A few months ago, I ran a seven-part collection of near-random ruminations on Edward Gibbon’s monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, not quite a book report, since I only read about two thirds of Gibbon’s work. Gibbon is famous/infamous for summing up his account of the D&F with the sentence “I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion,” but later took it back, claiming that the Empire fell of its own weight. Now Stanford University Professor Ian Morris, proposes a new villain in his book War! What Is It Good For?—the horse!
Morris, who takes all of “civilization” as his subject, argues that, starting around 9000 BC, when organized settlements first started appearing in the Middle East, proto-states in the “lucky lattitudes”—a band stretching more or less from Spain across the Mediterranean and continuing all across Asia to the Pacific and then jumping the Pacific to reappear on the west coast of the Americas—could command enough surplus wealth to create effective armies—armies that could engage in “productive war”, war that more than paid for itself. The more you conquered, the more powerful you became. These proto-states eventually coalesced into the famous empires that dominated Europe and Asia at the start of the common era and allowed the creation of the monuments of unageing intellect that still define much of what is meant by “civilization” today.
Unfortunately for civilization, as Morris tells it, civilization rubs off. Barbarians—most particularly, the mounted bowmen of the Mongolian plateau—learned enough of civilization’s tricks to create “cheap” effective armies whose superior mobility and hardihood allowed them to make a living by theft and terror, like wolves descending on the fold. War became productive of booty, but not of beauty. Bigger was no longer better, but only more vulnerable. This was true not only for Rome, but for all of the empires of the lucky latitudes. From the zero hour of Christ’s birth until the mid-fifteenth century, when western states began to use gunpowder effectively, civilization no longer paid—at least not consistently. Empires rose, but then ultimately fell. The one great exception—the enormous Muslim empire that arose in the century after Mohammed’s death—proved the rule by falling into pieces, some of which were ultimately conquered by first the Seljuk and then the Ottoman Turks from Central Asia.
It’s an interesting thesis, and War! What Is It Good For? is definitely a good read, though definitely a notch below Morris’s first “big picture” book, Why The West Rules—For Now, which is the best “West vs. East” book I’ve read. When Morris reaches the present day, he gets a bit British on our arses, bemoaning the failure of the U.S. to play the role of Great Britain as “globocop”—a singularly infelicitous coinage, offending both ear and intellect—overestimating, to my mind, Britain’s role in policing, and civilizing, the world from 1813-1914 and overestimating the need for such global policing—not to mention its possibility—today.
Afterwords
The first part of my seven-part take on Gibbon can be found here. Just click on the link at the end of each post to go on to the next.
