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I watched the second and final installment of Niall Ferguson's TV show, "Civilization" last night. ( See my post on the first installment here ). He covered three of his "killer applications" that explain why western civilization is so much better than the rest of the world. 1. Medicine.  A main point in this section was that imperialism (French imperialism in west Africa) isn't so bad, because some medical advances were made by imperialist physicians in Senegal. At the end of the show, Ferguson decries the fact that "empire" has become a "dirty word." He is frustrated by the fact that people just ignore the great benefits of empires and imperialism. This is so blatant that I can't even think of a clever response! 2. Consumerism.  Blue jeans caused the Prague spring in 1968, and they also caused the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Blue jeans later caused the fall of the Berlin wall. And the Chinese are the worst-dressed people in t...

I watched the first installment of Niall Ferguson's TV series, "Civilization: The West and the Rest,"tonight. Much of it was entertaining, and there were many insights. But overall I found it a superficial and simplistic triumphal history. How did the West come to dominate the East? Ferguson attributes the West's victory to six factors (he calls them "killer applications;" it's not clear why he uses a software metaphor): competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society, and the work ethic. Well, this certainly is not a rigorous comparative study. Where did these factors come from? What theoretical model generated this set of six? David Bronwich published an eloquent, understated, and highly critical review of Ferguson's book of the same name in the New York Review of Books (December 8, 2011) On the six factors, he states, "These make an absurd catalog. It is like saying that the ingedients of a statesman are an Oxford degree...

This summer I am moving my office and lab to another building. As I pack up, I am tossing lots of old paperwork and junk. So what do I do with the two file drawers full of my old reprints? Most of these papers are posted on my website, so I really don't need to keep reprints. Apart from one or two that are very nice aesthetically (e.g., my reprint from Hansen's city-states book has a beautiful color image of an painting of  "good government" on the cover), I should just toss them all. But I am a pack-rat by nature; maybe I will want these someday (yeah, right). More importantly, these reprints are my career! This is what I have accomplished as a scholar. How can I just toss these things into the recycle bin? I spent a few weeks going back and forth (Toss them all! Save them all!), and then my wife suggested I keep a few complete sets and toss the rest. Maybe our kids will want these someday. Maybe we'll need something to light fires with in post-carbon times. One ...

Today's quiz: which discipline--sociology or political science--has a better understanding of ancient states? You would think political science would have better things to say about ancient state-level societies than sociology. After all, political science focuses on power, governments, and political phenomena. But no, sociology has a MUCH BETTER understanding of ancient states, except perhaps in the area of empires. I have been reading up in these two disciplines, trying to link up their concepts with those used by archaeologists and anthropologists on ancient states and cities. That was not too hard for sociology. The field of historical sociology, starting with Max Weber, has a big literature on how ancient states work, from tax collection in the Roman Empire to state power in China and the Ottoman Empire. It was not too hard to relate that literature to our understanding of ancient states. There are problems, of course. The biggest one is that historical sociologists rarely loo...

When our paper, " Archaeology as a social science ," was published online last week, I emailed copies to a bunch of people, including John Gerring. Gerring is a political scientist, and I have been reading his books on social science methodology. I like them a lot - he has a strong scientific epistemology, but a broad outlook that values qualitative research and case study research (which covers much archaeology; see my post on this ). I also like his article on direct and indirect control, which fits my understanding of empires very well. I have written a number of posts on Gerring's works (try searching). Anyway, after I had sent our paper to Gerring, I read the final chapter of his 2012 book, Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framewor k (2nd edition). I strongly recommend this book to archaeologists who are concerned with rigorous methods of social interpretation. On page 390, he implicitly states that archaeology is not even an observational science, but a specula...

Max Weber I've been reviewing what sociologists and political scientists have written about premodern states. In the past I have largely avoided this material, perhaps taking a quick look and then dropping it. Much of what they say is clueless and either wrong, or at least very incomplete (e.g., Greece and Rome and medieval Europe exhaust the variation in premodern states, perhaps occasionally considering dynastic China). It turns out that Max Weber was pretty smart about these things, although he did limit his writings to the Old World historical societies. But I found lots of value in Weber when I was working on Aztec taxation; Weber had much more useful comparative and theoretical material than any anthropologist or archaeologist. Anyway, the reason I have been looking at historical sociology and the like is for an upcoming proposal where a group of us will have to convince other social scientists that archaeological data are valid and  worthwhile. So we'd better not say dum...