The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,137

of the day.

As we might predict from the lopsided power-law distribution of war magnitudes, the wars among great powers (especially the wars that embroiled several great powers at a time) account for a substantial proportion of all recorded war deaths.81 According to the African proverb (like most African proverbs, attributed to many different tribes), when elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. And these elephants have a habit of getting into fights with one another because they are not leashed by some larger suzerain but constantly eye each other in a state of nervous Hobbesian anarchy.

Levy set out technical criteria for being a great power and listed the countries that met them between 1495 and 1975. Most of them are large European states: France and England/Great Britain/U.K. for the entire period; the entities ruled by the Habsburg dynasty through 1918; Spain until 1808; the Netherlands and Sweden in the 17th and early 18th centuries; Russia/USSR from 1721 on; Prussia/ Germany from 1740 on; and Italy from 1861 to 1943. But the system also includes a few powers outside Europe: the Ottoman Empire until 1699; the United States from 1898 on; Japan from 1905 to 1945; and China from 1949. Levy assembled a dataset of wars that had at least a thousand battle deaths a year (a conventional cutoff for a “war” in many datasets, such as the Correlates of War Project), that had a great power on at least one side, and that had a state on the other side. He excluded colonial wars and civil wars unless a great power was butting into a civil war on the side of the insurgency, which would mean that the war had pitted a great power against a foreign government. Using the Correlates of War Dataset, and in consultation with Levy, I have extended his data through the quarter-century ending in 2000.82

Let’s start with the clashes of the titans—the wars with at least one great power on each side. Among them are what Levy called “general wars” but which could also be called “world wars,” at least in the sense that World War I deserves that name—not that the fighting spanned the globe, but that it embroiled most of the world’s great powers. These include the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48; six of the seven great powers), the Dutch War of Louis XIV (1672–78; six of seven), the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–97; five of seven), the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13; five of six), the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–48; six of six), the Seven Years’ War (1755–63; six of six), and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815; six of six), together with the two world wars. There are more than fifty other wars in which two or more great powers faced off.

One indication of the impact of war in different eras is the percentage of time that people had to endure wars between great powers, with their disruptions, sacrifices, and changes in priorities. Figure 5–12 shows the percentage of years in each quarter-century that saw the great powers of the day at war. In two of the early quarter-centuries (1550–75 and 1625–50), the line bumps up against the ceiling: great powers fought each other in all 25 of the 25 years. These periods were saturated with the horrendous European Wars of Religion, including the First Huguenot War and the Thirty Years’ War. From there the trend is unmistakably downward. Great powers fought each other for less of the time as the centuries proceeded, though with a few partial reversals, including the quarters with the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and with the two world wars. At the toe of the graph on the right one can see the first signs of the Long Peace. The quarter-century from 1950 to 1975 had one war between the great powers (the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953, with the United States and China on opposite sides), and there has not been once since.

FIGURE 5–12. Percentage of years in which the great powers fought one another, 1500–2000

Source: Graph adapted from Levy & Thompson, 2011. Data are aggregated over 25-year periods.

Now let’s zoom out and look at a wider view of war: the hundred-plus wars with a great power on one side and any country whatsoever, great or not, on the other.83 With this larger dataset we can unpack the years-at-war measure from the previous graph into two dimensions. The first is frequency. Figure 5–13 plots how many wars were