Authors: Ian Morris

War: What is it good for?

BOOK: War: What is it good for?

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WAR

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

IAN MORRIS
is Willard Professor of Classics and a fellow of the Archaeology Centre at Stanford University. He has appeared on a number of television networks, including the History Network and PBS and has directed excavations in Greece and Italy. His first trade book
Why the West Rules â For Now
was published to critical acclaim and won a number of prizes including a PEN USA Literary Award. Morris's second book
The Measure of Civilisation,
a companion volume to his first, was praised as a âtreasure trove of information about social development'.

ALSO BY IAN MORRIS

Why the West Rulesâfor Now

WAR

WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?

THE ROLE OF
CONFLICT

IN
CIVILISATION,
FROM

PRIMATES
TO
ROBOTS

IAN MORRIS

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

PROFILE BOOKS LTD

3
A
Exmouth House

Pine Street

London
ECIR
0
JH

www.profilebooks.com

First published in the United States of America in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint lyrics from “War,” written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, 1969, first recorded by Edwin Starr, 1970, released as a single by Gordy Records (Gordy 7101). Publisher: Stone Agate Music (from BMI Repertoire).

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN 978 1 84765 454 0

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Friend to the Undertaker

1.Â Â Â The Wasteland? War and Peace in Ancient Rome

2.Â Â Â Caging the Beast: The Productive Way of War

3.Â Â Â The Barbarians Strike Back: The Counterproductive Way of War,
A.D.
1â1415

4.Â Â Â The Five Hundred Years' War: Europe (Almost) Conquers the World, 1415â1914

5.Â Â Â Storm of Steel: The War for Europe, 1914â1980s

6.Â Â Â Red in Tooth and Claw: Why the Chimps of Gombe Went to War

7.Â Â Â The Last Best Hope of Earth: American Empire, 1989â?

ILLUSTRATIONS

Table 1	Historian Niall Ferguson's “menu” of forms of government (From Colossus: The Price of America's Empire by Niall Ferguson, copyright Â© 2004 by Niall Ferguson. Used by permission of The Penguin Press, a division of Penguin Group [USA] LLC.)
Figure 1.1	Locations in the Roman Empire mentioned in Chapter 1
Figure 1.2	First-century A.D. German auxiliary soldier fighting for Rome (Landesmuseum Mainz, Mainz, Germany)
Figure 1.3	Barbarian auxiliaries presenting the Roman emperor with the heads of enemies killed in Dacia, 110s A.D. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Figure 1.4	Shipwrecks and lead pollution from the Mediterranean Basin, A.D. 1â900
Figure 1.5	Roman marines preparing to board an enemy ship, first century B.C. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Figure 1.6	Locations outside the Roman Empire mentioned in Chapter 1
Figure 1.7	Yanomami club fight, early 1970s (Â© Dr. Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yanomamo, Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1997, p. 187)
Figure 2.1	Greek infantryman spearing a Persian, ca. 470 B.C. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
Figure 2.2	Ancient empires, 250 B.C.âA.D. 300
Figure 2.3	The lucky latitudes
Figure 2.4	Sites of the original revolutions in military affairs, ca. 9500â500 B.C.
Table 2.1	Military and social developments, 10,000â1 B.C.
Figure 2.5	Fighting on a cave painting from Los Dogues, Spain, CA. 10,000â5000 B.C. (From Jean Guilane and Jean Zammit, The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, p. 105)
Figure 2.6	The Vulture Stele, carved ca. 2450 B.C. (Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)
Figure 2.7	Egypt's pharaoh Ramses II in a chariot at the Battle of Kadesh, 1274 B.C. (Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)
Figure 2.8	The size of Eurasian empires, 3000 B.C.âA.D. 117
Figure 2.9	Estimated rates of violent death for the Stone Age, ancient empires, and the twentieth century
Figure 3.1	Locations in western Eurasia mentioned in Chapter 3
Figure 3.2	Locations in Asia mentioned in Chapter 3
Figure 3.3	Locations on the Eurasian steppes mentioned in Chapter 3
Figure 3.4	Equestrian statue of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (Getty Images)
Figure 3.5	Roman troops burning Dacian villages as shown on the column of Marcus Aurelius (Alinari ArchivesâAnderson Archive, Florence)
Figure 3.6	The size of states in Eurasia's lucky latitudes, A.D. 1â1400
Figure 3.7	The falling average size of states in Eurasia's lucky latitudes, A.D. 1â1400
Figure 3.8	Christian and Muslim cavalry at the Battle of Damietta, 1218 (Â© Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
Figure 3.9	Locations in East Asia and Oceania mentioned in Chapter 3
Figure 3.10	Locations in Africa mentioned in Chapter 3
Figure 3.11	Locations in the Americas mentioned in Chapter 3
Figure 3.12	The orientation of the continents
Figure 4.1	Locations in Asia mentioned in Chapter 4
Figure 4.2	The world's oldest true gun, from Manchuria, 1288 (Â© Yannick Trottier)
Figure 4.3	Locations in Europe mentioned in Chapter 4
Figure 4.4	Locations in Africa mentioned in Chapter 4
Figure 4.5	French and Portuguese galleons fighting off the coast of Brazil, probably in 1562 (Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)
Figure 4.6	Count William Louis of Nassau's letter to Maurice of Nassau explaining the principles of volleying, December 1594 (Koninklijke Huisarchief, The Hague, Netherlands)
Figure 4.7	Locations in the Americas mentioned in Chapter 4
Figure 4.8	Skull 25 from the Battle of Towton, 1461 (From Biological Anthropology, University of Bradford Biological Anthropology Research Centre, Towton Mass Grave Project)
Figure 4.9	The triangular trade routes of the Atlantic Ocean
Figure 4.10	Diverging wages in northwestern and southern Europe, 1500â1750
Figure 4.11	Spanish insurgents attacking French troops, May 2, 1808 (PhotoAISA, Barcelona)
Figure 4.12	Zulu prince Dabulamanzi kaMpande with his soldiers, 1879 (South Wales Borderers' Regimental Museum, Brecon, United Kingdom)
Figure 4.13	The extent of European empires, 1900
Figure 4.14	Estimated rates of violent death for the Stone Age, ancient empires, the age of migrations, nineteenth-century colonies, and the nineteenth-century West
Figure 4.15	GDP per person per year, 1500â1913
Figure 5.1	Locations in Europe mentioned in Chapter 5
Figure 5.2	Industrial output per person in five major economies, 1750â1913
Figure 5.3	The size of five major economies, 1820â1913
Figure 5.4	Relative naval power of the eight biggest fleets, 1880â1914
Figure 5.5	Halford Mackinder's map of the heartland, inner rim, and outer rim
Figure 5.6	German troops infiltrating through Pont-Arcy, May 27, 1918 (Â© Imperial War Museums [Q 55010])
Figure 5.7	British dead at Songueval, March 1918 (Â© Imperial War Museums [Q 42245])
Figure 5.8	The size of the world's five largest economies, 1913â39
Figure 5.9	Locations in Asia mentioned in Chapter 5
Figure 5.10	Burned children in Shanghai's bombed-out railway station, 1937 (Copyright Â© Corbis)
Figure 5.11	A German artilleryman at the Battle of Kursk, July 1943 (Getty Images)
Figure 5.12	The first Soviet atomic test, August 29, 1949 (Private collection of David Holloway)
Figure 5.13	Economic growth, 1943â83
Figure 5.14	The size of Soviet and American nuclear arsenals, 1945â83
Figure 5.15	U.S. 1st Air Cavalry Division, Binh Dinh Province, South Vietnam, January or February 1968 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Figure 6.1	Locations in Africa mentioned in Chapter 6
Figure 6.2	Four chimpanzees charging a fifth at Arnhem Zoo, late 1970s (Â© Frans de Waal. From Chimpanzee Politics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.)
Figure 6.3	The Ngogo War, 1998â2009
Figure 6.4	Female bonobos engaged in genito-genital rubbing (Getty Images)
Figure 6.5	The divergence of great apes from our last shared ancestor
Figure 6.6	Plectroctena ants fighting, Tanzania (Â© Muhammad Mahdi Karim)
Figure 6.7	The ranges of chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and protohumans
Figure 6.8	Homo ergaster and Australopithecus afarensis skeletons
Figure 6.9	Estimated rates of violent death for the Stone Age, ancient empires, the age of migrations, and the twentieth century
Figure 6.10	Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan (Copyright Â© Corbis)
Figure 7.1	Estimated rates of violent death for the Stone Age, ancient empires, the age of migrations, the twentieth century, and the early twenty-first century
Figure 7.2	Relative growth of GDP per person in different parts of the world, 1980â2010
Figure 7.3	Locations in Europe mentioned in Chapter 7
Figure 7.4	Locations in Africa and the Middle East mentioned in Chapter 7
Figure 7.5	Exercise at the U.S. Army National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California, 2011 (Department of Defense photos)
Figure 7.6	The First Island Chain, East Asia
Table 7.1	Estimates of American, Chinese, and Indian economic growth, 2011â60
Figure 7.7	U.S. economy as a percentage of world GDP, 1950â2010
Figure 7.8	The arc of instability
Figure 7.9	NASA estimates of global warming, 1910â2010
Figure 7.10	Israeli Iron Dome antimissile missile at Tel Aviv, November 17, 2012 (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)
Figure 7.11	Northrop Grumman X-47B robot fighter plane, 2013

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