Review of Sergey A. Nefedov, Faktornyy analiz istoricheskoho processa. Istoriya Vostoka. [Factor analysis of historical process. The History of the East].

In this epic book, Sergey Nefedov elaborates his three-factor model of historical process embracing interconnected geography, demography, and technology, and tests the theory by applying it to the military history of ancient, medieval, and early modern Asian and Northern African empires.Nefedov, a Russian historian with a background in mathematics, is one of the major modern contributors to the neo-Malthusian study of demographic cycles.His population studies advance within the lines of the demographic-structural perspective of Jack Goldstone.Nefedov belongs to the academic circle of Russian macrohistorians who apply mathematical modeling to historical social change, which they refer to as global dynamics or cliodynamics.This intellectual network involves such scholars as Leonid Grinin, Andrey Korotayev, Sergey Malkov, and Peter Turchin, who co-author and edit a book series titled History & Mathematics (e.g.Turchin et al. 2006).Essentially, Sergey Nefedov claims that historical process can be largely explained as an interplay of geographic, demographic, and technological factors (58).In fact, he convincingly explains political, economic, and social cycles and transformations of major pre-modern and early modern Asian and Northern African empires.He accomplishes this task by considering the systemic complexity of interaction between a comprehensive set of variables: ecological (climate

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