The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,143

of the modern international order. Europe was now partitioned into sovereign states rather than being a crazy quilt of jurisdictions nominally overseen by the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. This Age of Sovereignty saw the ascendancy of states that were still linked to dynasties and religions but that really hung their prestige on their governments, territories, and commercial empires. It was this gradual consolidation of sovereign states (culminating a process that began well before 1648) that set off the two opposing trends that have emerged from every statistical study of war we have seen: wars were getting less frequent but more damaging.

A major reason wars declined in number was that the units that could fight each other declined in number. Recall from chapter 3 that the number of political units in Europe shrank from five hundred around the time of the Thirty Years’ War to fewer than thirty in the 1950s.99 Now, you might think that this makes the decline in the frequency of wars just an accounting trick. With the stroke of an eraser, diplomats remove a line on a map that separates warring parties and magically take their conflict out of the “interstate war” books and hide it in the “civil war” books. But in fact the reduction is real. As Richardson showed, when we hold area constant, there are far fewer civil wars within national boundaries than there are interstate wars crossing them. (Just think of England, which hasn’t had a true civil war in 350 years, but has fought many interstate wars since then.) It is another illustration of the logic of the Leviathan. As small baronies and duchies coalesced into larger kingdoms, the centralized authorities prevented them from warring with each other for the same reason that they prevented individual citizens from murdering each other (and that farmers prevent their livestock from killing each other): as far as an overlord is concerned, private quarrels within his domain are a dead loss. The reduction in the frequency of war is thus another manifestation of Elias’s Civilizing Process.

The greater lethality of the wars that did take place was the result of a development called the military revolution.100 States got serious about war. This was partly a matter of improved weaponry, especially cannons and guns, but it was more a matter of recruiting greater numbers of people to kill and be killed. In medieval Europe and the Age of Dynasties, rulers were understandably nervous about arming large numbers of their peasants and training them in combat. (One can hear them asking themselves: What could possibly go wrong?) Instead they assembled ad hoc militias by hiring mercenaries or conscripting miscreants and ne’er-do-wells who could not buy their way out. In his essay “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” Charles Tilly wrote:In times of war . . . , the managers of full-fledged states often commissioned privateers, hired sometime bandits to raid their enemies, and encouraged their regular troops to take booty. In royal service, soldiers and sailors were often expected to provide for themselves by preying on the civilian population: commandeering, raping, looting, taking prizes. When demobilized, they commonly continued the same practices, but without the same royal protection; demobilized ships became pirate vessels, demobilized troops bandits.

It also worked the other way: A king’s best source of armed supporters was sometimes the world of outlaws. Robin Hood’s conversion to royal archer may be a myth, but the myth records a practice. The distinctions between “legitimate” and “illegitimate” users of violence came clear only very slowly, in the process during which the states’ armed forces became relatively unified and permanent.101

As armed forces became more unified and permanent, they also became more effective. The thugs who had made up the earlier militias could hurt a lot of civilians, but they were not terribly effective in organized combat because bravery and discipline held no appeal. Mueller explains:The motto for the criminal, after all, is not a variation of “Semper fi,” “All for one and one for all,” “Duty, honor, country,” “Banzai,” or “Remember Pearl Harbor,” but “Take the money and run.” Indeed, for a criminal to perish in battle (or in the commission of a bank robbery) is essentially absurd; it is profoundly irrational to die for the thrill of violence and even more so for the procurement of booty, because you can’t, after all, take either one with you.102

But during the military revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, states began to form professional standing armies. They conscripted