Nomadic Universalismworking title
Why do peripheral, improbable groups sometimes overrun the world? The recurring answer is a form, not a virtue: a thin membrane of membership — cheap to join, defined by adherence rather than blood or soil — bolted to a hard, portable core, one non-negotiable protocol carried anywhere. Islam and the United States are the two fullest experiments, a millennium apart.
But the same open form that incorporates can also extract, and this book refuses the triumphal story: the “low barrier to entry” was annihilation for those outside the membrane. It is a reckoning with the architecture of belonging at civilizational scale.
Membrane thin, skeleton non-negotiable.
Only-skin orders — loose confederations — dissolve in a generation. Only-skeleton orders — a rigid centre that cannot metabolise newcomers — starve. The rare world-conquerors had both, and a polycentric binding layer between skin and skeleton that let many centres cohere under one rule-set. The Mongols’ fatal lack.
Six experiments, one form.
Arab-Islam, 632–750. The Mongols, 1206–1294. Rome, republic to empire. The United States, 1776 onward. The Comanche, c. 1700–1875, as the triangulating case. And the network state of the 2020s as the forward case, and the caution. Each is read on the same five variables, so the form can be seen rather than asserted.
Generative or extractive — form is not destiny.
The same thin-protocol form is mycelial or parasitic depending only on which way value flows: outward to its nodes, or inward to a centre. The book’s one normative claim is that this is a choice, not a fate. Its closing image is the refugium — many small, resilient places, left alone.
Provisional structure
- Intro — The Black-Swan Puzzle
- Part I — The Machine: the five variables, case by case
- Part II — The Two Great Experiments: Islam as the first draft; America as the secular version
- Part III — The Physics, the Ecology, and the Governance
- Part IV — The Shadow, the Refuge, and the Present
- Coda — Form Is Not Destiny
The reading, and the rules the book holds.
- The corrective is the spine: "incorporation over annihilation" is false for those outside the membrane.
- Adjudicate no people.
- Ecological language describes forms, never peoples.
- A heuristic, not a law. No golden age.
The engine of membership
- Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah (ʿaṣabiyya) — to Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics.
- James C. Scott — the keystone: Seeing Like a State (legibility; formal order parasitic on the informal it cannot create; mētis), The Art of Not Being Governed, Against the Grain. With Pierre Clastres.
- Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society; A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History — the realist translation of Deleuze & Guattari; meshwork against hierarchy.
The cases
- Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire; Lakota America — a real stateless nomad power, and its ecological decline.
- Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism; William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples; Lynn Margulis on symbiosis; Ilya Prigogine on dissipative structures.
Governance and the corrective
- Elinor Ostrom on polycentric governance; Karl Polanyi — the generative, local pole; the commons.
- Hardt & Negri, Empire; Benjamin Bratton, The Stack; Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State — contemporary instances, and cautions.
Not yet.
A passage will appear here when the book is closer to print. Until then, essays and notes surface in the Library.
In development.
Spec v0.3 (September 2026): thesis, the engineering law, a six-case table, a provisional structure. Research banks open.
The question of whether an order gives life to its members or feeds a centre is the same one the consulting work asks of a firm.