Abstract
"Barbarism" is perhaps best understood as a recurring syndrome among peripheral societies in response to the threats and opportunities presented by more developed neighbors. This article develops a mathematical model of barbarigenesis-the formation of "barbarian" societies adjacent to more complex societies-and its consequences, and applies the model to the case of Europe in the first millennium CE. A starting point is a game (developed by Hirshleifer) in which two players allocate their resources either to producing wealth or to fighting over wealth. The paradoxical result is that a richer and potentially more powerful player may lose out to a poorer player, because the opportunity cost of fighting is greater for the former. In a more elaborate spatial model with many players, the outcome is a wealth-power mismatch: central regions have comparatively more wealth than power, peripheral regions have comparatively more power than wealth. In a model of historical dynamics, a wealth-power mismatch generates a long-lasting decline in social complexity, sweeping from more to less developed regions, until wealth and power come to be more closely aligned. This article reviews how well this model fits the historical record of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Europe both quantitatively and qualitatively. The article also considers some of the history left out of the model, and why the model doesn't apply to the modern world.
Highlights
Societies past and present differ in their level of social development [1,2,3]
Social development is correlated with social scale, social complexity, and intensity of economic production
In the Data and Results sections, we show that the model provides a good fit to population estimates for Europe over the first millennium—a reasonable proxy for social complexity
Summary
More developed societies may or may not provide improved biological well-being, greater prosperity, or more liberty and equality for most of their members [4, 5] They do consistently command more resources, and excel in their “abilities to master their physical and intellectual environments and get things done in the world” [1]. Scale, complexity, and intensity tend to increase together over time and to diffuse in space from more to less developed regions These long-term, large-scale trends result from multiple causes, including population pressure, capital accumulation, intellectual and practical innovation and diffusion, growth in the extent of the market and the division of labor, and competition between social groups [1, 3, 6,7,8,9]
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