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Global Boom, Pandemic, Crash: Is History Just Repeating Itself?

May 7, 2020

Global Boom, Pandemic, Crash: Is History Just Repeating Itself?

If Peter Turchin is right, we face the end of a 300-year cycle, as did previous far-flung empires.

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The intensification of globalized networks creates more instability, insecurity and unpredictability. Epidemics can hasten the ends of ‘secular cycles’ for highly-interconnected civilizations. Image: Shutterstock.

The coronavirus pandemic is, among other things, a tribute to human ingenuity and our relentless pursuit of globalization, an impulse thousands of years old. Previous civilizations, from the Romans to the Mongols, traded aggressively and invaded new ecosystems. They, too, connected far-flung geographies in innovative ways. None of it, however, ended particularly well.

By trading in all manner of peoples, plants, germs and animals, these empires diligently tested the limits of globalization and its growing complexity by seeding their own disintegration.

The corona pandemic, a pretty mild affair in the scheme of things, is telling us that we are now in the middle of a historic cycle where hyper-connectivity combined with hyper-complexity could rapidly lead to decline, if not collapse.

In fact, pandemics are not black swans, but predictable and natural events that often appear like clockwork in the evolution of human empires. They trigger other crises or partner up with them.

These mass reversals often appear after periods of intense population growth and changes in population density just as an imperial adventure unknowingly begins its descent.

In the process of pruning human numbers, pandemics invariably play a significant role in the disintegration of civilizations. They reveal wealth inequalities and technical fragilities. In this regard pandemics announce both the ending and beginning of things. They can have both negative and positive effects.

Peter Turchin, a Russian historian, has long argued that civilizations expand and contract in distinct waves or what he calls “secular cycles” that last about 300 years.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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