What was the tallest building of the ancient world? Or the average life expectancy in medieval Byzantium? Where did scientific writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ritual human sacrifice ever? We are used to thinking about history in terms of stories. Yet we understand our own world through data: vast arrays of statistics that reveal the workings of our societies. Radical historians Peter Turchin and Dan Hoyer draw on their own Seshat project - a staggeringly ambitious log of demographic and econometric information for every society that has ever existed - to find the large-scale patterns in Figuring Out the Past. Join them now for a dive into the numbers that reveal the true shape of the past.
Professor Peter Turchin is the founder of a new transdisciplinary field of Cliodynamics. He has authored seven books and has published 200 articles, including a dozen in such top journals as Nature, Science, and PNAS. Dr Dan Hoyer works with Peter Turchin on the Deep Roots of the Modern World, part of the Seshat: Global History Databank Project.
Title: Figuring Out The Past: The 3,495 Vital Statistics that Explain World History
Author: Hoyer, Dan,Turchin, Peter
ISBN: 9781788161923
Binding:
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Publication Date: 2020-10-29
Number of Pages: 272
Weight: 0.4601 kg
If you're thinking about setting up a giant land empire in Asia, you cannot do so without this book ... Vital ... If only the last Song emperor had had this book by his side, he might have avoided his appalling fate -- Dan Snow