War in Human Civilization

I teach this book to my graduate students every year.

It is a wide-ranging, deeply researched attempt to understand the nature of war in the human experience. And unlike so many other surveys of military history, Gat goes all the way back to human evolution and the fundamental motives underlying human conflict. He also then shows how conflict itself shaped human cultural evolution and the rise of states. 

This historical-analytical overview covers the last – wait for it – two million years. Gat surveys publications from zoology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary psychology – to conclude (spoiler alert) that fighting is hard-wired into (human) males. This alone does not explain warfare, which is about getting organized groups to go and fight, and not spontaneously, but after extensive preparations. Using archaeology and urban-architectural history, taking the approach of an anthropologist, Gat marches us through dozens of civilisations of Antiquity and the Middle Ages which at earlier or later points developed urban settlements, generally seeing the need to fortify them to keep… show more.