Secular Cycles

Malthusian cycles are political-demographic cycles that were typical for complex premodern societies. Due to a number of mechanisms, within the premodern social systems (and some would argue even in the 21st century), population growth tended to produce a set of imbalances and strains, eventually resulting in political-demographic collapses and substantial population decline. After stabilization, the population growth usually restarted— marking the beginning of a new Malthusian political demographic cycle. This entry provides an overview of elements of the Malthusian cycle dynamics, a consideration of its political aspects, a summary of theories and mathematical models that have been advanced to explain the Malthusian cycles, and a discussion of the escape from the Malthusian trap and its political consequences.

Page 1. 1 Natalia Komarova Andrey Korotayev Historical Population Dynamics: A Model of Pre-Industrial Demographic Cycle Introduction We believe that one of the most important recent findings in the study of the long-term dynamic social processes was the discovery of the demographic cycles as a basic feature of complex agrarian systems' dynamics.

Human society is a complex nonequilibrium system that changes and develops constantly. Complexity, multivariability, and contradictions of social evolution lead researchers to a logical conclusion that any simplification, reduction, or neglect of the multiplicity of factors leads inevitably to the multiplication of error and to significant misunderstanding of the processes under study. The view that any simple general laws are not observed at all with respect to social evolution has become totally dominant within the academic community, especially among those who specialize in the Humanities and who confront directly in their research the manifold unpredictability of social processes. A way to approach human society as an extremely complex system is to recognize differences of abstraction and time scale between different levels. If the main task of scientific analysis is to detect the main forces acting on systems so as to discover fundamental laws at a sufficiently coarse scale, then abstracting from details and deviations from general rules may help to identify measurable deviations from these laws in finer detail and shorter time scales. Modern achievements in the field of mathematical modeling suggest that social evolution can be described with rigorous and sufficiently simple macrolaws. The first book of the Introduction (Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth. Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2006) discusses general regularities of the World System long-term development. It is shown that they can be described mathematically in a rather accurate way with rather simple models. In this book the authors analyze more complex regularities of its dynamics on shorter scales, as well as dynamics of its constituent parts paying special attention to "secular" cyclical dynamics. It is shown that the structure of millennial trends cannot be adequately understood without secular cycles being taken into consideration. In turn, for an adequate understanding of cyclical dynamics the millennial trend background should be taken into account.

Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution, 2018

We adopt an imagined exchequer, the functionary responsible in an early polity for securing resources from its agrarian subjects, and we develop a feature-rich demographic and environmental model to explore the population ecology of agricultural production in the context of population growth, Malthusian constraints and economic exploitation. The model system allows us to (i) identify and characterize a peak of surplus production early in population growth, prior to density-dependent constraints and (ii) characterize the taxation potential of a population at its Malthusian equilibrium. For a fixed total level of taxation the exchequer has two options: a small population taxed at a high rate, unstable to small perturbations, or a larger population taxed at a lower rate, which is stable. In a small and growing population it is more effective to tax goods; as the population approaches its density-dependent equilibrium it becomes more effective to tax labor. We likewise show that early agrarian states afflicted by stochastic variation in agronomic output face an extinction risk dependent on the level of taxation and magnitude of yield variation. Successful agrarian states balanced resource exploitation against dynamic population ecology constraints; we propose that fiscal mismanagement should be among the hypotheses for polity failure.

2006

Human society is a complex nonequilibrium system that changes and develops constantly. Complexity, multivariability, and contradictions of social evolution lead researchers to a logical conclusion that any simplification, reduction, or neglect of the multiplicity of factors leads inevitably to the multiplication of error and to significant misunderstanding of the processes under study. The view that any simple general laws are not observed at all with respect to social evolution has become totally dominant within the academic community, especially among those who specialize in the Humanities and who confront directly in their research the manifold unpredictability of social processes. A way to approach human society as an extremely complex system is to recognize differences of abstraction and time scale between different levels. If the main task of scientific analysis is to detect the main forces acting on systems so as to discover fundamental laws at a sufficiently coarse scale, then abstracting from details and deviations from general rules may help to identify measurable deviations from these laws in finer detail and shorter time scales. Modern achievements in the field of mathematical modeling suggest that social evolution can be described with rigorous and sufficiently simple macrolaws. The first book of the Introduction (Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth. Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2006) discusses general regularities of the World System long-term development. It is shown that they can be described mathematically in a rather accurate way with rather simple models. In the second book (Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends. Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2006) the authors analyze more complex regularities of its dynamics on shorter scales, as well as dynamics of its constituent parts paying special attention to "secular" cyclical dynamics. It is shown that the structure of millennial trends cannot be adequately understood without secular cycles being taken into consideration. In turn, for an adequate understanding of cyclical dynamics the millennial trend background should be taken into account. In the present book the authors analyze the interplay of trend and cyclical dynamics in Egypt and Subsaharan Africa.

Quaternary International, 2017

Inferred European Holocene population size exhibits large fluctuations, particularly around the onset of farming. We attempt to find explanations for these fluctuations by employing the concept of cycling, especially that of the Adaptive Cycle. We base our analysis on chronologically and chorologically highly resolved ceramic and site data from the Linear Pottery culture (Germ. Linearbandkermik) of the early Neolithic of southwestern Central Europe. Typological seriation with dendrochronological anchor dates provides the age model for these data. Ceramic motifs are analysed with respect to the temporally changing diversity in decoration. The temporal sequence of major decoration motifs is interpreted as an indicator of social diversity: when stylistic diversity is low, social diversity is low and vice versa. The sequence of secondary decoration motifs is interpreted in terms of individual lineage emphasis: when this diversity is low, there is strong emphasis on individual lineage and vice versa. The diversity time series are complemented by a relative population size indicator derived from the count of occupational features. Diversity and population size share a shape that is typical for (part of) an Adaptive Cycle, and they differ in their positioning on the time axisdthey are time-lagged. By relating the different curves to the (metaphorical) stages of the Adaptive Cycle, we find that these cycles progress at non-identical speed in different aspects of a social system. By relating the social dynamics to well-dated and highly resolved climate fluctuation records, we find evidence that severe climate excursions shaped the location of tipping points in the social system and that these social tipping points precede inferred population decline by several generations.

Human society is a complex nonequilibrium system that changes and develops constantly. Complexity, multivariability, and contradictions of social evolution lead researchers to a logical conclusion that any simplification, reduction, or neglect of the multiplicity of factors leads inevitably to the multiplication of error and to significant misunderstanding of the processes under study. The view that any simple general laws are not observed at all with respect to social evolution has become totally dominant within the academic community, especially among those who specialize in the Humanities and who confront directly in their research the manifold unpredictability of social processes. A way to approach human society as an extremely complex system is to recognize differences of abstraction and time scale between different levels. If the main task of scientific analysis is to detect the main forces acting on systems so as to discover fundamental laws at a sufficiently coarse scale, then abstracting from details and deviations from general rules may help to identify measurable deviations from these laws in finer detail and shorter time scales. Modern achievements in the field of mathematical modeling suggest that social evolution can be described with rigorous and sufficiently simple macrolaws. The first book of the Introduction (Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth. Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2006) discusses general regularities of the World System long-term development. It is shown that they can be described mathematically in a rather accurate way with rather simple models. In the second book (Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends. Moscow: Editorial URSS, 2006) the authors analyze more complex regularities of its dynamics on shorter scales, as well as dynamics of its constituent parts paying special attention to "secular" cyclical dynamics. It is shown that the structure of millennial trends cannot be adequately understood without secular cycles being taken into consideration. In turn, for an adequate understanding of cyclical dynamics the millennial trend background should be taken into account. In this book the authors analyze the interplay of trend and cyclical dynamics in Egypt and Subsaharan Africa.

The present yearbook (which is the fourth in the series) is subtitled Trends & Cycles. It is devoted to cyclical and trend dynamics in society and nature; special attention is paid to economic and demographic aspects, in particular to the mathematical modeling of the Malthusian and post-Malthusian traps' dynamics. An increasingly important role is played by new directions in historical research that study long-term dynamic processes and quantitative changes. This kind of history can hardly develop without the application of mathematical methods. There is a tendency to study history as a system of various processes, within which one can detect waves and cycles of different lengths – from a few years to several centuries, or even millennia. The contributions to this yearbook present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of global historical, political, economic and demographic processes, as well as their mathematical models. This issue of the yearbook consists of three main sections: (I) Long-Term Trends in Nature and Society; (II) Cyclical Processes in Pre-industrial Societies; (III) Contemporary History and Processes. We hope that this issue of the yearbook will be interesting and useful both for historians and mathematicians, as well as for all those dealing with various social and natural sciences.

2009