On November 5, 2025, the International Big History Association was pleased to host a webinar by Sabin Roman, of the Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, University of Cambridge, UK. In it, he addressed some common methodological pitfalls in understanding societal collapse and propose a framework to remediate them. Given recent advances in modelling of ancient societies, that lend support to Tainter’s theory of societal collapse, we extend its theoretical foundations to a dynamical setting by identifying the feedback mechanisms that underlie it and how these can be applied to specific historical cases. We find an archetypal pattern of feedback loops that relate different measures of complexity, of resource exploitation and of generated returns that characterize a society. The general pattern, called the Θ-process (Theta process), is instantiated by proposing specific feedback relationships that operated in different societies over timescales of centuries, accounting for both long-term growth and eventual decline or collapse. The framework allows us to classify societies depending on the key activities and institutions they rely on: agriculture for Easter Island and the Lowland Classic Maya, the military and state bureaucracy for the Western Roman Empire and Imperial China, religious beliefs for the Egyptian Old Kingdom and the Greenland Norse and trade activity for the East Mediterranean basin during the Bronze Age. Overall, the framework provides a unifying perspective on a wide diversity of historical cases of collapse and proposes feedback mechanism analysis to be at the forefront of conceptualizing societal dynamics. The recording is at https://youtu.be/I_zjyR8CzO4.
For more on this, see his article in the Journal of Big History, https://doi.org/10.22339/jbh.v8i3.8303
