However, for societies simpler than Mesopotamian states, Pacific Northwest Indians, and the Calusa, defeated enemies were of no value alive. War’s goal among the Dani, Fore, Northwest Alaskan Inuit, Andaman Islanders, and many other tribes was to take over the enemy’s land and to exterminate the enemy of both sexes and all ages, including the dozens of Dani women and children killed in the June 4, 1966, massacre. Other traditional societies, such as the Nuer raiding the Dinka, were more selective, in that they killed Dinka men and clubbed to death Dinka babies and older women but brought home Dinka women of marriageable age to force-marry to Nuer men, and also brought home Dinka weaned children to rear as Nuer. The Yanomamo similarly spared enemy women in order to use them as mates.
Total warfare among traditional societies also means mobilizing all men, including the Dani boys down to age six who fought in the battle of August 6, 1961. State war, however, is usually fought with proportionally tiny professional armies of adult men. Napoleon’s Grande Armée with which he invaded Russia in 1812 numbered 600,000 men and thus rates as huge by the standards of 19th-century state warfare, but that number represented under 10% of the total population of France at that time (actually even less, because some of the soldiers were non-French allies). Even within modern state armies, combat troops are generally outnumbered by support troops: the ratio is now 1 to 11 for the U.S. Army. The Dani would have been scornful of Napoleon’s and the U.S. armies’ inability to field combat troops, measured as a proportion of the society’s whole population. But the Dani would have found familiar Sherman’s behavior on his march to the sea, reminiscent of Dani behavior during the dawn raid of June 4, 1966, when they burned dozens of settlements and stole pigs.
Ending warfare
The remaining big difference between tribal and state warfare, after that distinction between total and limited warfare, involves the differing ease of ending war and maintaining peace. As illustrated by the Dani War of Chapter 3, wars of small-scale societies often involve cycles of revenge killings. A death suffered by side A demands that side A take vengeance by killing someone from side B, whose members now in turn demand vengeance of their own against side A. Those cycles end only when one side has been exterminated or driven out, or else when both sides are exhausted, both have suffered many deaths, and neither side foresees the likelihood of being able to exterminate or drive out the other. While analogous considerations apply to ending state 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?