by Ian Morris
British plans for 1919: J.F.C. Fuller 1936, pp. 322–36. Surrendering: N. Ferguson 2004, debated in Dollery and Parsons 2007 and A. Watson 2008. H1N1 flu and German collapse: Barry 2004; Price-Smith 2009, pp. 57–81.
Interwar world: P. Kennedy 1987, pp. 275–343; N. Ferguson 1998, pp. 395–432; Frieden 2006, pp. 127–72. British financial situation after 1918: Boyce 1987; N. Ferguson 2001, pp. 45–47, 125–27.
Wilson and the League of Nations: R. Kennedy 2009; Mazower 2012, pp. 116–53.
Russian Civil War: Figes 1997, pp. 555–720; Lincoln 1999. (My own sense of these events was indelibly imprinted by David Lean’s 1965 film of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie.) Russo-Polish War: N. Davies 2003.
Crash of 1929 and subsequent banking crisis: H. James 2009, pp. 36–97.
Decline of confidence in the British Empire: J. Morris 1978, pp. 299–318, is a classic account.
Soviet violence: Conquest 2007; Naimark 2010; Snyder 2010. Soviet economy: Davies et al. 1994. Ishiwara: Peattie 1975. Japanese invasion of China: Mitter 2013. Rape of Nanjing: I. Chang 1997. Russo-Japanese war of 1939: S. Goldman 2012.
General course of World War II: The literature is so big, says Max Hastings 2007, p. 559, that “a catalogue of relevant titles becomes merely an author’s peacock display.” With that caveat, my favorite readable recent mid-length surveys are Beevor 2012, Evans 2009, Hastings 2011, and Andrew Roberts 2011, and on the details Weinberg 2005. N. Davies 2006 is good on the messiness of the outcome.
Development of Hitler’s thought: Kershaw 2000.
Development of blitzkrieg: Muller 1996, W. Murray 1996, and Gat 2000, suggesting that British stick-in-the-mudness was less of an issue than tank theorists such as Liddell Hart and Fuller liked to claim. On the practice of blitzkrieg, Guderian 1992 (1937) is the classic, although Guderian never used the word blitzkrieg in his book. It seems to have been coined by a journalist at Time magazine in 1939. (The famous passage in which Guderian says that he took his ideas from Liddell Hart does not appear in the original German text, apparently being inserted later at Liddell Hart’s suggestion—Guderian 1992, p. 16.)
Fall of France: E. May 2001. Bloch 1999 (1946), an eyewitness account by a brave man caught up in the disaster, is subjective but powerful.
Why Germany nearly won: Mercatante 2012.
Hitler’s use of violence against internal enemies: The literature is vast, but Evans 2005 is a good starting point. Massacres in World War I: Hull 2005; Kramer 2007. Greatest Possible Germany: N. Ferguson 2006, p. 315. Starving Russian cities: Weinberg 2005, p. 267.
How the Allies won: Overy 1995. Learning in World War II: W. Murray 2011, pp. 119–261. Allied economies: Harrison 1998; on the United States, Herman 2012 is very readable.
If Hitler had won: On this, novelists have the most interesting things to say (especially R. Harris 1992 and Sansom 2012).
Visions of an Anglo-American world order: Ryan 1987. American thinking about Europe: Harper 1996. Soviet thinking about Europe: Applebaum 2012.
Collapse of Britain’s Asian Empire: Bayly and Harper 2004.
Cold War generally: There are excellent short accounts in D. Reynolds 2000 and Gaddis 1997 and 2005a. Leffler and Westad 2010 provide rich detail, and CNN’s twenty-four-part TV documentary The Cold War (1998) has excellent footage and interviews. Cold War outside Europe: Westad 2005; Brands 2010.
The bomb: Rhodes 1987, 1996, and 2007 are required reading.
World government: Baratta 2004. United Nations: Mazower 2012.
U.S. nuclear strategy: Rosenberg 1983; Jervis 1990; Freedman 2003. Soviet nuclear strategy: Garthoff 1958; Holloway 1994; Fursenko and Naftali 2006. European nuclear strategy: Heuser 1997. Effects of a one-megaton bomb: Freedman 2003, p. xiii. Containment: Gaddis 2005b.
Democratic peace: Doyle 1983 elaborates Kant’s Perpetual Peace into a philosophical account of why twentieth-century democracies rarely went to war, but the theory remains controversial among political scientists (Kinsella et al. 2005). Western murder levels: Eisner 2003, table 1; Roth 2009, Figure 1.1 More generally, Spierenburg 2008, pp. 165–205; and Roth 2009, pp. 435–68.
American affluence and Europe: De Grazia 2006. Car ownership: Figures from Sandbrook 2005, p. 121; and Patterson 1996, p. 71.
Figure 5.13: Data from Maddison 2003. “Western Europe” shows Maddison’s twenty-nine-nation scores, and “Eastern Europe” his seven-nation scores. Maddison combined East and West German data; I have treated Germany as part of western Europe, which means that Figure 5.9 understates eastern European performance (though not enough to change the shape of the graph dramatically). Eastern European data are unreliable before 1950.
Soviet repression: Applebaum 2003, 2012. Buchenwald: M. White 2012, p. 390. Families with one child executed by Hitler and a second by Stalin: Snyder 2010, p. 149. Soviet murder levels: Pridemore 2007, p. 121. Soviet economic growth: Spufford 2010 is a quirky, fascinating account.
Lowe 2012 does a fine job comparing postwar eastern and western Europe.
Casualty estimates for 1962: N. Friedman 2000, pp. 284–85.
Figure 5.14: Data from Norris and Kristensen 2006; Kristensen and Norris 2012, 2013.
Berlin crisis: Kempe 2011. Cuban missile crisis: Fursenko and Naftali 1998. Peace movements: Wittner 2009. Dr. Strangelove: Columbia Pictures, 1964.
Vietnam: Among the studies written before the Vietnamese archives opened up, Karnow 1997 stands out; among those written since the opening, Nguyen 2012 is excellent. Strategy: Summers 1982; Krepinevich 1986.
Likely forms of war in Europe in the 1960s–80s: Dinter and Griffith 1983. N. Friedman 2000, pp. 271–442, is good on the larger strategic picture, and Hoffenaar et al. 2012 on the various armies’ planning. The Third World War: Hackett et al. 1978. I take the numbers of Soviet nuclear weapons to be used from their 1983 war plan (N. Friedman 2000, pp. 424–25).
Much of the American debate over détente took place in the pages of journals such as Commentary and Foreign Affairs. Broader 1970s situation: N. Ferguson et al. 2010.
Afghanistan: Feifer 2009. China’s reorientation: Lüthi 2008; Macmillan 2008. American 1980s military buildup: Zakheim 1997. November 1983 war scare: Rhodes 2007, pp. 154–67.
6. RED IN TooTH AND CLAW
On evolution and human behavior generally, E. O. Wilson 1975 remains the classic theoretical work. Diamond 1997 and Robert Wright 2000 are (to my mind) the most interesting historical applications.
Ape and human war: Wrangham and Peterson 1996 is fundamental. Ape and human politics: De Waal 1982.
Gombe War: Goodall 1986, pp. 503–16; Wrangham and Peterson 1996, pp. 5–18.
Similarities of human and chimpanzee genome: Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium 2005 (the 98 percent similarity figure obscures several technical difficulties). Divergence of humans and chimpanzees from a shared ancestor seven to eight million years ago: Landergraber et al. 2012.
Criticisms of Goodall: See particularly Power 1991, with discussion in Wrangham 2010 (Goodall’s team was in fact the first to highlight the distortions introduced by feeding chimpanzees [Wrangham 1974]). Chagnon debates: See Chapter 1 above.
Chimpanzee wars observed since the 1970s: Wrangham 2010; M. Wilson 2013. Ngogo War: Mitani et al. 2010. A few primatologists and anthropologists continue to question the reality of chimpanzee wars (for example, Sussman and Marshack 2010; B. Ferguson 2011).
Extreme chimpanzee violence: De Waal 1986; Goodall 1991. De Waal 1982 does a wonderful job of putting the violence in perspective.
Wamba encounters: Idani 1991; Wrangham and Peterson 1996, pp. 209–16. Bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees/Pan paniscus): De Waal 1997; Furuichi and Thompson 2008. Bonobo genito-genital rubbing: Fruth and Hohmann 2000.
Origins of life and single-celled organisms: There are many recent accounts (Dawkins 2004 is a fascinating, quirky example), but Margulis and Sagan 1987 remains hard to beat. Dawkins 1989, Dennett 1995, and Coyne 2009 are my favorite trea
tments of the workings of biological evolution, and Christian 2004 and Robert Wright 2000 link the biological story to human history. Evolution of consciousness: Dennett 1991; Hofstadter 2007.
Game theory: Poundstone 1992 engagingly describes the field’s history, calling the classic technical exposition, von Neumann and Morgenstern’s daunting Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), “one of the most influential and least-read books of the twentieth century” (p. 41). Schelling 1960 may be the best point of entry for readers interested in military applications.
Evolutionarily stable strategies: Maynard Smith 1982 is the best account, and Dawkins 1989, pp. 68–87, has an extremely clear summary. Violent outliers among humans: Raine 2013.
Psychological bases of human violence: Anderson and Bushman 2002.
Importance of numbers in chimpanzee attacks: Wilson et al. 2012.
Social animals: De Waal and Tyack 2003. Game theory has a lot to say on the evolution of sociability (Axelrod 1984 is a classic), and Shultz et al. 2011 discuss the evolution of primate sociality. Cooperation and competition: Bowles and Gintis 2010.
Ants: Hölldobler and Wilson 1990; D. Gordon 2000. Superorganisms: Hölldobler and Wilson 2008. Army ants: Gotwald 1995. Ant communication: D. Gordon 2010.
Territoriality: Wrangham and Peterson 1996.
Bonobo cannibalism: Fowler and Hohmann 2010.
Fossil evidence for evolution of modern apes: Klein 2009, pp. 112–26. The only chimpanzee fossils yet found come from the drier climate of Kenya, at the extreme eastern end of their range (McBrearty and Jablonski 2005).
Formation of Congo River: J. Thompson 2003, with Caswell et al. 2008, p. 11, on dating. Divergence of chimpanzee and bonobo DNA: Caswell et al. 2008. Congo River as an obstacle to gene flows: Eriksson et al. 2004.
Reasons for divergence of chimpanzee and bonobo diets: Wrangham and Peterson 1996, pp. 220–30; Potts 2004; Furuichi 2009; Hohmann et al. 2010. Sapolsky 2006 provides more evidence on how quickly changes in the environment can affect primate violence, this time among baboons.
Chimpanzee rape: There is a long-running debate between evolutionists and feminists over whether rape is an adaptation that allows otherwise uncompetitive males to spread their genes or a tool of male oppression; the answer, not surprisingly, seems to be that it is both at once (Muller and Wrangham 2009).
Chimpanzee sperm competition: Diamond 1992, pp. 72–75. Boesch 2009 emphasizes the methods female chimpanzees have developed to exploit male sexuality and aggression for their own reproductive ends. Gorillas: Fossey 1983; Harcourt and Stewart 2007. Sperm competition theory: Birkhead 2002.
Minimal sexual violence among bonobos: Hohmann and Fruth 2003. Importance of female bonobo coalitions: Furuichi 2011. Importance of mothers in regulating bonobo sexual competition: Surbeck et al. 2011.
Prince Chim: Yerkes 1925. Yerkes’s famous Primate Laboratory was based at Yale University, but Chim died before Yerkes moved there from Harvard in 1925.
Human evolution generally: Klein 2009 is strong on the details; Stringer and Andrews 2012 is beautifully illustrated. Our knowledge of Sahelanthropus, Ardipithecus, and Australopithecus (not to mention several newly identified genera) is improving rapidly: See White et al. 2009; Dirks et al. 2012; Haile-Selassie et al. 2012; Berger et al. 2013. Australopithecus brain: http://meeting.physanth.org/program/2013/session16/bienvenu-2013-the-endocast-of-sahelanthropus-tchadensis-the-earliest-known-hominid-7-ma-chad.html.
Teeth, tubers, and roots: Lee-Thorp et al. 2012. Bipedalism: Klein 2009, pp. 271–78.
Expensive brain tissue: Aiello and Wheeler 1995; Fish and Lockwood 2003. Brain growth in the last three million years: McHenry and Coffing 2000. Tool use among apes: Roffman et al. 2012; Sanz et al. 2013.
Early Homo: Aiello and Antón 2012. Homo ergaster/erectus: Antón 2003. Climate and evolution of H. ergaster: Magill et al. 2012. Brains: Rightmire 2004.
Early use of fire: Berna et al. 2012.
Cooking and pair-bonding: Wrangham 2009. Bonobo monkey hunts: Surbeck and Hohmann 2008.
On all matters (human) breast- and penis-related: Yalom 1998; Hickman 2012. Penis, testicle, and breast size: Diamond 1992, pp. 72–76.
Skeletal evidence of protohuman violence: Wu et al. 2011, with table S2 (available at www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2011/11/14/1117113108.DCSupplemental/pnas.201117113SI.pdf#nameddest=ST2), containing fifty-three examples; Walker 2001.
Patterns of violence among Stone Age humans: Keeley 1996; Gat 2006. Similarities to chimpanzee violence: Wrangham and Glowacki 2012. Similarities between human and chimpanzee gangs of young adult males: Wrangham and Wilson 2004. Chimpanzees are usually hostile toward members of other communities, but de Waal 1989 describes ape strategies for resolving conflicts without violence. Chimpanzee mortality rates: Hill et al. 2001; M. Wilson 2013. Males and violence: Ghiglieri 1999.
Spread of protohumans out of Africa: Klein 2009, pp. 279–372, gives an exhaustive overview. Discovery of new species: Meyer et al. 2012. Heidelberg Man communication: Martinez et al. 2012. Stone spearheads: Wilkins et al. 2012.
Neanderthals: Mithen 2005. Stab wounds: Shanidar 3 and St. Césaire 1, mentioned in Walker 2001, p. 585. Stone weapons: Lazuén 2012. Bone breakage patterns: Berger and Trinkaus 1995. Cannibalism: Klein 2009, pp. 574–76.
The modern brain: J. Allen 2009; Pinker 1997.
The Ice Age and its end: N. Roberts 1998; Mithen 2003.
Evolution of fully modern humans: Klein 2009, pp. 615–751. Shea 2011 discusses variability and modernity in Homo sapiens behavior before fifty thousand years ago.
I explain my views on cultural evolution (this is the expression generally used in American English; in British English, social evolution is more common) and its relationship to biological evolution more fully in my book The Measure of Civilization (I. Morris 2013, pp. 6–24, 252–63). Whiten 2011 and Whiten et al. 2011, which I had not read when I wrote The Measure of Civilization, are valuable analyses of how human culture evolves and its relationship to culture among other apes.
Chimpanzee culture: Wrangham 2006; Boesch 2012. Bonobo culture: Hohmann and Fruth 2003.
Fatal spear thrust 100,000 years ago (Skhul skeleton 9): Walker 2001, p. 585.
Evolution of diversity of human cultures: Foley and Mirazón Lahr 2011.
Neanderthal genome: Green et al. 2010. Denisovan DNA: Rasmussen et al. 2011. Neanderthal extinction: Finlayson 2010.
Chimpanzee stable dominance hierarchy: De Waal 1982.
Freddy, Oscar, and Scar: Chimpanzee (Disneynature 2012, directed by Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield).
Pacifist’s Dilemma: Pinker 2011.
Game theory and 1950s–60s nuclear strategy: Poundstone 1992; Freedman 2003, pp. 165–78. John Nash: Nasar 1998.
NATO and Soviet war aims in the 1980s: Odom 1988; Heuser 1998.
“The Nylon War”: Riesman 1951.
The final stages of the Cold War remain controversial, but in addition to the sources cited for Chapter 5, I have found Gaidar 2007, Grachev 2008, and Sebestyen 2009 helpful for seeing the crisis from the Russian side.
7. THE LAST BEST HOPE OF EARTH
Homicides in New York: www.cnn.com/2012/11/28/justice/new-york-murder-free-day/index.html. Chicago: www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/28/chicago-homicide-rate-201_n_2569472.html. San Bernardino: Friend 2013. Newtown: www.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/nyregion/gunman-kills-20-children-at-school-in-connecticut-28-dead-in-all.html. U.S. rates: www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/preliminary-semiannual-uniform-crime-report-january-june-2012.
Global statistics for 2004: Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development, www.genevadeclaration.org/fileadmin/docs/Global-Burden-of-Armed-Violence-full-report.pdf. Global statistics for 2010: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html. Global rate of violent death for 2012: World Health Organization, www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/en/ Syrian civil war: www.cnn.com/2013/01/02/world/meast/syria-civil-war/index.html.
Frequency of interstate wars: Uppsala Conflict Data Program and Peace Research Institute of Oslo, www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_prio_armed_conflict_dataset/. Downward trend in civil wars: Hegre 2013, drawing on Peace Research Institute of Oslo data.
Number of nuclear warheads: See Kristensen and Norris 2012a, 2012b. The best-known index of the risk of annihilation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” (www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/timeline), is rather misleading: it is currently set at five minutes to midnight, closer to the apocalypse than it was during the Cuban missile crisis.
Nuclear weapons as career suicide: Panel discussion at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, March 5, 2013.
GDP per person: Maddison 2010. Figure 7.2 is based on these data, brought up to date with World Bank data (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD) converted to Maddison’s metric of 1990 Geary-Khamis international dollars.
Problems of the American globocop: Ikenberry 2011. Similarities (and differences) between the British and the American globocops: N. Ferguson 2003, 2004a.
First draft of 1992 Defense Planning Guidance: www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/index.htm. New York Times leak and reactions, March 8, 1992: www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html.
American foreign relations since 1989: Herring 2011, pp. 899–964. United States and Europe: R. Kagan 2002.
EU and U.S. GDPs: Maddison 2010.
European integration: Gillingham 2003. Fiscal integration: H. James 2012. UBS report: Deo et al. 2011. On German policy, The Economist’s special report on Germany (June 15, 2013) is excellent, as is the Financial Times’ special report on the future of the European Union (May 15, 2013). The OECD’s Economic Outlook Web page (www.oecd.org/eco/economicoutlook.htm) is valuable for following events.
European demilitarization: Sheehan 2008. Common Security and Defence Policy: Deighton 2011; http://eeas.europa.eu/cfsp/index_en.html; and comments by Catherine Ashton at a lunch at Stanford University on May 7, 2013.