Musing about historiography

It occurs to me that history is very often written about the succession of rulers, ruling parties, and ruling regimes. Clearly, when there are changes at the top others things are often changed as well. Indeed, when a people are conquered by another people, wholesale changes are triggered.

It also occurs to me that change seems to characterize the modern world, and that some changes occur much more rapidly than others. Thus, for example, the cadre of political appointees can be changed relatively rapidly, while it takes years for a population to learn a new language. People change religion at a different rate than they change their agricultural or industrial technology. New laws can be passed and promulgated, but the people may chose not to obey them for a long time. The understanding of which causes in the past resulted in which changes must be very hard to develop -- more so than the histories I read would suggest.

Would it not be nice to have good mathematical models describing cultural dynamics? Such models might represent the inertia inherent in different aspects of culture, and the forces available for inducing social and economic change. Even qualitative information might be useful.

Aspects of culture are interdependent, and ideally one would like to see a matrix that showed how the an overall set of social forces collectively influence the overall set of cultural elements.

The point I am making is that history, as it is generally written, may emphasize political forces for change while leaving out other forces; it may emphasize the modifications of relatively sensitive cultural properties, while neglecting the cultural properties with more inertia.

When the Bush administration forced regime change in Iraq, prosecuted deBathification, disbanded the Iraqi army, changed the constitution and laws, and introduced a variety of radical economic reforms, they seem to have had a very inaccurate view of the likely outcomes. Was their misunderstanding of the complexity of the situation, and of the resistance of key cultural elements to change, simply the result of reading histories that misrepresented the complexity of culture?