warfare, states and large chiefdoms go to war with much more limited goals than do bands and tribes: at most, just to conquer all of the enemy’s territory.
But it’s much harder for a tribe than for a state (and a large centralized chiefdom) to reach a decision to seek an end to fighting, and to negotiate a truce with the enemy—because a state has centralized decision-making and negotiators, while a tribe lacks centralized leadership and everyone has his say. It’s even harder for a tribe than for a state to maintain peace, once a truce has been negotiated. In any society, whether a tribe or a state, there will be some individuals who are dissatisfied with any peace agreement, and who want to attack some enemy for their own private reasons and to provoke a new outbreak of fighting. A state government that asserts a centralized monopoly on the use of power and force can usually restrain those hotheads; a weak tribal leader can’t. Hence tribal peaces are fragile and quickly deteriorate to yet another cycle of war.
That difference between states and small centralized societies is a major reason why states exist at all. There has been a long-standing debate among political scientists about how states arise, and why the governed masses tolerate kings and congressmen and their bureaucrats. Full-time political leaders don’t grow their own food, but they live off of food raised by us peasants. How did our leaders convince or force us to feed them, and why do we let them remain in power? The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau speculated, without any evidence to back up his speculations, that governments arise as the result of rational decisions by the masses who recognize that their own interests will be better served under a leader and bureaucrats. In all the cases of state formation now known to historians, no such farsighted calculation has ever been observed. Instead, states arise from chiefdoms through competition, conquest, or external pressure: the chiefdom with the most effective decision- making is better able to resist conquest or to outcompete other chiefdoms. For example, between 1807 and 1817 the dozens of separate chiefdoms of southeastern Africa’s Zulu people, traditionally warring with each other, became amalgamated into one state under one of the chiefs, named Dingiswayo, who conquered all the competing chiefs by proving more successful at figuring out how best to recruit an army, settle disputes, incorporate defeated chiefdoms, and administer his territory.
Despite the excitement and the prestige of tribal fighting, tribespeople understand better than anyone else the misery associated with warfare, the omnipresent danger, and the pain due to the killings of loved ones. When tribal warfare is finally ended by forceful intervention by colonial governments, tribespeople regularly comment on the resulting improved quality of life that they hadn’t been able to create for themselves, because without centralized government they hadn’t been able to interrupt the cycles of revenge killings. Anthropologist Sterling Robbins was told by Auyana men in the New Guinea Highlands, “Life was better since the government had come because a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot. All men admitted that they were afraid when they fought. In fact, they usually looked at me as though I were a mental defective for even asking. Men admitted having nightmares in which they became isolated from others in their group during a fight and could see no way back.”
That reaction explains the surprising ease with which small numbers of Australian patrol officers and native policemen were able to end tribal warfare in the then-territory of Papua New Guinea. They arrived at a warring village, bought a pig, shot the pig to demonstrate the power of firearms, tore down village stockades and confiscated the war shields of all warring groups in order to make it lethally dangerous for anyone to initiate war, and occasionally shot New Guineans who dared to attack them. Of course, New Guineans are pragmatic and could recognize the power of guns. But one might not have predicted how easily they would give up warfare that they had been practicing for thousands of years, when achievement in war had been praised from childhood onwards and held up as the measure of a man.
The explanation for this surprising outcome is that New Guineans appreciated the benefits of the state- guaranteed peace that they had been unable to achieve for themselves without state government. For instance, in the 1960s I spent a month in a recently pacified area of the New Guinea Highlands, where 20,000 Highlanders who until a decade or so previously had been constantly making war against each other now lived along with one Australian patrol officer and a few New Guinea policemen. Yes, the patrol officer and the policemen had guns, and the New Guineans didn’t. But if the New Guineans had really wanted to resume fighting each other, it would have been trivially easy for them to kill the patrol officer and his policemen at night, or to ambush them by day. They didn’t even try to do so. That illustrates how they had come to appreciate the biggest advantage of state government: the bringing of peace.
Effects of European contact
Did traditional warfare increase, decrease, or remain unchanged upon European contact? This is not a straightforward question to decide, because if one believes that contact does affect the intensity of traditional warfare, then one will automatically distrust any account of it by an outside observer as having been influenced by the observer and not representing the pristine condition. Lawrence Keeley used the analogy of supposing that watermelons are white inside and become red only as soon as they are cut with a knife: how could one ever hope to demonstrate that watermelons really are red even before they are cut open in order to examine their color?
However, the mass of archaeological evidence and oral accounts of war before European contact discussed above makes it far-fetched to maintain that people were traditionally peaceful until those evil Europeans arrived and messed things up. There can be no doubt that European contacts or other forms of state government in the long run almost always end or reduce warfare, because all state governments don’t want wars disrupting the administration of their territory. Studies of ethnographically observed cases make clear that, in the short run, the initiation of European contact may either increase or decrease fighting, for reasons that include European- introduced weaponry, diseases, trade opportunities, and increases or decreases in the food supply.
A well-understood example of a short-term increase in fighting as a result of European contact is provided by New Zealand’s original Polynesian inhabitants, the Maori, who had settled in New Zealand by around AD 1200. Archaeological excavations of Maori forts attest to widespread Maori warfare long before European arrival. Accounts of the first European explorers from 1642 onwards, and of the first European settlers from the 1790s onwards, describe the Maori killing Europeans as well as each other. From about 1818 to 1835 two products introduced by Europeans triggered a transient surge in the deadliness of Maori warfare, in an episode known in New Zealand history as the Musket Wars. One factor was of course the introduction of muskets, with which Maori could kill each other far more efficiently than they had previously been able to do when armed just with clubs. The other factor may initially surprise you: potatoes, which we don’t normally imagine as a major promoter of war. But it turns out that the duration and size of Maori expeditions to attack other Maori groups had been limited by the amount of food that could be brought along to feed the warriors. The original Maori staple food was sweet potatoes. Potatoes introduced by Europeans (although originating in South America) are more productive in New Zealand than are sweet potatoes, yield bigger food surpluses, and permitted sending out bigger raiding expeditions for longer times than had been possible for traditional Maori depending upon sweet potatoes. After potatoes’ arrival, Maori canoe- borne expeditions to enslave or kill other Maori broke all previous Maori distance records by covering distances of as much as a thousand miles. At first only the few tribes living in areas with resident European traders could acquire muskets, which they used to destroy tribes without muskets. As muskets spread, the Musket Wars rose to a peak until all surviving tribes had muskets, whereupon there were no more musket-less tribes to offer defenseless targets, and the Musket Wars faded away.
In Fiji as well, the introduction of European muskets around 1808 made it possible for Fijians to kill each other in much larger numbers than they had traditionally been able to do with clubs, spears, and arrows. European guns, boats, and steel axes transiently facilitated inter-island head-hunting in the Solomon Islands in the 19th century: unlike stone axes, steel axes can behead many humans without losing their sharp edge. Similarly, European guns and horses, and European guns and slave-buyers, stimulated warfare in the North American Great Plains and in Central Africa, respectively. For each of these societies that I have just mentioned, warfare had been endemic long before European arrival, but effects of Europeans caused an exacerbation of warfare for a few decades (New Zealand, Fiji, Solomon Islands) or a few centuries (Great Plains, Central Africa) before it died out.
In other cases the arrival of Europeans or of other outsiders led instead to warfare’s end without any hint of an initial flare-up. In many parts of the New Guinea Highlands the first Europeans were government patrols that
