The Life-Spans of Empires
- 28 July 2011
- journal article
- scholarly incursions
- Published by Taylor & Francis Ltd in Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History
- Vol. 44 (3), 127-129
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2011.577733
Abstract
The collapse of empires is exceedingly difficult to understand. The author examined the distribution of imperial lifetimes using a data set that spans more than three millennia and found that it conforms to a memoryless exponential distribution in which the rate of collapse of an empire is independent of its age. Comparing this distribution to similar lifetime distributions of other complex systems—specifically, biological species and corporate firms—the author explores the reasons behind their lifetime distributions and how this approach can yield insights into empires.Keywords
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