Ethnic diversity is the popular one people like to accuse today, but in fact the most successful empires in history have had no problem integrating new ethnicities into the fold and often took great pride in this, for example the Roman, Islamic and in a more limited sense American empires. To put it another way the things that drive down social trust and reduce cohesion end up weakening society as a whole. When those things fray, collective action becomes impossible and decay of some sort inevitable. Although the world we live in today is very different from the past, I do think there is some truth to the fact that the strength of societies is tied to levels of inter-group trust and cooperation. This is a book that tries to apply predictive logic to the rise and collapse of imperial systems: reviving Ibn Khaldun's concept of asabiyya, or group cohesion, and applying it to the contemporary world. Humans are the same, but modern technology is a social variable that we are still desperately trying to wrap our heads around. I'm a bit skeptical of Big History books, primarily because the world we live in today is so radically different from the cyclical political orders that existed in the past.
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