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Violence, Social Science, and World History

Article  in  International Studies Review · July 2021

DOI: 10.1093/isr/viab037

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International Studies Review (2021) 0, 1–5

BOOK REVIEW

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Violence, Social Science, and World History

REVIEW BY JARED MORGAN MCKINNEY

Air University, USA

The Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume I: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds.
Edited by Garrett G. Fagan, Linda Fibiger, Mark Hudson, and Matthew Trundle.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 756 pp., $155 hardcover (ISBN: 978-
1107120129).
The Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume II: 500–1500 CE. Edited by Matthew
S. Gordon, Richard W. Kaeuper, and Harriet Zurndorfer. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2020. 722 pp., $155 hardcover (ISBN: 978-1107156388).
The Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume III: 1500–1800 CE. Edited by Robert
Antony, Stuart Carroll, and Caroline Dodds Pennock. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2020. 732 pp., $155 hardcover (ISBN: 978-1107119116).
The Cambridge World History of Violence, Volume IV: 1800 to the Present CE. Edited
by Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2020. 694 pp., $155 hardcover (ISBN: 978-1107151567).

Criticizing Steven Pinker’s best-selling history about the decline of violence, The
Better Angels of Our Nature (2012), has become a fertile scholarly niche in the so-
cial sciences and humanities, akin to how the international relations (IR) subfield
engaged with Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics. One recent attempt
to move discourse beyond Pinker claims that his “work is simply disengaged from
the approaches that are currently shaping the field”—namely, new imperial history,
which focuses on colonial violence; comparative genocide studies, which expand
the study of such violence beyond the Holocaust; war and society, which add soci-
ological and cultural perspectives to traditional military history; and the gendering
of violence, which isolates disproportionate effects and social structures (Fitzpatrick
and Kevin 2020, 13). This criticism, however, does not challenge Pinker’s main ar-
gument: that a secular decline in violence across world history occurred due to state
formation, the spread of gentle commerce, and the elevation of human reason. In-
stead, it merely insists that Pinker has not submitted to the “narrow specialization”
and “obscurantist faith in the expert’s special skill” that Popper (2008, xxvi) effec-
tively criticized. The only way to falsify Pinker’s thesis would be to show that it does
not capture and explain tens of thousands of years of human experience with vi-
olence (Popper 2008, 37–38). That enterprise requires sober interaction with the
entire historical record of violence, not just an idiosyncratic case or narrow(er)
research program.
In the past, one could argue that this requirement sets the bar too high. After all,
expertise exists for a reason; no single person has command of all cases. Works like
the new, four-volume World History of Violence, however, make clearing such a high
bar possible. According to the editors, the volumes “will allow readers to assess the

McKinney, Jared Morgan. (2021) Violence, Social Science, and World History. International Studies Review,
https://doi.org/10.1093/isr/viab037
© Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association 2021. This work is written by (a) US
Government employee(s) and is in the public domain in the US.
2 Violence, Social Science, and World History

nature and the extent of violence across time and place, to examine its causes, and
to consider the reasons for particular levels of violence at given moments of history”

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(I: p. 1). With more than 100 contributors and over 2,500 pages of text, the project
merits consideration as a “monumental” work.
The volumes collectively show that the perceived “usefulness” and legitimacy of
violence differ across epochs and polities. Although plausible, such a claim unearths
a challenge—namely, specifying when and where the differences occurred, as well
as how they impacted the level of violence. As Leblanc notes, addressing this re-
quires “looking at a time frame long enough to see a change from warfare to peace
(and too often, or almost always) back to warfare again” (I: p. 56). Even with that
perspective, though, easily reached, definitive conclusions will be hard to come by,
especially given measurement problems. As socio-economic and socio-political in-
equality increased in Neolithic Europe, for example, the scale of violence perhaps
increased (I: chap. 3), and yet the proportion of violence relative to the population
may not have. The Talheim Death Pit, which contains the remains of thirty-four indi-
viduals, highlights the problem. It represents genocidal violence directed against a
whole community/family group (I: chap. 14). Communities today are much larger.
Comparisons of violence, then, will only make sense in terms of a ratio, rather than
an absolute count, as students of criminality have long known (see Spierenburg
2014).
What, across history, have been the primary drivers of violence? No single essay
attempts to answer this question, despite the volumes’ goals, but considering the
contributions as a whole, six themes emerge. First, resource scarcity possibly triggers
group conflict, including both low-level and more severe violence (I: chap. 1; I:
p. 114). Second, mobility allowed humans to “avoid” group conflict. The general
transition to more sedentary ways of life undermined that strategy, likely increasing
the frequency of conflict (I: p. 301). Third, violence helped form and sustain group
coherence and identity (e.g., the Maya, I: chap. 9, II: chap. 25; early Mesopotamia,
I: chap. 10; Greek polities in the Classical era, I: chap. 26; and the Aztecs, II: chap.
19). Marietta (III: chap. 19), for example, shows that the homicide rate in North
America was high through the early 1600s (i.e., 100 homicides per 100,000 annually
in New England; 200 per 100,000 in Virginia), higher than today’s most dangerous
cities. King Philip’s War (1675–1678) changed that, for it “unified the colonists and
generated fellow feeling that curbed hostility and violence among them” (III: p.
372). External threats suppressed internal violence, “letting concord among human
beings emerge through their discord,” as Immanuel Kant once postulated (Mara
2019, 111).
The editors define warfare as “socially sanctioned conflict between independent
polities” (I: p. 40)—a definition that includes raiding, which is the fourth theme.
Agrarian states historically acquired citizens, slaves, and wealth through warfare (I:
chap. 27); in fact, Greek philosophers saw this as natural (I: p. 33). For this reason,
military campaigns became an annual practice in early Mesopotamia (I: chap. 10).
The demand for slaves motivated Egyptian raids (I: chap. 16), the European slave
trade in West Africa (III: chap. 1), and the industrialization of warfare in the Ameri-
cas (III: chap. 5). As French argues, “[w]ealth intensification was not really possible
[during the Middle Ages], so extensification was the real option” (II: p. 98). The
Vikings often pursued this strategy too, creating a life centered on the violent ac-
quisition of wealth (II: chap. 5). Given the difficulty of making wealth, states, kings,
and polities practiced taking (and often, violently breaking) instead (see McKinney
2020).
Fifth, in the modern era, making wealth became a more respectable path than
taking. At the same time, colonial ventures institutionalized taking behavior. Impe-
rialism promoted the attitudes and norms that later boomeranged back to Europe
as totalitarian violence (e.g., see World War I, which tested new “thresholds of vi-
olence,” IV: chap. 14; see also IV: chaps. 12 and 16). Levene (IV: chap. 18), for
 JARED MORGAN MCKINNEY 3

example, understands genocide as emerging from the confluence of nationalist ide-

als, collapsing empires, modern technologies, and geopolitics. Similarly, Tyner (IV:

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chap. 25) emphasizes the modern nature of the Cambodian genocide. The Khmer
Rouge progressed from being a marginal revolutionary party; to a popular coalition
that challenged a United States-supporting regime; to a ruling government seeking
independence through import substitution; to a monomaniacal entity dedicated to
exporting rice—complete with indifference to use-valuations, massive forced labor
campaigns, and paranoid efforts to reduce consumption; to a frenzied, extermina-
tory organization. In the pre-modern world, groups may have perpetrated and insti-
tutionalized violence to serve the gods (I: chap. 30; II: chaps 19 and 25; III: chap. 5),
but not to attain a favorable balance of trade, or on such a scale. Modernity changed
the causes of violence.
A sixth, and final, theme notes that the mix of nationalist and religious identities
has created the intolerant religious nation-state, which appears today across South
Asia (e.g., Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Myanmar; IV: chap. 5) and the
Middle East (IV: chap. 13). The flames that emerge from this fuel source will be
difficult to douse. “Because ethno-religious differences accompany categorical es-
chatological claims, social contracts resulting from a pragmatic negotiation, based
on equality, are almost impossible in the Levant” (IV: p. 282), something true from
the late Ottoman era forward, when older, more tolerant practices began breaking
down (III: chap. 4).
That leads to a larger question. How does state formation (or breakdown) af-
fect trends in violence? It is hard to reject the proposition that strong states stamp
out sub-state violence—though one can still fairly ask whether (all things consid-
ered) the strong state improves a situation, and if so, according to whose perspec-
tive. The state formation approach, however, may miss the deeper element of state
consolidation, an element not particular to Europe or the early modern era. The
contemporary world unprecedentedly governs large numbers of people within a
small number of states. These states emerged through a violent process—replete
with conquest, civil war, genocide, assimilation, and ethnogenesis—that eliminated
some 600,000 other polities (Carneiro 1978). Dutton’s entry on early-modern Viet-
nam (III: chap. 22) illustrates this tortured road. From Trần Cao’s Rebellion in
1516 to the final Nguyen victory in 1802, endless rebellions, clan wars, ethnic and
religious persecution, and overall instability devastated Vietnam. The state finally
unified and consolidated, but only in time to fall victim to French colonization. His-
tories like Vietnam’s explain why states become obsessed with internal unity (e.g.,
on China, see Pines 2012) and how the elimination of alternative rulers and states,
when successful, reduces occasions for violence.
State consolidation, however, does not explain declining violence on its own.
From the Middle Ages to 1800, a “massive decline” in homicide rates unfolded in
Europe, with the biggest shift occurring in the eighteenth century. Spierenburg con-
tends that changing conceptions of honor—increasingly seen as attainable through
intellectual, commercial, or moral achievements, instead of martial prowess or brav-
ery alone—reduced violence among upper-class men, and that this eventually trick-
led down to the lower classes, an effect apparently still in progress (III: chap. 15).
Something similar may have occurred in the Western Savanna, where “Stricter forms
of Islam tended to gradually replace competition honour and the glorification of
martial heroes with moral respectability and focus on the Prophet” (III: p. 557). A
fascinating parallel exists here with respect to Imperial China. In roughly the same
period, violence in Qing China rose due to unprecedented demographic expansion
and societal dislocation (III: chap. 18); yet the society devalued violence and honor,
replacing it with piety and shared ideas in order to maintain national unity (II: p.
536). Self-cultivation and self-control replaced the demands of masculine vindica-
tion (II: p. 537). This would shock honor-sensitive Europeans (see II: chap. 21) like
Matteo Ricci, the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary to China, who reported home
4 Violence, Social Science, and World History

that the Chinese “in their hearts” were “more like women” (Ricci 2019, 124). Re-
gardless, the Chinese shift resulted from a lengthy sequence of events. Sun Tzu, for

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example, focused on the costs of war, rather than the honor or glory involved in
fighting it (I: pp. 425–26). And whereas the Qin dynasty legitimated itself through
its (Legalist) mastery of violence, the Han relied on a (Confucian) criticism of Qin
violence (I: chap. 20).
The transfer of violence from one area to another is another complexity found
across eras. After the decline in homicides that followed King Philip’s War in North
America, violence (to some extent) relocated into the expanding institution of slav-
ery, where “the poor whites, erstwhile criminals and rebels, instead of disrupting
the peace of Virginia would secure it” (III: p. 374). In an analogous manner, Japan’s
Warring States era (1467–1615) gave way to the Tokugawa Great Peace (II: chap. 7).
That “peace,” however, fueled new domestic violence; denied the honors of battle,
the Samurai sought honor through violence (III: chap. 12). In Late Imperial South
China, the state tried to assert its monopoly over violence, while the lower classes
(who rejected the Confucian civilizational discourse against popular violence; III:
p. 632) embraced cockfights as a way to actualize “the social tensions with the com-
munity” (III: p. 618). Other instances of violence’s sublimation appear throughout
history, including dueling with printed pamphlets and libel suits instead of weapons
(in modern Europe), ritualizing contentiousness in angry diplomatic letters instead
of wars (in the Ancient Near East; Liverani 2001, 150), or constructing moments
that symbolize submission, even as states interacted with one another as equals (in
late antiquity; Canepa 2009, 31, 114).
The volumes’ most frustrating aspects are the tendency to separate essays with
contradictory arguments into different sections and the editors’ failure to even at-
tempt to mediate those contradictions. A few examples illustrate the point. Wells
(I: chap. 7) argues that Iron Age Europe only developed in a particularly violent
way after coming into contact with Roman armies, while Armit (I: chap. 21) pro-
poses that ritualized violence and warfare had long been central practices there.
Roth (I: chap. 11) explains that Rome was not a uniquely violent society, even as
Fagan (I: chap. 27) claims that violence defined Rome. France (II: chap. 4) and
Ames (II: chap. 23) each highlight how ideological warfare after 1095 increased the
tempo of violence in Europe (and eventually produced internal crusades against
heretics); Throop (II: chap. 20), in contrast, attempts to erase the demarcation be-
tween the crusades and earlier European history. Carroll (III: chap. 33) argues that
the Middle Ages were not as violent as often depicted, but evidence from Butler
(II: chap. 16) seemingly undermines that argument. Finally, other chapters simply
inform the reader that violence existed in a particular era (e.g., I: chap. 15), a point
that nobody questions and that does not contribute to comparative inquiry. With-
out editorial guidance, the reader must reconcile these contradictions and find the
contributions of various arguments herself.
The “usefulness” and legitimacy of violence have declined in significant ways over
time—a feature the volumes’ entries reveal, despite the editors’ skepticism about
the overall decline of violence thesis. The entries also demonstrate that the predom-
inant causes of violent conflict shifted from the agrarian state’s raids to the nation-
state’s purifying violence. State formation stamped out sub-state violence along the
way, but state consolidation resulted from a long process replete with extreme lev-
els of violence that have yet to be fully accounted for; dead polities often tell no
tales. Changing conceptions of honor permitted different outlets for contention,
and violence transferred to different areas (e.g., sports, I: chap. 24, IV: chap. 10;
public spectacles, III: chap. 8; monuments, I: chaps. 31 and 32; art, II: chap. 31; and
modern films, IV: chap. 28), some involving more physical harm than others.
From the perspective of deep history, the approximately 200 states that today
defend their monopoly on the use of force derive from a long, idiographic pro-
gression. This blood-soaked process exists even among the states within this select
 JARED MORGAN MCKINNEY 5

group that are still attempting to secure that monopoly—such as Nigeria, Ethiopia,
or Myanmar. The fully “formed” states, however, are hardly in a position to cele-

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brate. They have inherited advantages that reduce relative levels of violence. But as
“civilization” and indeed peace have progressed in the modern era, the left tail of
existential risk has lengthened (Salisbury 2020; Sears 2021).
As scholars continue to investigate the history of violence, a smug sense of satis-
faction with modernity is not warranted. Key questions remain unanswered. States
and civilizations across history have almost uniformly failed to theorize any solu-
tion to the problem of war, apart from hegemony or individual spiritual withdrawal
(I: chaps 29 and 33; Raaflaub 2016). Such a solution still eludes us today, even as
“Great Power Competition” returns to the fore. Inter-state violence may be less use-
ful, less legitimate, and radically more dangerous today, but that does not mean it
will not occur. If there is any lesson in world history, it is that your luck will, eventu-
ally, run dry, and violence—once again—will rear its ugly head.
Going forward, scholars will need to put periods of peace at the center of their
research programs, as Leblanc (I: chap. 1) envisions, studying them comparatively
in order to isolate the necessary conditions for peace, as well as the causes of peace’s
breakdown. While the volumes reviewed here do not accomplish this, they do show
that the field of IR must (and can) consider thousands of years of history.

Disclaimer
The views expressed represent those of the author alone and are not necessarily the
views of the Department of Defense or the United States Air Force.

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