Table Of ContentPEACE
PEACE
A World History
Antony Adolf
polity
Copyright © Antony Adolf 2009
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For Ioana, our families and friends,
To whom I owe my life and peace of mind;
For peace workers past, present and future, To whom we owe the world and this
book is a tribute; For teachers, mentors and colleagues,
To whom more is owed than can be recognized; Thank you.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: How Does Peace Have a World History?
1. Survival of the Peaceful: Prehistory to the First Civilizations
Pre-Human Peace and Peacemaking
Prehistoric Evolutions of Peace
Peace, Peacemaking and the First Civilizations
2. Peace in the Ancient West: Egypt, Greece and Rome
A Tale of Two Worlds: Peace and Peacemaking in Ancient Egypt
Ancient Greece, Cradle of Western Peace and Peacemaking?
One Empire, One Peace: The Rise of Rome to the Pax Romana’s Decline
3. Peace in the Ancient East: India, China and Japan
The Many, the Few, the One: Peace and Peacemaking in Ancient India
Harmonies and Antinomies of Ancient China
Foreign Influences and Native Peace in Japanese History
4. Monotheistic Peaces: Judaism, Christianity and Islam
Shalom: Peace in the Torah and its Times
“Our” Universal Peace: From Christ to Constantine
A Pillar of Peace: The Qur’an and its World
5. Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation Peaces
A Tale of Two Cities: Medieval Peace and Peacemaking
(Re)Births of Peace: Renaissance Revivals of and Departures from
Traditions
Reforming Christian Peace and Peacemaking
6. Peace, Peacemaking and the Ascent of Nation-States
Intra-National Peace and Peacemaking
International Peace and Peacemaking
Peace and Peacemaking Despite Nation-States
7. Colonial and Imperial Peace and Peacemaking
Peaces of the World: Colonial Peace and Peacemaking
The World in Peaces: Imperial Peace and Peacemaking
8. Modern Economics of Peace and Peacemaking
Capitalism: The Profitability of Peace and the Cost of War
Who Owns Peace? Socialist Perspectives
9. Peace in the Twentieth Century, Part I: 1900–1945
The “War to End all Wars”
The Peace to End all Peace?
10. Peace in the Twentieth Century, Part II: 1945–1989
Cold War/Hot Peace
One World, Many Peaces 207
11. The Presents of Peace
Globalization: Peace at the End of History
Threatening Opportunities: Terrorism, Technology, New Media and Peace
Conclusion: The Pyramid of Peace: Past, Present and Future
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been possible without the outstanding work of
researchers, writers and publishers it would take volumes just to name, before
whom I remain in awe and gratitude. The editorial and production teams at
Polity have not only been a pleasure to work with, but are also to be merited
with a professionalism and expertise for which credit here does slight justice; my
appreciation to Andrea Drugan, Jonathan Skerret, Neil de Cort and Susan Beer.
The anonymous reviewers of the book’s early drafts provided insights for which
I am thankful, as I am for those who commented on them at other stages. I value
the enthusiastic support of George, Catherine and Christine Adolf, Matt Norman,
Cheryl Zaleski, Rachel Hurst, Nick Smaglio and Stephanie Studzinski, among
many others. All acknowledgments share the inherent deficiency of leaving out
more than they can possibly include, and this one is no exception. But a
constituency no acknowledgment should overlook is the most obvious: readers,
thank you.
Introduction
How Does Peace Have a World History?
An analysis of the history of mankind shows that from the year 1496 BC to the year 1861 of our
era, that is, in a cycle of 3357 years, there were but 227 years of peace and 3130 years of war: in
other words, thirteen years of war for every year of peace. Considered thus, the history of the
lives of peoples presents a picture of uninterrupted struggle. War, it would appear, is a normal
attribute of human life.
Ivan Bloch1
As the industrialist, internationalist peace activist Bloch goes on to contend, we
no longer have the luxury of seeing the actualization of peace as a noble if naive
vision of how things could have been or can be. His argument in The Future of
War is that the historically unimaginable destructive capacity of modern
weapons, coupled with the inclinations of those who use them, have made
risking war morally impermissible as well as rationally unthinkable. He put forth
his unheeded advice at the turn of last century, in the midst of the technological,
socio-economic and political upheavals leading up to the First World War. But
the promises of and perils to peace today make his point as valid and vital at the
turn of our own.
The problem with Bloch’s shorthand world history of peace is his narrow
definition of it exclusively as the absence of war, also a dominant one
contemporarily. Convenient for quick quantitative analyses, this confinement
makes qualitative approaches based on the many other meanings of peace
proposed and practiced throughout world history practically impossible. Two
millennia ago, as the Roman Republic became an Empire and the Pax Romana
dawned, the historian Livy asserted that “war has its laws as peace has.”2 What
Livy here allows for and Bloch does not is that just as some ways of waging and
winning wars are constant and others change over time, depending on what wars
mean for participants and the means at their disposal (to name just two factors),
so it is with ways of making and maintaining peace. Peace and peacemaking are
not a line of pharmaceutical products the only functions of which are to treat
symptoms and diseases of war, nor are they merely preventative vaccines. What
are they?
Description:How peace has been made and maintained, experienced and imagined is not only a matter of historical interest, but also of pressing concern. Peace: A World History is the first study to explore the full spectrum of peace and peacemaking from prehistoric to contemporary times in a single volume aimed
