Turchin and Nefedov's quantitative study of secular cycles in agrarian societies — testing structural-demographic theory against historical data from medieval France, England, Rome, and Russia.
Structural-demographic theory developed: population growth → resource depletion → elite competition → state fragility → crisis and collapse → recovery. Tested across multiple historical cases with quantitative data. The secular cycle: 200-300 year oscillations in state capacity, social cohesion, and living standards. The founding empirical work of cliodynamics.
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