Hazards and Disasters in the Sociocultural Evolution of World-Systems

Natural and human-caused disasters have operated as selection mechanisms in the evolution of within-polity and interpolity sociocultural systems by destroying lives and the human-built environment, and they have provoked challenge-and-response dynamics that caused human polities to innovate and to implement innovations that resulted in increases in complexity and hierarchy. Individuals, households, communities, settlements, and polities and interpolity systems that were most prepared and resilient to these selection mechanisms survived and prevailed. This article reviews the theoretical literature in geography, historiography, sociology, anthropology, political science and economics on hypotheses regarding the effects of disasters on human social change, including both increases and decreases in sociocultural complexity and hierarchy.