Peace in World History

Peter Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134757213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

In Peace in World History, Peter N. Stearns examines the ideas of peace that have existed throughout history, and how societies have sought to put them into practice. Beginning with the status of peace in early hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies, and continuing through the present day, the narrative gives students a clear view of the ways people across the world have understood and striven to achieve peace throughout history. Topics covered include:

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• Comparison of the 'pax Romana' and 'pax Sinica' of Rome and China

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• Concepts of peace in Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, and their historical impact

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• The place of peace in the periods of expanding empires

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• The emergence, starting in the 19th century, of formal schemes to promote peace amid increasingly destructive technologies for warfare

Moving away from the view of history as a series of military conflicts, Peace in World History offers a new way of looking at world history by focusing on peace. Showing how concepts of peace have evolved over time even as they have been challenged by war and conflict, this lively and engaging narrative enables students to consider peace as a human possibility.

1 Peace and early human societies

DOI: 10.4324/9781315879598-2

The early phases of the human experience, stretching over a long span of time, raise a number of questions about peace and about precedents established that might extend into more recent centuries. There is the issue of human nature, as the species emerged and evolved. Were early people more or less peaceful than their modern counterparts? What kinds of arrangements did hunters-gatherers establish to minimize collective violence? Motives and opportunities for war may have increased with the advent of agriculture. But agriculture flourished far more abundantly with peace, and peasant farmers may have found new reasons and some new techniques to reduce their vulnerability to war. Topics under the heading: agriculture and peace, thus follow questions about the early species and peace. The initial civilizations, usually along major rivers, raise a fresh set of challenges for peace, from about 3500 bce onward. But they also created new opportunities to articulate peace goals. Each phase of the early human experience thus offers its own questions about peace as a priority and a possibility. Each phase also harbors variety, requiring comparisons of different peace capacities and intentions depending on the particular society involved, another anticipation of complexities still with us today.

The early record is not always easy to determine or interpret, as evidence is scattered. But one point does emerge: from early times to the present there has been no simple evolution from warlike to peaceful, or vice versa. Humans have long grappled with options, and of course they still do.

A hunting and gathering species

The debate begins here: is the human species naturally warlike, or is peace more natural or at least equally natural? The evidence is mixed, the disagreements sharp. But the actual historical record of early humans suggest that, whatever one’s views of basic human nature, frequent warfare was not a common goal or experience, and a large minority of societies were actually quite peaceful. Here too, the picture is mixed, but not as bleak – from a peace standpoint – as is often imagined.

The dilemmas are not new. Philosophers have discussed this aspect of human nature, in many different societies, for a long time. Some, like the Legalists in China or Thomas Hobbes in seventeenth-century Britain, have seen humans as naturally disorderly, ready to do violence against their fellows, unless restrained by some superior force such as a powerful state. Others have taken a more optimistic view, compatible with the notion that people may usually seek peace.

The discussion is no mere abstraction. Contemporary peace prospects are clearly related to views of human nature – though one can always argue that even a naturally violent species can and should learn new behaviors. A United Nations offshoot convened a scholarly meeting in 1989, in Seville, Spain, and issued the following as part of the Seville Statement on Violence: “It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature … or that war is caused by ‘instinct’ or any single motivation.” Is this hopeful statement accurate? Is it compatible with actual human experience?

The problem of biology

Developments in nineteenth-century science, or more properly perverse popularizations of nineteenth-century science, generated a wider sense that war, rather than peace, is the natural human condition. Charles Darwin’s great discovery of the process of evolution involves the concept of natural selection, in which members of a species would compete and struggle, with the superior individuals coming out on top (the genetics aspect was discovered later). “Survival of the fittest” was the slogan that emerged from this concept in the hands of popularizers, and this in turn could suggest a basic biological propensity for war, particularly in species capable of more deliberate planning and organization – such as human beings. War here would be a “filtering mechanism” and an absolutely standard behavior. Ideas of this sort encouraged a view of primitive man as inherently warlike, engaging in recurrent combat to gain greater access to food resources, to seize available females – the aggressive apparatus that long attached to concepts of the cave man.

And it does seem to be true that human beings are among the only species that routinely organize groups to try to kill other adults in the same species. Chimpanzees also engage in war, though it is not clear how often this occurs. Two or three chimp wars have been studied by contemporary observers. In these wars, groups of young males deliberately raid the territory of another group, retreating if they encounter large numbers of the enemy but beating more isolated males to death; females are usually spared but their offspring are eaten. The results of these wars can be the acquisition of more territory for the home group, improving food resources and therefore encouraging population growth. Primatologists argue as to whether the chimp warriors “know” the reasons for their action – that is, are capable of this kind of goal orientation along with their clear capacity for some group planning – or whether the males are simply naturally aggressive.

For our purposes, the bigger question is how chimpanzee behavior relates to that of humans. Some contend that the two species derive from a common ancestor, and therefore inherit similar propensities for aggressive violence and war as well as the capacity to plan. But others point to entirely peaceful primate species – also close relatives – to dispute the connection. There’s even an interesting argument that humans, as opposed to chimps, developed a “sociability gene” as part of the later evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens, about 80,000 years ago, that actually restrains humans and prompts them to seek mechanisms to reduce disputes and normally restrain violent impulses. Put male chimps on a 13-hour flight, this argument goes, and they will be trying to kill each other well before the plane lands; but do the same for people, and violence rarely results given superior human sociability impulses. More broadly, sympathy for other people and a desire to help others in distress seem natural parts of the human condition, suggesting at least the importance of complexity and options in human responses.

In other words, debates about basic biology do not resolve the question of innate human propensities for peace or for war, though on balance they probably incline toward the side of more natural aggression. Obviously, even if humans are not naturally peaceful, they can learn the behavior, using different cultural norms and institutional mechanisms to “escape” their inherent tendencies. And even if war once served a purpose in evolution, this does not mean that modern war, with its destructive technologies, continues to operate in that fashion. For human beings also have the capacity to work for peace, to develop personal and social mechanisms to reduce conflict, and this, too, can serve basic biological purposes. The “fittest” who survive are not necessarily always the most aggressive, but often those who learn arrangements that reduce exposure to violence. One scholar has suggested that we test the idea of “survival of the peaceful,” as not only a more desirable but a more accurate description of what has worked best in human history.

Hunting and gathering societies

Evidence from the earliest forms of human societies, all based on hunting and gathering activities, advances the debate about human tendencies, but it does not definitively resolve it. Many hunting and gathering societies engaged in forms of war, but some never did and many remained peaceful most of the time. Here too, evidence points both ways, in terms of the arguments about natural aggressiveness, though in some ways the available data highlights a greater normal interest in peace than the more abstract discussions of human nature suggest.

Two factors complicate this discussion of the early human experience. In the first place, records are limited. We have no evidence about what people actually thought about peace or war, or how conscious they were of peace as a desirable option. We build data about early societies either from archeological remains, including examination of human skeletons from the period, from the behaviors of hunting and gathering groups that operate still today, or in some combination.

The second complexity flows from the nature of hunting and gathering groups. They were small, with limited resources and relatively simple technologies. This means that their capacities for war were in many ways constrained: the fact that wars were not too common may suggest peaceful motives but may also flow from limited capacities. Hunting bands did not have the resources to support a specialized military apparatus – so the relative absence of war may not prove much about motivations. Thus while armies depend on the advent of agriculture and civilization – the first known organized army dates from about 5,000 years ago – this does not mean that informal groups (particularly of young men) could not practice collective violence that was in fact a form of war. Similarly, we know that early human groups did not pay much attention to the development of weaponry. But this was part of a general lack of technological sophistication, and further, since tools used in hunting could also serve in violence against other humans the claim may be fairly hollow. Finally, while we will see that very little killing occurred even when early skirmishes did break out, even low levels of violent death could have a devastating effect given the small size of the hunting bands; some claim that higher percentages of early humans died in wars, at least in some regions, than is now the case (the contemporary figure is about 5 percent).

With all the qualifications, however, it looks like the long history of early humans was often quite peaceful. Hunting and gathering groups moved around a lot, so that if war threatened some would just pack up and leave. Similarly, additional resource needs could sometimes be met by migration, rather than fights over territorial control. The striking fact is that death by violence is suggested in only 4 of 110 fossil sites left by early humans. There’s a huge chronological gap between the long record of hunting and gathering activity and the first definite sign of war.

In fragile hunting and gathering economies, war could be dangerously disruptive. Whatever aggressive sentiments humans – and, particularly, young males – naturally possess could be taken out in hunting. Early societies often developed explicit mechanisms to promote peace – more than war-avoidance was at play here: there was clearly a positive if implicit concept of peace. Bands of hunters and gatherers frequently exchanged gifts, expressly to provide alternatives to conflict. Joint feasts and other rituals developed to promote harmony. Formal opportunities for intermarriage often supported peaceful relations among neighboring bands, creating practical connections whereby groups could share resources.

Some hunter-gatherer societies went beyond the common conflict-prevention arrangements, to develop an explicit and positive concept of peace. An example that has survived to the present day involves the Utku Inuit group in the Canadian Arctic, many of whose characteristics are shared by other Inuit peoples. Though a hunting people, accustomed to administering death, the Utku believe deeply in nonviolence toward people. While killing game excites them, they react with horror to the idea of aggression against other humans. They lack even a word for anger in their language, and while they encounter conflicts they express feelings with great care, and if a sense of hostility becomes too strong the angry party simply walks away. Great emphasis is placed on warmth within family and community. Children’s games are organized to foster positive emotions and to subdue aggression. Interestingly, and possibly because of the expectation of tight emotional control and fear of offending others, suicide rates are fairly high, but acts of interpersonal violence are rare, and formal warfare unknown.

The Semai, an indigenous people in Malaysia, offer a second example of deliberate and successful devotion to peace, in a so-called primitive society (though in this case, some agriculture supplements hunting). The Semai work hard to avoid anger and violence, emphasizing sharing and caution instead. A popular saying holds that “dispute holds more danger than a tiger.” Individuals suspected of fomenting quarrels are shamed in front of others, but if an actual dispute breaks out the group emphasizes settlement rather than blame. Village meetings work to resolve any conflicts, with the local leaders emphasizing the importance of group solidarity and peace. Disputants get to present their case, but the assumption is that the decision of the meeting will resolve any problems and restore emotional control: Semai belief in their own pacifism provides basic guidelines. As with the Utku, though with different specifics, the Semai carefully raise children to learn that anger wins no response; youngsters who get in a fight are simply pulled away by adults and sent home in shame.

There are obvious problems in generalizing from examples of this sort. They are unusual, involving (for whatever reason; causation is hard to determine) extraordinary levels of emotional socialization and control. At the least, they demonstrate that human societies can consistently avoid war and remain quite intentionally devoted to peace. They contribute, thus, to the complex debate about “natural” human impulses. On the other hand, there is no basis for claiming that societies of this sort were the norm in hunting and gathering settings. Far more typical, though involving some of the same tactics and motives as with the Utku or Semai, were various, though less extreme, peace-promoting strategies:

• Many early societies featured a divinity devoted to peace. Sometimes they had a god of war as well, but in many cases peace predominated in the polytheistic spectrum. Thus the Lakota Indians, though not systematically nonviolent, devote great attention to the goddess Wohpe, devoted to peace. The daughter of Wi and the Moon, when Wohpe visited earth she gave the Sioux Indians a pipe as a symbol of peace (and correspondingly, passing the pipe in the group, and even sharing it with strangers, became an important ritual designed to promote solidarity). Wohpe represented peace, harmony, and meditation. Her presence as a divinity helped support the importance of reducing conflict and underpinned practices designed to prevent or end disputes.
• While the practice of ritual meals was common, as a means of promoting positive social bonds, some groups placed particular emphasis on the intentional strategy involved. The leader of a New Zealand tribe in the nineteenth century was quoted to the effect that feasts “have many times been the means of keeping peace between us, and may be of service again.”
• Games between groups could also serve to reduce conflict. Early in the twentieth century an Australian tribe promoted a practice called makarata, or ceremonial peacekeeping fights, in which individuals were allowed to express aggression as a means of releasing anger and restoring peace.

Some anthropologists, surveying practices of this sort among so-called primitive peoples, argue that peace is in fact the basic human norm, the standard goal of hunting and gathering societies; war, in this view, is a learned behavior, a later product of history, and can therefore in principle be unlearned.

Other evidence, however, is somewhat less encouraging, though not entirely contradictory. A careful survey of current hunting and gathering societies, with conditions similar to the forms that had characterized the early human experience, suggests that about 30 percent rarely or never go to war. Some have military apparatus and capacity, but do not use it; others, as we have seen, are even more conscientiously devoted to peace. Included in this percentage are groups so averse to war that they simply try to flee if confronted with aggression. On the other hand, some of the remaining 70 percent not only participate in war but do so very frequently, in many cases at least once a year. Their wars are usually brief skirmishes, usually raids or ambushes, lasting at most a few days and involving low death rates (though again, even these can devastate a small human band). Motives – apart from a possibly “natural” aggression – seem to emphasize seizing goods and resources, more than any idea of conquest.

This type of evidence is obviously hard to interpret. It certainly suggests that examples like the Utku are not only strange by contemporary American standards, where anger control is not practiced nearly so systematically, but are also atypical even in a hunting and gathering context. It’s the variety that is striking: some settings and some cultures really do manage to avoid war, but others do the opposite, in some cases making frequent if minor war essentially a social norm. Whatever one’s conclusions about human nature in the abstract, it seems that in actual fact – in lived experience, in the original types of societies – it can go either way. It can generate systematic and successful inculcation of peace; but it can also sustain war. Peaceful hunting and gathering groups may be on the decline in contemporary conditions, where encroachments of settled societies limit opportunities to flee and create greater competition for available space; so the 30–70 split between peace and war may be a bit misleading. But it certainly seems that peace and war are social options, as against any idea that human nature inevitably pushes to a single approach.

So finally, what does available archeological evidence tell us about the actual history of war, and how does this fit with the complicated picture we have assembled up to now? This is the final test to undertake, and yet here too the evidence is murky. Here’s what we know for sure: the oldest record of injuries caused by warfare – based on skeletons of people clearly killed by weapons, in some kind of mass violence – dates from about 14,000 years ago, in the Sudan region of northeast Africa. Archeologists wonder if regional climate change at that point forced different kinds of hunting and gathering groups into contact with each other, searching for newly scarce resources, thus prompting this first definite war situation.

But wars may have occurred before this, yet simply did not leave distinct traces. We know that people were violently killed before this point, by stones or spears, but these acts were usually individual fights, not more general wars. Yet more collective deaths could have happened, with the skele...