Imperial boom and bust (and contemporary patterns)
Why niches matter in human history: using evolutionary reasoning (III).
The first post in the series discussed the pitfalls of evolutionary reasoning and advanced 42 propositions about the development of human tool use, cooperation and mating patterns. The second post advances a further 78 propositions on use of fire, norms, language, prestige, propriety, diet, social aggression, male/female differences, religion, and murdering our way to niceness. This third post is an interlude on why niches matter, even in complex societies and how this throws light on contemporary social and political patterns.
About niches
Natural selection proceeds by competition between genetic lineages over the available niches members of those lineages can occupy. The more resources available to sustain such niches, the more niches there can be, in number and type. Tropical jungles team with life, deserts don’t.
One of the striking things about humans is our ability to generate new niches, and to move between them, due to our technology and cognitive plasticity. At a dozen or so localities within five or six regions around the world, populations moved from occupying foraging niches to creating and occupying farming niches.
Foragers started the opening up of the steppes for human use by domesticating horses—along with dogs and reindeer, the only animals domesticated by foragers. Adding axles to wheels meant wagons, which enabled animal herders (i.e., pastoralists) to wander, with their herds, across the steppes. It later also meant chariots, which made them very dangerous to other groups.
Later still, the invention of the recurve bow meant that horse archers could shoot as far and with as much power as people on chariots or foot, while being much more effective raiders. Massed horse archers created the basis for steppe empires, starting with the Scythians.
Both farming and pastoralism dramatically increased the number of human niches compared to foraging. But having children does not automatically create niches for them. As in all species, human lineages compete for the available niches.
Males in particular compete for marriage/mating opportunities. One of the things polygyny does is intensify such intra-male competition, as a marriage does not take a male out of the ongoing competition but does remove their wife from the marriage market.
Polygyny tends to distribute women up the social scale, leaving men at the bottom without marriage prospects within the group. Thus, insisting on single-spouse marriage helps social cohesion within a group or society.
Single-spouse marriage also creates partnership marriages, where the wife could—and regularly did—deputise for her husband in his absence. Having a wife deputise for her husband in a polygynous household where wives (and concubines) were competing for the prospects for their children was a recipe for disaster.
Elite polygyny in Chinese society generated a non-breeding male underclass. It also helped generate the outlaws, rebellious sects and peasant revolts that are such a feature of Chinese history. In our own time, Gulf state polygyny helps generate recruits for jihadism in poorer Arab countries.
Polygyny plus horse archery, or boats, is a great way to create a raiding culture, on the basis of “those people over there have women, steal theirs” and “wealth raises my status and so my marriage prospects”. Monasticism, by contrast, can be a way of “soaking up” excess males (and corralling the non-normies).
A key feature of Middle Eastern history is that areas of farming and pastoralist niches are geographically interwoven, to the extent that people have regularly moved between the two. There was thus a social selection advantage in being able to unite people across those ecological divides: something monotheism, with its unified moral, ritual and doctrinal framing, did very well. Hence the region is the source for all the major monotheisms.
Since the C7th Arab break-out, the region has been dominated by the monotheism that sanctified the Arabian pastoralist synthesis: polygyny, patrilineal kin-groups, raiding and enslaving non-believing outsiders (including taking their women), law based on revelation and high levels of cousin marriage.
Prior to that, the Iranian plateau had been dominated for over a millennia by the proto-monotheism of Zoroastrianism and the lands westward had been dominated for around three centuries by the monotheism that sanctified the Roman farming synthesis—single-spouse marriage, law as a human creation, no consanguineous marriage, female consent for marriage, individual wills coupled with testamentary freedom, suppression of kin-groups—while also anathematising sex outside marriage.
Rivers provide fertile soil, animal and plant resources, so could support relatively dense human forager populations and even denser farming populations. This meant that early city-building cultures typically arose in river valleys. Plant-eating, river-valley farmers working in irrigated fields full of pathogens and parasites were then periodically conquered by meat-eating pastoralists.
The massive expansion out of the Pontic steppes by the Yamnaya that led to half the world speaking Indo-European languages as their first, or a second, language was a dramatic example, but so were the histories of the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, Ganges and Yellow river valleys: all of which were in range of pastoralists, whether from North Africa, Arabia, nearby uplands such as the Zagros mountains, or the steppes.
The Mekong did not so suffer—no pastoralists within range. On the contrary, the upland horticulturalists suffered regular slaving raids from the riverine states.
The farmers regarded pastoralists as raiding, thieving, woman-stealing, raping, murderous, human pests. The pastoralists regarded farmers as weaklings who could not defend their own. In accordance with stereotype accuracy, they were both correct.
The demographics of imperial success leading to imperial failure
The Chinese dynastic cycle was also driven by constraints on the number of niches. A founder establishes a dynasty, unifying the Han heartland. This brings peace. Farming production and trade, so resources, increases. The population expands because more niches are generated.
Eventually, the farming population begins to reach the limits of sustainable farming niches, given the existing technology. The farming niches shrink in size, making taxes more onerous. Excess population is squeezed out of farming niches, into banditry.
Putting that in more conventional economic terms, food prices rise as population increases faster than production. The return to labour thus falls, while those to land (rents) and capital (interest) rise. As the costs of land and capital rise—and distress increases—the concentration of ownership of both land and capital is likely to increase, further increasing inequality. Material stress—including the sharpening of status differentiations—makes family formation harder and violence a more attractive strategy.
Given elite polygyny, the aspiring-elite population increases faster than do elite niches. Increased contestation over resources corrodes norms, allowing bureaucratic pathologies to worsen. (This is especially so if there is no character test among the elite, such as the duel of honour.)
Disappointed elite aspirants form a counter-elite and organise the increasingly numerous outlaws and desperate peasants in large-scale revolts, often via religious sects. The Taiping Rebellion is an extreme manifestation of this repeated pattern: one reason Chinese political culture is so obsessed with order and harmony is when order breaks down, millions die.
At some stage, the dynasty is overwhelmed and collapses; war, disorder and disease massively culls the population, and the cycle begins again.
Historical modelling suggests that normative cohesion—what the pioneer of systematic social analysis Ibn Khaldun called asabiyya—was weakest within Chinese polities when population pressure was most intense and strongest when it was least intense. The balance of external threat and internal tensions affecting normative cohesion is a recurring pattern in human affairs.
Norms evolved to generate more robust common expectations, enabling higher levels of cooperation. Of course a decline—or, worse, collapse—in normative cohesion within societies and polities is bad for human cooperation and flourishing (and the polity).
We can see, for example, the collapse of the Soviet Union—so the removal of an external threat and of the concern within Western elites that it might be necessary to mobilise their own working class to deal with an existential threat—has been succeeded by increasingly polarised Western politics, including Western elites becoming increasingly hostile to (indeed, contemptuous of) the interests and concerns of their own working classes.
This assault on working class interests and concerns includes trade policies that off-shored manufacturing; technology that hollowed out local manufacturing employment; mass immigration that broke up working-class communities, and so their locality-based social networks, while generating a fractured demos; denigration of the local majority’s cultural heritage, often using immigration as an excuse to do so; morally grandstanding debauching of beloved entertainment franchises; housing policies that drove up rents and house price by restricting supply and driving up demand through mass immigration; education, policing and prosecution policies that put the local working class as the lowest priority; using metastasising linguistic taboos to—via moral abuse, cancel culture and outright censorship—block and de-legitimise working class speech as unacceptable morally vulgar; plus a general shift to non-electoral—often transnational—institutional policy-making that by-passes working class votes. Quantitative easing, by inflating asset prices, increased the experiential and perspective gap between elites and workers.
When working class voters—in reaction to all this—started voting national populist, this became an excuse for another wave of moral abuse and de-legitimisation. Ibn Khaldun was not wrong to note that normative cohesion (aka asabiyya) within a polity waxes and wanes, and this matters.
Versions of the cycle of the creation of domestic order generating population growth that then creates both elite and popular pressures on social order have afflicted polities since states—and especially empires—began. While pre-1820s economic history did generate various economic “efflorescences”—periods of growing living standards—these never lasted because the technological take-off required to break out of the Malthusian constraints did not happen.
Until, of course, it did: in Britain, in what we call the Industrial Revolution. Britain became the first country to adopt learning-by-experimentation at scale. The commercialised technological breakthroughs by jobbing artisans enabled ever greater use of energy to create more, more varied, and larger, human niches.
Crucially, no elite coalition vetoed this take-off.
A classic example of technological/economic take-off being vetoed by an elite coalition is the Ottoman Empire’s ban from the C15th to early C18th of the use of the printing press by Muslims: a ban that was not fully lifted until the C19th. The use that Christian Europe made of the printing press from 1440 to 1830—uses that Islam eschewed—explains much of the very different trajectories in the adjacent civilisations over that time.
‘Net Zero’ and its equivalents—such as denuclearisation—represent contemporary elite coalitions vetoing economic advance, worsening contestation over resources and thereby destabilising the existing political Party system. This is especially so when constraining the supply of housing, while using mass immigration to drive up the demand, thereby increasing rents and house prices, turns into a new way to have increasing population/land ratios put downward pressure on the size of niches.
Cheap energy was the escape from the Malthusian constraints. Turning against it is not a path for human flourishing.
Universities that massively overproduce elite aspirants, while generating elite status games systematically hostile to human flourishing—due to being based on systematically false claims about humans, and human social dynamics, plus dubious ones about our wider environment—are not a good civilisational prospect.
So—having seen why niches matter in human history—the next post resumes the propositions about basic features of humans and human sociality, focusing on the rise of states, culture, cognitive dimorphism, and mass production.
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