gan, A History of Warfare (1993); Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (1995); and William Pfaff, The Wrath of Nations (1993). All but the first of these is a product of the post-Cold War era, but the reason for the sequence in which they are discussed here lies not in the dates of publication but in the nature of each author's discussion. Instead, the sequence is from the most general analysis of the sources of warfare, in McNeill, to that most immediate to contemporary conditions, in Pfaff. It is hoped that the nature and significance of this sequence will become clear below.
McNeill, perhaps best known for his general history The Rise of the West, published in the 1960s, wrote The Pursuit of Power as a counterpiece to another earlier work, Plagues and Peoples (McNeill, vii). As that title suggests, the earlier work dealt with the historical impact of diseases, and particularly of microparasites. By an analogy, McNeill regards warfare and aggression as a kind of "macroparasitism," and his general treatment may be regarded narrowly as economic, or more broadly as ecological.
The earliest maurading armies, or later barbarian invasions, swept across populations almost like epidemic diseases, sustaining themselves by their ravages. At a later stage, exploiters of armed power become "endemic," supporting themselves not by sporadic and catastrophic raids, but by drawing on subject populations in the form of tribute or taxation. In this latter form, military force could acquire a symbiotic relationship with the subject population, since a population ruled by a powerful army was at least protected from catastrophic incursions by the armed force of outsiders.
Within this broad framework, and consistant with it, McNeill sees warfare as driven by technology, and the constraints imposed by technology. Thus, for example, for about two thousand years, from the sixth century BC till the 14th century...