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  • Hi I'm John Green; this is Crash Course World History, and today, we're going to talk -- for the absolute last time, I promise -- about war.

  • Well, it's not the last time we're going to talk about war because we're gonna talk about the 20th century later, pretty much defined by war,

  • but it's the last time we're going to talk about war in an abstract way.

  • Mr. Green! Mr. Green! And then we can get to the battles?

  • Because this has been pretty ... esoteric.

  • Oh, me from the past, I remember when I spent 30 minutes with an SAT prep book and emerged with the word "esoteric" in my vocabulary.

  • But fair enough, me from the past. It is a little bit esoteric.

  • You know what else is esoteric?

  • Human existence.

  • Anyway, in the last episode we examined why individuals might want to go to war,

  • and the unspoken assumption in all of that was that war is, you know, on the whole, bad.

  • But is that actually true?

  • I mean, obviously, war is tremendously destructive and it can be very bad for the lives of individual humans,

  • but is it possible that violence and war have had a positive effect on human development?

  • Or at least, some positive effect?

  • [Theme Music]

  • So, as we've discussed previously, wars are usually some type of competition for resources.

  • But war can also lead to cooperation.

  • Like, the earliest examples of wars were probably raids, right?

  • And one of the best defenses against a raid is to gather people together in a group.

  • You know, you circle the wagons, you put everybody inside the fort, et cetera.

  • And some archaeologists maintain that human settlements, especially cities, started BEFORE agriculture, and, if that's true, the likeliest explanation is defense.

  • And then there's the fact that agriculture itself has some defensive value,

  • especially when you compare it to, like, herding, because herds are a very inviting target for raids.

  • Y'know, you can round up all of the cows and make off with them because they can run,

  • but it's hard to, like, rustle 20 tons of wheat.

  • Plus, agriculture usually requires larger concentrations of people,

  • which has a defensive value, and, as far as armies go, agriculture provides the resource surpluses that sustain larger groups of warriors.

  • So we've often said on Crash Course World History that agriculture and the cities that came with it were like the beginning of civilization,

  • but, in fact, maybe war was the beginning of agriculture.

  • And then there's the argument that war can be the basis of political leadership.

  • Like, in the ancient world - as in Game of Thrones -

  • successful war leaders build up a retinue of fighters, and in order to keep them happy, the war leaders need to supply a constant flow of booty --

  • not that kind of booty -- I mean looting, like the spoils of war.

  • Anyway, this sets up a need for continuous war,

  • because, as your general, the only way I have of paying you is in booty.

  • And we can only get booty if we continue to war.

  • The people who were best at gathering loot became chiefs, and

  • then through conquest, chiefdoms grew into kingdoms.

  • The examples of this process are too numerous to count, and many weren't recorded, but the rise of the Zulus in Africa provides a really interesting modern analogy.

  • The people who would become the Zulu nation were originally Nguni-speaking agriculturalists and herders organized into numerous small chiefdoms, until the early 1800s.

  • One of their chiefs, Dingiswayo, was able to extend his control over the others by his military strength.

  • And then he would often cement his control over these chiefdoms

  • by replacing their chiefs with someone loyal to him,

  • sometimes through a politically expedient marriage, again like Game of Thrones.

  • Dingiswayo was killed in 1817, and eventually replaced by his military commander Shaka,

  • whose clan name, Zulu, was given to the kingdom.

  • Shaka's military success allowed him to build up a state,

  • that eventually controlled quite a lot of territory,

  • but he was unable to transition it into a nation-state.

  • So, we've seen a bit of the way that war can change the way that humans organize themselves,

  • and that war, or, at least, the threat of attack, also may have played a role in the development of the city states.

  • Let's go to the Thought Bubble.

  • Cities began as settlements, which, because they were stationary, were targets for raids.

  • And so to deter raiders, cities built walls.

  • But those efforts required coordination, or else coercion, and resources which states are good at.

  • Like, Greek city-states built walls to defend against constant threats,

  • mostly from other Greek city-states.

  • Egypt, on the other hand, never developed walled cities because they were relatively free from powerful enemies, other than,

  • like, the Assyrians and the Sea People.

  • And Egypt had fewer internal struggles thanks to the unity provided by the Nile River.

  • So war shaped city-states both physically and politically,

  • but city-states also shaped war, because they changed the way that wars were fought.

  • Concentrated urban populations were the basis of civil militias, made up of soldiers who were also citizens.

  • That meant that they were both effective fighting forces and political catalysts.

  • They built civic pride and diminished the power of wealthy warrior elites, who couldn't defeat these new, larger armies.

  • The best example of this citizen-militia is probably the Roman legion, which became so successful at fighting and empire-building that we forget that Rome actually started out as a city-state.

  • Thanks, Thought Bubble.

  • Although I believe Rome actually got its start when it was founded by two boys raised by a wolf.

  • But, speaking of Rome, lets talk for a minute about empires.

  • Now, it goes without saying that empires are fairly reliant upon military power.

  • I guess you could also use the dark side of the force, but even Darth Vader needed stormtroopers.

  • But the very nature of an empire is, like, one group of people ruling over many groups of people, and to do that, you generally do need some military power,

  • whether you're the Persians, or the Romans, or even the Mongols.

  • [Mongoltage]

  • No, they're not an exception this time, Stan.

  • But imperial success can backfire when rich empires decide that it's easier or cheaper to have mercenaries do the fighting for them.

  • And because they aren't citizen-soldiers, they aren't loyal to the state.

  • Mercenaries are in it for the loot.

  • And so when you rely upon mercenaries, you need constant war,

  • which can stretch you thin, and also those mercenaries aren't loyal to you,

  • and this can be a real problem, as the Romans discovered, but also many others.

  • So empires have a ceaseless urge to get bigger, but the bigger they get the more

  • vulnerable they get to both internal problems, like peasant revolts, and external threats, like barbarians.

  • And this may be why we don't see that many empires any more.

  • They're expensive and unstable.

  • Putin's behind me, isn't he. Putin! Stop building an empire!

  • So, ultimately in the pre-modern world, wars probably unmade as many states and empires as they made.

  • As Ibn Khaldun put it:

  • "Royal authority is a noble and enjoyable position,

  • it comprises all the good things of the world, the pleasures of the body, and the joys of the soul.

  • Therefore, there is, as a rule, great competition for it.

  • It is rarely handed over voluntarily, but may be taken away.

  • Thus, discord ensues. It leads to war and fighting."

  • In short, war and the state developed simultaneously, and they probably had a reciprocal relationship.

  • And states are good ... ish. I mean, if you're not in the position of being, like, pro-hunter-gatherer,

  • I think that you have to be pro-state.

  • And I'm kind of pro-hunter-gatherer, but I love pizza and the internet, and they can't have either.

  • But anyway, if wars create power and wealth for states, why don't we see that many big empire-building wars anymore?

  • I mean, except for you.

  • Well, one answer actually has to do with wealth.

  • So, warfare changed a lot in the early modern era -- after about 1500 CE -- with the large-scale introduction of gunpowder weapons.

  • This has often been called a military revolution because cannon made cities very vulnerable.

  • Although, in the end, cities proved pretty resourceful in developing fortification techniques to deal with cannons and, you know, we have cities today despite like, really excellent cannons.

  • But anyway, if you've ever watched an episode of Pawn Stars, you'll know that cannons are very expensive.

  • So the age of gunpowder weapons probably led to states getting more power over their subjects,

  • because in order to pay for all of this military technology, they had to modernize their bureaucracies, especially their tax collection systems.

  • So the most successful states were those that could marshal their resources to pay for guns and forts and ships and

  • most importantly, troops, which remain the largest military expenditure.

  • So now we're beginning to see one of the reasons why Europe would dominate much of the rest of the world after 1500, and would REALLY dominate after 1850.

  • Europe was raking in money from trade, and especially from colonies,

  • which allowed investment in technology and industry that reinforced its military advantages.

  • Essentially, there was a lot of wealth to extract from the colonies;

  • Europe had the cannons to do so; extracting that wealth gave them ever-better cannons.

  • And that, my friends, is why here at Crash Course History we focus more on trade and resources than battles and war.

  • So this rising cost of armies and navies meant that, increasingly, wealth was power.

  • One of the biggest differences between the pre-modern and modern eras was that in the former, a state could accumulate wealth through conquest,

  • while in the latter, trade is the better and safer bet.

  • Especially exploitative, unfair, and unilateral trade with colonies.

  • And then, as trade-reliant states began to eclipse those more reliant on conquest, a funny thing happened.

  • The rich states that had built their wealth on military might began to shy away from expensive wars.

  • And this was particularly true of the states considered liberal democracies.

  • Although to be fair, liberal democracies are also pretty into war.

  • But at least compared to empires and other kinds of states, they seem to be less likely to go to war, he said controversially, causing a big explosion in the comments.

  • Why? Well the most common answer is that democracies are answerable to constituents who are unlikely to go to war, because, y'know, dying is bad.

  • But Athens was like the purest democracy of all time and also remarkably bellicose.

  • Rome had a fair amount of citizen participation, and look how peaceful they were.

  • And then there's the argument that wars became more expensive.

  • Oh, it's time for the open letter! But first, let's see what's in the secret compartment today.

  • Ohh, it's an open letter to military spending.

  • Dear military spending, you kind of get a bad rap.

  • Or too good of a rap, depending on your perspective.

  • Here's the thing, military spending: you're one of those people who, like, acts like they've changed so much, and they're, like, totally different from what they were last year, but you're really the same.

  • It's true that modern armies cost much more than pre-modern ones, but modern economies are also much bigger.

  • In fact, as a percentage of state budgets, military spending has remained relatively stable at between 3% and 5% of GDP,

  • even at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s. You're cool and all, military spending, but you're not the reason we have fewer wars. Best wishes, John Green.

  • So I'd argue that it's not the costs of going to war that has made peace so attractive, it's the benefits of not going to war.

  • Now, the not killing and not dying benefits of peace are obvious, but good trade relations with other nations also leads to more stuff for everybody, essentially.

  • This is true for cheap T-shirts and sneakers, but it's also true for like medicine and food.

  • Now that peace is more economically beneficial than war is not exactly a shocking revelation, nor is it particularly new, as John Stewart Mill pointed out.

  • "... Commerce first taught nations to see with good will the wealth and prosperity of one another. Before, the patriot, unless sufficiently advanced in culture to feel the world

  • his country, wished all countries weak, poor, and ill-governed but his own:

  • He now sees in their wealth and progress a direct source of wealth and progress to his own country. It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete."

  • Now, you may have noticed that that actually hasn't happened.

  • And I'm not going to argue that everything has been peaceful and open-world trade since the end of the Napoleonic Wars or that capitalist countries seeing war as bad for business and have given up on it,

  • but compared to earlier times, wars between major powers are much less frequent, a fact that tends to be obscured by the massiveness of the two Great Wars of the 20th century.

  • So, I apologize that this isn't straightforward military history, because I also enjoy a good glorious battle.

  • But here at Crash Course we want to provide a framework for thinking about war generally,

  • and we want to examine what it says about us as individuals, and as social orders, both good and bad.

  • War may be part of why we have agriculture, and cities, and states, but even centuries ago, John Stewart Mill noticed that it seemed to be outliving its welcome.

  • Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.

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