Cliodynamics: An AI-Assisted Introduction Through Its Founding Journal, 2010–2026

Cliodynamics is the quantitative science of history and cultural evolution — an interdisciplinary field applying methods from complexity science and data science to historical questions: How do states form? What drives the rise and fall of empires? What role does inequality play in societal collapse?

The field's founding journal is Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution, launched in 2010 under the leadership of Peter Turchin (University of Connecticut). This open-access journal had published 198 articles by 2026, documenting the emergence of a new science.

This book distills that literature — all 198 articles — into a thematic overview across 16 chapters, produced through an AI-assisted human-machine workflow. The text is released into the public domain. This is the English master version; a machine-translated German edition is also available.

Third Edition (August 9, 2026)

↓ PDF (1.04 MB)↓ EPUB (598 KB)

Cite as: Logies, M. (2026). Cliodynamics: An AI-Assisted Introduction Through Its Founding Journal, 2010–2026 (3rd ed.). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21859794
To always cite the latest edition, use the concept DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21859793.

Note on rendering: The EPUB contains diagrams (e.g. in Chapter 13, Author Statistics). Not all readers display these correctly – ReadEra and Moon+ Reader/Pro, for instance, do not show them. Recommended: Readest (open source, for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS), which displays the EPUB completely and also offers back/forward navigation across followed links, cross-device highlights (exportable as Markdown/text), and text-to-speech. On ChromeOS, Readest runs more reliably as a Flatpak in the Linux VM than as the Android app, where e.g. mouse-based text selection works only intermittently. In Google Play Books, cross-chapter references in this edition don't work.

Author: Michael Logies
Cover image: the ancient Egyptian goddess Seshat, patroness of writing, history, and architecture (Wikimedia Commons, CC0)

For the full table of contents, older editions (kept for traceability only), the German edition, the complete Zotero RDF source material, the translation source kit for other languages, and a detailed account of the AI-assisted methodology behind this book, see the main overview page: Cliodynamics: An AI-Assisted Introduction Through Its Founding Journal, 2010–2026.