What are the key factors behind the rise and fall of civilizations?

[lumpthing]

I was reading Wimsey's economic model and fantasizing about a slightly more realistic version of civ. I was thinking about how the rise and fall of civilizations might be incorporated. By this I mean an ancient civ could grow massive, thrive for a few centuries, and then collapse in on itself for reasons other than being invaded by a rival civ; while other civs might appear much later in the game but then hit a golden age where they start advancing very rapidly to the point where they've overtaken much older civs.

So before going into how this might be simulated in a game, I was wondering if it was even possible to summarize the key dynamics behind the rise and fall of civilizations in real-life history. Or is every case too particular for any generalizations to be made?

Maybe a monumental list of every civilization that has risen and fallen and the key factors behind that rise and fall would be helpful

 

[RedRalph]

Pretty big question! Without even attempting to go into specific details, it might be worth breaking it down into the following categories

Economic
Environmental
Military
Political
Demographic
Cultural/Social

A serious problem in any one of those categories on its own can cause a collapse

 

[Masada]

A serious problem in any one of those categories on its own can cause a collapse

It generally takes a bunch of factors acting in tandem to bring down a civilization. They also tend to need to fall relatively close together, with each event setting of the next in a 'cascade' which overwhelms the internal mechanisms of the state. Gradual decline into oblivion isn't all that common either - you generally need to be pushed and pulled in all directions for complete collapse to happen.

 

[RedRalph]

It generally takes a bunch of factors acting in tandem to bring down a civilization. They also tend to need to fall relatively close together, with each event setting of the next in a 'cascade' which overwhelms the internal mechanisms of the state. Gradual decline into oblivion isn't all that common either - you generally need to be pushed and pulled in all directions for complete collapse to happen.

But one triggers the others, generally speaking. An economic collapse will leave you with little military to defend yourself, can cause huge demographic problems and lead to political crisis. A Political crisis will cause economic problems. A serious military defeat will cause political crisis, etc. One will generally bring on the others. Environmental collapse will make everything else irrelevant.

 

[Dachs]

There are a ridiculously low number of civilizations that have collapsed from environmental factors, and a greater number that sustained serious environmental threats without undergoing collapse.

Besides, while it is true that one overarching problem in one sphere can lead to disasters in others, more frequently civilizations - insofar as civilizations exist/can be defined (do we just mean polities here?) - are able to solve single problems before they spin out of control. If serious military defeat leads to a political crisis that actually ends up hurting a state, that state almost always had preexisting political problems that helped spur that crisis in the first place. If economic problems lead to military downsizing on such an order that the military is unable to prevent the total collapse of the state, that military probably already had problems too. Stuff like that.

Anyway, I never was much a fan of macrohistorical analysis and junk like that, so I'm unwilling to try to identify overarching factors. The devil's in the details.

 

[RedRalph]

I agree Dachs, none of that really contradicts what I said. We should probably define 'collapse' and 'civilisation' though. Does fall of the USSR count, or does this have to be an Easter Island type event?

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

The most convincing argument for the downfall of civilizations was made in the book "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. Diamond asserts that civilizations bring themselves down by overexploiting their resources, and being unable and often unwilling to modify their economic, political, and social systems to adjust to changing demands. By the time trouble is realized, the civilization has already expanded its population to the point where it may be impossible to adjust, thereby causing a rapid and catastrophic collapse.

He cited many civilizations who had plundered their resources beyond their means to sustain their civilization, and others who had faced problems but adjusted their way of life to overcome them.

So if you had to plot a course for a civilization, it would go as follows. First, a civilization gains some advantage which allows it to rapidly expand and perhaps even conquer its neighbors. It then reaches a functional maximum, based on its economic and social paradigms, at which time it tries to maintain the same way of life. Eventually, this proves to be untenable, and it is unable to realize the underlying cause of the problem. It collapses in a rather short period of time, due to over-expansion of the population and power base beyond the means to maintain it.

 

[Tekee]

He cited many civilizations who had plundered their resources beyond their means to sustain their civilization, and others who had faced problems but adjusted their way of life to overcome them.

Never read the book but heard Mark Steyn paraphrase it for me. (Mark Styen argues that demographics cause civilization collapse)
First the author's curious choices of civilizations, the Mayans, Easter Island.
And these "civilizations" all collapsed because they cut down all their trees.
Overexploitation of resources is not something I believe to be a cause of civilization collapse.
But if it falls under economic problems, then yes, economics can cause a civilization to collapse. Like Ottoman Empire's weak farming structure causes its decline and overtaxation of poor people in OTTOMAN empire.

 

[xchen08]

I disagree with Diamond, or rather disagree that overexploitation of the environment is the primary or even single most common cause of civilizational collapse, which I believe Diamond does not himself advocate. In general, before the modern era, the primary problem facing civilizations in competitive environments is lack of population, not excessive population. War, disease, and the social impact of things like laws regulating inheritance all serve to limit population growth, often driving it into negative. Sure, you have places like Easter Island where the environment is particularly vulnerable, and the situation is not conducive to either war or disease, but there are numerous examples of the exact opposite. There's a reason the Byzantines launched campaigns into the Slavic Balkans to round up tribals for resettlement in Anatolia. It weakens the enemy's economic and military base while bolstering your own. When the State broke down, it was because of too few military settlers and too much land lying fallow leading to too small a tax base to support a sufficient defense rather than insufficient land or natural resources. You see the same situation in Imperial China, where the Histories invariably mention population growth and the reclaiming of fallow land as preceding a period of prosperity. More peasants means more land under cultivation, more workers for economic and military projects, more military settlers/soldiers, a lower tax burden per capita, more wealth for the cities, etc. Sure, that kind of growth can't be sustained indefinitely, but there's always a barbarian invasion, civil war, plague, or natural disaster around the corner to whittle down the population and weaken the state, which subsequently makes it more vulnerable to more of the same.

 

[Masada]

Does fall of the USSR count, or does this have to be an Easter Island type event?

The Easter Island collapse is overrated - completely. It has close analogues in most Pacific Island societies. Central control by a line of Kings breaks down due to some political event, probably defeat in battle, the Royal Clan is decimated and the survivors are forced to call upon more distant non-Royal kin to settle the affair. They do, then promptly depose the Royal Clan, then can't decide on quite how to divide the spoils and set about fighting each other for them. Somewhere along the lines someone rises to the top and manages to pull together a wide enough political mandate to exert authority again. This might result from (1) the winner beating the hell out of his opposition or (2) might be the result of comprimise usually sealed by marriage arrangements with a practical decentralization of power at a regional level - with the new 'High Chief' or whatever merely becoming a first among equals.

Those were the usual paths - the Waikato and Bay of Plenty Maori followed (1) while the Samoans had this annoying tendency to follow (2) whenever they looked like they were going to do something interesting. Easter Island fell into a ******** mix of the two, it couldn't manage a decisive victory and neither could it come a workable comprimise thus the whole cycle of conflict was perpetuated again and again and again. The only reason Europeans have some regard for the thing - and not for the far more interesting Maori Wars or the whole bunch of wars in and between Samoa, Fiji and Tonga - was that they had a long gap between contacts to try and explain. Which they did poorly.

There ain't anything unusually about Polynesian populations rising and falling - New Zealand Maori must have fought a particularly violent conflict in the early days of settlement because there isn't all that much genetic diversity on the male side. And you can be sure that like most Polynesian immigrations it was top heavy with young men with nothing else to do. So it only stands to reason that something happened - like say, a fight over women. Most Islands have seen population movements during their histories of 30-50% at some time due to constant tribal conflict which existed quite independent of environmental considerations. If scarce resources were a major cause of conflict, why did Maori fight all the time, there was more land than you could shake a stick at? It was simply a part of Polynesian society to fight all the time. Europeans did exactly the same thing on a much larger and slightly less personal scale for most of their history as well. So meh.

The most convincing argument for the downfall of civilizations was made in the book "Collapse" by Jared Diamond. Diamond asserts that civilizations bring themselves down by overexploiting their resources, and being unable and often unwilling to modify their economic, political, and social systems to adjust to changing demands. By the time trouble is realized, the civilization has already expanded its population to the point where it may be impossible to adjust, thereby causing a rapid and catastrophic collapse.

Diamond could come up with only a handful of examples to support that supposition. None of them were particularly good ones, either. (Ref: above).

He cited many civilizations who had plundered their resources beyond their means to sustain their civilization, and others who had faced problems but adjusted their way of life to overcome them.

He cited a handful - and his Easter Island case ignored about forty years of scholarly work which points to exactly what I suggested as the prime medium for conflict.

So if you had to plot a course for a civilization, it would go as follows. First, a civilization gains some advantage which allows it to rapidly expand and perhaps even conquer its neighbors. It then reaches a functional maximum, based on its economic and social paradigms, at which time it tries to maintain the same way of life. Eventually, this proves to be untenable, and it is unable to realize the underlying cause of the problem. It collapses in a rather short period of time, due to over-expansion of the population and power base beyond the means to maintain it.

I'm seriously starting to doubt the validity of massive marco-historical generalizations like this. It's simply not possible to sustain the plurality of them if you start having a regard for the specific circumstances that led to 'collapse' assuming of course that 'collapse' is a discrete event that can be measured or pointed to.

 

[Dachs]

I agree Dachs, none of that really contradicts what I said.

Environmental collapse will make everything else irrelevant.

There are [sic] a ridiculously low number of civilizations that have collapsed from environmental factors, and a greater number that sustained serious environmental threats without undergoing collapse.

]But one triggers the others, generally speaking. An economic collapse will leave you with little military to defend yourself, can cause huge demographic problems and lead to political crisis. A Political crisis will cause economic problems. A serious military defeat will cause political crisis, etc. One will generally bring on the others.

Besides, while it is true that one overarching problem in one sphere can lead to disasters in others, more frequently civilizations - insofar as civilizations exist/can be defined (do we just mean polities here?) - are able to solve single problems before they spin out of control. If serious military defeat leads to a political crisis that actually ends up hurting a state, that state almost always had preexisting political problems that helped spur that crisis in the first place. If economic problems lead to military downsizing on such an order that the military is unable to prevent the total collapse of the state, that military probably already had problems too. Stuff like that.

To make things more black and white, I claim that, contra your first post, civilizations - or polities or whatever, the argument is already almost impossible without definitions - do not merely collapse if they are faced with a single "serious" problem. It is almost always due to other factors acting in tandem, with divergent origins.

 

[Lord Baal]

The Easter Island collapse is overrated - completely. It has close analogues in most Pacific Island societies. Central control by a line of Kings breaks down due to some political event, probably defeat in battle, the Royal Clan is decimated and the survivors are forced to call upon more distant non-Royal kin to settle the affair. They do, then promptly depose the Royal Clan, then can't decide on quite how to divide the spoils and set about fighting each other for them. Somewhere along the lines someone rises to the top and manages to pull together a wide enough political mandate to exert authority again. This might result from (1) the winner beating the hell out of his opposition or (2) might be the result of comprimise usually sealed by marriage arrangements with a practical decentralization of power at a regional level - with the new 'High Chief' or whatever merely becoming a first among equals.

Exactly. The main reason the Easter Island collapse is so well-known is that it happened after the Europeans arrived, and in a shorter time than usual. Of course, the estimates of the pre-existing population that the Dutch made could also be way off, meaning it was no better or worse than any other Polynesian collapse.

 

[Quackers]

Demography - if you are having 1.1 children per generation which means the population halfs a generation and than on the other side of the world the fertility rate is 5 your already losing, already at a disadvantage. And when that woman on the other side of the world becomes your neighbour and continues having 5 times more children than you and refuses to intergrate than you have a massive problem. This is the current problem in the West bar USA which just about manges intergration. The WEST is having a civilisation problem at the moment we have lost the confidance in our culture and superioty of our way of life - to put it frankly we've lost our balls. We've replaced our obvious best culture and replaced it with fluffy bunny multiculturalism. The social democratic states of Western Europe and the Communist malaise thoughout Eastern Europe have sucked out the initiative, self-reliance and independece our of the general population. More people now rely on the state for everything and have become more like client-citizens than free citizens.

So in order for Western Europe to continue lavishing its citizens on the welfare state it must maintain a worker-pensioner ratio which means we can actually support that population. Problem is naturally we can't do this and so we import others baby maker skills from the most hostile places on Earth to Western values: the Muslim world. If you cannot even sustain your own population and need others to fill it up for you that is a massive structural deficit right their. Of course these new immigrants haven't had political correctness agenda forced down their necks they have some faith in the superioty of their way of life so when they arrive in Britain or France where their is no overriding british culture or french culture (that would be racist) hes offered with "multiculturalism" or he can stick with his old way of life as their is an Iman around the corner because he can choose to live in a Muslim area or not. Amazingly instead of choosing to live a Western way of life, working till your 48 and than deciding to have 1 designer baby he marries at 20 and has 5!

Demography was 1 of the causes of the Roman Empire's collapse. Christians became a large part of the population because didn't abort their children like the Pagan Romans did they believed in life.
Another roman failure was when the Goths were allowed into the Empire in 376 AD and a few years later revolted and killed the Emperor.

 

[innonimatu]

Demography - if you are having 1.1 children per generation which means the population halfs a generation and than on the other side of the world the fertility rate is 5 your already losing, already at a disadvantage. And when that woman on the other side of the world becomes your neighbour and continues having 5 times more children than you and refuses to intergrate than you have a massive problem. This is the current problem in the West bar USA which just about manges intergration. The WEST is having a civilisation problem at the moment we have lost the confidance in our culture and superioty of our way of life - to put it frankly we've lost our balls. We've replaced our obvious best culture and replaced it with fluffy bunny multiculturalism. The social democratic states of Western Europe and the Communist malaise thoughout Eastern Europe have sucked out the initiative, self-reliance and independece our of the general population. More people now rely on the state for everything and have become more like client-citizens than free citizens.
[rant continues...]

Tell me, did you read Spengler's famous book, or did you arrive independently at the same stupid conclusions?

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Never read the book but heard Mark Steyn paraphrase it for me. (Mark Styen argues that demographics cause civilization collapse)
First the author's curious choices of civilizations, the Mayans, Easter Island.
And these "civilizations" all collapsed because they cut down all their trees.
Overexploitation of resources is not something I believe to be a cause of civilization collapse.
But if it falls under economic problems, then yes, economics can cause a civilization to collapse. Like Ottoman Empire's weak farming structure causes its decline and overtaxation of poor people in OTTOMAN empire.

Don't criticize a book you've never read. Going by what a critic told you it says is useless because he could have biases. Why is it "curious" to choose Easter Island? Is it because it's just a bunch of primitives on a Pacific island? Dare I say, is it because of "rasism"?

As a matter of fact, it makes perfect sense, because it was an isolated society that could be studied without confounding variables.

And what exactly is the difference between economic decline and decline in resources? Either way, you have a scarcity of resources.

I disagree with Diamond, or rather disagree that overexploitation of the environment is the primary or even single most common cause of civilizational collapse, which I believe Diamond does not himself advocate. In general, before the modern era, the primary problem facing civilizations in competitive environments is lack of population, not excessive population. War, disease, and the social impact of things like laws regulating inheritance all serve to limit population growth, often driving it into negative. Sure, you have places like Easter Island where the environment is particularly vulnerable, and the situation is not conducive to either war or disease, but there are numerous examples of the exact opposite. There's a reason the Byzantines launched campaigns into the Slavic Balkans to round up tribals for resettlement in Anatolia. It weakens the enemy's economic and military base while bolstering your own. When the State broke down, it was because of too few military settlers and too much land lying fallow leading to too small a tax base to support a sufficient defense rather than insufficient land or natural resources. You see the same situation in Imperial China, where the Histories invariably mention population growth and the reclaiming of fallow land as preceding a period of prosperity. More peasants means more land under cultivation, more workers for economic and military projects, more military settlers/soldiers, a lower tax burden per capita, more wealth for the cities, etc. Sure, that kind of growth can't be sustained indefinitely, but there's always a barbarian invasion, civil war, plague, or natural disaster around the corner to whittle down the population and weaken the state, which subsequently makes it more vulnerable to more of the same.

The Byzantine Empire collapsed due to conquest.

The Easter Island collapse is overrated - completely. It has close analogues in most Pacific Island societies. Central control by a line of Kings breaks down due to some political event, probably defeat in battle, the Royal Clan is decimated and the survivors are forced to call upon more distant non-Royal kin to settle the affair. They do, then promptly depose the Royal Clan, then can't decide on quite how to divide the spoils and set about fighting each other for them. Somewhere along the lines someone rises to the top and manages to pull together a wide enough political mandate to exert authority again. This might result from (1) the winner beating the hell out of his opposition or (2) might be the result of comprimise usually sealed by marriage arrangements with a practical decentralization of power at a regional level - with the new 'High Chief' or whatever merely becoming a first among equals.

I'm no scholar of Pacific Island civilizations, but I prefer to shave with Occam's razor.

He cited a handful - and his Easter Island case ignored about forty years of scholarly work which points to exactly what I suggested as the prime medium for conflict.

Which part of this should impress me, the part about "scholarly" or "40 years"?

I'm seriously starting to doubt the validity of massive marco-historical generalizations like this. It's simply not possible to sustain the plurality of them if you start having a regard for the specific circumstances that led to 'collapse' assuming of course that 'collapse' is a discrete event that can be measured or pointed to.

Well, I find Diamond's explanation (and he's not the first to propose it) the most convincing. Maybe it can't always be boiled down to common themes, but it seems it can often enough.

 

[warpus]

How about the assertion that civilizations are complex enough entities that coming up with a generic "collapse formula" may be impossible?

 

[xchen08]

The Byzantine Empire collapsed due to conquest.

What's your point? Nearly every civilization in a competitive environment have collapsed due to conquest, and as such, it is a meaningless classification, except for the few cases where a truely overwhelming enemy arrives, like the Mongols for example. Nations are conquered because their military capacity falls. The Byzantine collapse that led the loss of all Asian/African holdings outside of Anatolia was due to the demographic collapse following decades of war with Persia. The final collapse of the empire was in the wake of yet another demographic decline. In neither case, nor all the examples in between could it be claimed that overpopulation hurt the empire.

 

[dannyshenanigan]

The Easter Island collapse is overrated - completely. It has close analogues in most Pacific Island societies. Central control by a line of Kings breaks down due to some political event, probably defeat in battle, the Royal Clan is decimated and the survivors are forced to call upon more distant non-Royal kin to settle the affair. They do, then promptly depose the Royal Clan, then can't decide on quite how to divide the spoils and set about fighting each other for them. Somewhere along the lines someone rises to the top and manages to pull together a wide enough political mandate to exert authority again. This might result from (1) the winner beating the hell out of his opposition or (2) might be the result of comprimise usually sealed by marriage arrangements with a practical decentralization of power at a regional level - with the new 'High Chief' or whatever merely becoming a first among equals.

Those were the usual paths - the Waikato and Bay of Plenty Maori followed (1) while the Samoans had this annoying tendency to follow (2) whenever they looked like they were going to do something interesting. Easter Island fell into a ******** mix of the two, it couldn't manage a decisive victory and neither could it come a workable comprimise thus the whole cycle of conflict was perpetuated again and again and again. The only reason Europeans have some regard for the thing - and not for the far more interesting Maori Wars or the whole bunch of wars in and between Samoa, Fiji and Tonga - was that they had a long gap between contacts to try and explain. Which they did poorly.

There ain't anything unusually about Polynesian populations rising and falling - New Zealand Maori must have fought a particularly violent conflict in the early days of settlement because there isn't all that much genetic diversity on the male side. And you can be sure that like most Polynesian immigrations it was top heavy with young men with nothing else to do. So it only stands to reason that something happened - like say, a fight over women. Most Islands have seen population movements during their histories of 30-50% at some time due to constant tribal conflict which existed quite independent of environmental considerations. If scarce resources were a major cause of conflict, why did Maori fight all the time, there was more land than you could shake a stick at? It was simply a part of Polynesian society to fight all the time. Europeans did exactly the same thing on a much larger and slightly less personal scale for most of their history as well. So meh.



Diamond could come up with only a handful of examples to support that supposition. None of them were particularly good ones, either. (Ref: above).



He cited a handful - and his Easter Island case ignored about forty years of scholarly work which points to exactly what I suggested as the prime medium for conflict.



I'm seriously starting to doubt the validity of massive marco-historical generalizations like this. It's simply not possible to sustain the plurality of them if you start having a regard for the specific circumstances that led to 'collapse' assuming of course that 'collapse' is a discrete event that can be measured or pointed to.

So are you positing that Easter island's collapse had nothing to do with the fact that they completely deforested the island and it was merely political? Let's not forget that deforestation not only deprives people of firewood and building material but also leads to severe water and wind caused soil erosion and can cause draught in some instances. The Easter Islanders were unable to fish in the open sea after they destroyed all their boat building material and crop yields were severely diminished due to erosion.

Competition for dwindling resources will no doubt cause political and social strain (especially during particularly dry years) that will lead to the political factors you described above. He also explains why Easter Island was more susceptible to deforestation than other pacific islands: less naturally fertile soil, comparably less rainfall, remoteness from active volcanoes and Asian continental windblown dust (which helps renew fertility on other pacific islands).

I am halfway through Collapse right now so I will refrain from giving my complete assessment of Diamond's points. But I see he applies his hypothesis to many other places such as modern Montana, other Polynesian islands, the Maya, the Anasazi, the Viking colonies of the north Atlantic, Japan, Rwanda, the Dominican Rep., Haiti, China, and modern Australia (of course a couple of these examples are not of societies that have collapsed, but they are affected by environmental factors that may shape their destiny).
There certainly are many more civilizations that collapsed that had very little to do with environmental factors, and Diamond makes no such claim that they play a role in every collapse. But, environmental factors can certainly affect any society.

I also think some of his points could be applied to other areas not covered in his book such as the Fertile Crecent, and the empires of Western Africa, but I will not give a detailed analysis until I'm finished with the book and do a little more research.

 

[Godwynn]

I think being the first to arise from the azure main at Heaven's command contributes to the rise of a civilization.

 

[Lord Baal]

So are you positing that Easter island's collapse had nothing to do with the fact that they completely deforested the island and it was merely political? Let's not forget that deforestation not only deprives people of firewood and building material but also leads to severe water and wind caused soil erosion and can cause draught in some instances. The Easter Islanders were unable to fish in the open sea after they destroyed all their boat building material and crop yields were severely diminished due to erosion.

Competition for dwindling resources will no doubt cause political and social strain (especially during particularly dry years) that will lead to the political factors you described above. He also explains why Easter Island was more susceptible to deforestation than other pacific islands: less naturally fertile soil, comparably less rainfall, remoteness from active volcanoes and Asian continental windblown dust (which helps renew fertility on other pacific islands).

I am halfway through Collapse right now so I will refrain from giving my complete assessment of Diamond's points. But I see he applies his hypothesis to many other places such as modern Montana, other Polynesian islands, the Maya, the Anasazi, the Viking colonies of the north Atlantic, Japan, Rwanda, the Dominican Rep., Haiti, China, and modern Australia (of course a couple of these examples are not of societies that have collapsed, but they are affected by environmental factors that may shape their destiny).
There certainly are many more civilizations that collapsed that had very little to do with environmental factors, and Diamond makes no such claim that they play a role in every collapse. But, environmental factors can certainly affect any society.

I also think some of his points could be applied to other areas not covered in his book such as the Fertile Crecent, and the empires of Western Africa, but I will not give a detailed analysis until I'm finished with the book and do a little more research.

The Easter Islanders deforested the land in response to their political and economic turmoil, not the other way around. Those trees were used to make weapons, houses, fortifications, etc., not just for farmland. Undoubtedly, chopping down all the trees meant that they would never recover to their former heights, but they could still have recovered.