War Between Societies, Violence Within Societies

Simon James is not the most prolific researcher, but his words are always worth carefully considering. A few years ago he had this to say:

In discourse on the European Iron Age, the terms ‘war’ and ‘warrior’ are rarely examined or defined. ‘War’ (except ‘civil war’) is commonly understood to connote organized collective armed violence between polities. Yet in many historically attested societies, possessing, displaying and using lethal weaponry are/were not about war, primarily and sometimes hardly at all. Rather weapons may articulate social dynamics, mutual fear and conflict within a polity – as exemplified by the contemporary United States.

Simon James (in press) “Ch. 30: Arms, the armed, and armed violence.” In Colin C. Haselgrove, Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, and Peter S. Wells (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the European Iron Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

In 2007 the USA averaged 88 civilian firearms per 100 people: c. 270 million guns, by far the world’s highest absolute and relative numbers (Small Arms Survey 2007: chapter 2, annexe 4). Many are for hunting, but millions are ostensibly for protection against fellow citizens. In 2011 alone, 8,583 Americans were murdered by firearms (Federal Bureau of Investigation 2011). This figure, rather low by historical standards, dwarfs US combat fatalities by an order of magnitude: 5,324 over more than a decade of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (as of 15 August 2014: Department of Defense 2014). In terms of personal weapon ‘culture’ and body count, in the USA internal armed violence far outweighs external war in importance.

I suggest similar patterns prevailed in other cultural contexts across time, including many societies of Iron Age Europe. It is, then, unjustifiable, and potentially profoundly misleading, automatically to discuss archaeological evidence of weapons and their use solely in terms of warfare. Conversely, much violence in war is committed not with dedicated weapons but with fist, foot, and phallus; war is not even simply a subset of armed violence. Rather, there exists a broad field of interpersonal violence, in which war and weapon-use only partially overlap.

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Given the foregoing, rather than the more traditional ‘weapons, warriors, and warfare’, this chapter is framed in terms of ‘arms, the armed, and armed violence’ which, where involving confrontation between armed opponents rather than using weapons on the unarmed, comprised ‘combat’.

The California School saw early Greek violence in terms of wars between cities and kings, because that is what Thucydides and Xenophon and Diodorus focus on in the period 432-362 BCE. That also fit the nationalist ideologies of Victor Davis Hanson and the European researchers before 1914. But even in that place and time, there were many wars within communities, whether raids by exiles or succession struggles between the old king’s sons. And our sources on early Greece suggest that there was even more piracy, cattle-theft, armed robbery, kidnapping, and political murder in early times (and outside of southern mainland Greece and the Ionian coast). Greek communities and strongmen were never as successful at creating a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence as they wished. Thucydides was proud that Athenian men did not have to carry weapons everywhere like in the Odyssey, but he noted that in some places men still did walk armed out of fear.

One of the functions of that term war is legitimization. Many public figures take it for granted that it is legitimate for a soldier in war to kill dozens of people he never met, but not for someone to punch someone for stealing thousands of dollars. As recently as the middle ages, the word war did not have this function: there were private wars. We should be very careful about using our own moralizing to decide what parts of the past are worth studying.

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(scheduled 11 February 2023)