Dolia, an example of one type of pottery common in Roman times that completely disappeared from Western Europe after the fall of the empire. “Ostia Antica Dolia” by AlMare – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.Image Source. Economic history blogger Pseudoerasmus published an interesting pair of posts earlier this month titled […]
In the December issue of International Studies Quarterly Paul Avey and Michael Desch published one of the more interesting articles to come from an academic international relations journal in a long while. For the last few years there has been a rather voracious debate within social science generally and political science specifically about whether or […]
“Books” by Leonid Afremov. Image Source The last two months were far busier than I expected them to be. I apologize to the Stage’s readers for the lull in posting–more than once I started post or essay during these weeks only to discover that I did not have the spare time to finish it. Now that […]
Info-graphic taken from Peter Turchin, “The Double-Helix of Inequality and Well-Being,” Social Evolution Forum (8 February 2013) Recently in a discussion at a different venue I wrote the following: I am extremely pessimistic about the near term (2015-2035) future of both of the countries I care most about and follow most closely, but very optimistic […]
“You may have horses…. But remember this: if you have horses everything will be changed for you forever.” -Cheyenne Myth quoted in Pekka Hamalainen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” Journal of American History, vol. 90, no. 3 (December 2003), p.841. “The historian of the early military must first see how a […]
The side-bar of this blog declares that the Stage is a space to discuss “the intersections of governance, ecology, demographics, and culture.” [1] This casts a wide net–at times, too wide of a net. It would be much easier to maintain a blog devoted solely to exploring the ‘dynamics of human civilization,’ chronicling the decline […]
As Lexington Green says, if you are not reading John Robb‘s new website, then you should be.Mr. Robb has a unique biography. Titles like USAFA cadet, SERE school grad, Yalie, astronautical engineer, counter-terrorism operator, military theorist, tech analyst, software executive, and best selling author have been given to Mr. Robb at one point or another. […]
Scott Reinhard, Expert Button (February 2010). Print at Scott Reinhard Co. Image source. Last month Tom Nichols, professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a well regarded authority on Russian foreign policy and American nuclear strategy, published a thought-provoking essay on his blog titled “The Death of Expertise:” […]
A Taureg nomad in the Sahara. Photograph by Carsten Peter, National Geographic. © “The nomadic strategy is one means by which people adapt to thinly spread resources and to the variability of the resources across space and over time. It is also a strategy for avoiding other deleterious environmental conditions, such as extreme heat […]
The world before the Mongols. Map Created by Thomass Lessman for Wikimedia “I will now tell you all about the Tartars and how they acquired their empire and spread throughout the world.” – Marco Polo, The Travels [1] I suspect the Mongol Empire needs no introduction to the readers of The Stage. No conquests so […]
