Interesting in modern science takes place on the joint of disciplines, in fertile areas, arising up in place of hard, unreceptive to new ideas borders more recently dividing humanitarian and natural-science knowledge. Collection the "Natural experiments of history" edited the most known biologist, anthropologist and культуролога Джареда Даймонда ("Guns, microbes and steel", "Collapse", "World the day before yesterday") and economist James Робинсона ("Why one countries rich, and other poor") is excellent illustration of this process.Authors of collection of essay are historians, культурологи, economists, - adopting instruments at mathematicians and statisticians, under a span-new corner examine the historical events of different epochs and regions. Why between the islands of the Pacific ocean, populated by the same people - ancient Polynesian, - in course of time there were so powerful cultural distinctions? How statistically to measure the consequences of centuries-old slave-trade for the different African states? That general at the explosive height of American фронтира and rapid development of Russian Siberia in the end XIX - beginning of XX of centuries? Here only some questions on that the authors of this unusual book try to answer.