Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Drawing on cutting-edge scholarship of world history and economics, Turchin and Hoyer reveal the progress of civilization by numbers. Building on the Pocket World in Figures series' trademark charts and tables, World History in Figures uses charts, maps, and other graphics to literally show the rise and fall of trade networks, countries, and empires, as well as just how far we have come in the past few centuries.
For instance, did you know that the Mongol conquests resulted in a perceptible drop in carbon emissions? That malaria has been the most common cause of death? That the United Kingdom was the most indebted it has ever been at the end of the Napoleonic wars?
World History in Figures promises to change how we think about history and the economy.
Synopsis
What was history's biggest empire? Or the tallest building of the ancient world? What was the plumbing like in medieval Byzantium? The average wage in the Mughal Empire? Where did scientific writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ever ritual human sacrifice?
We are used to thinking about history in terms of stories. Yet we understand our own world through data: cast arrays of statistics that reveal the workings of our societies.
In Figuring Out the Past, radical historians Peter Turchin and Dan Hoyer dive into the numbers that reveal the true shape of the past, drawing on their own Seshat project, a staggeringly ambitious attempt to log every data point that can be gathered for every society that has ever existed. This book does more than tell the story of humanity: it shows you the big picture, by the numbers.
Synopsis
Discover the world records that define our history and jump headfirst into the past using scientific data that reveals accurate and insightful answers to life's biggest questions. What was history's biggest empire? Or the tallest building of the ancient world? What was the plumbing like in medieval Byzantium? The average wage in the Mughal Empire? Where did scientific writing first emerge? What was the bloodiest ever ritual human sacrifice?
We are used to thinking about history in terms of stories. Yet we understand our own world through data: cast arrays of statistics that reveal the workings of our societies. In Figuring Out the Past, radical historians Peter Turchin and Dan Hoyer dive into the numbers that reveal the true shape of the past, drawing on their own Seshat project, a staggeringly ambitious attempt to log every data point that can be gathered for every society that has ever existed. This book does more than tell the story of humanity: it shows you the big picture, by the numbers.