Now this is a chart:
This comes from a 2014 paper by Manuel Eisner called "From Swords to Words: Does Macro-Level Change in Self-Control Predict Long-Term Variation in Levels of Homicide?" Eisner's paper is stuffed with estimates of murder rates across Europe during the past millennium.
But I'm more fascinated by the estimate of regicides, mainly as a demonstration that there's a chart for everything. But also: why the big surge around 1050? Were kings being especially annoying back then? Eisner doesn't say, but he attributes the peaks and valleys in homicide rates to changes in alcohol consumption and, more generally, to periodic waves of civility and self-discipline.
Eh, maybe, but Eisner also teases me by taking a look at more recent murder rates:
Homicide rates in the United States have dropped by at least 40 percent since 1991, mirroring a much broader downturn of violent crime that includes assault, robbery, rape, bullying, and child abuse
Why yes. Do go on:
But while the US decline has long been known, experts only recently began to realize that something similar is happening across the Western world. Homicide rates in most European countries have declined considerably since the early 1990s and overall crime levels have been moving along a downward trend for the past 20 years. The phenomenon of a largely synchronized decline in violent crime
across the Western world has puzzled researchers.Initial explanations had mainly focused on the United States, but as the evidence for the similarities mounts, scholars find that attention must be paid to mechanisms that account for the astonishing commonalities.
Yes, yes! Crime went down everywhere. What could be the cause?
One such approach interprets the past two decades as one of several extended historical periods during which interpersonal violence was in retreat. They are believed to be part of a broader civilizing process—a long dynamic toward the growing concentration of the legitimate use of force in the hands of the state.... Communities began recivilizing their young men, the criminal justice system became more predictable, self-control became increasingly central to crime prevention programs, and society returned to glorifying the value of responsibility.
So close! But this isn't really an explanation. Why was interpersonal violence in retreat? Saying merely that we happen to live in one of several "extended historical periods" of calm isn't very satisfying, is it?
It was lead, Manuel, good ol' tetraethyl lead in gasoline. And for the big surge in the mid-1300s I'd guess bubonic plague. For the one in 1315 maybe the Great Famine. For the later ones, your guess is as good as mine.
Around 1050 it was decided that "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." The rest is history that makes for good literature. Blame it on the witches.
The murder of UHC CEO should be counted as regicide. We have lots of kings now…
With 8 billion people on this planet… wars raging all over… etc… crime is not “down”. Silly.
Except that if you actually look at the numbers, crime is indeed down across most dimensions, wars being generally anomalous and minor blips, sorry to interrupt your preferred narrative.
Or, you know, the numbers are just all over the place.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191134/reported-murder-and-nonnegligent-manslaughter-cases-in-the-us-since-1990/
I’m sure Mr Drum could expand on this chart. More people, more murderers. It’s a simple thing, really.
We don't care about the absolute number of murders, we care about how likely any given person is to be murdered. Hence why the chart shows rate per 100,000 rather than a raw number.
😂
Of course you don’t. I do. Silly.
Several people were shot at a place near me last week. You want me to think it’s ok. I don’t think it’s ok.
You want me to think.
it's okayI don’t think.it’s okI'm inclined to believe that the general downward trend in regicide was due to strengthening social norms against it, as people realized more and more that regicide is incredibly destabilizing and the resulting civil wars tend to be negative-sum. Too much infighting among domestic rivals leaves a country vulnerable to foreign invaders.
More granularly:
600s-800s: Regicide declines from a high peak as the chaos unleashed by the fall of Rome gradually settles down.
800s-1000s: Regicide increases as Feudalism sets in, with nobles gaining strength and kings getting weaker, with uppity nobles not wanting kings to tell them what to do and sometimes getting regicidal over it.
1000s to 1200s: Regicide declines as the Feudal system becomes established and accepted, with the expectations of kings and nobles getting better aligned, leaving less reason for violence.
1300s: Regicide increases a bit due to the instability brought on by the Black Death.
1300s to 1500s: Regicide declines as kings gain the upper hand on the nobles and centralize their states, with rebellious nobles losing their fights with the kings.
1600s: My knowledge of history is not good enough to guess what this small uptick in regicide is about. I know Charles I got beheaded, but who else got offed in this century? How large is the sample size? Maybe it's statistical noise?
Of course, this assumes that the chart includes only Europe.
The 1600s was a bad century to be the Sultan of Morocco.
The other big thing going on in Europe in the 1600s was the Thirty Years War.
Right?! How do people miss this? German princes on pikes at every intersection...
And the 1000's the little things like Norse raiding, kingdom toppling, and in 1415 an estimated one third of French nobility was planted at Agincourt during the 100 Years War.
Thank you! Thirty Years War explains the 1600s uptick nicely.
My high school history class barely mentioned the Thirty Years War. Almost everything I know about it was learned in college and on the Internet. If other American high schools give it similarly short shrift, that'd explain why a lot of people miss it.
The surge around 1050 would just be William the Conquerer, wouldn't it?
My guess is there were simply fewer kings around as nations were consolidated. This is roughly compatible with what shapeofsociety said, of course.
The chart shows "Regicide rate per 1000 ruler-years" so having fewer kings doesn't affect it.
The idea of calculating a murder rate for the fourteenth century is ludicrous. As for the regicides, they’re black swan events. you can’t draw inferences from trends like this. sociology is a garbage discipline.
You'd be surprised. Surviving civic records for the fourteenth century are not as complete or high-quality as the ones we have from later periods, but records do exist. Regicides mostly don't happen at random, they are products of political conflict which display patterns that can be tracked over time. Most of these regicides weren't random assassins, they were political rivals who killed kings in succession conflicts and civil wars.
The red line doesn't extend prior to 1200 because we don't have adequate records before then that would allow us to calculate a murder rate with any useful accuracy. Regicides don't pass unrecorded, so that line could go farther back.
This sounds like a classic "I don't understand this, so it must be trash" complaint.
Wikipedia has you covered.
It's Vikings, Pechenegs and Muslims, oh my!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1050s
Yeah, the 1050s were the crest of the Viking wave, as Viking families took over England, Sicily, and several smaller crowns. And I knew that the Seljuk invasion of the Babylonian sultanate of Arabia & Anatolia was at about that time. But I'd never heard of the Pechenegs, and will have to dig into that one. At a glance, it looks like they may have been a reason for the Seljuk Turks turning south, to find new lands further away from really bad neighbors. 🙂
Should've scrolled.
☎️ If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered, press 1.
Nice performance, mr. Drum. I could practically see you nudging Eisner: “yesss, yesssssss, go on …..”
Like most people Kevin wants a root cause not to be multivariate. Even carrots have multiple roots though -- despite appearances to the contrary.
+1
Like most people Kevin wants a root cause not to be multivariate. Even carrots have multiple roots though -- despite appearances to the contrary.
I want a multivariate explanation if the data point to that. And that indeed is often the way things look. Sometimes, though, the data suggest a single, dominant causative mechanism is more likely. The data surrounding the sharp decline in crime in myriad locations globally—nicely synchronized to fit the differing timelines of various countries' phase-outs of leaded gasoline—suggests Pb is the answer.
Wow, people must sure have used a lot of lead in the periods prior to, say, 1600!
And the reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral bears that out. Remember how, during the blaze, rivers of molten lead were seen flowing down the streets away from the building?
Yes indeed. People back then knew that lead was poisonous in large amounts, but no one knew that even small amounts do a lot of damage to children's brains. So they used it a lot, without any real safety precautions.
It’s why I read this blog….
You got it. I just don't understand why our culture, which obsesses over so many other environmental hazards, real and imagined, but can't seem to acknowledge this particular one. Is it because it was solved, and therefore not acceptable in an age where everyone is convinced everything is going to hell?
Part of the answer, I think, is that somehow modern society has adopted the erroneous view that "single" cause explanations are intrinsically suspect in that they "oversimplify" matters. In our "complex" modern world, people tend to view multivariate explanatory mechanisms as ipso facto more credible. Which is rubbish, of course. Sometimes single, dominant phenomena aren't the explanation. Sometimes they are. It really depends on the particulars.
Looking more closely at the red line on the chart, I will note that homicide rates were consistently very high between the 1200s and the early 1600s, even if you ignore the giant spike in the 1300s. After the late 1600s it's way lower, with fluctuations that are much smaller in absolute numbers. Even the infamous leaded-gas crime wave looks tiny compared the the pre-1600s rates.
The transition from a high baseline to a low baseline happened in the mid-1600s. Why? It's too early to have been the Industrial Revolution, or even the Enlightenment. Did state capacity improve? Was there a drop in social tolerance for homicide, with fewer homicides being considered justifiable for silly reasons like "honor"? Were people less inclined to kill each other over resources because they now had the option of emigrating to the Americas?
Europe (and soon, North America) was getting wealthier; living standards were improving; literacy was becoming more common; and, yes, I expect as part of that march of progress, state capacity was indeed growing.
I'll go with the lead (and mercury) theory. Lead was far more prevalent 500 years ago, and even more prevalent 1000 years ago.
So now we're supposed to believe The Better Angels of Our Nature?
I can't follow the lefty whiplash.
Or are we still supposed to hate on Steven Pinker, and agree that everything he has ever said is false; and only refer to THIS paper when we want to make this particular point?
Sorry life is too complicated for you to figure out.
Why would you care what you're "supposed" to believe?
Pinker's thesis has supporters and detractors, but I don't recall Kevin ever dissing it. So I don't see any reason to call this post "whiplash".
Re: And for the big surge in the mid-1300s I'd guess bubonic plague.
Huh? Just two sitting monarchs died of the Plague: Alfonso XI of Castile and Simeon, ruling prince of Moscow. And we would not hgsay those two were "killed" in the sense of a regicide.
On the 1300s Edward II and Richard II of England was both deposed and killed. Pedro IV of Castile was killed, in battle I think. Joanna of Naples was assassinated. John the Blind of Bohemia fell in battle (yes, he fought in one despite being blind). I'm having trouble thinking of any others, but maybe there were a few more?
This was an interesting post until Mr. Drum used it for his favorite hobbyhorse (his next favorite hobbyhorses are: 2. Fox News is destroying everything. 3. AI will destroy everything. 4. Woke activists are annoying. 5. Nothing really matters.)
Lead is a good explanation for the 1970s-1990s crime wave, but I doubt it has a whole lot of explanatory power for most of the fluctuations on this chart. People in the past did use a lot of lead with no serious safety precautions because they didn't know how dangerous it was, but other factors also matter, including state capacity and social norms. The scope of socially-acceptable reasons to kill somebody used to be a LOT bigger than it is now, and governments used to be weaker.
but I doubt it has a whole lot of explanatory power for most of the fluctuations on this chart.
Drum addresses this in the last paragraph.