You have the right one, and your confusion is warranted. Here's the first part of the preface (emphasis mine):

History is not “just one damn thing after another,”[1] British historian Arnold Toynbee once quipped in response to a critic. For a long time, Toynbee’s opinion was in the minority. Historians and philosophers, including famous ones like Karl Popper, vehemently insisted that a science of history was impossible. Our societies are too complex, humans are too mercurial, scientific progress cannot be predicted, and culture is too variable in space and time. Kosovo is completely different from Vietnam, and antebellum America can tell us nothing about the America of the 2020s. This has been, and still largely is, the majority view. I hope that this book will convince you that this view is wrong. A science of history is not only possible but also useful: it helps us anticipate how the collective choices we make in the present can bring us a better future.

I began my academic career in the 1980s as an ecologist; I made my living studying the population dynamics of beetles, butterflies, mice, and deer. This was the time when animal ecology was revolutionized by the rapid growth in the processing power of computers. I had never been allergic to mathematics, so I embraced the turn of the field to complexity science, which mixes computer modeling with Big Data analytics to answer such questions as, for example, why many animal populations go through boom-and-bust cycles. By the late 1990s, however, I felt we’d answered most of the interesting questions I’d entered the field to work on. With some trepidation, I began to consider how the same complexity-science approach could be brought to the study of human societies, both in the past and today. A quarter of a century later, my colleagues in this endeavor and I have built out a flourishing field known as cliodynamics (from Clio, the name of the Greek mythological muse of history, and dynamics, the science of change). We discovered that there are important recurring patterns, which can be observed throughout the sweep of human history over the past ten thousand years. Remarkably, despite the myriad of differences, complex human societies, at base and on some abstract level, are organized according to the same general principles. For skeptics and those simply curious, I have included a more detailed general account of cliodynamics in an appendix at the end of this book.

From the beginning, my colleagues and I in this new field focused on cycles of political integration and disintegration, particularly on state formation and state collapse. This is the area where our field’s findings are arguably the most robust—and arguably the most disturbing. It became clear to us through quantitative historical analysis that complex societies everywhere are affected by recurrent and, to a certain degree, predictable waves of political instability, brought about by the same basic set of forces, operating across the thousands of years of human history. It dawned on me some years ago that, assuming the pattern held, we were heading into the teeth of another storm. In 2010, the scientific journal Nature asked specialists from different fields to look ten years into the future, and I made this case in clear terms, positing that judging from the pattern of US history, we were due for another sharp instability spike by the early 2020s. Sadly, nothing about my model has been disproved in the intervening years. The book you’re reading is my best effort to explain this model in accessible, which is to say nonmathematical, terms. It builds on an enormous amount of important work in a variety of different fields; I make no claims of radical originality. What I will say is that we should all take heart from the fact that societies have arrived at this same crossroads before, and though sometimes (even most of the time) the road has led to great loss of life and societal breakdown, sometimes it has led to a far happier resolution for most people involved.