Peter Turchin, a leading thinker in the highly technical field of population dynamics, lucidly presents for the first time an approach to understanding the world's great powers throughout history with powerful implications for nations today. Readers of Jared Diamond, Robert Putnam, and Samuel Huntington will find a fresh voice weaving human history with the grand arcs of a new thesis explaining the rise and fall of empires. Turchin, trained as a theoretical biologist, steeped in statistical analysis, and renowned for his work in ecology, pin points the importance of cooperation for the transformation of Russia, America, the Roman Empire, and the rise of Islam. Indeed he traces the idea of social cooperation back to the 14th century North African thinker Ibn Khaldun's idea of Asabiya, which he shows underlies modern ideas such as Putnam's social capital. Turchin shows how the edges of empires are the crucibles of new long-lived empires and how processes of decline inevitibly follow on a 1000 year cycle. This sweeping work of social science culminates with a crisp declaration of the general principles of the science of history. A short final section considers Tolstoy and free will in a world of historical cycles, and includes an incisive look at the U.S.

now.