The long-term development of political systems over extended time periods has been somewhat neglected. More People, Fewer States examines world history through population explosion and empire size changes across 5000 years of socio-technological development, revealing three distinct phases: Runner, Rider, and Engineer empires. A careful comparative approach reveals that Old Egypt, Achaemenid, Caliphate, Mongol, and Britain each achieved remarkable yet rarely acknowledged expansions, leading to their successive record empire sizes. If identified past trends persist, a potential single world state could emerge by 4600, although environmental concerns may intervene. Focusing on population dynamics and area metrics of states, this book provides a novel framework for evaluating the growth, structure, and decline of empires. It not only illuminates ancient historical space but also ventures into future projections, making it an essential read for scholars interested in the long-term evolution of political systems.

‘Rein Taagepera and Miroslav Nemčok present, document, and discuss an extremely important historical trend: the enlarging size of political communities. In addition, they cautiously present intriguing extrapolations for future developments. The topic is fascinating, and the authors’ treatment is superior to everything written before. This should become a reference book with long-term validity.’

Josep M. Colomer - Georgetown University

‘Taagepera and Nemčok have produced a masterful synthesis of history, anthropology, political science, geography, and applied mathematics that spans the globe and millennia of human existence to generalize about how population size and the number (and nature) of polities are systematically related. The book is chock-full of findings that will enlighten and often surprise, along with important cautions about what the uncovered trends may portend for humanity’s future.’

Matthew S. Shugart - Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of California, Davis

‘This book summarizes and extends Rein Taagepera’s earlier prodigious quantitative comparative studies of the territorial sizes of empires and puts his results in a larger anthropological comparative framework that also considers primate groups, tribes, and chiefdoms. The methodological approach combines careful estimations of quantitative measures that make it possible to compare the scales and temporal changes in scale across cultures and civilizations over a very long period up to the present. This volume also adds the study of populations of polities and the sizes of cities which provides new insights into the timing and location of the upsweeps and down-sweeps of scale. This produces original insights about the nature of sociocultural evolution that have important implications for the future.’

Christopher Chase-Dunn - University of California, Riverside