Evaluating a volume on the fragility of ancient societies in this moment seems both fitting and fraught. My thoughts are informed by the grim words and images of people afflicted by a devastating disease. A woman, her face and hands exposed, tries to soothe a patient with her speech and touch. The infected individual is moaning, writhing, and too weak to sit up while bundled against fever chills. First-person accounts are especially harrowing:

These are the visual and textual records of a plague that consumed Mexico in 1576, collected and recorded by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún in his General History of the Things of New Spain (1575–1577).

As I write this review, a similar “invisible enemy” (Shafer, Politico Magazine, 9 April 2020) is exposing acute and unexpected vulnerabilities of seemingly powerful states, regardless of their specific political, social, economic, or ideological structures. Much like in 1576, a virus will mark the end of some of those structures and spur the reinvention of others. The scales of the two events are incomparable (in terms of both the numbers of fatalities and the geographical areas affected), but both sixteenth-century hemorrhagic fevers and a twenty-first-century coronavirus, along with the cases detailed in The Evolution of Fragility: Setting the Terms, raise key and imminently relevant questions about what makes states fragile, where in complex social and political hierarchies that fragility lies, and how it might be identified and analyzed. Fragility will be rethought after COVID-19.

This open-access volume is the outcome of a conference held at the Getty Museum in 2017, when global pandemics were mostly the stuff of science fiction and Hollywood blockbusters. The book itself reads almost as a transcript of the conference: a short introduction (under six pages), followed by a series of nine stand-alone, paradigmatic case studies: the Andes (Dillehay and Wernke), Bronze Age China (Li), the Classic Maya lowlands (McAnany), Egypt (Morris), Cahokia and Chaco (Pauketat), the Indus civilization (Petrie), sub-Saharan Africa (Robertshaw), Angkor (Stark), and Mesopotamia (Yoffee and Seri). Although Norman Yoffee provides a comparative organizational framework in his introduction (p. 3)—grouping the contributions according to their apparent long-term stability (Egypt, Angkor, and the Indus), “ironically” long-lived city-states (Mesopotamia and the Maya), ideologically fragile states (sub-Saharan Africa and Cahokia and Chaco), and fragile empires (China and the Andes)—the volume's chapters are not presented according to his or any other temporal, regional, or thematic framework but instead proceed in alphabetical order (by the first author's last name).

Individually, the chapters in the volume are excellent. They are written by well-known senior scholars who draw on their own substantial experience and contributions to their field as well as on decades of evaluating, comparing, critiquing, and adapting to the claims of others. Each contribution follows a broadly similar narrative arc. The authors outline the various processes through which particular cities or states and their codependent social, political, and economic systems coalesced, while also emphasizing how those same elements might contribute to their own instability. The details, however, vary considerably. For example, where Li Min (Chapter 3) questions how the legacies of Bronze Age China contributed to the fragility of new regimes by creating a basis for resistance, Patricia McAnany (Chapter 4) highlights the weight of the past—in the Classic Maya notion of monumental time—as a durable and stable anchor that could make fragility appear as continuity (whether real or imagined). Timothy Pauketat (Chapter 6) suggests that Cahokian and Chacoan fragility was more than human, in the sense that maize, water, earth, and light not only provided cosmic frameworks for human organizations and activities but also frequently tested their strength, boundaries, and longevity. By contrast, Miriam Stark (Chapter 9) argues that Angkorian fragility lay not in potentially fickle elements of the environment or landscape but in a system of differential power based on charisma and connection, with nested levels of patronage from the king to the countryside. Tom Dillehay and Steven Wernke (Chapter 2) point to the uncertainty of Inka succession as one of the state's inherent vulnerabilities that could, at times, produce fragility, whereas Ellen Morris (Chapter 5) highlights dynastic breaks in Egypt as moments of resilience, as evidence of the state itself persisting as a recognizable entity, regardless of who was at its head. The case studies are detailed and focused on the question of fragility, but the wide range of evidence and explanations can be dizzying, especially given the lack of cross-chapter dialogue or a conclusion to summarize the volume's diverse contents.

The book comes to a sudden end after Yoffee and Seri's chapter on Mesopotamia (Chapter 10), leaving the first chapter as its only moment of comparison. Yoffee notes in his introduction that James Scott offered a response to his introductory paper at the conference, but a contribution from Scott, who is referenced repeatedly throughout the volume (e.g., Dillehay and Wernke, p. 9; McAnany, pp. 47–48, Morris, pp. 61, 63; Petrie, pp. 110, 125; Robertshaw, p. 148; Stark, p. 166), is conspicuously absent. The abrupt ending leaves the reader wondering if a conclusion (perhaps by Scott?) was originally intended for the volume or whether the book is meant to segue into a planned subsequent volume, which will involve the same conference participants and is provisionally titled “The Unfolding of Fragility: New Directions in Archaeology and Ancient History” (Yoffee, p. 1). The effect produced is one that is, at least for this reader, uncomfortable. In terms of the goal outlined by Yoffee in the introduction—“understanding how early cities and states struggled to survive and often did not”—I felt both better equipped to evaluate those processes by the wealth of regionally and historically specific data provided by each individual chapter, and overwhelmed by the task of sifting through and weighing those data to draw my own comparative and synthetic conclusions about the topic of fragility.

The volume's subtitle, Setting the Terms, accurately describes one of its key contributions. Several chapters ask exactly what those terms should be in the discussion of fragility. Are fragile cities the same thing as fragile states (Petrie, p. 125)? Is it acceptable to focus on “secondary” states (Robertshaw, p. 135)? Are questions of fragility and longevity only about state institutions, or should they also consider traditional nonstate institutions of governance and community formation, some of which may have survived multiple imperialist strategies (Dillehay and Wenke, p. 13; Stark, p. 174)? In addition, we should also ask about the stability and fragility of states that might not fit the mold exemplified by these archetypal case studies, such as the nomadic empires of the Comanche (Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire, 2008) or the Mongols (May, The Mongol Empire, 2018).

The 1576 epidemic described by Sahagún was apocalyptic for the inhabitants of Mexico. It led to a demographic collapse on the heels of violent conflict and in the midst of ecological upheaval. Yet certain structures and human networks endured—outlasting the rise and fall of both the Aztec and Spanish empires (Johnson, Pueblos within Pueblos: Tlaxilacalli Communities in Acolhuacan, Mexico, ca. 1272–1692, 2017). This volume provides ancient case studies that force us to clarify what we mean by fragility as much as strength and stability, to consider which social institutions are long lasting or temporary, and to imagine alternatives to some of the world's best-known histories. The Evolution of Fragility: Setting the Terms shows us that not every state is equally fragile. It also exposes one of the common and recurrent markers of fragility that seems critically important in the present moment: how difficult it is to see it until things break.