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This article is a response to Slingerland et al. who criticize the quality of the data from Seshat: Global History Databank utilized in our Nature paper entitled “Complex Societies Precede Moralizing Gods throughout World History”. Their critique centres around the roles played by research assistants and experts in procuring and curating data, periodization structure, and so-called “data pasting” and “data filling”. We show that these criticisms are based on misunderstandings or misrepresentations of the methods used by Seshat researchers. Overall, Slingerland et al.’s critique (which is crosslinked online here) does not call into question any of our main findings, but it does highlight various shortcomings of Slingerland et al.’s database project. Our collective efforts to code and quantify features of global history hold out the promise of a new era in the study of global history but only if critique can be conducted constructively in good faith and both the benefits and the pitfalls of open science fully recognized.

What have been the causes and consequences of technological evolution in world history? In particular, what propels innovation and diffusion of military technologies, details of which are comparatively well preserved and which are often seen as drivers of broad socio-cultural processes? Here we analyze the evolution of key military technologies in a sample of pre-industrial societies world-wide covering almost 10,000 years of history using Seshat: Global History Databank. We empirically test previously speculative theories that proposed world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding, as central drivers of military technological evolution. We find that all of these factors are strong predictors of change in military technology, whereas state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication play no major role. We discuss how our approach can be extended to explore technological change more generally, and how our results carry important ramifications for understanding major drivers of evolution of social complexity. © 2021 Turchin et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This work was supported by: a John Templeton Foundation grant to the Evolution Institute, entitled "Axial-Age Religions and the Z-Curve of Human Egalitarianism" (HW, PF, PT); a Tricoastal Foundation grant to the Evolution Institute, entitled "The Deep Roots of the Modern World: The Cultural Evolution of Economic Growth and Political Stability" (PT); an Economic and Social Research Council Large Grant to the University of Oxford, entitled "Ritual, Community, and Conflict" (REF RES-060-25-0085) (HW); a grant from the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 644055 [ALIGNED, www.aligned-project.eu]) (HW, PF); a European Research Council Advanced Grant to the University of Oxford, entitled (Ritual Modes: Divergent modes of ritual, social cohesion, prosociality, and conflict" (HW, PF); a grant from the Institute of Economics and Peace to develop a Historical Peace Index (HW, PF, PT, DH); and the program (Complexity Science,) which is supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG under grant № 873927 (PT).

The origins of religion and of complex societies represent evolutionary puzzles1–8. The ‘moralizing gods’ hypothesis offers a solution to both puzzles by proposing that belief in morally concerned supernatural agents culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies9–13. Although previous research has suggested an association between the presence of moralizing gods and social complexity3,6,7,9–18, the relationship between the two is disputed9–13,19–24, and attempts to establish causality have been hampered by limitations in the availability of detailed global longitudinal data. To overcome these limitations, here we systematically coded records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality. Our analyses not only confirm the association between moralizing gods and social complexity, but also reveal that moralizing gods follow—rather than precede—large increases in social complexity. Contrary to previous predictions9,12,16,18, powerful moralizing ‘big gods’ and prosocial supernatural punishment tend to appear only after the emergence of ‘megasocieties’ with populations of more than around one million people. Moralizing gods are not a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, but they may help to sustain and expand complex multi-ethnic empires after they have become established. By contrast, rituals that facilitate the standardization of religious traditions across large populations25,26 generally precede the appearance of moralizing gods. This suggests that ritual practices were more important than the particular content of religious belief to the initial rise of social complexity. Belief in moralizing gods followed the expansion of human societies and may have been preceded by doctrinal rituals that contributed to the initial rise of social complexity.

This article analyzes how the British writers Frances Trollope (1779–1863) and William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) described the Belgian coastal resort Ostend in the 1830s and 1840s. A special focus is placed on both the British travelers passing through Ostend and the British resident communities at Ostend. The article will highlight how the assessments of Frances Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray of Ostend as a coastal resort frequented by the British can be unpacked fruitfully within two overarching themes: the theme of “genteel poverty” and “respectability” on the one hand, and the theme of “national identity” and “religious identity” on the other. These assessments by Frances Trollope and William Makepeace Thackeray are contextualized against the background of contemporary British guidebooks and travel accounts on Ostend, and against some statistics on the British traveller and resident communities in mid-nineteenth century Belgium. (PF)

Author(s): Turchin, Peter; Hoyer, Daniel; Bennett, James; Basava, Kiran; Cioni, Enrico; Feeney, Kevin; Francois, Pieter; Holder, Samantha; Levine, Jill; Nugent, Selin; Reddish, Jenny; Thorpe, Chelsea; Wiltshire, Sal; Whitehouse, Harvey | Abstract: This report describes the current canonical time-series dataset named “Equinox2020,” a subset of Seshat: Global History Databank data for a well-curated list of polities and variables available on the Seshat Data Browser. The report provides an introduction to the methods and procedures of the Seshat project relating to the curation and release of the Equinox2020 dataset.

This contribution reports on the collaborative effort of building an open access multilingual corpus of European novels published 1840-1920 (the European Literary Text Collection - ELTeC) within the COST Action "Distant Reading for European Literary History" (COST Action CA16204). Working at the intersection of many languages and cultures, we address practical and technical aspects of corpus design based on a theoretical discussion of pluri-cultural computational modeling of literature. In the corpus design, we adopt a metadata-based approach that allows for representing the diversity of novels published 1840-1920 across Europe. Our sampling and balancing criteria use metadata including publication date, text length, reprint counts and authors’ gender, and we deliberately focus on inclusion of non-canonical novels. While one overarching goal of the project is the distant reading of European novels, this contribution puts its main focus on the theoretical and technical dimensions of corpus creation.

New advances in computer science address problems historical scientists face in gathering and evaluating the now vast data sources available through the Internet. As an example we introduce Dacura, a dataset curation platform designed to assist historical researchers in harvesting, evaluating, and curating high-quality information sets from the Internet and other sources. Dacura uses semantic knowledge graph technology to represent data as complex, inter-related knowledge allowing rapid search and retrieval of highly specific data without the need of a lookup table. Dacura automates the generation of tools to help non-experts curate high quality knowledge bases over time and to integrate data from multiple sources into its curated knowledge model. Together these features allow rapid harvesting and automated evaluation of Internet resources. We provide an example of Dacura in practice as the software employed to populate and manage the Seshat databank.

The origins of religion and of complex societies represent evolutionary puzzles1–8. The ‘moralizing gods’ hypothesis offers a solution to both puzzles by proposing that belief in morally concerned supernatural agents culturally evolved to facilitate cooperation among strangers in large-scale societies9–13. Although previous research has suggested an association between the presence of moralizing gods and social complexity3,6,7,9–18, the relationship between the two is disputed9–13,19–24, and attempts to establish causality have been hampered by limitations in the availability of detailed global longitudinal data. To overcome these limitations, here we systematically coded records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality. Our analyses not only confirm the association between moralizing gods and social complexity, but also reveal that moralizing gods follow—rather than precede—large increases in social complexity. Contrary to previous predictions9,12,16,18, powerful moralizing ‘big gods’ and prosocial supernatural punishment tend to appear only after the emergence of ‘megasocieties’ with populations of more than around one million people. Moralizing gods are not a prerequisite for the evolution of social complexity, but they may help to sustain and expand complex multi-ethnic empires after they have become established. By contrast, rituals that facilitate the standardization of religious traditions across large populations25,26 generally precede the appearance of moralizing gods. This suggests that ritual practices were more important than the particular content of religious belief to the initial rise of social complexity. Belief in moralizing gods followed the expansion of human societies and may have been preceded by doctrinal rituals that contributed to the initial rise of social complexity.

This article reports the results of a collaborative effort to estimate agricultural productivities in past societies using Seshat: Global History Databank. We focus on 30 Natural Geographic Areas (NGAs) distributed over 10 major world regions (Europe, Africa, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Central Eurasia, North America, South America, and Oceania). The conceptual framework that we use to obtain these estimates combines the influences of the production technologies (and how they change with time), climate change, and effects of artificial selection into a Relative Yield Coefficient, indicating how agricultural productivity changed over time in each NGA between the Neolithic and the 20th century. We then use estimates of historical yield in each NGA to translate the Relative Yield Coefficient into an Estimated Yield (tonnes per hectare per year) trajectory. We tested the proposed methodology in two ways. For eight NGAs, in which we had more than one historical yield estimate, we used the earliest estimate to anchor the trajectory and compared the ensuing trajectory to the remaining estimates. We also compared the end points of the estimated NGA trajectories to the earliest (the 1960s decade) FAO data on crop productivities in the modern countries encompassing Seshat NGAs. We discuss the benefits of this methodology over previous efforts to estimate agricultural productivities in world history.

Over the past 10,000 years, human societies evolved from “simple”—small egalitarian groups, integrated by face-to-face interactions—to “complex”— societies of millions, characterized by great differentials in wealth, status, and power, extensive division of labor, and elaborate governance structures. At the heart of this transformation was the rise of the state; a politically centralized territorial polity with an internally specialized administrative organization. But what drove the emergence and evolution of specialized governance is broadly contested. Here we use Seshat: Global History Databank to empirically test predictions from a variety of theories. One set of explanations proposes social scale (polity population and territory, population of the largest settlement) as the primary factor favoring the evolution of specialized governance institutions. Other theories focus on alternative mechanisms, such as social stratification or the provisioning of public goods. Still others point to the importance of sophisticated information and money systems as potential preconditions for the evolution of bureaucracy. Our analysis identifies polity population size as the main evolutionary driver of state-formation. Although information systems also play a role, stratification has no detectable impact, once polity population is included in the model; and, while territorial expansion may be a key factor in the emergence of certain first-generation or primary states, the territorial extent of polities actually has a negative effect on the evolution of sophisticated governance, once polity population is included in the model.

We thank Tosh et al. (1) for their interest in our research (2) but note that their analyses do not undermine the main findings of our article. Their suggestion that polity population divided by polity area should be one of the social complexity dimensions raises a number of issues. What does this ratio mean at large spatial scales, where populations are concentrated in large urban centers and much of the territory is not heavily populated? How are societies distributed across this variable and why? For example, a small-scale “simple” society could have a very high population density if it has access to a rich resource base. Tosh et al. (1) do not provide sufficient information or context to meaningfully … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: t.currie{at}exeter.ac.uk. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

This chapter addresses the task of building world-historical data resources. The group that has formed, Big Data in Human History, is a collaboration of several social-science research groups using advanced information technology to document the characteristics of human society at multiple scales from the present back to early human times. The chapter underscores the need for global social-science analysis but also the major scientific and organizational challenges of such analysis. The chapter introduces the five social-science groups working on parallel and interactive projects at the scale of humanity over historical time, building interconnections while remaining distinct. For instance, researchers working on times 5000 years ago must use different data and techniques than those working on the period since 1800, though many of the analytical questions are similar. The first half of the chapter reviews the global framework, showing categories of scale and theory on a global level, then describes how the research projects of the groups are distributed over time and analytical focus. The second half of the chapter provides more detailed exploration of the research process in large-scale social-science analysis, especially through examples from the Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis as well as Seshat: Global History Databank. These sections begin with the information infrastructure—data collection, archiving, documentation, linking, analysis, and visualization—to be developed by the groups. Details on data and especially on metadata are central to the aggregation of data to a global level. Closely related are the formal ontologies that must be developed in space, time, topics, and levels of aggregation. Analysis relies on established methods of social science analysis but especially on new techniques. The concluding section explores prospects for deeper collaboration in quantitative analysis of the characteristics of human society.

Copyright © 2015, The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Enquiries

In recent years there has been an increased interest in the study of out-of-body experiences (obes) by cognitive and neuro-scientists. Nowadays, far-reaching claims regarding the uncovering of the neural mechanisms and pathways, as well as the mystery ofobes in the anthropological and historical record are on offer. In this article the implicit assumption thatobes are much better understood and that real progress has been made are questioned on the basis of the definitional and conceptual problems that still haunt this area of research. It is suggested that progress will only be registered once the spectrum of out-of-body phenomena (obp) is recognized and attention is paid to the neurocultural complexity of distinct instances ofobes.

Social scientists have long argued that collective rituals produce social cohesion and this has something to do with their emotionality. The fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun argued that emotionally intense rituals constituted a fundamental driving force in political history. In the medieval Muslim world, powerful dynasties commonly traced their ancestry from peripheral tribal groups, and urban elites were periodically overthrown and replaced by such groups. This pattern could easily be generalised to many other civilisations—from the dynastic cycles of China and Persia to the barbarian invasions of the Graeco-Roman and Christian worlds. Khaldun’s explanation for this pattern hinged on the notion of aṣabiyah (roughly ‘social cohesion’). Rural tribes derived their aṣabiyah from collective rituals that served to bond them into tight-knit military units, capable of standing together on the battlefield and carrying out daring raids. It was this quality of aṣabiyah that enabled rural tribes to invade and displace urban dynasties periodically. But having successfully deposed a ruling elite, the invading tribe’s emotional rituals would become sanitised and rendered ineffectual as part of the process of becoming educated into more literate forms and expressions of religiosity. Thus, the urban dynasty would become vulnerable over time to invasion and overthrow by another rural tribe, whose aṣabiyah remained intact. This cyclical theory of history has been taken up and developed in novel ways in recent decades.1 If emotional collective rituals do indeed unite groups, then they may be capable not only of motivating coups and rebellions but also of legitimating established authority structures. Voluminous literatures in the social sciences, commonly inspired by the functionalist logic of Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,2 have provided ample examples of this legitimating role of ritual.3

This article analyses how nineteenth-century British visitors of Waterloo anticipated, experienced and explained their visit of 'the field'. The article shows how British visitors attempted to claim ownership over Waterloo and to legitimise their own commemorative practices by simultaneously searching for authenticity and longing for the familiarity (and commercialisation) of the 'beaten track'. By doing so this article calls for a shift in our understanding of nineteenth-century British Waterloo tourism. The view that emphasises the succession of an early generation of authentic travellers by a later generation of 'mere' tourists is replaced by a view which sees the desire for authenticity and the need for the familiar as two forces which were continuously negotiated in creative ways by travellers throughout the whole nineteenth century.

This article calls for a more evolutionary understanding of the “birth of the modern travel guide” by contextualizing the guidebooks of Murray and Baedeker within the wider genre and by focusing on their lesser-known predecessors. An analysis of British travel guides to and accounts of “Belgium” from the period 1815–1870 reveals that the division between the “travel account” and the “travel guide” was not always clear-cut, as both genres were closely intertwined. It demonstrates that the process of gathering travel information became less transnational during the period 1815–1870 and increasingly reliant on internal borrowing from other travel guides and accounts published in English. We therefore need a more nuanced assessment of the use of travel literature as a source for the study of intercultural representation, imagery, and stereotypes—an assessment in which there is ample room for a transnational focus.

This article analyses the views of British travellers of the Belgian past for the period 1830–70. The article explores how the Belgian Revolution of 1830 and the closely intertwined rise of contemporary British sympathy for Belgium led to a reinterpretation of the ‘Belgian’ past. After 1830, the British interpretation of the Belgian past was increasingly centred on the sixteenth century and the ‘true’ Belgian national identity was believed to have been oppressed by a chain of foreign oppressors. Furthermore, the travellers saw the Belgian past and national identity as very similar to the British past and national identity. The view of the Belgian past was an integral part of the view of the Belgian future; a future that, so it was believed, would justify British claims that Belgium was a ‘little Britain on the Continent’ and that the Belgian and British national identities were highly similar. Finally, the article also explains why the interpretation of the Belgian past did not change once more af...

Agricultural productivity, and its variation in space and time, plays a fundamental role in many theories of human social evolution. However, we often lack systematic information about the productivity of past agricultural systems on a large enough scale in order to be able to test these theories properly. The effect of climate on crop yields has received a great deal of attention resulting in a range of empirical and process-based models, yet the focus has primarily been on current or future conditions. In this paper, we argue for a “bottom-up” approach that estimates productivity, or potential productivity based on information about the agricultural practices and technologies used in past societies. Of key theoretical interest is using this information to estimate the carrying capacity of a given region, independently of estimates of population size. We outline how explicit crop yield models can be combined with high quality historical and archaeological information about past societies, in order to infer the temporal and geographic patterns of change in agricultural productivity and potential. We discuss the kinds of information we need to collect about agricultural techniques and practices in the past, and introduce a new databank initiative we have developed for collating the best available historical and archaeological evidence. A key benefit of our approach lies in making explicit the steps in the process of estimating past productivities and carrying capacities, and in being able to assess the effects of different modelling assumptions. This is undoubtedly an ambitious task, yet promises to provide important insights into fundamental aspects of past societies, and will enable us to test more rigorously key hypotheses about human socio-cultural evolution.

François Pieter. De convergentie tussen de Angelsaksische ideeëngeschiedenis en de Duitse/continentale begripsgeschiedenis - een status quaestionis. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 83, fasc. 4, 2005. Histoire medievale, moderne et contemporaine - Middeleeuwse. moderne en hedendaagse geschiedenis. pp. 1175-1203.

The origin of human ultrasociality—the ability to cooperate in huge groups of genetically unrelated individuals—has long interested evolutionary and social theorists, but there has been little systematic empirical research on the topic. The Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution, which we introduce in this article, brings the available historical and archaeological data together in a way that will allow hypotheses concerning the origin of ultrasociality to be tested rigorously. In addition to describing the methodology informing the set-up of the database, our article introduces four hypotheses that we intend to test using the database. These hypotheses focus on the resource base, warfare, ritual, and religion, respectively. Ultimately the aim of our database is to offer a ‘rapid discovery science’ route to the study of the past. We believe our approach is not only highly complementary with existing traditions of enquiry in history and archaeology but will extend their intellectual scope and explanatory power.

Thesis (M.Com. (Management Accounting))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006. The creation of shareholder wealth has become a key measurement of corporate success. Value-based management (VBM) is a powerful management framework with the aim to focus all managerial processes on shareholder wealth creation. It therefore encourages all staff levels within the organisation to focus on value creation. Various metrics have been developed to measure the value creation process within the organisation. Discounted cash flow to the present value at the weighted average cost of capital lies at the heart of these metrics. The application of VBM principles at the lower levels within the organisation is critical to ensure that lower level staff applies value-creating principles in their daily jobs. Through the use of value mapping, underlying value drivers are linked to the overall strategy of value creation. The application of VBM within the financial services industry is critical for survival within a continuous changing environment. For organisations to be value creators it is imperative to apply VBM principles at the customer- and product level for decision-making and rewarding. The usage of VBM tools, such as embedded value (EV) and customer lifetime value (CLV), provide an understanding of the impact that a product or customer has on the value of the organisation. These tools do not only provide information on the profitability of customers today, but also provides information on the potential value of a customer or product. Despite the agreement that shareholder value and the use of EV's for sales rewards should take centre stage, management within First National Bank (FNB) is still inclined towards traditional metrics, creating scenario's where the business unit and short-term performance takes preference over the intent of the organisation and long-term sustainable shareholder value. With international organisations entering the South African financial market, local financial institutions cannot be managed as they have been managed previously within a protected market. South African financial institutions need to adjust themselves to become world-class value creating organisations, where the shareholder comes first. Masters

This article analyses the different British views of, and attitudes towards, Belgium during the period 1830–70. The rise and fall of the myth of Belgium as ‘a little Britain on the Continent’ is central in this analysis. This myth originated during the first years after the Belgian Revolution of 1830 and represented a major U-turn in British sympathies. It was built around Belgium's supposed gratitude towards Britain, its liberalism, constitutionalism and the close ties between the royal families of both countries. Furthermore, the British believed that British and Belgian national identity were very similar and that the nature of Belgian national identity was inherently Protestant. However, during the eighteen-fifties and sixties, disagreement on free trade, on France and on the continuing strength of Belgian Catholicism, led to Belgium becoming seen as just ‘another’ continental country.

Rapidly solidified aluminium, AlMg (0 to 16.5 at % Mg) and AlSi (0 to 20.2 at % Si) alloys were produced by melt spinning. The AlMg ribbons were single-phase, whereas the AlSi ribbons were dual-phase. In the ribbons of both alloy systems the fineness of the microstructure increased with increasing alloying element content. The melt-spun ribbons were consolidated by hot extrusion. For comparison, conventionally cast alloys of corresponding compositions were extruded analogously. During the extrusion process in AlMg (16.5 at % Mg) and in the AlSi alloys precipitation occurred. The consolidation of the ribbons was markedly influenced by the oxide layer on the ribbon surfaces: in the AlSi consolidates a more intimate contact between the ribbons was apparent than in the aluminium and AlMg consolidates. In the extrudates of the conventionally cast alloys the grains and second-phase particles were much larger than in the consolidates. The observed dependence on alloy composition of hardness, ultimate tensile strength and elongation at fracture of both consolidated ribbons and extrudates of the conventionally cast alloys are discussed in terms of matrix grain size, solute content of the matrix, amount and size of second-phase particles and recrystallization behaviour. For all compositions of the alloys the Vickers hardness of the as-melt-spun ribbons was higher than that of the consolidated products, owing to recrystallization and precipitation provoked by the hot consolidation process. The ultimate tensile strength as well as the elongation at fracture of both consolidated ribbons and extruded conventionally cast alloys did not differ significantly for AlMg. However, due to a finer microstructure and a stronger inter-ribbon bonding, for AlSi alloys with a high silicon content the rapid solidification processing route did yield a product with significantly improved mechanical properties as compared with the extruded conventionally cast alloys.

On nitriding iron specimens nitrogen concentration profiles within the specimens are built up. A numerical method for the calculation of such concentration profiles was developed. The results calculated were compared with experimental data. It was found that during nitriding the nitrogen surface concentration approached relatively slowly the equilibrium value. This effect strongly influenced the development of the nitrogen concentration profile. The model predicted correctly the incubation time for compound(i. e., iron nitride) layer formation at the surface. If the fatigue resistance is strongly dependent on the (compressive) residual surface stress, the present treatment allows calculation of anoptimum nitriding time by determining when the maximum (compressive) residual surface stress occurs.

This paper describes OWL ontology re-engineering from the wiki-based social science codebook thesaurus developed by the Seshat: Global History Databank. The ontology describes human history as a set of over 1500 time series variables and supports variable uncertainty, temporal scoping, annotations and bibliographic references. The ontology was developed to transition from traditional social science data collection and storage techniques to an RDF-based approach. RDF supports automated generation of high usability data entry and validation tools, data quality management, incorporation of facts from the web of data and management of the data curation lifecycle. This ontology re-engineering exercise identified several pitfalls in modelling social science codebooks with semantic web technologies; provided insights into the practical application of OWL to complex, real-world modelling challenges; and has enabled the construction of new, RDF-based tools to support the large-scale Seshat data curation effort. The Seshat ontology is an exemplar of a set of ontology design patterns for modelling uncertainty or temporal bounds in standard RDF. Thus the paper provides guidance for deploying RDF in the social sciences. Within Seshat, OWL-based data quality management will assure the data is suitable for statistical analysis. Publication of Seshat as high-quality, linked open data will enable other researchers to build on it.

The vast amount of knowledge about past human societies has not been systematically organized and, therefore, remains inaccessible for empirically testing theories about cultural evolution and historical dynamics. For example, what evolutionary mechanisms were involved in the transition from the small-scale, uncentralized societies, in which humans lived 10,000 years ago, to the large-scale societies with an extensive division of labor, great differentials in wealth and power, and elaborate governance structures of today? Why do modern states sometimes fail to meet the basic needs of their populations? Why do economies decline, or fail to grow? In this article, we describe the structure and uses of a massive databank of historical and archaeological information, Seshat: The Global History Databank. The data that we are currently entering in Seshat will allow us and others to test theories explaining how modern societies evolved from ancestral ones, and why modern societies vary so much in their capacity to satisfy their members’ basic human needs.

The annual report of the activities of the Digital History Research Centre at the Unviersity of Hertfordshire (2015-16).