War: What is it good for?

by Ian Morris

  But whatever their motives, judges sent out from Britain did gradually roll back the company’s rough-and-ready martial law and reduce the violence of Indian life. The most visible consequence was a blanket ban on the Hindu ritual of sati, in which a widow would throw herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre. Several Mughal emperors had legislated against sati (“in all lands under Mughal control, never again should officials allow a woman to be burned,” Aurangzeb had ruled in 1663), with some success, but the British blanket ban of 1829 more or less eradicated it.

  Documents written by educated Indians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have little to say about rates of violent death, but a remarkable number of their authors seem to have concluded that the British Empire was, on balance, no bad thing. The extraordinary Calcutta-based scholar Rammohun Roy, for instance, embraced British liberalism, education, and law and joined the British crusade against sati. Roy did not hesitate to criticize the Europeans; he rebuked the British in 1823 for being slow to teach the “useful sciences” to Bengalis and had a smart put-down for a bishop of Calcutta who mistakenly congratulated him on converting from Hinduism to Christianity (“My lord,” Roy said, “I did not abandon one superstition merely to take up another”). But when all was said and done, Roy thought that the ideal outcome for India would be to remain within the British Empire, in a position like Canada’s. “India, in a like manner [as the Canadians],” he wrote in 1832, “will feel no disposition to cut off its connection with England, which may be preserved with so much mutual benefit to both countries.”

  Other Indians—such as the members of the Young Bengal movement, who shocked their elders in the 1830s by championing Tom Paine over Hindu scriptures—went much further in their admiration of all things Anglo. But their opinions, just like Roy’s and Lieutenant Murray’s, remain mere impressions. Until social historians do the kind of painstaking archival work that vindicated Elias’s claims about Europeans becoming less violent, or until physical anthropologists catalog much more skeletal evidence of violent trauma, we have to continue to rely on qualitative evidence, just as we do in studying ancient times. But even so, the weight of the documentation does seem to be overwhelming. Despite their smugness, Kipling and Murray really were onto something. Once the conquests died down and the rebellions were suppressed, European empires generally drove down rates of violent death.

  That said, the colonies and frontiers always remained rougher than Europe’s imperial heartland. By 1900, homicide was taking the life of only one western European in sixteen hundred, but one American in every two hundred was still dying violently at that point. And even within the white settler colonies, there were stark differences between the urban cores and the wilder peripheries: murder was no more common in New England than in old England, but parts of the West and the South were ten times as dangerous. (According to one story, a southerner, quizzed about this by a Yankee, “replied that he reckoned there were just more folks in the South who needed killing.”)

  The likelihood of being killed in war fell almost as fast as the chance of being murdered. When we throw in all the battles, sieges, and feuds, about one western European in twenty was dying violently around 1415, but between 1815 and 1914, Europeans fought few major wars. The muddy, bloody Crimean War of 1853–56 killed 300,000, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 another 400,000 or more, and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 a further half million. This was a lot of slaughter, and yet, even after adding in every single war, less than one European in fifty (and probably closer to one in a hundred) can have died in conflict between 1815 and 1914.

  Wars within and between white settler colonies (as opposed to wars they waged against nonwhites) were almost as rare. In the Americas, the horrific War of the Triple Alliance between 1864 and 1870 (in which Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay blocked Paraguayan expansion) claimed about half a million lives, and the American Civil War (1861–65) took closer to three-quarters of a million. In Africa, the Second Boer War (1899–1902) killed at least sixty thousand. Overall, Europeans who settled overseas were more likely to die violently than those who stayed home, but not much more so.

  The Five Hundred Years’ War was far bigger than the wars that built the ancient empires. Mass armies with iron weapons had allowed the Romans, Han, Parthians, and Mauryans to project power on a subcontinental scale, but oceangoing ships, guns, and steam power extended Europeans’ reach across the entire planet. Ancient wars produced societies tens of millions strong, with rates of violent death, I suggested, in the 2–5 percent range, but the Five Hundred Years’ War produced societies hundreds of millions strong, with rates of violent death in the European core in the 1–3 percent range. Rates were slightly higher in the American and Australasian white settler colonies, and those in direct-rule colonies higher still.

  Patchy data, lack of scholarly study, and the sheer variety of places involved—ranging from hells on earth such as the Congo through Margaret Mead’s Samoa to sleepy outposts in Nepal—combine to make meaningful estimates of rates of violent death in the nineteenth-century empires almost impossible. This means that the number I offer in Figure 4.14—somewhere between 2.5 and 7.5 percent—is perhaps the most speculative in this whole book. It simply means that on average, nineteenth-century direct-rule colonies in Africa, Asia, and Oceania were more violent than the ancient empires but less violent than Eurasia in the age of migrations. One day, archival research and skeletal studies will allow us to make much better estimates, but we are not there yet.

  Figure 4.14. Getting better most of the time, version 1: estimates of rates of violent death, showing the range for each period (10–20 percent for Stone Age societies, 2–5 percent for ancient empires, 5–10 percent for Eurasia in the age of migrations, 1–3 percent for the nineteenth-century West, and 2.5–7.5 percent for Europe’s direct-rule colonies) and its midpoint

  What Calgacus said about Rome’s wars of conquest was just as true of Europe’s: both made wastelands. But on the other hand, what Cicero said about Rome’s empire was also true of Europe’s: both eventually drew their subjects into larger economic systems, which, in most cases, made them better-off. It is hard to argue with the economist Daron Acemoglu and the political scientist James Robinson when they say in their influential recent book, Why Nations Fail, that “the profitability of European colonial empires was often built on the destruction of independent polities and indigenous economies.” And yet, as Figure 4.15 shows, this was what economists like to call creative destruction. As new economic systems replaced old ones, income and productivity rose all over the world after 1870. There were certainly exceptions (the Congo again springs to mind), and the bulk of the gains did flow to the rulers of the new world-system. But as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the rising tide of the Five Hundred Years’ War was lifting all the boats, making the world richer than ever as well as safer.

  Figure 4.15. Getting better most of the time, version 2: productivity per person per year, 1500–1913, as calculated by the economist Angus Maddison and expressed in 1990 “international” dollars (an artificial unit commonly used to sidestep the problems of calculating conversion rates over long periods of time)

  So it was that in August 1898, Nicholas II, tsar of all the Russias, drew what seemed to be the obvious conclusion and ordered his foreign minister to make an unprecedented announcement to the dignitaries who danced attendance on his court. “The preservation of a general peace and a possible reduction in the excessive armaments that now burden every nation,” it said, “are ideals toward which all governments should strive.” Nicholas therefore proposed an international conference—“a happy overture to the century ahead”—to discuss the end of war and mass disarmament.

  General delight ensued. Baroness Bertha von Suttner, author of the international bestseller Lay Down Your Arms (one of Tolstoy’s favorites) and soon to become the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, called Nicholas “a new star in the cultural heavens,” and in 1899—on the tsar’s birthday, i
n fact—130 diplomats convened at a sylvan château near The Hague, in the doggedly neutral Netherlands, to work everything out.

  After two months of dining, dancing, and decreeing, they emerged with a string of agreements, if not to end war, then at least to limit its barbarity. They agreed, enthusiastically, that another meeting was called for. This duly convened in 1907 at the same delightful spot, and such was its success that everyone made firm plans to gather there again—in 1914.

  Footnotes

  1By convention, historians speak of England and Scotland as separate countries before the Act of Union in 1707, and as Britain after that. (Ireland was added to the union in 1801.)

  2That is, the Mughal emperor.

  3The Monitor and the Merrimack were both originally Union ships, but after the Merrimack was sunk, the Confederates raised its wreck and refitted it as an ironclad, launched under the name CSS Virginia.

  5

  STORM OF STEEL: THE WAR FOR EUROPE, 1914–1980s

  Cosmos into Chaos

  The Daily Mail has never been the mouthpiece of Britain’s chattering classes (“produced by office-boys for office-boys,” one prime minister acidly remarked around 1900), but a century ago it was the country’s bestselling broadsheet, and Norman Angell—its Paris editor—was a man accustomed to being listened to. Even he, though, was astonished at the success of his book The Great Illusion when it appeared in 1910.

  Angell was a character. After abandoning an expensive Swiss boarding school at seventeen, he had run off to California, where he tried his luck at pig-farming, ditch-digging, cattle-ranching, and mail-carrying. But then he drifted back to Europe, and now, approaching respectable middle age, he turned more Kantian than Kant himself. Updating Perpetual Peace for the twentieth century, he asked: “What is the real guarantee of good behaviour of one state to another?” His answer: “It is the elaborate interdependence which, not only in the economic sense, but in every sense, makes an unwarrantable aggression of one state upon another react upon the interests of the aggressor.” War, he concluded, had put itself out of business. “The day for progress by force has passed,” he pronounced; from now on, “it will be progress by ideas or not at all.”

  Angell joined the long list of prophets with terrible timing. In 1914, the same politicians who had praised his book and attended the Hague peace conferences set off World War I, and over the next four years they killed fifteen million people. The civil wars that dragged on for another four years killed another twenty million, and between 1939 and 1945 the greatest war of all killed fifty to a hundred million more. Angell was perhaps the worst prophet ever.

  But then again … if Angell could have come back a century after he wrote, he might have claimed to be the best prophet of all time. In 2010 the planet was more peaceful and prosperous than ever before. The risk of violent death had fallen well below one in a hundred (in western Europe, below one in three thousand). People typically lived twice as long, ate well enough to grow four inches taller, and earned four times as much as their great-grandparents had in 1910.

  The twentieth century was the best of times and it was the worst of times, what the great historian Eric Hobsbawm called an “age of extremes,” combining the bloodiest war ever fought with the greatest peace ever known. Angell went on writing books for another forty years after The Great Illusion came out but never really did explain this paradox.

  The easiest way out of the conundrum, which Angell sometimes took, was to insist that the big story was that the world really was going the way he (and Kant) had said, but that bad luck had intervened. Given the way the First World War began, in an absolute avalanche of bad luck, this seemed rather reasonable. If Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand had just decided not to go to Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 (Figure 5.1), he would not have been murdered, Austria would not have declared war on Serbia, and Russia, Germany, France, and Britain would have stayed at peace too. Or if the head of Austrian security that day had not published the archduke’s route through Sarajevo in advance, let him ride in an open-topped car going at ten miles an hour, and refused to have any of the seventy thousand troops on maneuvers nearby serve as security details because their uniforms would be dirty, the terrorist plot would surely have failed. If the security chief had not then forgotten to tell the drivers of the first two cars in the archduke’s convoy about a change in the route; if he had not stopped them and had the whole convoy back up, so that it was moving even slower as it passed the assassin Gavrilo Princip; if he had put the archduke’s bodyguard on the side of the car facing the crowd, rather than the side facing the empty road; if another Serb had not attacked the policeman who grabbed Princip’s hand as he pulled his revolver … if any of these things had gone differently, there would have been no July Crisis. The Guns of August would not have fired. And come December, a million young men would still have been alive. Accident has a lot to answer for.

  Figure 5.1. The great wars: the fight for Europe, 1910s–1980s

  When the war was over, the politicians who had led their people into it embraced this argument, rushing to reassure readers that the catastrophe had not been their fault. “The nations in 1914 slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war without any trace of apprehension or dismay,” Britain’s wartime prime minister, David Lloyd George, claimed in his memoirs. Going one better, Winston Churchill (first lord of the Admiralty in 1914) suggested that the war had been a force of nature, beyond anyone’s control. “One must think of the intercourse of nations in those days,” he wrote in 1922,

  as prodigious organizations of forces active or latent which, like planetary bodies, could not approach each other in space without giving rise to profound magnetic reactions. If they got too near, the lightnings would begin to flash, and beyond a certain point they might be attracted altogether from the orbits in which they were restrained … and plunge Cosmos into Chaos.

  And yet the letters, diaries, and cabinet minutes that politicians actually wrote during the doomed summer of 1914 reveal something entirely different. Europe’s leaders were not slithering, sliding, or suffering from magnetic attraction. In reality, they coldly, calmly, and with all due calculation considered the risks and, one after another, concluded that war was their best option. Even after it was clear what the costs of war would be, more countries kept coming in—Turkey late in 1914, Italy and Bulgaria in 1915, Romania in 1916, and the United States in 1917. And in 1939, with no illusions left at all, the politicians condemned tens of millions more to death.

  Should we conclude that all these politicians, with all their years of education and experience, were in fact fools, so blinded by irrational fears and hatreds that they could not see where their peoples’ best interests lay? Judging from the number of books with titles like The March of Folly, many historians would answer yes. But this is superficial: the twentieth century’s leaders were neither wiser nor more foolish than those of other ages, neither more nor less predisposed to think that force would solve their problems than the men we met in Chapters 1–4. The reason that the last century combined such violence with such peace and prosperity was that the legacy of the Five Hundred Years’ War was more complicated than Angell—and many writers since his time—realized.

  Unknown Unknowns

  “When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done,” the chorus sings in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Pirates of Penzance, “a policeman’s lot is not an ’appy one.” Audiences hooted with laughter when the show first went onstage in 1879, but the masters of the world-system were perhaps not amused.

  For two generations, Britain had (usually) been willing and able to play globocop because, as late as 1860, it was the only truly industrialized economy on earth. British factories turned out better, cheaper goods than anyone else’s, and so long as the seas were safe for free trade, these could always find buyers. Britons could then use their profits to purchase food wherever it was best and cheapest, and the farmers selling the food could use the profits from these sale
s to buy more British goods, allowing the British to buy more food … and so on. Britain had the money to play globocop, and needed to play globocop to keep making money.

  Everyone involved prospered, but Britain prospered most of all. Its gross domestic product (GDP) almost tripled between 1820 and 1870, increasing from 5 percent to 9 percent of the world’s total (today it is 3 percent). Ships and bases to keep the sea-lanes open cost money, but the British economy grew so fast that they seemed like a bargain, costing just sixpence out of every pound of wealth being produced—less than 3 percent of GDP.

  By the 1870s, though, Britain was finding constabulary duty less happy, not because it was doing it badly, but because it was doing it too well. As British profits accumulated, the same free trade that allowed Britain to prosper also allowed the country’s capitalists to invest their surplus wealth wherever it promised to bring the highest returns—which, much of the time, meant financing industrial revolutions in other countries. Relying heavily on British loans (often using British money to buy British machines that could produce goods that would compete with British exports), a string of countries industrialized after 1870. That Britain’s ancient rival France would go this way surprised no one, but civil wars in the United States (1861–65) and Japan (1864–68) and wars of unification in Germany (1864–71) also produced centralized governments that aggressively pursued industrialization (Figure 5.2). In 1880, Britain still accounted for 23 percent of the world’s manufacturing and trade, but by 1913 this had fallen to 14 percent.