 | |
| Author | Luke Kemp |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | History |
| Published | 31 July 2025 (Penguin Books Ltd, Viking) |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (hard & paperback) |
| Pages | 592 |
| ISBN | 9780241741238 |
Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse is a 2025 non-fiction book by Cambridge University's lecturer Luke Kemp. A historical study of the collapse of human societies, the book references 324 case studies of powerful regimes and empires that ended in collapse, from the Bronze Age to modern age.
In the book, Kemp argues that collapsed former empires or societies were captured by corrupt elites, who used coercion to secure their dominance and seize control of the community and private resources, leading to extreme social, political and economic inequality, [1] hence, this increasing inequality in wealth and concentration of power in the hands of a small elite led to the empire's downfall. [2] "Fiscal fragility, ecological overshoot, legitimacy crises, and polarization typically appear before failure—but are filtered through partisan incentives and short time horizons." [3]
Although powerful, these regimes were also fragile due to "infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, over-expansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy," writes The Guardian's Damian Carrington. [4] "Inequality... is the 'constant variable' or Achilles’ heel that sooner or later causes all Goliaths to buckle. If people stop believing they are 'all in it together', the upshot will be a game of thrones that nobody actually wins," summarized the Irish Times' Andrew Lynch. "Goliath’s Curse clearly belongs to the “great unifying theory” genre that has produced international best-sellers such as Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens ." [5]
Ed Simon, in a review for the New York Times, observed, "Unlike Jared Diamond’s formative 1997 best seller Guns, Germs, and Steel , which focuses on a handful of examples..., Goliath’s Curse analyzes a massive data set through digital analysis. ....[it] provides a novel theory of civilizational development." [6]
"Democracy and inclusive institutions seem to be the big things that encourage states and societies to often last longer," Kemp told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. [7]
The book is based on research presented in the article "The vulnerability of aging states: A survival analysis across premodern societies" by Marten Scheffer, Egbert van Nes, Luke Kemp, Timothy Kohler, Timothy Lenton, and Chi Xu. [8] [9]