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+--- Thread: Did war help societies become bigger and more complex? (/thread-12609.html)
Did war help societies become bigger and more complex? - C C - Jul 26, 2022
https://bigthink.com/the-past/war-civilization-development/
INTRO: If you were to plot the development of human civilization — defined by population size as well as economic and cultural output, among other factors — you would find that development is not linear but exponential. For tens of thousands of years, people lived in the same basic social organization. But then, around 10,000 years ago, everything changed: In a small period of time, hunter-gatherers settled into villages. Those villages then grew into cities, those cities into kingdoms, and those kingdoms into nation-states.
Scholars of various academic disciplines — including history, economics, and sociology — have long searched for the root cause of this development. Currently, they are divided between two theories: one functionalist, the other based on conflict. The functionalist theory, which emerged in the 1960s, focuses on a society’s ability to navigate organizational challenges, like the provision of public goods. According to this theory, trade, healthcare, irrigation systems, and, above all, agriculture were the key factors that allowed civilization to evolve into its current form.
Conflict theory, which is much older than its functionalist counterpart, takes a different approach. It is concerned not with a society’s ability to solve problems related to food supply and public health, but its ability to fight internal and external threats in the forms of class struggle or war. Conflict theory is based on biology; just as the evolution of animal species is governed by that of their predators, so too is the sociological development of any given society kept in check by the military might of its closest enemies.
While scholars view agriculture as crucial to sociological development, they often don’t know what to make of war. “The majority of archaeologists are against the warfare theory,” Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, told Science. “Nobody likes this ugly idea because obviously warfare is a horrible thing, and we don’t like to think it can have any positive effects.” Undeterred by this widespread bias, Turchin has spent much of his career researching the historical significance of war, including military technology.
Earlier this year, Turchin put together an international team of researchers to find the most important factors in the rise of Earth’s oldest empires. The results of their study, published in the academic journal Science Advances on June 24, suggest that war — specifically, the use of cavalries and iron weapons — was just as, if not more, important than agriculture. This conclusion tosses a wrench into the functionalist framework, though not everyone is convinced... (MORE - details)