Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2021 Sep 16;16(9):e0254240. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0254240. eCollection 2021.
"Barbarism" is perhaps best understood as a recurring syndrome among peripheral societies in response to the threats and opportunities presented by more developed neighbors. This article develops a mathematical model of barbarigenesis-the formation of "barbarian" societies adjacent to more complex societies-and its consequences, and applies the model to the case of Europe in the first millennium CE. A starting point is a game (developed by Hirshleifer) in which two players allocate their resources either to producing wealth or to fighting over wealth. The paradoxical result is that a richer and potentially more powerful player may lose out to a poorer player, because the opportunity cost of fighting is greater for the former. In a more elaborate spatial model with many players, the outcome is a wealth-power mismatch: central regions have comparatively more wealth than power, peripheral regions have comparatively more power than wealth. In a model of historical dynamics, a wealth-power mismatch generates a long-lasting decline in social complexity, sweeping from more to less developed regions, until wealth and power come to be more closely aligned. This article reviews how well this model fits the historical record of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Europe both quantitatively and qualitatively. The article also considers some of the history left out of the model, and why the model doesn't apply to the modern world.
“野蛮”或许可以被理解为边缘社会对更发达邻邦所带来的威胁与机遇的一种周期性反应综合征。本文构建了一个“蛮族”社会形成（毗邻更复杂社会的“蛮族”社会的形成）及其后果的数学模型，并将该模型应用于公元 1 世纪欧洲的案例。其起点是一个游戏（由 Hirshleifer 提出），其中两个玩家将其资源分配用于创造财富或争夺财富。矛盾的结果是，一个更富裕且潜在更强大的玩家可能会输给一个较贫穷的玩家，因为前者的战斗机会成本更高。在一个具有多个玩家的更复杂的空间模型中，结果是财富与权力的不匹配：中心区域拥有相对更多的财富，而边缘区域拥有相对更多的权力。在历史动态模型中，财富与权力的不匹配会导致社会复杂性的长期下降，从较发达地区到欠发达地区，直到财富和权力变得更加一致。本文从数量和质量上评估了该模型如何适应当代欧洲晚期古代和中世纪早期的历史记录。本文还考虑了模型中遗漏的一些历史，并探讨了为什么该模型不适用于现代世界。
