More about War

and Peace

This is the second month of our new series, Big Picture Narratives. Last month, we looked at Ian Morris’s central claim in War. Over the long arc of history, violent deaths fell and prosperity rose because war forced humans into larger, more organized societies. This week, I want to zoom in on the specific examples that Morris uses and then connect them back to some of the earlier thinkers we’ve explored in the past.

Morris argues that Roman conquest ultimately created safer, more prosperous conditions for many people. But when you look closely, the story is far more complicated. Julius Caesar spent six years putting down revolts after overrunning most of Gaul in 58–56 BC. The Jews suffered even more. According to Josephus, a Jewish general who defected to Rome, the Romans burned the Temple and killed more than a million Jews during the revolt of 66–73 AD. When the Jews rose again in 132, Rome responded with annihilation. Judea was renamed Palestine, Jews were banned from Jerusalem except for one day a year, and survivors were scattered across Europe and the Middle East.

This is the paradox Morris finds within this history. War created the Roman peace but only after extraordinary brutality. It’s the same story we saw in Jared Diamond’s work. Geography and agriculture created the conditions for large, powerful states, but those same forces also generated inequality, conquest, and disease. Productive war is never productive for everyone.

During the first century BC, Roman aristocrats were ready to avenge any slight with violence. Shakespeare set so many plays in Rome because Roman politics were essentially armed personal feuds. You needed your own army to have power. It wasn’t until around 1500 that European elites finally gave up killing each other as a way to resolve disputes. This was a shift that echoes Joseph Henrich’s argument in WEIRD. Cultural evolution slowly reshaped how elites behaved, how they settled conflicts, and how they imagined authority.

Early anthropologists once described a coming‑of‑age pattern for civilizations, as if societies naturally matured into peaceful adulthood. But was that ever really true? Today, political scientists like Francis Fukuyama ask how we turn countries like Somalia, Haiti, Iraq, or Afghanistan into Denmark. Two thousand years ago, the question would have been how to turn them into Rome. The Roman Empire was not democratic, but it was peaceful, prosperous, and inclusive, at least for those inside the imperial circle.

Morris argues that the Greeks invented the Western way of war between 700 and 500 BC. This kind of war included head‑on charges between armored spearmen and a brutal collision of infantry that baffled and terrified non‑Western adversaries for 2,500 years. The Romans inherited this direct, bloody style of fighting, and it was this capacity for organized violence that created what the philosopher, Hobbes called the Leviathan. This is a state strong enough to suppress internal violence.

But Morris is careful to point out that the growth of large, safe, prosperous societies was not a Western peculiarity. Han China built its own Leviathan. Pax Sinica often outdid Pax Romana in stability and longevity. If the key to peace is getting the rich to calm down, the Han elite did it through Confucianism, where the man of the pen outranked the man of the sword. The Romans eventually embraced Stoicism, which taught elites to endure what they disliked rather than kill someone over it. India had its own Pax Indica, though the historical record is thinner.

Here’s where Morris connects back to Jared Diamond. Agriculture came first. Farming created food surpluses, which created crowding, which trapped people together in permanent settlements. Once people were trapped, they had only two choices. They could build larger, more organized societies, or be conquered by those who did. War didn’t create big societies out of nothing. It was farming that did that, but war determined which societies survived and expanded. Inside the “lucky latitudes,” agriculture produced both the surplus and the pressure that made large‑scale organization possible. War then made those societies even bigger by merging populations, keeping the peace internally, but also allowing for large disease pools, and technology to develop. Prosperity and devastation came as a package deal. Productive war created order, but it also created fragility.

You can see Morris’s logic in the early 20th century. Agriculture had already created the dense, interconnected societies that made global war possible. World War I then acted as the accelerator, moving millions of people, merging disease pools, and collapsing old political orders. The Spanish Flu spread along the very networks that farming and industrialization had made possible, through the trenches, troop ships, rail lines, and crowded cities. In that sense, the war didn’t cause the pandemic, but it amplified it by linking populations that had once been separated.

So we’re left with a confusing narrative. As the historian Arnold Toynbee once said, the past can look like chaos. Empires rise and fall, battles are won and lost, but nothing seems to change. Yet Toynbee also knew that world history is full of big patterns. Yuval Harari sees those patterns in shared myths. Jared Diamond sees them in geography. Joseph Henrich sees them in the individualistic culture created by religion. Morris sees the patterns in violence.

The question is whether these patterns are laws of history or just stories we tell to make sense of chaos. This is the messiness we find in any big picture narrative. But I love them anyway because we humans need stories to understand. Next month, we’ll jump into another book that looks at all kinds of violence beyond just war.