These data are part of a data portal that accompanies the special issue ‘Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture,’ published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in 2023. To access the data portal, please visit 10.5061/dryad.bnzs7h4h4. We have systematically collected information about the nature and consequences of societal crisis in over 150 cases covering different regions in the world in the preindustrial period. In this contribution, we discuss some critical insights arising from initial analysis of this material, which has informed the basis of our work.

Our data has been systematically and thoroughly researched through a multitude of sources including scholarly publications, social datasets, archeological information, and government organisations. The research that has been undertaken has employed a unique combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches to the study of history. This method of applying quantitative 'big data' tracking across more than 150 cases of crisis periods allows us to analyse macro-level patterns across polities spanning from the Neolithic to the pre-industrial world and covering a wide sample of global regions.

For this publication, we have applied the following 'crisis' variables to inform our data: decline, collapse, epidemic, downward mobility, extermination, uprising, civil war, century plus, fragmentation, capital, conquest, assassination, and deposition. The variables have been coded on a present-absent scale as follows: 1 (present), 0 (absent), 1.inf (inferred present), 0.inf (inferred absent), U.susp (unknown).

Forthcoming work by the Seshat: Global Databank will delve more deeply into the patterns revealed by the wider data.