All Crises are Unhappy in Their Own Way: The Role of Societal Instability in Shaping the Past

Abstract Societal “crises” are periods of turmoil and destabilization in sociocultural, political, economic, and other systems, often accompanied by violent power struggles, and sometimes significant changes in social structure. The extensive literature analyzing societal crises has concentrated on a relatively small sample of well-known cases (such as the fall of the Roman Empire), emphasizing separate aspects of these events as potential causes or consistent effects. To investigate crises in an even-handed fashion, and to avoid the potential small-sample-size bias present in several previous studies, we have created the Crisis Database (CrisisDB). CrisisDB uniformly characterizes a sample of 168 historical cases spanning millennia — from the prehistoric to the post-industrial — and varying polity complexities in diverse global regions. It features data on factors that are identified as relevant to explaining societal crises and significant “consequences” (such as warfare or epidemics), including institutional and cultural reforms (such as constitutional changes) that might occur during and immediately following the crisis period. Here, we study some examples from the CrisisDB and demonstrate our analyses, which show that the consequences of crisis experienced in each society are highly variable. The outcomes are uncorrelated with one another and, overall, the set of consequences is largely unpredictable, leading us to conclude that there is no “typical” societal crisis of the past. We offer some alternative suggestions about the forces that might propel, or mitigate, these varying consequences, highlighting areas that would benefit from future exploration, and the need for collaborative and interdisciplinary work on the study of crises.