Sublime

Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some other way?

While technology is by far the most important factor today, and apparently growing more so, all four major megapolitical factors have played a role in determining the scale at which power could be exercised in the past. Together, these factors determine whether the returns to violence continue to rise as violence is employed on a larger scale. This

Ever since Adam Smith, those trying to prove that contemporary forms of competitive market exchange are rooted in human nature have pointed to the existence of what they call ‘primitive trade’. Already tens of thousands of years ago, one can find evidence of objects – very often precious stones, shells or other items of adornment – being moved arou

I wanted to write about what collapsed as well as how and why it collapsed, because to me the Late Bronze Age is the most fascinating period in the history of the world.

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

For example, in Uruk, Mesopotamia, the world’s first city-states were founded on the idea of the king as the good shepherd: the king protected and provided for

the complexity of ecosystems often makes the consequences of some human-caused perturbation virtually impossible to