(I recently unearthed this review essay, written several years ago. Much of it is not quite finished, and it may be a little dated, particularly if “The Evolution of War” (Morris, 2012) has been entirely superseded by War: What is it Good For? (Morris, 2014), the publication of which probably explains why I shelved this paper. There is also too much repetition and too many asides into only loosely relevant issues, material which I would have eliminated if I had not been working on another project and therefore had too little time. Moreover, it discusses some issues that I have dealt with in my discussion of Peter Turchin’s Ultrasociety (in the blog section of this website). Nevertheless, here it is.)
(I) Introduction
Ian Morris is Willard Professor of Classics and a fellow of the Archaeology Centre at Stanford University. What makes him particularly interesting to this website, however, is that he has produced a significant body of work developing an account of human history from a broadly materialist perspective (Morris, 2010; 2013). Morris demonstrates an impressive command of a considerable body of archaeological, historical and ethnographic evidence. Moreover, his “social development” index, a measure of a region’s social development that quantifies and combines energy capture, social complexity, military power and literacy, provides a powerful technique for understanding the broad shape of human history. Morris (2010; 2013) uses this index to illuminate and compare the histories of eastern and western Eurasia, but the index could certainly be extended beyond these regions. Any serious approach to this subject in the future will need to engage with Morris’s innovations here. Moreover, Morris presents all of this material in an accessible and engaging way. For these achievements, Morris deserves the gratitude of all of those who are also attempting to develop a materialist account of human history.
My focus in this post, however, is on a paper (Morris, 2012) that encapsulates, in a particularly concise form, Morris’s views on the interplay between war and social development. I shall not question the archaeological or historical material that Morris presents here (except, perhaps, in some minor details). My disagreements with Morris really centre on the explanatory framework within and around which he organises this material.[i]
***
After a brief account of the overarching view that Morris presents of the co-evolution of war and human society (section II), I examine and criticise some of Morris's theoretical formulations (section III). I go on (in sections IV to VII) to present what I term Darwinian historical materialism (see Nolan, 1993; 2002b; 2006;2009; and the other pieces on this website), which I think is a more coherent theoretical framework than the one outlined by Morris.[ii] Indeed, I will argue that this alternative framework is sometimes implicit in Morris's own account of particular historical processes. In the next five sections (VIII to XII), I examine what Morris says about those processes, and reinterpret some of it through the prism of a Darwinian historical materialism (although I am not thereby obliged to endorse the evidence that Morris presents). In a short conclusion (section XIII), I attempt to summarise how I think that Morris's approach could be reformulated to make it a more powerful explanatory account of human history.
(II) The Co-Evolution of War and Society
Morris argues that, since the end of the last glacial period, war and social complexity (including governance) have “co-evolved” in those regions in which agriculture developed and spread. The main effects of war across the past 15 millennia of cultural evolution in these regions – and particularly over the last 500 years – have been to integrate societies, pacify them internally, and increase their material well-being (Abstract, 9).
After the end of the ice age, the “evolution” of agriculture in some parts of the world, with the development of denser, settled populations possessing increasing amounts of “fixed assets,” subjected human societies in those places to “circumscription” or “caging,” making it harder for groups that lost conflicts to move away. Such groups could then be absorbed by more successful groups (15-16). War had become “productive,” in the sense of building “larger, safer, richer, and more sophisticated” (18) societies. In the short run, of course, some wars were “counterproductive” and broke down these societies into smaller, more dangerous, poorer and simpler societies. Over the long run, however, such societies were absorbed into larger, more complex societies, which formed governments that pacified the societies internally and increased their prosperity (Abstract, 9).
However, the larger states produced by war changed the environment around them, and sometimes war turned “counterproductive” even over the relatively long term. In much of Eurasia, between about 200 and 1400 CE, the two effects of war settled into an unstable equilibrium (9), or perhaps war became almost entirely counterproductive (Abstract).
Wars after around 1400 CE, including the Thirty Years’ War, the Ming-Qing cataclysm, the Napoleonic wars, and the two World Wars, became much more destructive. But war also became more productive, pacifying societies and making them much wealthier (10).
Moreover, wars are less common than ever, and populations are very much larger than ever before. So the proportion of people dying in wars, or in any kind of violence, has fallen, from perhaps 10-20 percent of the population in non-agricultural “Stone Age” societies to around 1-2 percent of the world’s population during the twentieth century CE (Abstract, 9-10, 13).
In the twentieth century, however, war began turning counterproductive again. By the mid-twentieth century, war had become so destructive that, rather than unifying the entire planet, another great conflict could destroy it (Abstract, 9).
(III) Morris on “The Logic of Violence”
Morris, then, identifies some important long-term historical trends: the development of larger, internally more peaceful, more prosperous and more complex societies, and the decline in death rates from war (and other forms of violence). Morris sees these trends as the consequences of warfare, through the unfolding of what he calls the “logic of violence” (10, 11). He says, for instance, that “the main function of war in cultural evolution across the past 15,000 years – and particularly across the past 500 years – has been to integrate societies, increasing material well-being” (9, my emphasis). And he goes on to elaborate on this “logic of violence”:
Over the long run – for my purposes, the roughly fifteen thousand years since the end of the last ice age – the payoffs [from warfare] have clearly changed… In the very long run violence is self-defeating, because war and the fear of war drive the creation of larger societies that pacify themselves internally, in large part so that they can fight more effectively against other societies…
Over the last fifteen thousand years, wars between societies have become bloodier and bloodier as societies become larger and more sophisticated. But as societies have become larger and have pacified themselves internally, population and wealth have exploded, and the proportion of humanity dying violently has plummeted. (13, my emphases.)
So war has played this “productive” role for the last fifteen millennia. Elsewhere, however, Morris seems to date this “productive” war from the onset of domestication, which develops in Southwest Asia from around 7,500 BCE, and significantly later in other regions (15). And on other occasions, war plays this “productive” role only during “the fourth through first millennia BCE, and again in the second millennium CE” (23).
Morris is not entirely consistent, therefore, as to when war has been “productive.” It could be over the last 15 millennia (9, 13), over the last 9.5 millennia (14-16), or only over most of the last 6 millennia (23). (As that last quote implied, all of these periods would exclude the “era of counterproductive war” in large parts of Eurasia between roughly 200 and 1400 CE (Abstract, 9).)
***
This uncertainty as to the duration of productive war also emerges in a brief discussion of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. Morris says that the long-term decline in violence that is the central theme of Pinker’s book has
just one prime mover. In the fourth through first millennia BCE, and again in the second millennium CE, the real motor for the reduction of violence was violence itself. War made Leviathans, which pacified themselves, and all the other trends… and historical forces followed in war’s wake…
The institutional, intellectual, and psychological factors that Pinker identifies are the consequences of productive war. (23, 31-32, my emphases.)
Among the “trends” and “historical forces” that Pinker (2012, xxii-xxv) discusses are: the shift from hunting, gathering and horticultural societies to agricultural “civilizations” with cities and governments; the reduction of many independent polities to fewer and larger centralised kingdoms; the monopolisation of violence by these centralised governments; and the growth of commerce, literacy, mobility, knowledge and rationality. Morris seems to be claiming, then, that “all” of these “trends… and historical forces followed in war’s wake.”
These constitute a very ambitious set of claims. But a process of “productive” war that began during the fourth millennium BCE could surely not explain a transition from hunting, gathering and horticulture to agrarian states given that, in Southwest Asia, cultivation developed around 11,000 BCE, domestication around 7500 BCE, and agrarian states emerged around 3,500 BCE (14, 15, 16). If “productive” warfare really does explain the transitions from hunting, gathering and horticulture to agricultural states, then it must have been playing its “productive” role in Southwest Asia significantly before the fourth millennium BCE. So an earlier date for the beginning of “productive” war than the fourth millennium BCE is perhaps more consistent with Morris’s claims here. (As we shall see, the middle date of around 7,500 BCE would seem to be more consistent with his view that war became “productive” only when and where domestication developed and spread (14-16).)
***
Whenever and wherever war does explain social development, it is important to ask how and why war plays this role. Morris uses several metaphors to describe the historical role of “productive” war in explaining the development of larger, safer and richer societies over large stretches of human history. He tells us that war “has created larger, safer, and richer societies” (31, my emphasis), that “war and the fear of war drive the creation” of these societies (13, my emphasis; see also 23), that war was the “one prime mover” and “the real motor” in the long-term decline in violence (23, my emphases; see also 31). Unfortunately, such metaphors, though vivid, do not tell us how or why war played this “productive” role.
***
Elsewhere, Morris seems to award geography the primary role in explaining social development, at least for some historical transitions. He says, for instance, that “geography… was the determining factor” in the development of cultivation and domestication (15, my emphasis). But Morris also makes more ambitious claims for the explanatory role of geography in history, despite what he also says about war (13, 23, 31), telling us that “geography has been one of the prime movers in history… geography determines how societies develop…” (14, my emphases).
There is an obvious tension here between Morris’s more ambitious claims regarding the explanatory roles of geography and of warfare. (At least there is a tension for those periods and places where war is productive or counterproductive, rather than merely unproductive.) This tension could perhaps be relieved if Morris specified clearly how both geography and war play these explanatory roles. As we shall see in sections IV and V, Morris does make some attempt at explaining how war “drives” social development, but he also relies too much upon metaphors to describe the roles of war and geography in social development. And using the same metaphor of “prime mover” to describe the explanatory roles of both war (23, 31) and geography (14) only increases the tension.
Although he gives some examples of the effect of geography upon social development (which we shall examine below), nowhere here does Morris offer any general considerations that would motivate these general claims for the explanatory role of geography. Morris (14) does refer to his previous book on this topic (2010, 26-35), but again offers no reasons there for thinking that these general claims for geography (as opposed to particular explanatory claims involving geography) are true.
***
So, for Morris, the role of geography is clearly crucial to social development. But at the same time, he significantly qualifies it by also allowing “how societies develop” an important reciprocal role:
Cultural evolution has… fed back onto the environment, transforming it in ways that drive further cultural evolution…
… geography has been one of the prime movers in history, but in a rather complicated way: geography determines how societies develop, but how societies develop determines what geography means, in a back-and-forth relationship. (12, 14, my emphases.)
Now, it is not exactly clear what it is to “determine what geography means.” But, given that geography “determines” social development, while social development only “determines what geography means,” then geography does still perhaps have greater explanatory weight than social development in this “back-and-forth [one might almost say dialectical] relationship.”
Perhaps what Morris wants to do here is to acknowledge that societies (particularly as they develop and expand) have significant effects upon their environments, and that these (partially) transformed environments in turn affect the further development of those societies. But he wants to do this while still insisting that geography influences social development to a greater extent than social development influences geography.[iii] But this important, and perfectly reasonable, point is obscured by Morris’s reliance upon the metaphor of what geography “means.”
***
Morris does attempt to reconcile the roles of geography and warfare in explaining social development, saying that “geography has played a decisive part in shaping the relations between war and social development” (10, my emphasis) and that “war’s ability to produce bigger, safer, richer societies is shaped massively by geography” (14, my emphasis).
Morris argues, as we shall see, that the geography of particular regions led to an early development of agriculture in those regions, and sedentary agriculture inhibited movement, allowing warfare to produce “larger, safer and richer” societies. But, beyond particular explanatory claims, Morris does not explain how or why, in general, geography exerts this massive effect upon the long-term outcome of warfare.
(See sections V and VI below for my own suggestions as to how and why “geography” affects reproductive and military success (and thus the differential spread of cultural traits) through its effects on productive success.)
So, for Morris, war explains social development (9, 13, 23, 31). But Morris also says that geography explains social development (14). And social development has a reciprocal, though perhaps not as powerful, effect upon geography, because social development “determines what geography means” (12, 14). Presumably, therefore, social development could also have a reciprocal, though perhaps not as powerful, effect upon warfare (possibly because social development determines what warfare “means”). Moreover, the effect of warfare upon social development is “shaped massively” by geography (10, 14). So perhaps the effect of geography upon social development is also shaped massively by warfare (given that warfare has “created” (31) the larger, safer and richer societies the development of which constitutes Morris’s “social development”).
Given these various claims and their implications, it is difficult to think of an explanatory relationship between geography, war and social development that is not included here, and this reflects how worryingly indeterminate this theory is.
***
One interpretation of Morris might be that he is saying that geography and warfare both play an important role in explaining “social development” (or “cultural evolution”). Together, geography and warfare lead to the emergence of “larger, safer, richer and more sophisticated” (18) societies. Which of them is the “prime mover” in this process can vary over time and between regions. Moreover, geography and social development both affect each other, with neither having, in general, any greater explanatory weight.
All of this might seem to chime in well with the historian’s traditional aversion to “grand theory.” But Morris does not share this aversion. As I have suggested above, Morris seems to be presenting a general theory of history in these passages, a theory that gives due explanatory weight to geography, warfare and “governance”, and that informs his account of historical change. This is an ambition that I am entirely sympathetic with. Unfortunately, however, Morris is not as clear as I think he needs to be as to the precise explanatory roles of geography, warfare and governance in explaining social development/cultural evolution. Whatever relative explanatory weight they each might have, they surely cannot all explain in the same way, they surely cannot all play the same role in historical explanation. In the next few sections, I will attempt to elaborate an alternative conceptualisation that specifies a little more clearly the distinct roles of war, geography and governance in the explanation of social development.[iv]
(IV) Warfare as a Selective Mechanism
Morris’s general formulations are not, then, as clear as they could be. He implicates war, geography and governance in his theorising on social development, but he uses metaphors that do not clearly specify and distinguish the explanatory roles played by each of these. Darwinian historical materialism focuses upon more or less the same elements as does Morris but, by integrating them into a broadly Darwinian explanatory structure, goes further towards showing how the various explanatory elements do their explanatory work.
When we assert long-term, directional and, in some sense, “adaptive” trends (or tendencies) as central to human history, as Morris does, we can underpin such trends with several possible mechanisms. To simplify considerably, claims of this sort need to consider both rational choice and selective mechanisms. Do the trends occur because of the (sufficiently) rational choices of (enough) social agents? Alternatively, is there some form of selection through the differential outcomes of varying cultural traits, the operation of which brings about the claimed trends, and the postulation of which makes no excessive demands upon human rationality?
I have argued elsewhere against rational choice as a fundamental mechanism for a general theory of history (Nolan, 2002b; 2006; 2009). Human behaviour is undoubtedly intentional (and even sometimes rational). Behavioural innovations are, therefore, non-random, in that they are directed towards particular ends (which does not mean, of course, that they generally achieve those ends). These ends tend to reflect the relatively short-term interests of individuals or of small groups, however, interests that are indifferent both to the long-term survival of populations, and to long term trends and processes. Furthermore, human ignorance and irrationality, along with inter-societal and intra-societal conflict, give rise to too many unpredictable and unintended consequences to allow us to see rational choice as the unmediated basis for the long-term trends that occur in human history. (The more complex human societies are, the more conflicting interests there are likely to be. Intra-societal conflict can involve conflict between individual and group interests, between the more and less powerful, between men and women, between younger and older, or between different classes and ethnic groups. There is no reason to assume that the interests of all of these in the societal distribution of benefits and burdens usually coincide.)
Cognitive psychology may have illuminated the sources of our irrationality, but I doubt that we needed it to know that history is not in the hands of rational agents with the appropriate combination of interest in, knowledge of, and power to bring about just those changes that will lead to the long-term trends that history displays.[v] It is more realistic, therefore, to see the choices that people make as effectively “random” with respect to these long-term trends, much as natural selection sees (genetically-explained) variation as random with respect to enhancing reproductive fitness and establishing “adaptive” characteristics.[vi]
We seem to be predisposed to explain historical processes (no matter how large-scale and long term they are) as the intended results of the behaviours of more or less rational agents, perhaps because that is how we explain our own behaviour, and even most of our everyday social interactions. But these historical processes are emergent processes. The tendencies are the unintended products of countless numbers of, often ignorant, irrational and/or conflicting, choices.
This does not mean that cultural innovations are inexplicable. It simply means that they are not standardly introduced because they will contribute to the long-term fitness (however defined) of human groups. Innovations are random in the sense that whether they will actually enhance (relative) fitness has been unpredictable for most of human history. So there is little or no bias towards those innovations that will actually lead to the persistent tendencies or long-term trends.
Of course, the archaeological, historical and ethnographic records are biased towards those innovations that were successful and did spread. But we should not let that appearance blind us to the reality of the very mixed record of success and failure in human history, or to the fact that one party’s success is often another party’s failure.
Such random innovations/choices would clearly not issue in the long-term directional trends and large-scale patterns that actually occur in human history unless they were subject to some kind of selection process, perhaps one akin to natural selection. The central claim of the theory of natural selection is that, within organic populations, differential reproductive success leads to the spread of those inherited variations that enhance (relative) reproductive success. Within these populations, consequently, there are tendencies towards increasing reproductive success and, therefore, accelerating population growth.[vii]
I would argue, somewhat analogously, that differential reproductive and/or military success within human populations lead to the expansion of the groups possessing the cultural variations that most enhance reproductive and/or military success (often at the expense of those groups that do not possess those cultural variations). So I am suggesting a differential reproductive and/or military transmission of (behaviourally) acquired characteristics.[viii] Consequently, there will be persistent tendencies within human populations to increasing reproductive fitness (and accelerating population growth) and increasing military power.[ix]
I argue, then, that war plays its explanatory role primarily as a selective mechanism, that is to say that differential success in war leads to the spread (through territorial expansion, conquest, absorption, and so on) of those traits that enhance success in war.
So, if war explains the development of “larger, safer, richer, and more sophisticated” (18) societies, this is because, in the very long run (and assuming small-scale, “random” cultural variation between societies), societies that happened to be somewhat larger, safer, richer and more complex tended to be militarily (and/or reproductively) more successful than societies that were somewhat smaller, less safe, poorer, and less complex. This at least to the extent necessary to give rise to the long-term trends to much “larger, safer, richer, and more sophisticated” societies.
Morris hints at this view of the explanatory role of war:
Over the long run, such groups [that lost conflicts] were absorbed into larger, more complex societies…
Groups in the lucky latitudes started fighting one another more intensely, and instead of running away, the losers often found themselves absorbed into larger societies. (9, 16.)
So it seems that, whatever the metaphors he uses, Morris is here offering a selective explanation in which larger societies absorb smaller societies through conquest (or perhaps the threat of conquest).[x] There will, therefore, be a trend for the average size of societies to grow over time. This conception of the role of war as a selective mechanism is also, as I will show, embodied in some of the explanations that Morris offers of particular historical processes.
Moreover, when Morris says that “war is an evolutionary mechanism that works its magic only on very long time scales” (13; see also 18), the phrase “evolutionary mechanism” and the emphasis upon long time scales imply a selective process that is not wholly short-circuited by rational choice. And Morris’s statement also implies (sensibly) that this is a process in which larger, safer, richer and more complex societies do not always win in military confrontations with somewhat smaller, less safe, poorer and simpler societies, but merely win often enough to establish the persistent tendencies or long-term trends to larger, safer, richer and more complex societies.[xi]
But Morris is not as explicit in his general theoretical statements as I think he needs to be. The metaphors he uses to describe the historical role of war - “drives the creation of… prime mover… real motor… created…” - do not capture this distinctive explanatory role of differential military success as a selective mechanism that spreads those cultural traits that enhance military success, perhaps obscuring the point more than they illuminate it.[xii] Moreover, as I will show below, Morris is not consistently selectionist, but is sometimes ambiguous across rational choice and selective war as explanatory mechanisms.
(V) The Role of “Geography”
Once we have clarified the role of war as a selective mechanism, working on varying cultural traits and giving rise to directional tendencies, we also need to be clear about the limits to the explanatory power of war.
Whatever the tendencies that differential military success implies, whether it actually selects for larger, safer, richer, and more complex societies over the long term depends upon to what extent, if at all, such societies will enhance military success. In some circumstances they might, in other circumstances they might not.
Neither war nor the fear of war themselves explain why there are sometimes trends to larger, more peaceful, and more productive societies but sometimes not, nor why the trends appear earlier in some regions than in others, are sometimes relatively rapid and sometimes relatively slow, and can result in different kinds of large, complex societies (more or less centralised, for instance). It is here, I think, that Morris’s “geography” plays its distinctive explanatory role in the theoretical structure that I am suggesting; a role connected to, but quite different from, that played by war. (Morris comes close to suggesting this, but his use of metaphors, and sometimes the same metaphor, to describe the explanatory roles of both geography and war obscures the distinction.)
To understand this role, it might be helpful to continue to think in terms of an analogy with natural selection. I have said that natural selection claims that differential reproductive success leads to the spread of those inherited variations that enhance reproductive success. But what is it that explains which variations will most enhance reproductive success (and that therefore explains which variations will tend to spread)? The standard answer, I would suggest, is that it is the organisms’ relationship to their environment that explains which variations will most enhance reproductive success. So, for example, whether there is selection for greater speed or greater strength in a population of predators depends upon the predators’ methods of predation and the (evolving) nature of the species that they prey upon.
We can ask an analogous question of a Darwinian theory of history. Differential military success leads to the spread of those cultural variations that enhance military success. But what is it that explains which variations will most enhance military success (and that therefore explains which variations will spread because of differential military success)? My answer to that question is an adaptation of the Darwinian answer: it is the relationship between the people and their environment that explains which variations will most enhance military success, and thus tend to spread.
It perhaps seems a minor point to insist that it is the people-environment relationship, rather than merely “geography,” that explains what is selected by differential military success. And it might be that, when Morris refers to “geography,” he really means human geography, and has something like the people-environment relationship in mind (Morris, 2010, 29f). Even if this is the case, however, I would argue that we need to be as explicit as we can be in our theorising.
The difference between geography and the people-environment relationship is close to, perhaps even identical with, the distinction that ecologists draw between habitat and niche:
Habitats are simply the geographical environments in which species live… In biology and ecology, a niche is the particular way of living for which an organism seems to have been sculpted or adapted by evolutionary processes. (Christian 2005, 84.)
Two different species in the same habitat would occupy different niches. A predator species and its prey species may live in the same habitat, but each has a very different niche within that habitat, a very different relationship to that habitat.[xiii]
The crucial point here, whichever term we use, is that the people-environment relationship (or geography), unlike war, is not in itself a selective mechanism. The distinct explanatory role of the people-environment relationship is that it explains why selective mechanisms, such as warfare or reproductive “competition,” select some variations rather than other variations, why differential military success sometimes selects for larger and more complex societies, and sometimes does not.[xiv]
The metaphor “prime mover” (14) does not capture this sense in which the people-environment relationship explains which cultural traits enhance military success and which do not, and which therefore spread through differential military success. To say that “geography determines how societies develop” (14, my emphasis) is perhaps a little more apt, in that the people-environment relationship could be said to “determine” which cultural variations war selects (though “determine” is not a word that I would use in this context). I would prefer to say that the people-environment relationship enables and directs, or channels, social development. And one particular aspect of the people-environment relationship, productive circumstances, plays a particularly important part in this process.
(VI) Productive Circumstances as the Enabler and Channeller of Productive Development
If, for a Darwinian theory of history, it is peoples’ relationship to their environment that explains which cultural variations will, directly or indirectly, most enhance reproductive and/or military success (and therefore spread), for a Darwinian historical materialism, production is the aspect of that people-environment relationship that bears the most explanatory weight. By “production,” I mean the extraction, processing, transportation and storage of resources from the environment.
Perhaps the first piece of evidence in favour of this explanatory role of production in human history, is that levels of production per capita have risen, if not inexorably then fairly persistently, over the course of human history, at first locally, then regionally, then globally. Both Marxian and Darwinian historical materialisms claim that this is because those (innovations in) productive techniques and social forms that, in the given productive circumstances, enhance productive success will tend to spread. The given productive circumstances therefore largely explain which innovations in productive techniques and social forms will tend to spread.
“Productive circumstances” involve existing productive techniques, including those of transport, trade, storage and communication, but also productively-relevant characteristics of geography, climate, ecology, and so on. For any version of historical materialism, it is these productive circumstances that explain which innovations in productive techniques will be the most productively successful, and therefore tend to spread. And social forms that are more conducive to enhancing productive success in the prevailing productive circumstances will tend to replace social forms that are less conducive.[xv]
But why does this tendency to increasing productive success exist? And how do those productive techniques and social forms that enhance productive success come to predominate? Marxian and Darwinian historical materialisms give different answers to these questions.
Karl Marx never really addressed these questions at any length. The most important recent expositor of Marxian historical materialism, G. A. Cohen (1978, 147 n. 1, 152-155, 158-159; 1988, 20-25, 85-86), argues that humans, being somewhat rational, will choose those productive techniques and social forms that are most conducive to productive success, at least over the long term. Some form of rational choice must also underpin the class struggle and revolution approach which is the traditional Marxian explanation of how appropriate social forms are established, and in which revolutionary struggle is the rational course of action for a sufficient number of social actors. In my view, though, rational choice is not a good answer to the why-question or the how-question, for the reasons given in section IV above, and I instead opt for the (quasi) Darwinian mechanisms of differential reproductive and military success.
Why is there a tendency to productive development? Because, for Darwinian historical materialism, it is variations in productive success that largely explain variations in reproductive success, and variations in both that explain variations in military success. It will be those societies that have higher levels of production that will be reproductively and militarily more successful than less productive societies, for several fairly obvious reasons. More productive societies can reproduce more people per unit area and, therefore, produce more warriors per unit area.[xvi] More productive societies can also better equip, train and supply those warriors, and can sustain this in warfare for longer than less productive societies. There will, therefore, be a tendency within human populations to increasing levels of production.[xvii]
Consequently, the variations that are conducive to higher levels of production (such as those productive techniques, social relations, and cultural practices and values that enhance productive success in the given productive circumstances) will tend to spread (through differential reproductive and/or military success). That is the answer to the question of how those productive techniques and social forms conducive to productive success are established. It is the existing productive circumstances, consequently, that explain which cultural traits will spread within a given population. Why do the outcomes of these processes vary from region to region? Because productive circumstances vary from region to region, and are more or less conducive to productive development.
(We should bear in mind here the important distinction between the tendencies that a selective mechanism implies abstracted from any context, and the actual trends that such a mechanism would give rise to in particular contexts. There is, for example, a tendency for natural selection to lead to a rise in reproductive fitness in a population of organisms. But whether the tendencies to increasing reproductive success and population growth generated by the operation of natural selection are realised as long-term trends depends upon, among other things, the extent to which a (tendentially growing) population can continue to extract resources from its environment, given that resources are always limited, that there is usually competition from other organisms, and that environments constantly change, sometimes markedly and relatively rapidly. The situation is similar for human history. And even seemingly small human interventions can (directly or indirectly) change the environment unpredictably and irreversibly, with possibly significant consequences for human productive and reproductive success.)
To paraphrase G. A. Cohen’s (1978, 147 n. 1) exposition of Marx: in so far as the course of history is, for Marx, explicable, it is explicable because people, being rational, will choose those productive techniques and social forms that, in the given productive circumstances, tend to enhance productive success. For Darwinian historical materialism, on the other hand, in so far as the course of history is explicable, it is explicable because differential reproductive and military success will lead to the spread of those productive techniques and social forms that, in the given productive circumstances, tend to enhance productive success, and thereby enhance reproductive and/or military success. In both theories, it is productive circumstances that explain which variations are “chosen” or “selected,” and this is what makes both of them versions of historical materialism.
So, Morris’s historical trend to the development of “richer” (Abstract, 13, 14, 31), “wealthier” (27) or more prosperous (9) societies is, for Darwinian historical materialism, the development of more productive societies. And, although it is effected by differential reproductive and/or military success, this productive development can only be effected to the extent and in the ways that productive circumstances allow (so differences in productive circumstances explain differences in productive development).
I am not sure whether Morris would agree with this view of productive development. He does not focus here upon higher levels of production, though they would confer obvious advantages upon societies embroiled in warfare. And he says that, because of conflict, societies “formed governments that pacified the group internally and as a side-effect increased its prosperity” (9, my emphasis). The italicised phrase could be taken to imply that higher levels of production are only an indirect effect of warfare, with no significant effect upon warfare, rather than, as Darwinian historical materialism would see it, an adaptation that is explained by its effect on military success. Not at all, in other words, a mere “side-effect” without its own crucial effects.
Marxists have devoted enormous attention to the development of capitalism, but their focus seems to have been on why some societies became capitalist before, or more rapidly than, other societies. Some have stressed endogenous processes (such as changing class structures and social conflict), while others have stressed exogenous processes (such as the development of long-distance trade and international markets). These are undeniably important issues. But Marxists have tended to think that explaining why some societies/regions became (more) capitalist before other societies/regions explains why capitalism developed. It might be more enlightening, though, to ask whether more-capitalist societies/regions were reproductively and/or militarily more successful or less successful than less-capitalist societies/regions. Darwinian historical materialism focuses upon just such processes of inter-polity selection. There will always be variation between societies, but the crucial issue for long-term historical processes is what are the variations that (in the given productive circumstances) lead to some societies being reproductively and/or militarily more successful than others? If, over the course of the second millennium CE, less-capitalist societies had tended to be reproductively and militarily more successful than more-capitalist societies, then capitalism would not have developed and spread.
***
Turning now from productive development to the other trends that Morris (2012) focuses on, the development, over the long term, of larger, safer and more complex societies (Abstract, 9). Morris says that there is a
built-in… logic of violence. In the very long run violence is self-defeating, because war and the fear of war drive the creation of larger societies that pacify themselves internally, in large part so that they can fight more effectively against other societies. (13, my emphasis.)
This unqualified claim that war has a “built-in… logic” to “drive the creation of larger societies” could be misleading as to the outcomes of selection through differential military success. It implies that there is a developmental logic to warfare that will be fulfilled whatever the people-environment relationship is (or, at least, that this is a standard result of warfare). I do not think that this unqualified claim is what Morris intends, or that the historical evidence that Morris himself presents supports such an unqualified claim.
Again, the distinction between tendencies and trends is important here. It may be true that there is a tendency for warfare to lead to larger, internally-pacified, and more complex societies. For Darwinian historical materialism, though, differential reproductive and/or military success will lead to such societies only in those productive circumstances in which somewhat larger, safer and more complex societies are reproductively and/or militarily more successful than somewhat smaller, less safe and simpler societies. And these would be productive circumstances in which such societies could continue to raise levels of production (and therefore enhance reproductive and/or military success) more than could smaller, less pacified, and less complex societies.
In some of his formulations Morris perhaps implies this role for “geography,” though without ever actually stating it explicitly. He says, for instance, that “violence drove the creation of increasingly effective governments,” but only in “certain geographical settings” (10). But what is it about “certain geographical settings” that allows intergroup violence to do this, while other settings do not? In my view, it was in those geographical settings in which the productive circumstances allowed continued productive development that war “drove the creation of increasingly effective governments,” because such governments enhanced productive success, and therefore enhanced military (and probably reproductive) success.
***
Morris repeatedly says that social development changes the “meaning” of geography:
Geography drove social development, but social development simultaneously drove what geography meant, so that geographical factors that were highly advantageous at one level of development could be positively disadvantageous at another. (23; see also 11, 14.)
It is not clear what it is to change the meaning of geography. But I can say something about the interplay of “geography” and social development from the perspective of Darwinian historical materialism.
As productive techniques change (tending to improve), then the people-environment relationship changes, and different parts of the habitat of the population become productively relevant. Whatever the extent to which the habitat itself is changed by the new productive techniques, the crucial point is that the peoples’ niche within that habitat shifts, changing the productively-relevant aspects of the habitat. This in turn changes the balance of the various costs and benefits faced by the population, changing the selection pressures impinging upon people, so that different productive techniques and, therefore, social forms become advantageous (and sometimes, new and advantageous productive techniques become possible).
Suppose, for instance, that a change in climate led to the proliferation of stands of large-seeded wild grasses, such that it was productively (and therefore reproductively and/or militarily) advantageous for mobile foragers to become more sedentary in order to better exploit this resource. In these new productive circumstances, new selection pressures acting upon these newly semi-sedentary foragers might mean that it then became advantageous for them to become wholly sedentary, and develop new techniques for cultivating such stands and storing the resulting crops. Those groups that did happen to shift somewhat in that direction (for whatever reason) would benefit reproductively and/or militarily.
Morris himself gives an example of this elsewhere: as techniques of water-borne transport developed, proximity to larger rivers, then seas, then oceans became more advantageous (Morris 2010, 33-34).
If this shift in selection pressures is more or less what Morris intends when he says that “how societies develop determines what geography means” (14; see also 10-11), and it is difficult to see what else he could mean, then I would entirely agree. But he needs to avoid the use of metaphors here.
***
Morris refers to “the world’s resource-poorest environments, such as Australia, the Sahara, and Siberia, where caging could barely operate and war remained unproductive, with violence generating no trend toward the creation of larger, safer, wealthier societies” (27). (Elsewhere he mentions “Siberia, the poles, the great deserts” as areas that were “unsuitable for agriculture” (14).)
I would prefer to say that, in circumstances where levels of production could not be increased significantly, war maintained smaller, less complex and less wealthy societies (together with very different forms and patterns of warfare).
War remained “unproductive” in these environments at the extremes of the climatic gradient (the arctic and tundra regions at one extreme, desert and tropical rainforest at the other) because the existing productive circumstances were not conducive to productive development. War elsewhere was metaphorically productive to the extent that the mode of production was actually productive.
Therefore we should not assume, as Morris perhaps does, that “unproductive” war played no important historical role. In a world in which little or no productive development was possible, a world trapped in a permanent ice age, say, or a world made up entirely of areas “unsuitable for agriculture,” such as “Siberia, the poles, the great deserts,” (14), even “unproductive” war could still act as a selective mechanism. If higher levels of production were not possible, differential military success could still select against lower levels of production, and maintain smaller, less complex and less hierarchical societies (because more hierarchical societies that intensified production in such unpropitious productive circumstances would face diminishing returns, and thus falling military, and probably reproductive, success).
There would still be a tendency here for differential military (and reproductive) success to lead to larger, safer and wealthier societies (in the same sense that natural selection generates a tendency to higher levels of reproductive success even within populations where such levels are not possible, and even within populations heading towards extinction). But in such a world this tendency would not give rise to historical trends leading to the creation of such larger, safer and wealthier societies. There might still be historical processes in this world, but they would be very different to the processes that actually occurred in our world.
It is not that “Australia, the Sahara, and Siberia” are inherently resource-poor, of course. Certainly, they were resource-poor for their indigenous peoples, in that the resources needed for an independent transition to agriculture, and therefore a long-term development of increasingly productive agriculture, were not available (or, in the Sahara, the resources necessary to sustain agriculture disappeared). But these areas are not necessarily resource-poor for developed industrial societies; they may, on the contrary, be resource-rich for such societies. To reiterate, it is not geography as such that is crucial here, it is the relationship between people and their environment, especially their productive circumstances, that explains which variations would enhance production, thereby enhance military (and/or reproductive) success, and thereby spread. So the existing productive circumstances explain what these selective mechanisms actually select.
Warfare may intensify selection, and perhaps even innovation, and this might accelerate productive development (and therefore social change), but only where (and to the extent and in the way that) the productive circumstances allow productive development to be accelerated. This cannot happen just anywhere, however intense the warfare might be.
Although he might not express it in these terms, Morris (10-11) is clearly aware that processes of differential military success seem to have had very different outcomes in different regions, and he might agree that varying long-term outcomes of military competition are a result of varying productive circumstances. Perhaps what Morris is saying is that geographic circumstances determine whether war plays a productive, counterproductive, or merely unproductive role in social development. But Morris does not here focus clearly upon what I would argue is the key “geographical” variable (and the one that elsewhere he effectively emphasises): productive circumstances.
***
Some see the development of modern science, as opposed to productive circumstances, as the fundamental “cause” of the acceleration in productive development that has taken place over recent centuries.
Of course, there was productive development before the development of science. That productive development eventually reached the level that we could begin to systematically test productive innovations in quasi-artificial settings before applying them in non-artificial settings.
I agree that science has accelerated productive development, but only to the extent and in the way that productive circumstances allowed. (Would such an acceleration have occurred, for instance, in a world without the Americas, or without fossil fuels?) Moreover, a scientific culture developed and spread because it enhanced productive development.
We need to distinguish between the method(s) of science and the results achieved by applying those methods. Scientific methods are essentially ways of generating and testing hypotheses. In the case of productively applicable science, these hypotheses would, presumably, imply innovations in productive techniques.
Science can, in this way, discover which productive innovations are likely to be (the most) successful, but it is still the existing productive circumstances, not science, that determine which productive innovations are actually (the most) productively successful in real-world settings. In short, science proposes, productive circumstances dispose. (Less shortly, but more precisely: science proposes, productive circumstances and differential productive success, then differential reproductive and/or military success, dispose.) For these reasons, I do not think that science deprives productive circumstances of the explanatory role that Darwinian historical materialism assigns to them, that of the enabler and channeller of productive development.
Of course, those productive innovations suggested by scientific research that do establish themselves and spread will alter the existing productive circumstances. So, in this process of generating and testing productive innovations and developing new knowledge, science gives rise to new productive techniques and, therefore, new productive circumstances. And those new productive circumstances will decide the extent to which further productive innovations (including those suggested by science) will be successful.
(VII) Explaining Political and Social Structures
Morris also allots an important explanatory role to the institutions of government, saying that “more effective governance changed what geography meant, with the result that entirely new geographical settings became more advantageous” (11). So, Morris (10-11) seems to be suggesting a “dialectical” relationship in which “governance” is explained by “geography,” but governance also has significant effects upon geography. But, again, Morris does not really make clear what it is, in general, to change the meaning of geography.
As I argued in the last section, new productive techniques could have changed the people-environment relationship, thereby changing the balance of costs and benefits, and the fitness landscape faced by the population. But how did “more effective governance” change “what geography meant,” unless it was through changing something about the people-environment relationship (and probably something relating to production)? As we shall see below, Morris explains the shifts between different kinds of warfare, and therefore the shift between social development and (what we might call) stagnation or regression, ultimately by changes in productive circumstances.
Whatever Morris might mean by phrases such as this, it is clear that long-term changes in governance, and in political and social structures generally, are among those things that a theory of history must explain. It is equally clear, however, that they cannot simply be effects of warfare or productive development, because we know that such structures themselves have profound effects upon warfare and upon productive development.
Darwinian historical materialism acknowledges, indeed emphasises, the effects that political and social structures have upon reproductive and military success (often through their effects upon production). This is because those structures that enhance reproductive and/or military success (and thus spread) are selected through, and thus explained by, those enhancing effects (direct or indirect) upon reproductive and/or military success. So, perhaps paradoxically, the “causes” of the development and spread of new political and social structures lie in their effects.
It might be helpful to think of political and social structures as analogous to phenotypic features in natural selection. Phenotypic features evolve through their contribution to reproductive success, and their character is explained by that effect. To take a tired but venerable example, the long necks of giraffes are not simply an effect of differential reproductive success; longer necks enhanced reproductive success, and their development and spread are explained by this enhancing effect upon reproductive success.
But in the debates around the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution, for example, it seems to me that those who stress (what I would call) productive circumstances (the transatlantic economy, the agricultural revolution, coal and iron ore deposits, and so on) and those who stress institutions (property rights and the rule of law, competitive markets, and so on) often talk past each other because they do not have a conceptual framework that can integrate these different elements. As a result, these elements tend to be seen as explanatory rivals. Many of these writers seem to have a (zero-sum?) model of explanation in which different kinds of “causes” compete against each other. So, the more effect productive circumstances have, the less effect institutions have. It is as if two zoologists were arguing about giraffes, with one saying “The long necks of giraffes explain their reproductive success,” and the other saying “No, their reproductive success explains their long necks.” But evolutionary biologists work within a framework of evolutionary explanation through natural selection that enables them to avoid these simplistic dichotomies.
Marxists may think that production being necessary for human survival establishes the explanatory primacy of production in human history, and refutes the claim that appropriate institutions are essential. Conversely, those who emphasise the explanatory role of institutions may think that institutions being necessary conditions of productive development refutes the claim that production has an explanatory primacy over institutions. In my view, they both draw a false conclusion from a true premise. Institutions (that are at least roughly appropriate) may be necessary conditions of productive development. But it is implausible to claim that the same kinds of institutions will enhance productive success in all circumstances. What kinds of institutions are (or are not) appropriate varies with productive circumstances, so it is the prevailing productive circumstances that explain what kinds of institutions are more effective in enhancing productive success, and thereby reproductive and/or military success, and what kinds of institutions will therefore spread.[xviii]
***
As trade networks developed and expanded, intensifying market competition between commercial enterprises worked to generate productive innovations, and to select the more productively successful of them (and thereby encouraged productive development). But competitive markets do not, in themselves, explain why productively successful innovations are productively successful. It is the existing productive circumstances that explain which innovations are (the most) productively successful, which firms are therefore (the most) commercially successful, and which innovations therefore spread.
So competitive markets acted to short-circuit processes of differential reproductive and/or military success. But market competition did not entirely, or even largely, replace such processes. Competitive markets developed and spread because they enhanced the productive success, and thereby the reproductive and military success, of more-capitalist societies as against less-capitalist societies.
(This is an imperfect process, of course, and does not always work in this way. Markets are not always as perfectly competitive as simple microeconomic models assume (not always as explicitly as they should). But the process works well enough to have the effects on production that I have claimed for it. And I am not claiming that competitive markets were the only institutional requirement of rapid productive development. Among other things, government involvement in supporting and directing markets, and in waging war against other polities, was also clearly crucial.)
The development of both widespread competitive markets and science was bound up with productive development. And competitive markets, like science, no doubt accelerated productive development to the extent and in the way that productive circumstances allowed (depending, for instance, upon the presence of substantial deposits of fossil fuels). But neither deprives productive circumstances of their explanatory role in determining which innovations were more or less successful and which, therefore, would tend to spread through market competition, and ultimately through differential reproductive and/or military success. It is productive circumstances that explain why competitive markets and science brought about this productive development rather than that productive development. In a world without fossil fuels, for example, industrialisation may have involved wind- and water-generated electric power. It would almost certainly have been much slower than, and have initially occurred in different regions to, the industrialisation powered by fossil fuels that actually occurred (Le Page, 2014, 34-39).
Competitive markets and (productively-applicable) science are both, in their different ways, methods for generating and testing (and thereby selecting) innovations. But the litmus test, so to speak, is how these innovations perform within the real-world context of the existing productive circumstances. That test will decide whether the productive innovations and the firms that employ them will survive and expand or not.
So competitive markets and science are short cuts to successful innovations. Among productively developed agrarian-manufacturing polities, those whose economies relied more upon competitive markets and had more of a scientific culture tended to be productively more successful, and therefore reproductively and/or militarily more successful, than societies with less reliance upon competitive markets and less of a scientific culture (other things being equal). That is why competitive markets and science developed and spread.
***
In the examples that Morris gives, it tends to be productively-relevant resources and new productive techniques (rather than governance) that directly change the impact of geography and make “entirely new geographical settings… more advantageous,” and at the same time explain historical shifts between unproductive, productive and counterproductive war.
So, the development of sedentary agriculture after the end of the ice age explains the shift from unproductive to productive war (15-16); the expansion of increasingly productive agriculture, the breeding of larger horses and the development of horse-mounted pastoral nomadism on the Eurasian steppes, and the development of long-distance overland trade, explain the transition from productive to counterproductive warfare in the early first millennium AD (24-26); the development of guns and oceangoing ships (with magnetic compasses and powerful rudders) and transoceanic trade, and then of industrialisation based on fossil fuels, explain the shift back to productive war in the modern age (28-30); and the production of nuclear weapons in the twentieth century explains the threatened transition back to counterproductive warfare (30). These back-and-forth shifts in warfare explain rises and falls in social development. Morris does, therefore, seem to think that production has some sort of key role within his overall explanatory structure.
Of course, political structures that enhance this productive development thereby indirectly change the people-environment relationship, and thereby change the selective pressures that a society faces. If this process is what Morris intends to capture with the claim that “governance changed what geography meant” (11), then, again, I agree (but I wish that he would be more explicit).
***
Much of the theoretical model that I have presented is implicit in Morris (as it is, I think, in Diamond, 1998). But, if we are to explain the long-term trends and large-scale patterns of human history, then metaphors, implications and hints are not enough. We need to be as explicit, and as precise, as we are able to be. A clearly specified theory is perhaps more vulnerable to criticism than a more vaguely specified theory, but it is not an appropriate response to criticism to keep the theory vague.
(VIII) Warfare before farming
As we have seen, although his chronology is not entirely clear, Morris does not regard war as being productive before the development of domestication and circumscription/caging (which first appears in Southwest Asia around 7,500 BCE).
Morris is certainly aware that war existed before the transitions to agriculture. He says, for instance, that “every human group sometimes resorts to violence to settle its disputes” (14). But he regards it as non-productive in that it did not build larger, safer and richer societies (18), because warfare before circumscription/caging had very different results to warfare after circumscription/caging set in. Nomadic hunter-gatherers had lower population densities than sedentary farmers, and were without fixed assets, so nomadic foragers who were unsuccessful in warfare could generally move away relatively easily rather than be absorbed by the militarily successful (15-16), so there was no trend to larger, safer and richer societies.
No doubt it is generally true of nomadic foragers that it is both less difficult and less costly for them to move when defeated in warfare than it is for sedentary agriculturalists living among denser populations and possessing fixed assets. But why should this preclude warfare playing a selective role even among fully nomadic foragers? In my view, differential reproductive and/or military success can play a role in explaining long-term historical change even prior to the development of agriculture.
Morris argues that during “most of human history, people have fought more through raids and ambushes than through pitched battles” (18). But raids and ambushes could eventually force a rival group of foragers onto less productive foraging territory, perhaps dispersing them, or even eliminating them as a rival group, and this could surely be part of a selective process. This process would tend to favour the productively, and thereby reproductively and militarily, more successful foraging groups, perhaps spreading the productive and other cultural traits that made them more successful (and, incidentally, perhaps further enhancing the reproductive success of the victorious group and reducing that of the defeated group).
Morris claims that rates of violent death were around four times higher among “Stone Age” societies than among empires of the late first millennium BCE (13, 22-23). Some of these “Stone Age” societies would have been hunter-gatherers, some of them would presumably have been horticulturalists, and others of them might have been hybrids of, perhaps even transitional between, foraging and horticulture. Given this disparity in rates of violent death, it does not seem plausible to suggest that, whereas war in these ancient empires was a selective mechanism (to express it in my terminology), war in many of these Stone Age societies was not.
Moreover, there seems to have been productive development and accelerating population growth (and probably social change) long before the development of agriculture (Livi-Bacci, 1992, 31; Pettitt, 2005, 171-173). These processes need to be explained, and differential reproductive and military success seem to me to be good candidate mechanisms for explaining the spread of productively and reproductively more successful traits within forager populations.
Differential military success may have selected for higher levels of production (and for social structures that facilitated these higher levels of production) before the transitions to agriculture, though perhaps at a much slower rate than did warfare after the transitions and the development of circumscription/caging. (And, as I have argued, where higher levels of production were not possible in the prevailing circumstances, war would at least have selected against lower levels of production (and against social structures associated with these lower levels of production).)
(IX) The development of agriculture
Morris’s account of the emergence of cultivation and domestication begins with the warming of the world’s climate marked by the end of the Late Gladial Interstadial, around 12,700 BCE (13, 14, 17). Over the millennia after around 11,000 BCE, and after a possible interruption by the Younger Dryas cold period (10,800 to 9,600 BCE), cultivation and then domestication seem to have developed and become widespread in various parts of the world (13, 14, 17).
But Morris says that the first appearances of cultivation, and then domestication, and the first developments of larger, more peaceful and wealthier societies occurred “in a very specific part of the planet, between roughly 20 and 35 degrees North in the Old World and 15 degrees South and 20 degrees North in the New” (14). These “lucky latitudes,” which included (in the Old World) Southwest Asia, South Asia and East Asia, and (in the New World) Mesoamerica and the northern Andes, had by far “the densest concentrations of potentially domesticable plants and animals” (14).
The general pattern of development within these regions was similar. The transition to agriculture began with plant cultivation, involving the selection of larger grains, and was followed by domestication, the evolution of plants and animals that are so genetically modified, through a process of “artificial” selection by humans, that they depend upon humans for their reproduction (13, 14-18, 22).
As Morris presents them, then, the widespread transitions from hunting-gathering to cultivation and then domestication seem to have been predicated upon crucial environmental changes, and the consequent development of regions with dense concentrations of potential domesticates. So, these changes in geography (changes in productive circumstances, as I would say) explain a shift in those regions from nomadic foraging to sedentary agriculture.
But how, given that humans are not automata under the direct control of geography (or productive circumstances), do these “geographical” changes in climate and ecology explain the long-term changes in human behaviour (the development of cultivation and domestication)? One might think that Morris’s answer to that question would be that those groups with slightly more developed cultivation or domestication (and perhaps with somewhat different social forms that facilitated cultivation and domestication) would tend to be victorious in war, and thereby spread the relevant behaviours at the expense of those groups with slightly less developed (or no) cultivation or domestication.
Morris is aware of the existence of warfare during the initial transitions to agriculture (14), but he does not here give warfare a role in explaining those transitions (though he emphasises warfare in the development, after those transitions, of steeper hierarchies, cities, increasingly powerful armed forces, centralised states and empires). Given his stress on the explanatory role of (productive) war after the initial transitions, from the development of circumscription/caging (15-16; see also 17, 23, 31-32), his failure to mention it here seems to indicate that he thinks that war does not play a fundamental part in explaining the initial shifts from nomadic foraging to sedentary agriculture. Is there something other than warfare, then, that could play a similar explanatory role for the initial transitions to agriculture to that which warfare plays after the transitions to agriculture and the onset of circumscription/caging? Morris does not suggest any alternative here.
Perhaps Morris thinks that, if he can provide enough evidence to support the geographical explanation, then he does not need an account showing how these geographical changes explain changes in human behaviour. Morris points out that not all of these regions within the lucky latitudes were equally well resourced. Among them, Southwest Asia had the densest concentration of resources, South Asia and East Asia had somewhat less dense concentrations, while Mesoamerica and the Andes were the least well resourced of these regions (14).
Widespread cultivation seems to have developed first in Southwest Asia around 9500 BCE, then in South and East Asia around 7500 BCE, then in the Americas around 6500 BCE (15, 17). Domestication followed a similar timetable, developing first in Southwest Asia around 7500 BCE, then in South and East Asia around 5500 BCE, and then in Mesoamerica around 3300 BCE, and in the Andes around 2800 BCE (15, 17).
Morris concludes from this that the “consistent fit between resource density and the date of domestication suggests strongly that geography… was the determining factor” (15).
So, as Morris presents it, the differences between these regions in the timing of the transitions is explained first and foremost by differences in their geographies (or differences in their productive circumstances, as I would say). Now, this evidence might increase our confidence that geography explains these transitions in some way. But, however perfect the “consistent fit” might be, and whatever confidence we might consequently place in the geographical explanation, it remains seriously incomplete without an account showing how the geographical changes led to these long-term changes in human behaviour. An account, moreover, that makes no unrealistic assumptions about human rationality and knowledge (such as, that innovations tended to be rationally chosen, and thus directly “tracked” environmental changes, without any intervening selective process).
I would argue that we can provide that account by postulating cultural variations between groups in the extent to which they adopted proto-horticultural practices (making them a little more or less productive), along with some varying combination of differential reproductive and military success between the more and less productive. This would show how changes in productive circumstances could explain those changes in long-term patterns of human behaviour that constitute the transitions to agriculture, and also why the precise forms of those transitions would vary in different productive circumstances.[xix] Provision of these “mechanisms” would further increase our confidence in the suggested explanation.[xx]
We can elaborate a little on that sketch. The physical and ecological changes consequent upon the end of the ice age brought about enormous (and involuntary) changes in the relationship between people and their environments. There would always have been significant variation between hunting-gathering groups, and they would have responded to any environmental changes in a variety of ways. These were people, of course, with the productive techniques of Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers, including significant empirical (as opposed to causal) knowledge about the plants and animals that they interacted with and depended upon. But these variations in cultural behaviour would, nevertheless, have been “random” with respect to the long-term and large-scale changes that we are trying to explain.
The very slow transition to farming and herding began in those regions with particularly dense concentrations of potential domesticates. While remaining predominantly hunters and gatherers, some groups would have been just a little further than others along that complex continuum between complete reliance upon hunting and gathering and (almost) complete reliance upon farming and herding.
In these regions, productively-relevant circumstances were now such that the level of production of those proto-horticultural and herding groups was higher than the level of production of the groups more orientated towards “pure” hunting and gathering. These enhanced levels of production would have allowed enhanced levels of reproductive and/or military success for the former groups, probably at the expense of the latter. As these processes continued, greater reliance upon increasingly cultivated, and then domesticated, foods would have spread within the wider population, and complete reliance upon purely wild foods would have declined.
The changes in productively-relevant aspects of the people-environment relationship, therefore, explain why differential reproductive and/or military success shifted from favouring relatively mobile, foraging societies, to favouring the spread of semi-sedentary foragers-horticulturalists-herders, to favouring the spread of sedentary, agricultural societies.[xxi]
(X) Agriculture, warfare and the development of “larger, safer, richer, and more sophisticated” societies
Morris explains the development of “larger, safer, richer, and more sophisticated” societies (17-18) by a shift from “unproductive” (27) to “productive” war. What, then, explains this shift in the long-term results of war? Why does war become “productive,” giving rise to these “larger, safer, richer, and more sophisticated societies” (17-18), only during certain periods and only in “certain geographical settings” (10-11; see also Abstract).
Morris says that the shift to productive war occurred in the regions where agriculture developed and spread, initially within what he calls the “lucky latitudes” (14-16), and his explanation of the shift suggests that it occurred after and because domestication began in those regions.
Domestication led to a population explosion, and this resulted in the “circumscription” or “caging” of populations within the “lucky latitudes” where domestication first developed. While it had been easy for foragers to move away when faced with military defeat, for these early farmers it became more and more difficult to move within regions that were increasingly crowded (15-16). And, as population densities rose, warfare intensified (15-16). Moreover, as people settled, agricultural work produced fixed assets that were costly to abandon when moving to another area, so movement was further inhibited. These fixed assets were worth attacking and defending, so warfare intensified further (15-16).
Given that movement was much harder now for these sedentary agriculturalists, and given this increasingly intense warfare, the result was the growth of larger societies (15-16):
Groups in the lucky latitudes started fighting one another more intensely, and instead of running away, the losers often found themselves absorbed into larger societies. (16.)
So, after, and because of, the transition to settled agriculture, warfare began to drive the development of “larger, safer, and richer” societies, with the emergence of
a Productive Way of War, created by circumscription/caging all across the lucky latitudes, and spread from there across the rest of the world… Circumscribed wars produced larger societies, which pacified themselves internally, increasing wealth and population and simultaneously reducing the overall rate of violent death. (17-18.)
As unproductive war was transformed into productive war, these sedentary agricultural societies in the lucky latitudes also gradually became more hierarchical, eventually developing into centralised states, because this enabled them to survive in these new circumstances of more intense warfare (16).
As centralised states emerged, they developed larger armies and underwent a series of military revolutions, developing fortifications, bronze weapons, military discipline, chariot warfare and “mass formations of iron-armed and armored shock troops” (21). These military revolutions in turn led to the expansion of states into empires across the Eurasian lucky latitudes (18, 22). By the early sixteenth century CE, when they were conquered by Europeans, the states of the American lucky latitudes seem to have been in the early stages of a similar process (27).
According to Morris, then, a long-term shift from mobile foraging to sedentary agriculture explains the emergence of circumscription. The development of such circumscribed sedentary agriculture in turn explains changes in the intensity of warfare and also in the long-term outcome of warfare, because the defeated (instead of being displaced) began to be incorporated by the victors, leading to “larger, safer, richer, and more sophisticated” societies (17-18).
These shifts in the mode of production in several key regions therefore explain the shifts from unproductive warfare to the productive warfare that created larger, safer, richer and more populous societies that expanded across these regions (17-18). Although I will suggest some reservations, this explanatory structure, in which a shift in productive circumstances explains a shift in what warfare selected, is close to what Darwinian historical materialism would suggest.
***
This relatively simple contrast between nomadic foragers and sedentary farmers (15-16) perhaps underestimates the ability of foraging economies, in appropriate productive circumstances, to support semi-sedentary, and even sedentary, lifestyles. And perhaps Morris also underestimates (at least here) the ability of sedentary, semi-sedentary, and even nomadic foragers to develop relatively large, complex and relatively productive societies, again in favourable productive circumstances.
So we should not assume, as Morris (15-18) perhaps does here, that agriculture was a necessary condition of the development of at least somewhat larger, more productive, complex and hierarchical societies. Some hunter-gatherers in particularly productive environments, such as along rivers and seacoasts, developed relatively large, densely populated and hierarchical societies. The best-known ethnographic example is probably the settled food-storing hunter-gatherers of the Northwest Coast of North America (Harris, 1979, 85; Johnson and Earle, 2000, 204-217; Milner, 2005, 707-709).[xxii]
Chiefdoms (or proto-chiefdoms) seem to have been the limit of hierarchy for such foraging societies, however. This was presumably because even the most productive foraging cannot increase levels of production to the extent that an agriculture in favourable productive circumstances, and intensified by emerging elites, can. All states seem to have developed within regions of increasingly intensive agriculture. The fact that sedentary foraging societies did not develop hierarchies beyond chiefdoms implies that it was their limited productive potential, rather than their ability to move easily, that prevented foragers building even more hierarchical societies.
(And perhaps it is worth acknowledging here the enormous diversity of social forms within the very broad categories of foraging, agricultural and industrial modes of production. Darwinian historical materialism would explain this diversity by the enormous diversity of productive circumstances within which processes of differential reproductive and military success have operated. The reason that I rarely use the expression “mode of production,” is precisely because I think that in its traditional use it might be a barrier to the recognition of this diversity.)
***
Morris may be right that, in those regions where hierarchies began to steepen markedly and early states first emerged, defeat in war was the main reason why people wanted to move. But it may also have been the case that people wanted to move because of the tribute and labour demands of these emerging elites (Harris, 1978, 78-79; 1979, 101-102).
And it might be true that such movement was inhibited because these regions had become too crowded after domestication. But it is also possible that movement was inhibited because of a form of ecological, rather than demographic, circumscription.
These early, or “pristine” states emerged in fertile river valleys or water basins: the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, the Indus and the Ghaggar-Hakra (Sarasvati), the Yangtzi and Huang-He, the rivers and lakes of the Mexico Basin, and the rivers running from the Andes to the Pacific (Scarre, 2005b, 194-195).
While some of these fertile zones would have had (already populated) upriver zones, they otherwise seem to have been surrounded by arid zones, or even deserts, less suited or entirely unsuited, to agriculture. So any farmers who did move, whether because of defeat in conflict or to escape the tribute and labour requirements of emerging elites, would not only have given up the fixed capital produced by previous generations of farmers, but would anyway have experienced a significant reduction in levels of production (Harris, 1978, 78-79), and therefore of reproductive and/or military success.
***
Morris claims that the “sequence of their [state-level societies] appearance closely follows the sequence for the beginnings of agriculture, with the rise of states generally coming three to four millennia after domestication began” (16, see also 17). Although this passage is referring only to the lucky latitudes, and it does seem to have been true wherever pristine states did develop, it could give the impression that the transition to agriculture (along with warfare) standardly led to the creation of state-level societies.
Although this is not, I think, his considered position, Morris perhaps implies this when he says that “war and the fear of war drive the creation of larger societies” or that “Circumscribed wars produced larger societies” (13, 18, my emphases). But we should not assume that, among early agricultural societies, warfare (or circumscribed warfare) did standardly lead to the development of larger, safer, richer and more complex societies.
In regions where productive circumstances entailed that increasing hierarchies and labour intensification could not sustainably enhance levels of production, even the most intense warfare would not result in sustained transitions to large, complex, state-level polities (unless, of course, they were conquered and incorporated by large, complex, state-level polities that imported more developed productive techniques).
Not all of those areas within which agriculture developed subsequently underwent the long-term productive development sufficient to bring about the emergence of large, complex, state-level societies. This would be true, for instance, of those tropical forest horticulturalists, who practised intense warfare, but who did not develop large, hierarchical societies (certainly not to the extent that occurred in the lucky latitudes). Ethnographically-known examples of these include shifting horticulturalists, such as the Yanomamo of the Venezuelan Highlands (Johnson and Earle, 2000, 142-170), and the Tsembaga Maring of the highland fringe of New Guinea (Johnson and Earle, 2000, 179-193), and even sedentary tropical forest cultivators, such as the Central Enga of the highland core of New Guinea (Johnson and Earle, 2000, 217-233). (And New Guinea was not one of those regions (14) where agriculture developed late; on the contrary, agriculture developed there relatively early (Scarre, 2005, 190-191).)
***
What explains the development of larger, richer, and more complex societies, therefore, is not just warfare, or even circumscribed agriculture and warfare combined. It is warfare given the possibility of raising production beyond a relatively low level (usually through intensive agriculture but, in well-resourced regions and only to a very limited extent, through intensive foraging). Only as long as the (changing) people-environment relationship allowed continuing productive development, could differential military success continue to select larger, more complex, hierarchical and militarily powerful societies. These societies could emerge to the extent that such larger, more complex and hierarchical societies would raise levels of production. But this depended upon the possibility of raising production from relatively low to relatively high levels given the existing productive circumstances. Caging might be a necessary condition for the initial development of larger, safer and wealthier societies, but it is hardly sufficient for the continued development of still larger, safer and wealthier societies.
Intensified warfare in the lucky latitudes after the emergence of agriculture may well have been what effected the shift to large, complex and steeply hierarchical societies, to centralised states, and the expansions of these states into empires (along with the military revolutions that accompanied these expansions). Societies competed through warfare, and the outcome of this competition was the development of such societies.
But it is facts about production that explain why warfare advantaged larger, more complex and hierarchical societies in the lucky latitudes from the fourth to the first millennia BCE, rather than advantaging relatively small, simple, less hierarchical societies. It was because of the existing productive circumstances that increasing size, complexity and hierarchy enhanced levels of production in these regions in that period, and thus enhanced military (and perhaps reproductive) success. I think that Morris knows this, but I do not think that he clearly explains this process.
In all selective stories, precisely what is selected depends upon the context as well as upon the selective mechanism(s). And the decisive context here was the new productive circumstances established by cultivation and then the domestication of plants and animals. These new productive circumstances allowed, in certain regions, the development of more and more productive forms of agriculture.
Where such productive development occurred more slowly, or only to a very limited extent, or not at all, this process of social and military development is also likely to have occurred more slowly, or only to a very limited extent, or not at all. And there seems to be no reason to assume that continual productive development will standardly be possible once agriculture has emerged.
If the existing productive circumstances make further independent productive development effectively impossible in a particular region, then warfare itself is impotent to select for higher levels of production, or of military power or for expensive hierarchies. However intense it might be, warfare cannot create the resources necessary to sustain these hierarchies and to carry out these military revolutions if those resources cannot be produced.
In the absence of the productive circumstances that allowed productive development, there would have been no military revolutions: no selection of larger armies, no development of fortification beyond the most minimal, no replacement of stone and wooden weapons by bronze weapons, or of bronze by iron, no development of command and control, no development of chariots or of cavalry, and no development of mass formations of heavy infantry shock troops.
This dependence of social and military development upon productive development is supported by Morris’s own comparison of developmental sequences in Eurasia with those of the Americas. Cultivation and then domestication developed first in Southwest Asia around 9500 BCE, and then over the next few millennia in South and East Asia, then in the Americas (14, 15, 17). The development of cities and states followed more or less the same sequence, developing first in Southwest Asia around 3500 BCE, and then over the next few millennia in South and East Asia, then in the Americas (16, 17). The development of empires, and the military revolutions that accompanied this, also seems to have followed a similar sequence, a sequence that Morris says was only partially completed in the Americas by the time they were conquered by Europeans (18-21, 22, 24, 27).
From my perspective, the very roughly similar periods elapsing between the dates of cultivation and domestication and the developments of states and empires in the lucky latitudes actually suggests that a relatively long period of the selection of more and more intensively productive agriculture (and of the increasingly hierarchical societies that facilitated this productive development) was required before states developed. This productive development is well illustrated by the evidence of rising energy capture in the Eurasian cores (Morris, 2010, 628; 2013, 61, 111) before and during the emergence of state-level societies in the fourth millennium BCE in western Eurasia, and the early second millennium BCE in eastern Eurasia (16, 17).
And the reason why war was “particularly” productive “across the past 500 years” (9) is that productive development accelerated across those centuries. And while war (along with competitive markets and science) may have effected that rapid productive development, it is productive circumstances, not war, that explain why war, competitive markets and science were able to bring about that acceleration.
(XI) The Emergence of Hierarchies
One of the social changes that Morris discusses, and that I would like to examine a little more closely, is the development of increasingly hierarchical societies, leading eventually to the development of more or less centralised states. Morris explains why (and perhaps hints at how) these hierarchical societies developed:
Hierarchy increased as societies reorganized themselves to compete more effectively in this new environment, raising more powerful armed forces, pacifying themselves internally, and increasing revenue flows to central government. (16, my emphasis; see also 13.)
The italicised phrase in this passage seems to imply that hierarchies developed through a process of rational choices, by “societies,” of new ways of organising themselves. Now, no doubt there were elements of (individual and group) rationality in this process, but they would have cut both ways, both contributing to and interfering with the relevant long-term processes, and therefore they cannot be assumed, without further argument and evidence, to have any explanatory relevance for those processes.
What I am concerned with here is the implication that rational choice is standardly part of an explanation that, in my view, does not need such an ambitious and unrealistic process of rational choice. This explanation seems to require people (or powerful elites) to have (and to retain over very long periods) the (fore)knowledge and the power to consciously develop and steepen hierarchies in order to subjugate and pacify their societies, in order to increase revenue flows to governing elites, in order to raise more powerful armed forces, in order to compete more effectively with other societies. (It is perhaps worth emphasising here that steepening hierarchies would probably meet with resistance and generate social conflict, with unpredictable and unintended consequences.)
And in the unlikely event that “societies” (or powerful elites) were able to rationally prepare for future conflict in this way, this would not preclude a subsequent, and overriding, process of selection through war. Given that war is inherently competitive, there is an inescapable selective component in war’s “creation” of more hierarchical societies (13, 16), however much rational choice may influence the processes involved. Even if peoples’ choices were standardly rational in some sense, therefore, selective processes of differential military success would still operate in human history and generate tendencies to rising military power, rising levels of production, and increasing reproductive success.
Explanation by historical selection, does not, therefore, need to posit a rational reorganisation of societies by their members (or by their elites) in order to improve their military effectiveness. All that such selection needs is small-scale variation, for some societies to be a little more militarily powerful than others (standardly because they are a little more productive, and this perhaps because they are a little more hierarchical, and perhaps a little more subjugated and pacified).
So Morris’s description of the process here, in my view, gets the fundamental explanatory structure the wrong way round. It was not so much that societies “reorganized themselves to compete.” It was more that military competition selected those societies that happened to be organised somewhat more effectively for military competition. After all, individuals and groups are constantly attempting to “reorganize” society in various and conflicting ways that they conceive to be in their own interests. And no doubt they are usually able to convince themselves (and sometimes others) that their intended changes are in the interests of their societies. These changes, if successfully carried out, may or may not make their societies more effective militarily. That issue is generally decided by military (and perhaps reproductive) competition.
Morris does not, therefore, clearly distinguish between explaining by means of a selective mechanism (such as differential military success) and explaining through rational choice, and he consequently produces explanatory formulations that equivocate between the two forms of explanation. (See page 18 for another example of an equivocal formulation.) Postulating explanations that contain elements of both is acceptable, of course, but we need to be explicit about what we are doing, and specify as clearly as we can the role of each element in the explanation. It is more realistic, I think, to conceive of long-term historical change as a fundamentally selective process, though perhaps (increasingly) accelerated by elements of rational choice (Nolan, 2006, 174-176). We should try, therefore, to explain as much as possible of these processes through selective mechanisms that make minimal assumptions about human rationality.
I would describe the process a little differently, then, both to avoid the hint of rational choice, and to emphasise the dependence of the process upon favourable productive circumstances.
Given productive circumstances where levels of production could be increased by steeper hierarchies, differential military success led to those societies that happened to be somewhat more hierarchical expanding more than (and at the expense of) those societies that were somewhat less hierarchical.[xxiii] Of course there is a list of important requirements connecting increasing hierarchy and increasing military success. These more hierarchical societies have to be more effective than less hierarchical societies at internal subjugation/pacification, and thereby more effective at increasing levels of production, at increasing the flow of the resultant resources to the higher levels of the hierarchy, and thereby more effective at raising more powerful armed forces. (The complexity of this process perhaps illustrates why large polities in these contexts can be so fragile, find it so difficult to maintain social cohesion, and can be so often subverted by individually self-interested behaviours.[xxiv])
Morris presents the process as one in which changes in warfare and in society drive each other:
In the ancient lucky latitudes, however, as war drove the evolution of larger, safer, richer, and more sophisticated states, these larger, safer, richer, and more sophisticated states in turn drove a series of revolutions in military affairs… interlocking technological, organizational, tactical, and logistical advances… [these] ancient revolutions in military affairs drove spectacular state expansion in Eurasia. (18, 22, my emphases.)
Morris emphasises the interaction between these military “revolutions” and social changes, saying that “we should think of these as being social, economic, cultural, and political transformations as much as military ones” (18). He goes on to emphasise the connection between military revolutions and intensifying centralisation and hierarchy:
In every case, a revolution could only succeed if a society reorganized itself with more powerful government institutions; and as societies did so, their governments pacified them internally in the name of cohesion against external foes. (18.)
To reiterate, despite the hint of rational choice (societies that “reorganized themselves,” and thereby happened to fortuitously acquire the appropriate institutions), these long-term trends, such as the development of more productive, larger and more hierarchical societies, military “revolutions” and growing military power, and the expansion of states into empires, need to be conceived of as involving fundamentally selective processes. And these selective processes are not well described by the metaphor “drove” or any of its cognates.
***
Again, however, I would emphasise that a crucial qualifying phrase here should be given productive circumstances that allowed rising levels of production. Productive circumstances explain long-term changes in what differential military success selected. Agriculture and (circumscribed) war could not, of themselves, “drive” further long-term social and military changes in the absence of long-term productive development. Rising levels of production are implied in all of these developments but, although he does mention the “lucky latitudes” here, Morris does not make this as explicit as it needs to be.
In those areas where increasingly productive agriculture was possible, differential success in warfare (and in reproduction) spread increasingly productive agriculture. And in the process, warfare also selected for larger, more complex, and more hierarchical societies, because these societies were productively, and therefore militarily (and reproductively), more successful. Societies with a somewhat greater division of productive roles (not to mention the expanding network of relationships between these increasing social roles), and with somewhat higher inequalities of economic and political power, tended to be more productive, and thereby enhanced levels of (reproductive and/or) military success. Societies tended, consequently, to become more complex, and hierarchies developed and steepened.
As warfare selected increasingly productive societies, and therefore larger, increasingly complex and hierarchical societies, these societies could go on developing new forms of warfare, and warfare selected against those that did this less effectively. Hence, those societies that underwent the appropriate military changes were more successful in surviving and expanding. And new forms of warfare selected larger and more productive societies that could sustain even newer forms of warfare, so, in the appropriate productive circumstances, states expanded.
This process was effected by war, because state expansion was selected for by military conflict, but long-term changes took place at the rate, to the extent, and in the direction made possible by the different productive circumstances of the different regions.
Social hierarchy, with a growing elite of non-producers, is expensive. But, in regions where productive circumstances allow rising levels of production, hierarchies will be selected if they enhance levels of production and channel the increased resources into increasing reproductive success and/or military power. Warfare can ensure the spread of the more productive societies that can bear the costs of the oppressive social hierarchies they need in order to be even more intensively productive.
Military revolutions, too, are expensive. Nevertheless, given favourable productive circumstances, there would be selection for more powerful, organised governments that could recruit and supply armed forces equipped with metal weapons and armour, including chariot and then cavalry formations, and build and maintain fortifications that could be defended against similarly equipped armies.
(XII) The Era of Counterproductive War
Turning briefly to what Morris calls “Eurasia’s Age of Counterproductive War, 1-1415 CE” (23-28). He says that
the larger states produced by war changed the environment around them, and for more than 1,000 years war turned counterproductive in the places that it had previously been productive, breaking up large states. After about 1400 CE a new phase of productive war began. (Abstract.)
But Morris also describes this period slightly differently:
In the short run, some wars broke down these larger, safer, richer societies, and in particular cases – such as much of Eurasia between about 200 and 1400 CE – the two effects of war [productive and counterproductive] settled into an unstable equilibrium. (9; see also 27.)
So, in Eurasia’s lucky latitudes, the period from at least 200 CE, and possibly from 1 CE, to around 1400 CE was either an age of counterproductive war or an age of unstable equilibrium between productive and counterproductive war, until war turned productive again (25-26). (Elsewhere in the world, war either became productive or remained unproductive (26-27).)
But the material that Morris (2010; 2013) presents in his earlier books on social development indicates that social development rose in the most developed core of eastern Eurasia from the sixth century CE (2010, 628; 2013, 243), and in the most developed core of western Eurasia from the tenth century CE (2010, 628; 2013, 241). So, in these core zones, social development began trending upwards several centuries before war turned productive again.
This discrepancy might be because Morris is defining “social development” in different ways. In the earlier books, “social development” is a composite measure of energy capture, social complexity, military power and literacy. In the 2012 essay, though, social development is a matter of how large, safe, rich and complex societies are. It seems to me, though, that there is at least sufficient overlap between these two to make it odd that the social development of the 2010 and 2013 books could be rising from the sixth century CE in eastern Eurasia and the tenth century CE in western Eurasia, while that of the 2012 essay did not start rising until the beginning of the fifteenth century CE.
The discrepancy might, on the other hand, be because the Morris of 2010 and 2013 is focusing upon the most developed cores of eastern and western Eurasia, whereas the Morris of 2012 might also be referring to less developed regions of Eurasia. But he does say that “After about 1400 CE a new phase of productive war began” (Abstract, my emphasis), and presumably it “began” in the core regions that developed more rapidly.
If we just confine ourselves to per capita energy capture (surely a measure of a society’s “wealth”), this seems to have begun to rise in the eastern core of Eurasia from the sixth century CE (2013, 111) and in the western core from the tenth/eleventh centuries CE (2013, 61). This would imply that productive war began to overshadow counterproductive war, and again generate wealthier societies, several centuries earlier than the beginning of the fifteenth century (Abstract, 9). There is a significant discrepancy, then, in the dates that Morris presents as beginning the revival of social development after the fall of the Western Roman Empire and of the Eastern Han Dynasty in China.
(XIII) In Lieu of a Conclusion
In parts, Morris’s paper on war repeats many of the general explanatory claims that his previous books (2010; 2013) made about the relationship between geography and social development, but it also makes distinct claims about war as a driver of social development. Unfortunately, the paper does not synthesise these two approaches to social development into a clear explanatory structure. But unless we do this, we lack a clear way of explaining why human societies changed in the ways that they did.
The following claim encapsulates what is perhaps the central argument of the two earlier books:
(1) Geography explains social development (14).
This second claim encapsulates at least one aspect of the paper on war (2012):
(2) Warfare explains social development (13, 23, 31-32).
There is an obvious tension between (1) and (2). This tension can be relieved, I think, if we reverse the order of the claims, and then slightly modify them:
(3) Warfare explains why social development occurs.
(4) Variations in the geographies of different regions explain variations in social development between these regions.
If we go on to further modify both claims, clarifying the explanatory processes involved, we then have a powerful theory of history:
(5) Differential success in warfare explains tendencies to growing military power, rising levels of production (because higher levels of production lead to higher levels of military success), and the spread of those social forms that facilitated higher levels of production and of military power.
(6) Variations in productive circumstances between regions explain differences in the extent to which, and the ways in which, these tendencies are expressed as long-term historical trends in these regions.
This theory of history can be made even more powerful, albeit undoubtedly more complicated, by the addition of the selective mechanism of differential reproductive success to that of differential military success. The resulting theory is Darwinian historical materialism.
Endnotes
[i] All numbers in parentheses, unless otherwise stated, refer to page numbers in Morris (2012, as paginated by my printer at any rate), while the word “Abstract” refers to the abstract at the beginning of that paper.
[ii] A longer treatment of Darwinian historical materialism is in preparation, with the working title Food, Sex and Violence: Production, Reproduction and Warfare in Human History. See also the work of Bertram (1990) and Carling (2002) on the selective role of warfare in historical materialism.
[iii] Compare Cohen’s (1978, 134) similar point regarding the explanatory claims of historical materialism.
[iv] I apologise if the above discussion seems excessively pedantic. In this very controversial area, however, there is an overriding need for conceptual clarity (which I hope to provide a little of in what follows).
[v] Some might see this scepticism concerning the historical role of rationality as underestimating the importance of rationality. In fact, I think that rationality is crucially important, and that any robust account of human freedom depends upon rationality. After all, our ability to make rational choices has to be compatible with whatever scientists discover that bears on the issue of “determinism." This is because scientific discoveries, if they are discoveries, presuppose our ability to make rational choices (and therefore our ability to make genuine choices) in the process of generating and testing hypotheses. I am not sure what other essential freedom we could reasonably hope for other than the ability to make rational choices. But rationality is neither easily achieved nor easily maintained. Its achievement involves an immensely long process of evolutionary, historical, social and individual development.
[vi] I would acknowledge that historical explanations can combine both selection and rational choice. And I would also acknowledge that rational choice might exert a growing influence across the course of human history, at least with the development of the natural and social sciences, and of greater intra- and even inter-societal cooperation (Nolan, 2006, 174-176). But even here I would caution against too much reliance upon rational choice. Rational choice seems to me to be a second order explanation, in that such choices, in order to be rational, need to be responsive to forms of selection that occur in human history independently of much more than minimal rationality.
[vii] This claim assumes that natural selection is not confounded by other, non-selective evolutionary forces, such as drift and mutation. Moreover, situations of frequency dependent selection may not lead to an increase in fitness (Levine and Sober 1985, 308; Sober 1984, 172-188). These situations may be relatively common and this may have implications for the argument developed in this essay, but not, I think, disastrous implications.
[viii] Perhaps this could be thought of as a Lamarckian element within a more or less Darwinian mechanism. But see Nolan (2009, 87-91) for an argument that this “Lamarckian” diffusion of cultural traits does not fatally undermine the historical selection that I am proposing.
[ix] Morris says that, in creating larger, more peaceful and more productive societies, “war (or the fear of war) seems to be pretty much the only mechanism that has worked” (13). He does not, therefore, seem to allow differential reproductive success any explanatory role in the development of such societies. At this stage it is perhaps best to be agnostic, but I suspect that differential reproductive success (often contributing to, and sometimes resulting from, differential military success) has also played a part in the development of larger, more peaceful and more productive societies. After all, the global population has risen at an accelerating rate, and even “exploded” (13, 15), over the last fifteen thousand years. Although that could be merely an effect of the selection of internally more peaceful and more productive societies through warfare, it may, alternatively, be an indication that there has also been selection through reproductive "competition.” Nevertheless, from this point on I will minimise references to differential reproductive success unless I am clearly expounding my own views.
[x] The size of societies is, presumably, measured by population size. This implies, significantly, that societies with higher levels of reproductive success will tend to be victorious in warfare, other things being equal. And this bears on the issues raised in endnote ix.
[xi] And both of these points, in turn, imply a lot of (short term) variation around the long-term trends of human history, which strikes me as an entirely realistic assumption.
[xii] “Selective mechanism” is also a metaphor, of course, but it has acquired a much clearer meaning from its emplacement within Darwinian theory. The same is not true of “driver,” “mover” or “motor.”
[xiii] To say that the people-environment relationship may simply be another term for the concept of the human niche does not, of course, entail denying that human populations reconstruct their niches more rapidly and more radically than other animals seem to, and have expanded their niches historically at the expense of those species that are neither their domesticates nor in a symbiotic relationship with humans or their domesticates.
[xiv] And, of course, it is partly because its outcomes are so context-dependent in this way that warfare, like all intentional behaviours, can lead to outcomes not intended by any historical actors, not even by the victors of that warfare. Herodotus overstated the case when he said that “Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.” Marx improved that thought in the “Eighteenth Brumaire,” but perhaps we can improve a little on Marx: people make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing or that they fully understand, and rarely, therefore, with all and only the results that they intend.
[xv] I do not use the term “cultural evolution,” but the result of the processes that I focus upon is what others call cultural evolution: long-term changes in cultural traits (or in combinations of cultural traits) within human populations.
[xvi] Increasing the quantity of people does not, of course, entail improving the quality of their lives. It often seems to involve the reverse.
[xvii] If, counterintuitively, differential productive success had no effect on differential reproductive or military success, then these selective mechanisms would generate no tendency to productive development. Or if, say, a higher intensity of religious belief enhanced reproductive and military success more than did higher productive success, then we could predict a stronger historical tendency to a growing intensity of religious belief than to productive development.
[xviii] There is not, therefore, only a selection of single cultural traits (however they might be identified), but often a selection of complexes of cultural traits in which, for instance, complementary technologies and the social relations and political structures that enable their more effective use, might all be selected. And, of course, there may be multiple traits each of which, in isolation, would be advantageous but which are difficult to fully establish together. So there are likely to be varying trade-offs, and selection would tend to favour the more successful of these. History is inherently very messy.
[xix] This explanation does, of course, depend upon some assumptions about between-group cultural diversity, about the ubiquity of cultural innovations within groups, and about higher rates of cultural transmission within groups than between groups. These assumptions seem to me to be widely (if rarely explicitly) adopted within historiography, archaeology and anthropology.
[xx] Elsewhere, Morris (2010, 108-109) does tentatively suggest differential reproductive and military success to explain the spread of farming. If Morris does think that differential reproductive success plays a role in explaining the spread of farming, this raises the question of why he seems to think it plays no role in explaining long-term historical change after that.
[xxi] This description is simply intended to be illustrative. Obviously, the transition would have taken different forms in different productive circumstances and, as productive circumstances changed in unpredictable ways, populations may have shifted back and forth in different ways along this foraging-farming spectrum.
[xxii] Warfare does seem to have been endemic among Northwest Coast groups (Johnson and Earle, 2000, 207-208), so warfare may have selected for such large, hierarchical foraging societies, and thus would presumably have been “productive” war for Morris.
[xxiii] The first clause here is crucial. As I argued in the previous section, there may be productive circumstances (such as foraging or tropical forest horticulture) where levels of production would be unlikely to independently rise to the level necessary for the emergence of centralised states no matter how much steepening hierarchies intensified work rates. Indeed, the diminishing returns that intensified work rates would eventually lead to in such circumstances would likely lead to the decline of such polities.
[xxiv] It is often said of competitive markets, of course, that they enable individually self-interested behaviours to standardly lead to socially beneficial outcomes. Even if this is true, however, the emergence of widespread commercial markets is a fairly recent historical phenomenon. And the looming climate crisis seems to be about to reveal some of these claims to involve wishful thinking. (Perhaps the “invisible hand” was always really the hand of God.)
References
Bertram, Chris 1990, “International Competition in Historical Materialism,” New Left Review, 183: 116-28.
Blackledge, Paul and Graeme Kirkpatrick (eds.) 2002, Historical Materialism and Social Evolution, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carling, Alan 2002, “Analytical Marxism and the Debate on Social Evolution,” in Blackledge and Kirkpatrick (eds.) 2002.
Christian, David 2005, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cohen, G. A. 1978, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Cohen, G. A. 1988, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Diamond, Jared 1998, Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the last 13,000 Years, London: Vintage.
Harris, Marvin 1978, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures, London: Collins.
Harris, Marvin 1979, Cultural Materialism: The Struggle for a Science of Culture, New York: Random House.
Johnson, Alan W. and Timothy Earle 2000, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Le Page, Michael 2014, “A world without fossil fuels,” New Scientist, 2991: 34-39.
Levine, Andrew and Elliott Sober 1985, “What’s Historical about Historical Materialism?” Journal of Philosophy, 82:6, 304-26.
Livi-Bacci, Massimo 1992, A Concise History of World Population, Oxford: Blackwell.
Milner, George R. 2005, “Complex Societies of North America,” in Scarre (ed.) 2005.
Morris, Ian 2010, Why the West Rules – For Now: The Patterns of History, and What they Reveal About the Future, London: Profile Books.
Morris, Ian 2012, “The Evolution of War,” Cliodynamics 3: 9-37.
Morris, Ian 2013, The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations, London: Profile Books.
Morris, Ian 2014, War! What is it Good For? The Role of Conflict in Civilization, from Primates to Robots, London: Profile Books.
Nolan, Paul 1993, Natural Selection and Historical Materialism, Watford: Glenfield Press.
Nolan, Paul 2002a, “What’s Darwinian about Historical Materialism? A Critique of Levine and Sober,” Historical Materialism 10: 143-69.
Nolan, Paul 2002b, “A Darwinian Historical Materialism,” in Blackledge and Kirkpatrick (eds.) 2002.
Nolan, Paul 2003, “Levine and Sober: A Rejoinder,” Historical Materialism 11: 183-200.
Nolan, Paul 2006, “Why Jerry Cohen Can’t Appeal to Charles Darwin to Help Him Defend Karl Marx (But Why Others Can),” Science & Society 70: 155-179.
Nolan, Paul 2009, “Diffusion and Intentionality in a Darwinian Historical Materialism: A Reply to Laibman,” Science & Society 73: 84-97.
Pettitt, Paul 2005, “The Rise of Modern Humans,” in Scarre (ed.) 2005.
Pinker, Steven 2012, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity, London: Penguin Books.
Scarre, Chris (ed.) 2005, The Human Past: World Prehistory & the Development of Human Societies, London: Thames and Hudson.
Scarre, Chris 2005, “The World Transformed: From Foragers and Farmers to States and Empires,” in Scarre (ed.) 2005.
Sober, Elliott 1984, The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.