“the art and regularity of European war” in a speech to his people during the Seven Years’ War:They have a written law among them, of which they boast as derived from him who made the earth and sea, and by which they profess to believe that man will be made happy when life shall forsake him. Why is not this law communicated to us? It is concealed because it is violated. For how can they preach it to an Indian nation, when I am told that one of its first precepts forbids them to do to others what they would not that others should do to them....
The sons of rapacity have now drawn their swords upon each other, and referred their claims to the decision of war; let us look unconcerned upon the slaughter, and remember that the death of every European delivers the country from a tyrant and a robber; for what is the claim of either nation, but the claim of the vulture to the leveret, of the tiger to the fawn?111
(A leveret is a young hare.) Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) was the quintessential exercise in the shifting of vantage points, in this case from the Lilliputian to the Brobdingnagian. Swift has Gulliver describe the recent history of his homeland to the King of Brobdingnag:He was perfectly astonished with the historical Account I gave him of our Affairs during the last Century, protesting it was only a Heap of Conspiracies, Rebellions, Murders, Massacres, Revolutions, Banishments, the very worst Effects that Avarice, Faction, Hypocrisy, Perfidiousness, Cruelty, Rage, Madness, Hatred, Envy, Lust, Malice, or Ambition could produce....
“As for yourself,” (continued the King), “who have spent the greatest Part of your Life in Travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many Vices of your Country. But by what I have gathered from your own Relation, and the Answers I have with much Pain wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.”112
Satires appeared in France as well. In one of his pensées, Blaise Pascal (1623–62) imagined the following dialogue: “Why are you killing me for your own benefit? I am unarmed.” “Why, do you not live on the other side of the water? My friend, if you lived on this side, I should be a murderer, but since you live on the other side, I am a hero, and it is just.”113 Voltaire’s Candide (1759) was another novel that slipped scathing antiwar commentary into the mouth of a fictitious character, such as the following definition of war: “A million assassins in uniform, roaming from one end of Europe to the other, murder and pillage with discipline in order to earn their daily bread.”
Together with satires suggesting that war was hypocritical and contemptible, the 18th century saw the appearance of theories holding that it was irrational and avoidable. One of the foremost was gentle commerce, the theory that the positive-sum payoff of trade should be more appealing than the zero-sum or negative-sum payoff of war.114 Though the mathematics of game theory would not be available for another two hundred years, the key idea could be stated easily enough in words: Why spend money and blood to invade a country and plunder its treasure when you can just buy it from them at less expense and sell them some of your own? The Abbé de Saint Pierre (1713), Montesquieu (1748), Adam Smith (1776), George Washington (1788), and Immanuel Kant (1795) were some of the writers who extolled free trade because it yoked the material interests of nations and thus encouraged them to value one another’s well-being. As Kant put it, “The spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people, and it cannot exist side by side with war. . . . Thus states find themselves compelled to promote the noble cause of peace, though not exactly from motives of morality.”115
As they did with slavery, Quakers founded activist groups that opposed the institution of war. Though the sect’s commitment to nonviolence sprang from its religious belief that God speaks through individual human lives, it didn’t hurt the cause that they were influential businessmen rather than ascetic Luddites, having founded, among other concerns, Lloyd’s of London, Barclays Bank, and the colony of Pennsylvania.116
The most remarkable antiwar document of the era was Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace.”117 Kant was no