Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization

Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as "Seshat: Global History Databank." We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history

Digital History: Towards New Methodologies

The field of Digital Humanities is changing the way historians do their research. Historians use tools to query larger data sets and they apply a different methodology to tackle certain research questions. In this paper we will discuss two propositions on the necessity of adapting to and taking advantage of the technological changes: (1) Digital Humanities tools are not the enemy of the historian, but they need to be used in a proper way. This requires historians to make ‘tool criticism’ part of their methodological toolkit; (2) Digital Humanities tools allow for a more data-driven and bottom-up approach to historical research. This eliminates some of the historian’s preconceptions that are inevitably part of more traditional historical research