Historians and social scientists have long been preoccupied with understanding and documenting periods of crisis. Such emphasis is only growing, and becoming more pressing, as the world continues to face a number of interrelated stressors in the form of irreversible climate change, major ecological shocks and disease outbreaks, eruptions of military violence, economic disruptions and deepening inequalities, political polarization and unrest, the rise of authoritarian and nationalist regimes. Crises in these domains are not new, but have been recurrent features of past societies. Although these periods have typically led to massive loss of life, the failure of critical institutions, and even complete societal collapse, there are instances in the historical record of societies managing to turn the tide of crisis even as violence and social turmoil grow. Here, we focus on four such cases of crises mitigated with structural reforms revealed from our previous historical analyses: early Republican Rome, mid-19th century England and Russia, USA during the the late 20th to early 21st centuries. Utilizing structural demographic theory as a lens to explore these cases, we seek to expose the pressures that built up leading to crisis and the early signs of violent confrontation revealed by these societies, as well as to examine the conditions and key decisions made in the midst of this unrest that allowed these societies to turn the tide and enact significant structural adaptations. Our findings have clear relevance to understanding and navigating similar crises in contemporary societies.

Non-technical summary This study combines revolutionary theory with emerging polycrisis discourses to show how various international and national factors and events can become intertwined, creating polycrisis events that can lead to revolutionary moments. Revolutionary moments can further contribute to stresses that cause polycrisis or systemic dysfunction elsewhere, due to our entanglement of global systems. Through the help of two case studies, the Young Turk Revolution and the Arab Spring, this study highlights how revolutions emerge and how they can unfold in the future.Technical summary Revolutions - the overthrow or unseating of governmental forces through mass mobilization - have played a crucial role in major societal transformations throughout history (Lawson, 2019, Anatomies of revolution; Goldstone, 2014, Revolutions: A very short introduction). One component of revolutionary theory, past and present, are the ways different factors and forces interact to create revolutionary moments, specifically how international/transnational and internal societal events interconnect to generate revolutionary situations, trajectories, and outcomes. Revolutionary theorist George Lawson (2019) notes that global networks are intermeshed in that they can produce multiple, complex stressors and triggers that cause revolution in what he terms an 'inter-social approach'. Building on these insights, we argue here through the case studies of the Young Turk Revolution and Arab Spring that the conceptualization of polycrisis as a causal entanglement of crises in multiple global systems provides a critical lens to understand revolutions.Social media summary In an age of polycrisis, risk of revolution increases. Explore how revolutions form and learn their future paths.

The scientific understanding of the complex dynamics of global history – from the rise and spread of states to their declines and falls, from their peaceful interactions with economic or diplomatic exchanges to violent confrontations – requires, at its core, a consistent and explicit encoding of historical political entities, their locations, extents and durations. Numerous attempts have been made to produce digital geographical compendia of polities with different time depths and resolutions. Most have been limited in scope and many of the more comprehensive geospatial datasets must either be licensed or are stored in proprietary formats, making access for scholarly analysis difficult. To address these issues we have developed Cliopatria, a comprehensive open-source geospatial dataset of worldwide states, political groups, events, and rulers from 3400BCE to 2024CE. Presently it comprises over 1600 political entities sampled at varying timesteps and spatial scales. Here, we discuss its construction, its scope, and its current limitations.

Societal "crises" are periods of turmoil and destabilization in sociocultural, political, economic, and other systems, often accompanied by violent power struggles, and sometimes significant changes in social structure. The extensive literature analyzing societal crises has concentrated on a relatively small sample of well-known cases (such as the fall of the Roman Empire), emphasizing separate aspects of these events as potential causes or consistent effects. To investigate crises in an even-handed fashion, and to avoid the potential small-sample-size bias present in several previous studies, we have created the Crisis Database (CrisisDB). CrisisDB uniformly characterizes a sample of 168 historical cases spanning millennia - from the prehistoric to the post-industrial - and varying polity complexities in diverse global regions. It features data on factors that are identified as relevant to explaining societal crises and significant "consequences" (such as warfare or epidemics), including institutional and cultural reforms (such as constitutional changes) that might occur during and immediately following the crisis period. Here, we study some examples from the CrisisDB and demonstrate our analyses, which show that the consequences of crisis experienced in each society are highly variable. The outcomes are uncorrelated with one another and, overall, the set of consequences is largely unpredictable, leading us to conclude that there is no "typical" societal crisis of the past. We offer some alternative suggestions about the forces that might propel, or mitigate, these varying consequences, highlighting areas that would benefit from future exploration, and the need for collaborative and interdisciplinary work on the study of crises.

Numerous researchers from various disciplines have explored commonalities and divergences in the evolution of complex social formations. Here, we explore whether there is a "characteristic" time course for the evolution of social complexity in a handful of different geographic areas. Data from the Seshat: Global History Databank is shifted so that the overlapping time series can be fitted to a single logistic regression model for all 23 geographic areas under consideration. The resulting regression shows convincing out-of-sample predictions, and its period of extensive growth in social complexity can be identified via bootstrapping as a time interval of roughly 2,500 years. To analyze the endogenous growth of social complexity, each time series is restricted to a central time interval without major disruptions in cultural or institutional continuity, and both approaches result in a similar logistic regression curve. Our results suggest that these different areas have indeed experienced a similar course in the their evolution of social complexity, but that this is a lengthy process involving both internal developments and external influences.

The term ‘polycrisis’ is gaining attention among academics, policymakers, and the public. Unlike a single crisis, a polycrisis involves complex, interconnected risks across multiple regions and systems, often including ecological factors. This interconnectedness heightens the chances of widespread adverse outcomes or disasters, affecting various systems and triggering cascading effects. The article examines how traditional disaster studies concepts must be adapted for the polycrisis context and places historical events on a spectrum of such critical moments. It concludes with recommendations for communities to build resilience and respond democratically to these challenges. The term ‘polycrisis’ has entered the lexicon of a growing circle of academics, policymakers, and the public. Polycrisis is a state that encompasses a complex set of risks characterized by multiple, macroregional, and often ecologically embedded linkages between inexorably interconnected systems. The article reevaluates disaster studies concepts within this polycrisis framework, locates historical events along a spectrum of such moments, and offers recommendations for democratic resilience. Discover how the term ‘polycrisis’ redefines our understanding of interconnected risks and informs new disaster response methods.

Scholars from a wide array of disciplines have sought to identify the core features underpinning cohesion and cooperation within increasingly large, complex, and internally diverse societies. Previous work has suggested that as societies grow in scale and complexity, extreme forms of inequality no longer provide a viable method of maintaining cohesion and cooperation. The relationship between these supposedly critical features, however, has not been subjected to large-scale systematic analysis. Here, we investigate the rise, spread, and impact of cooperation-promoting institutions and ideologies in a global sample of past societies. We find a clear divergence in the evolutionary trajectories of these traits: on one hand, certain ideological features relating to the adoption of moralizing religions, increasing complexity and professionalization of governmental administration, and maintenance of public goods clearly arise and spread alongside increases in social scale; on the other, ideologies and institutions limiting rulers’ power and authority are not uniformly characteristic of larger-scale societies. We discuss a range of possible interpretations for these patterns, noting that the forces driving these developments may operate on different scales of analysis and time-courses and suggest tentative explanations for these critical dynamics.

Societal ‘crises’ are periods of turmoil and destabilization in socio-cultural, political, economic, and other systems, often accompanied by varying amounts of violence and sometimes significant changes in social structure. The extensive literature analyzing societal crises has concentrated on relatively few historical examples (large-scale events such the fall of the Roman Empire or the French and Russian Revolutions) emphasizing different aspects of these events as potential causes or consistent effects. To investigate crises and prior approaches to explaining them, and to avoid a potential small-sample size bias present in several previous studies, we sought to uniformly characterize a substantial collection of historical crises, spanning millennia, from the prehistoric to post-industrial, and afflicting a wide range of polities in diverse global regions; the Crisis Database (CrisisDB). Here, we describe this dataset which comprises 168 crises suggested by historians and characterized by a number of significant 'consequences' (such as civil war, epidemics, or loss of population) including also institutional and cultural reforms (for example improved sufferance or constitutional changes) that might occur during and immediately following the crisis period. Our analyses show that the consequences experienced by each crisis is highly variable. The outcomes themselves are uncorrelated with one another and, overall, the set of consequences is largely unpredictable when compared to other large-scale properties of society suggested by previous scholars such as its territorial size, religion, administrative size, or historical recency. We conclude that there is no ‘typical’ societal crisis of the past, but crisis situations can take a variety of different directions. We offer some suggestions on the forces that might drive these varying consequences for exploration in future work.

Our target article empirically tested the Big Gods Hypothesis which proposes that beliefs in moralizing supernatural punishment (MSP) contributed to the evolution of socio-political complexity (SPC) in world history. We tested this hypothesis using a suite of measures of MSP, SPC, and other potential evolutionary drivers coded in Seshat: Global History Databank. Our analyses indi-cate that intensity of warfare and productivity of agriculture were major drivers in the evolution of both SPC and MSP. The correlation between social complexity and moralizing religion resulted from shared evolutionary drivers, rather than from direct causal relationships between these two variables. Most commentaries on the target article broadly accept our conclusions, but some argue that alternative measures might be used in future studies before the Big Gods Hypothesis can be conclusively rejected. In this response, we argue that while some of these alternative measures should be developed, they are closely related to the ones we have already adopted. Thus, it seems unlikely that further research will give rise to substantially di ff erent outcomes. A particularly fruitful aspect of the discussion is that it illustrates both the pitfalls and productive a ff or-dances of transdisciplinary research that seeks to bridge the “ two cultures ” of the humanities and sciences. Our target article has

Climate variability and natural hazards like floods and earthquakes can act as environmental shocks or socioecological stressors leading to instability and suffering throughout human history. Yet, societies experience a wide range of outcomes when facing such challenges: some suffer from social unrest, civil violence, or complete collapse; others prove more resilient and maintain key social functions. We currently lack a clear, generally agreed-upon conceptual framework and evidentiary base to explore what causes these divergent outcomes. Here, we discuss efforts to develop such a framework through the Crisis Database (CrisisDB) programme. We illustrate that the impact of environmental stressors is mediated through extant cultural, political, and economic structures that evolve over extended timescales (decades to centuries). These structures can generate high resilience to major shocks, facilitate positive adaptation, or, alternatively, undermine collective action and lead to unrest, violence, and even societal collapse. By exposing the ways that different societies have reacted to crises over their lifetime, this framework can help identify the factors and complex social-ecological interactions that either bolster or undermine resilience to contemporary climate shocks.

The causes, consequences, and timing of the rise of moralizing religions in world history have been the focus of intense debate. Progress has been limited by the availability of quantitative data to test competing theories, by divergent ideas regarding both predictor and outcomes variables, and by differences of opinion over methodology. To address all these problems, we utilize Seshat: Global History Databank, a large storehouse of information designed to test theories concerning the evolutionary drivers of social complexity in world history. In addition to the Big Gods hypothesis, which proposes that moralizing religion contributed to the success of increasingly large-scale complex societies, we consider the role of warfare, animal husbandry, and agricultural productivity in the rise of moralizing religions. Using a broad range of new measures of belief in moralizing supernatural punishment, we find strong support for previous research showing that such beliefs did not drive the rise of social complexity in world history. By contrast, our analyses indicate that intergroup warfare, supported by resource availability, played the most significant role in the evolution of both social complexity and moralizing religions. Thus, the correlation between social complexity and moralizing religion would seem to result from shared evolutionary drivers, rather than from strong direct causal relationships between these two variables. The data, methods, and results presented in this paper have been made publicly available online for others to inspect and critique, allowing additional analyses to be run and alternative assumptions to be tested, prior to peer review and publication.

In this article we respond to three critiques of our 2019 article ‘Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History.’ We clarify that our research does not, as our critics suppose, support the claim that moralizing gods played a decisive role in the development of complex societies. Indeed our goal was to test this claim and we found it wanting. Our methods ‘reduce’ neither religion or social complexity in the ways claimed, while our tentative conclusions about the relationship between frequent, routinized ritual and social cohesion are supported by much research beyond the paper under discussion. In the Roman Empire, many forms of collective ritual contributed to the propagation of Romanitas. We have never claimed that this depended on absolute uniformity of belief. Other misconceptions about our supposedly ‘inattentive’ qualitative analysis result from misreadings of information in our open-access database, which functions as an evolving set of information relevant to specific research questions rather than a general encyclopedia. Despite these disagreements, we continue to maintain that neither qualitative historical methods nor quantitative analytic approaches alone can produce satisfying answers to causal questions about world history. The best approach, we argue, is to integrate the insights from humanities with ‘Big Data’ analyses from social science, and we welcome continued engagement and collaboration across traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Academic and popular libraries are filled with works seeking to uncover why some past societies collapsed, or to explain why others flourished, or why a few prove resilient against the major shocks and disasters that have doomed so many others. While we have learned much from this diverse set of scholarship, there are still many questions about how these different aspects of societal dynamics relate to each other and we lack clear consensus on the best approach(es) to provide answers. Further, historical precedents of collapse, growth, and resilience are being sought to help craft effective responses to the forces that threaten our contemporary world, from climate change to the risk of global pandemics to rising inequality and sectarian conflict. This essay reviews recent and prominent approaches to these topics and provides some thought on how broad, holistic approaches to studying societal dynamics can shed light on these pressing issues.

Climate variability and natural hazards like floods and earthquakes can act as environmental shocks or socioecological stressors leading to instability and suffering throughout human history. Yet, societies experience a wide range of outcomes when facing such challenges: some suffer from social unrest, civil violence or complete collapse; others prove more resilient and maintain key social functions. We currently lack a clear, generally agreed-upon conceptual framework and evidentiary base to explore what causes these divergent outcomes. Here, we discuss efforts to develop such a framework through the Crisis Database (CrisisDB) programme. We illustrate that the impact of environmental stressors is mediated through extant cultural, political and economic structures that evolve over extended timescales (decades to centuries). These structures can generate high resilience to major shocks, facilitate positive adaptation, or, alternatively, undermine collective action and lead to unrest, violence and even societal collapse. By exposing the ways that different societies have reacted to crises over their lifetime, this framework can help identify the factors and complex social–ecological interactions that either bolster or undermine resilience to contemporary climate shocks. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture’.

This paper analyzes the collapse of the Qing dynasty (1644-1912) through the lens of the Structural Demographic Theory (SDT), a general framework for understanding the drivers of socio-political instability in state-level societies. Although a number of competing ideas for the collapse have been proposed, none provide a comprehensive explanation that incorporates the interaction of all the multiple drivers involved. We argue that the four-fold population explosion peaking in the 19th century, the growing competition for a stagnant number of elite positions, and increasing state fiscal stress combined to produce an increasingly disgruntled populace and elite, leading to significant internal rebellions. We find that while neither the ecological disasters nor the foreign incursions during the 19th century were sufficient on their own to bring down the Qing, when coupled with the rising internal socio-political stresses, they produced a rapid succession of triggering events that culminated in the Qing collapse.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the population dynamics of Mid-Holocene (Late Mesolithic to Initial Bronze Age, ca. 7000-3000 BCE) Europe are characterized by recurrent booms and busts of regional settlement and occupation density. These boom-bust patterns are documented in the temporal distribution of 14C dates and in archaeological settlement data from regional studies. We test two competing hypotheses attempting to explain these dynamics: climate forcing and social dynamics leading to inter-group conflict. Using the framework of spatially-explicit agent-based models, we translated these hypotheses into a suite of explicit computational models, derived quantitative predictions for population fluctuations, and compared these predictions to data. We demonstrate that climate variation during the European Mid-Holocene is unable to explain the quantitative features (average periodicities and amplitudes) of observed boom-bust dynamics. In contrast, scenarios with social dynamics encompassing density-dependent conflict produce population patterns with time scales and amplitudes similar to those observed in the data. These results suggest that social processes, including violent conflict, played a crucial role in the shaping of population dynamics of European Mid-Holocene societies.

Pietraszewski contends that group representations that rely on a “containment metaphor” fail to adequately capture phenomena of group dynamics such as shifts in allegiances. We argue, in contrast, that social categories allow for computationally efficient, richly structured, and flexible group representations that explain some of the most intriguing aspects of social group behaviour.