Competition and Conquest in Europe since the Bronze Age

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Reykjavík: ReykjavíkurAkademían, 2010. — 371 pp. — ISBN 978-9979-9922-1-9.Societies sometimes expand through population growth, military conquests and migrations. Why does this happen and in what way are expanding societies different from others? Examples of such episodes are many in European history and, to name but a few, include Archaic Greece, the Germanic barbarians and modernizing Europe of the 19th and 20th centuries. The present work is an attempt to construct a model that explains these expansions and others. At the same time it is an experiment in using some principles of the biological and social sciences in the study of history. Social scientists have discovered general laws that apply to human societies. Sociologists are most often concerned with modern and recent societies and anthropologists with simple ones. In between are the agrarian civilizations that dominate most of documented history and they rarely receive much attention from anyone except historians. Unfortunately, historians are usually not much interested in general laws and, therefore, the laws that explain the evolution of agrarian societies are largely unknown. Perhaps it is time for this to change. Axel Kristinsson (b. 1959) is an Icelandic independent historian with a background in the social and political history of Iceland in the medieval and early modern periods. I recent years, however, he has concentrated on his own brand of macro-history where the approach of evolution and complexity theory is used to discover general principles of the evolution of human societies. Axel lives in Reykjavik and grows trees in his spare time.Contents: History as biology Genes, Memes and Competition. Complexity. War. Barbarism and Civilization. States and Writing. The Laws of History. The Urnfield Expansion Catastrophe at the End of the Bronze Age. The Expansion Cycle. After Effects. The Cities of Greece The Greek System. The Greek Expansion. The End of the Greek System. The Hellenistic World. The Gauls The Celtic Predecessors. Competition and Iron. The Gallic Expansion. Elitization. The Rise of Rome On the Etruscan Frontier. Rise to Empire. The End of Expansion. Romans and Barbarians. Germanic Expansion and the Fall of Rome Early Expansion. Elitization and Statehood. Expansion Renewed. The Third Wave. The Reorganization of the West. Between Antiquity and the Middle Ages Ireland. The Anglo-Saxons. The Slavs. The Vikings. Iceland. Europe in the Middle Ages The System Takes Shape. The Italian Subsystem. Knights and Soldiers. The Rise of Popular Power. Towards Europe. The European System in the Modern Period Intensified Competition. Frontier Empires: the Benefits Of Size. Expansion Postponed. The Modern Expansion Cycle. The World System. Overview Conditions. Competitive Systems. Expansion Cycles. Elitization. Appendix. Сompetition and Expansion Outside Europe