ABSTRACT
Researchers searching for deterministic laws about the causes of the rise and fall of empires soon realise that, regardless of what hypothesis is raised, their opponents will not take long to find and present contradicting examples. This problem is not so critical for scholars in search of statistical laws. Metro-centric theories look for causes in demographic, economic, political and other processes that take place in societies whose polities carry out expansion and become metropoles. They conceive of imperialism as a means by which metropolitan societies resolve their domestic conflicts or other problems. This approach is represented not only by the Marxist-Leninist theory of imperialism. Turchin aims to test his metaethnic frontier territory theory using quantitative statistical analysis and thus show that a programme of empire cliodynamics as an exact and strict science is quite a serious enterprise indeed.
