A History Book I Didn't Expect to Finish

I picked this up because a regular left it on the bar two blocks from work, forgot it or ditched it, hard to say which. Cover said something about empires rising and falling and I figured, fine, I’ll read about something bigger than tonight’s ticket count for once.

Turchin attempts a familiar task here: trying to discern actual laws of history, not vibes, laws. He builds it around asabiya, a concept gleaned from the Maghrebi scholar Ibn Khaldun, social solidarity, more or less, how much a group of people will bleed for each other. Empires arise on one side or the other of what he calls a metaethnic frontier, say, the line between the Romans and first the Celts and then the German and Hunnish barbarians pressing in from the northeast. The friction builds the glue. As inequality increases and elites get too bloated, asabiya declines, and crime and civil war creep in, leading to war, epidemic, anarchy. The whole thing rots from comfort, not from getting invaded.

I liked the mechanism more than I expected to. Turchin takes his main examples from Russian expansion, the Roman Empire, the Hundred Years War, and none of it reads like a textbook, more like someone explaining a recipe that keeps working across cultures nobody would normally line up next to each other. That said, the book would’ve benefited from greater coverage of non-European empires, they barely get a mention, and if asabiya’s supposed to be a universal law you’d think he’d test it somewhere it isn’t Europe or Russia. He mostly doesn’t. How do you call something a law of history when you’ve only checked one continent??

Somebody in the other reviews said they stopped reading 125 pages in, called it an arrogant push of a flawed grand theory of history, said there are better books on history written that don’t try that. I get it, the confidence in this book is thick, Turchin doesn’t hedge much. But I finished it in four sittings, mostly after close with a beer going warm next to me, and it held up better than most theorybooks I’ve tried.

Three stars. Good idea, thin evidence outside its home turf.