Peter Turchin Quote
Patrick Kirch concludes: By the time of initial contact with Europeans, Hawaiians had taken the older Polynesian concepts of chiefship and rank, and subjected them to a form of hypertrophy, the logical extension of which was that their rulers, their kings, were now held to be divine. This was not simply a quantitative extension of the Ancestral Polynesian ranking system; it was truly a qualitative change by which Hawaiian society had entered a new realm.138 It appears that nearly all other archaic states experienced the same qualitative change to the extreme forms of inequality that Kirch describes for the Hawaiian kingdoms. Based on his survey of seven early civilizations,
Patrick Kirch concludes: By the time of initial contact with Europeans, Hawaiians had taken the older Polynesian concepts of chiefship and rank, and subjected them to a form of hypertrophy, the logical extension of which was that their rulers, their kings, were now held to be divine. This was not simply a quantitative extension of the Ancestral Polynesian ranking system; it was truly a qualitative change by which Hawaiian society had entered a new realm.138 It appears that nearly all other archaic states experienced the same qualitative change to the extreme forms of inequality that Kirch describes for the Hawaiian kingdoms. Based on his survey of seven early civilizations,
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About Peter Turchin
Turchin is an emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut in the departments of ecology and evolutionary biology, anthropology, and mathematics. He is a project leader at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and a research associate at the School of Anthropology of the University of Oxford.
He was editor-in-chief and remains a member of the editorial board at Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution. Turchin is a founding director of the Seshat: Global History Databank. He was a director of the Evolution Institute. In 2021, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.