fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study and a research associate at the Center for Existential Risk Studies at the University of Cambridge. His first book, "Goliath's Curse: The Deep History of the Fall of Societies and What It Means for Our Future" will be published in May 2025 by Penguin Random House.
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