Why Do Humans Wage War?

Why, despite knowing the devastation it causes, do humans insist on starting wars? Countless battles have littered the pages of our shared human story. Powerful leaders, hungry for glory and conquest, have always relied on conflict to achieve their goals. To understand the persistence of violent conflict in the human story, Dan is joined by Richard Overy, one of the great military historians and author of 'Why War?'. This was originally released as a History Hit subscriber-exclusive episode. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Max Carrey. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:15Speaker 01

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• 1:24Dan Snow?

  Welcome, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The first battle was fought in Canaan, is what is now Israel. The Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III, who ruled over the Egyptian empire at what was probably its maximum territorial extent, marched north to secure that empire at the head of a force of perhaps up to 20,000 infantry and charioteers. There were client kings who's risen up in rebellion and he was here to restore Egyptian control. An enemy force of ten, fifteen thousand, perhaps more, waited at Megiddo. They were commanded by the rebel ruler of Kadesh.

• 2:08Dan Snow?

  Thutmose moved fast. He knocked them off balance. He advanced using an unexpected route. He called his enemy unprepared. He positioned himself at the very centre of the Egyptian line, possibly in his chariot, if flattering depictions on temple walls or anything to go by. His first name, Menkepere, is the manifestation of Ra, and his enemies may well have felt that the embodiment of the sun god was charging down on them that terrible day. Led by their pharaoh, the Egyptians smashed the enemy line. Their foe fled, but the Egyptians, as so often in history, stopped to loot their camp. And this produced a great haul of plunder, but it did mean their defeated troops were able to get into the city of Megiddo

• 2:53Dan Snow?

  and bar the gates. Thutmose dug a ditch around the city, erect a wall, and he settled down for a siege. It took around eight months, we think, but in the end, the hunger, the hopelessness, the disease broke the resolve of the rebels, and they surrendered. In a mighty temple in the Egyptian capital, in Karnak, it's recorded that his army took home hundreds of prisoners, two thousand horses, great stallions, nearly a thousand chariots, suits of armour, bows, cattle, over twenty thousand sheep, plus the trappings of royal power of the kings of Megiddo. This is the first battle in human history for which we have a reasonably reliable account, which we think actually may have happened

• 3:38Dan Snow?

  in a way that we can get a grasp on. It was fought, we think, in 1457 B.C. We have quite good Egyptian sources for what happened there. It's interesting, that first battle, Megiddo, given its name to Armageddon, the last battle. And between those two terrible confrontations, there have been so many battles littering the pages of our history books. I always find accounts of Megiddo strangely familiar. You get men hungry for glory, powerful leaders seeking to extend their domain or exert discipline over their subordinates. You have huge armies of young men who hag

• 4:20Dan Snow?

  and stab at other young men whom they've never met, with whom they have no personal beef. And those young men scream and bleed and die and conquer. And at the end of it all, at the end of the fighting season, the victors march home with the spoils of war. Three and a half thousand years ago, and yet, depressingly, I could be describing what's happening in Ukraine now, what's happened in Congo or Myanmar over the last few years. It is this great central question about our race. In fact, it may be the most important question about our race. It may determine whether or not we can survive. Why do we fight? Why do we go to war? Many of our greatest minds have wrestled with it. You've got Einstein

• 5:04Dan Snow?

  and Freud, who a hundred years ago produced a pamphlet together on the subject, and historians, anthropologists, and philosophers, and psychologists, and archaeologists, all of them have debated this exact question. Is it innate? Are we predisposed to go to war? Or is it the state? Has the building of these giant hierarchical structures that control every aspect of our lives, have those forced us into wars which we would otherwise have avoided? And I suppose, why has it been so much harder to eradicate massive organised violence than it has been to overcome gravity, to get to the moon, to eradicate smallpox? Well, here to help me think about those questions and hopefully answer a couple of

• 5:48Dan Snow?

  them, we've got one of the best in the business. We've got Professor Richard Overeem. He's an honorary research professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is one of the greatest military historians alive at the moment. Why war? Simple as that. There's no more important question. Enjoy.

• 6:26Dan Snow?

  Richard, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  My pleasure.

• 6:29Dan Snow?

  How far back British has organised violence go? Where do you come down on the whole innate nature of human beings?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Well, this is of course a huge debate. Many historians and social scientists argue that we're only talking about war if you talk about the modern state, you know, from four or five thousand years ago. Because states can organise war, can pay for it, can mobilise soldiers and so on. But there are plenty of anthropologists, archaeologists and others who say that violence must have started much, much longer before. It seems implausible that human communities of hunter-foragers from a hundred thousand years ago didn't find at certain points a need for collective violence to protect their food supplies, to keep away other predatory communities and so on.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  The archaeological evidence, of course, is rather slender for this. But if you look at the way in which we've recorded the violence of hunter-gatherer communities in the last two or three hundred years, where some form of warfare is often endemic, I think we can, without too much difficulty, project that back to an earlier age where people fight about the same sort of thing: resources, vengeance, accusations of sorcery or witchcraft and so on. I'm really with the school that takes violence a long way back.

• 7:56Dan Snow?

  It seems to me when human beings get together, differences arise and violence is one of the tools that we have to resolve those differences.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  It certainly is, yeah. I mean, evolutionary psychologists argue in fact that this is one of the things that gradually developed with human communities, that being aggressive, either in defence or in attack, became something that was normative.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Something that people psychologically adjusted to, so that it became part of our toolkit, if you like, for survival. And that's something which is deeply rooted in human evolution. And we can still see it manifested today. Look at a playground, look at kids fighting each other on the playground. It's not the same, of course, but no, evolutionary psychologists argue that we need to see where all this comes from, and it probably comes from very early roots.

• 8:48Dan Snow?

  You do buy into this, the idea then, that it was the successful groups of our hominid ancestors who were able to work together to organise effective group violence, and therefore it's become encoded into our DNA?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Oh, well, whether it's encoded in our DNA, I think it's perhaps another, another very complicated question. But yes, successful groups, yes, prospered. And biologists, evolutionary biologists argue now that human groups probably manifested what other animal groups do, which is a thing called inclusive fitness, which essentially means that you try and spread your genes and you protect your kin. And groups that are better at spreading their genes, like capturing women, in fact, from other villages or the communities, killing competitors, protecting that particular gene group, were more successful and they would expand more. And that was a driving force in early evolution.

• 9:43Dan Snow?

  That's a little bit of biology for everyone. What about the psychology? Because I was very interested in this in your book. And this is, you know, Einstein, you bring in all sorts of fascinating characters in the 20th century. War as a psychological phenomenon? Did you buy into Freud's conclusion that humans do have a, well, a sort of death drive?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Well, no, I don't buy into that. And instead, I think what, rather than the death drive, that evolutionary psychologists now argue that we have, you know, various psychological modules in the brain which help us to survive and navigate as animals. And that one of the modules, or perhaps a combination of them, is the capacity for collective violence when it's needed, whether it's in defence or whether it's, you know, it's in attack. And I think that's a pretty persuasive argument.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Psychoanalysts, on the other hand, argued from nineteen thirty s onwards that it was all connected with the early development of the infants and so on, that warfare can be found in the nursery, and that when you reach adult age, you normally suppress this, but it doesn't take long to release it. That is really, of course, what Freud was talking about underneath, you know, we carry this death drive, as he calls it, it's a urge of destruction, and that's what lies at the root of war. I don't think any psychologist really would accept that today.

• 11:08Dan Snow?

  What I'm very struck by is defining war is really interesting here, because there is evidence of sort of blunt force trauma on ancient skeletons, violent death. Tell me about the archaeology. What do you think the archaeology is letting us know about organised violence?

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Well, it's a very interesting point, because for a long time, in twenty seventeen, archaeologists were not much interested in war. It's not what they wanted to find. But in the last forty or fifty years, there's been a huge increase in interest in manifestations of collective violence and the archaeological evidence necessary to support it. I suppose the real difference is between, I mean famously John Keegan, for example, who argued that there was a threshold, and that only in the civilized state did you reach that threshold, where you could organise a thing called war. Whereas the archaeological evidence shows that something we can call warfare, collective violence, one group against another, often

• 12:08Speaker 02

  savage violence, I mean, plenty of evidence of how savage it could be, goes back much, much further. I mean, you have pretty clear evidence in the last ten thousand years, before states, well before states were formed. And I think some of this archaeological evidence is pretty compelling, but the most compelling one is osteoarchaeology, the damage to the skeleton. And I spent a lot of time reading the Journal of Osteoarchaeology, which I never expected to do. And, you know, there's photograph after photograph of projectiles embedded in spinal columns and heads bashed in with axes. And I think that...

• 12:48Speaker 02

  You know, to just say this is fighting, you know, not war is nothing very misleading because there's clearly a continuum we're talking about from these early manifestations of violence, through tribal violence, onto the proto-state, and finally to the state.

• 13:01Dan Snow?

  I've always been fascinated by the archaeology of the Tullens Valley battlefield in what is now north-east Germany from sort of three and a half thousand years ago. A vast Bronze Age battle took place and we know so little about the protagonists, but it is just fascinating and in some ways a tragic example of big organised violence stretching way back in our history.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the frustration here, of course, is that the overwhelming bulk of evidence of archaeology has been destroyed. Weapons of anything except stone, unless you're on, of course, metal, have disappeared. Most skeletons have simply disappeared too. We rely on a very thin range of evidence, but by the time we get to two or three thousand years ago, of course, the evidence is plentiful. But yes, occasionally we see massacres, for example, where there are dislodging bodies and so on, crania bashed in from five, six, seven thousand years ago.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  And I think it's very difficult to simply say, well, yes, that's a massacre, but is that actually war? To me, these are forms of greater violence which provide the roots of our understanding of our modern war.

• 14:19Dan Snow?

  There are examples, aren't there, on the cusp of anthropology, archaeology and history, there are examples of cultures that seem less violent. I'm very struck by the prevalence of violence in these completely distinct civilizations and cultures all around the world that seem to, even when they evolved with an isolated geographical boundaries, you still see the prevalence of violence. But on the other hand, there are some cultures who seem to have kicked the habit.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Well, I think there are rather few, actually.

• 14:51Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Anthropologists in the twentieth century, Margaret Mead was a famous example, Paul Booth Benedict, two of the great anthropologists of mid-century, were very concerned to find peoples that were not violent. They thought, you know, it had to be possible to show that violence was not something general. But the examples they chose were very soon shown by other archaeologists to be, in fact, extremely violent not very long ago, is just they've become more peaceful because, of course, they were under the control of a state and, you know, the tribal violence they practiced could no longer be, you know, effectively carried out. Yes, of course, there are also, you know, tribal societies which are manifestly less violent. I think we shouldn't assume that, you know, human communities ten thousand, twenty thousand years all behaved

• 15:35Speaker 02

  the same. They obviously didn't all behave the same. But what's striking, I think, is that there are very few cultures where warfare doesn't feature to some extent. And in great many cultures, from long ago up to the present, where making war is a central feature of those societies and a central feature of cultures that endorse it.

• 15:55Dan Snow?

  So let's look at the four drivers that you identify towards conflict. Let's start with resources. And you've got examples, well, from literally the earliest times right up to the present, of why resource drives us to war. Can you tell me about that?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think this is a fairly obvious thing, but it's worth stressing that, you know, the search for resources, additional resources, long ago because of population pressure or because of the decline of the hunting stocks and so on, or just simply greed, because you think that, you know, another tribe has got something you really let you get your hands on. It's manifestly going to be a major driver for warfare. And it's been a major driver for warfare, you know, right the way through the classical age and up to the, up to the modern day. Example I use in my book, which will not surprise people because Adolf Hitler,

• 16:50Speaker 02

  who believed that what Germany needed was living space, more agricultural land, the resources it needed to become a superpower, and that they were going to be found somewhere in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. So the, you know, resources have remained a driver of war right the way through human history. And I think will remain a driver as key resources dry up in the 21st century. You know, we are some up billion people. Many resources are finite. So I think resource wars are going to be a feature of the 21st century as well.

• 17:31Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. Stick with us.

• 17:41Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail. But suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit

• 19:06Speaker 01

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• 20:11Dan Snow?

  As a child of the 90s, when we were told that history had come to an end and there would be no more wars, we had this utopian belief, I think, that the kind of globalized economy would allow different powers or fantastically rich and powerful individuals to sate their appetite for wealth and power on the market. You don't have to own Siberia in order to exploit its mineral resources or gain a share of the wealth that's created there, because you can do so in a kind of free-market, free-trading sense. And that now seems, with the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine and that more nakedly sort of old-fashioned forms of aggression, that it feels like the kind of resource war is sadly here to stay.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Most resources, of course, are today are traded peacefully, as indeed they were in the past. It's when you reach a moment of crisis. We need to remember that China, for example, has enormous resource power in the sense that it has scarce resources available, which it trades with with other states. But, you know, one might see in 10, 20, 30, 40 years' time, you know, a greater degree of resource selfishness. We can't rule out. I mean, nobody imagined in the 1930s that Japan and Germany would go to war in order to seize oil supplies because they were short of oil. That is actually what they did. And in the middle of the 21st century, we're going to be very short of oil. Let's see what happens.

• 21:31Dan Snow?

  There's a fashion, isn't there? You see optimists who see Russia's struggles in eastern Ukraine at the moment. There's a great fashion to say, well, of course... Japan and Germany, that desire for oil actually ended up completely destroying both those two societies. Russia is now in terrible trouble in eastern Ukraine. And yet the lesson from history is that sadly, I think, resource wars can work. I mean, Frederick the Great seized Silesia, one of the richest provinces of his neighbour, Maria Theresa, the Austrian Empire, the Austrian Empire. You'd have to argue strategically for Prussia, that was successful.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Yes, indeed, of course, the resource wars are work. I mean, look at the Roman Empire, the Roman Republican Empire. It was built on seizing the resources of other peoples and extracting tribute from seizing slaves, and it made the Roman Empire rich and successful. You know, resource wars, people calculated and calculated long in the past, I think, about what chances they had of getting the resources and keeping them. But that was the object, and almost certainly, the Neolithic man too, thought about, you know, how can I take control of that slint mine? And they took control of it, and often violently. So, yes, resource wars can work.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  The pullout of Germany and Japan in the 20th century, of course, is that there was more involved in the war, of course, than just simply resources. And they bit off far more than they could chew in confronting in the end the rest of the world. But resource wars in the 21st century, well, will they be won? Or are they now zero-sum wars? I think we can't be certain about this. What I think is certain is that, you know, resources are finite, and at some point it might well prompt a renewed round of violence.

• 23:18Dan Snow?

  What I think is so fascinating about us human beings is that we can build this superstructure of belief on top of a pretty base desire to get hold of resources. So we say to ourselves throughout history, I want that territory, I want the resources it provides. But I've come up with an extraordinarily complicated and rather magical justification for me doing so on top of that. And it strikes me, belief is often, well, perhaps a successful resource war, perhaps it sometimes requires belief to motivate you, demotivate enemies, somehow legitimise your conquests.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Well, it could do. I think many of the wars of belief, certainly the ones I'm talking about, belief is really autonomous. It is a point where you get, you know, intense religious enthusiasm, which prompts warfare in defence of the faith. We think of crusades, we think of, well, we think of wars of modern jihad in defence of Islam, in defence of Western secularism. I think the temptation of, certainly I think among social scientists, is to see belief as something that's used as a bit of a facade, as you suggested. You know, you justify what you're doing by referring to belief, but actually what you're doing is, you know, you're doing something for social and economic motives and so on. I

• 24:35Speaker 02

  think that's overplayed. I think that, you know, belief can become important for itself. And indeed, for early societies, it certainly was, where they, animated by a cosmology that we often don't now understand or know about, but it will drive them to fight neighbouring communities where there are, you know, accusations of sorcery or a belief that, you know, your gods require you to go off and see sacrificial victims, as the Aztecs did. So I think to see belief as a, as something connected to other forms of warfare can be misleading. I think in my book, I come back to the idea that when people say that they're fighting

• 25:17Speaker 02

  for religion, they very often are fighting for religion. That's what drives them. And of course, it's surrounded by political and social realities as well. But belief can be a major driver in itself.

• 25:31Dan Snow?

  How should we think about belief? Slightly extend the definition to think about European colonial wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, or the ultimate colonial war, the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, with the idea, in that case, the idea of smashing communism, Judeo-Bolshevism, Slavism. Is that something that you find sits alongside belief as a historical cause for war?

• 25:58Speaker 02

  I think the colonial argument is an interesting one. You know, because of course people assumed in the late 19th century that Europe was civilized and much of the rest of the world wasn't. And they defined what they meant by civilization and they thought they were exporting these ideas to the rest of the world. There are powerful beliefs in, you know, so-called white man's burden and so on, which justified, in fact, you know, often very cruel wars of colonial expansion. So you can, you can find belief in a variety of rather different contexts. And the Russian example, I mean, we talked about invading the Soviet Union for resources. Well, of course, the Soviet Union was also invaded because it was the home of communism and Hitler hated Marxism and wanted to extirpate it.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  So you get resources and you fulfill your ideological goal at the same time.

• 26:51Dan Snow?

  As you're speaking, I was reminded of, is it Cecil Rhodes who called British expansion in Africa philanthropy plus 5%. So this sort of civilizing, hugely philanthropic mission to conquer Africa, but, you know, taking a nice little return on top there as well. Let's come on to power, which is very interesting because you define power, it has a distinct place within these causes. And so tell me how you came to see power as separate from desiring resource domination?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Well, I didn't see them as entirely separate. I think, as I would stress, power is usually power for something. And that can be anything from seizing more territory, extracting tribute, you know, seizing women as sexual beauty, booty. There are many ways in which, you know, you exercise power in order to achieve something. But what I, I, I would argue is that, that there are plenty of examples in history. Of individuals, and they're usually kings or emperors and so, but they needn't be, who see power just for its own sake, extending power for its own sake.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  The Roman Empire, or the Roman Republic, actually, extended power for its own sake. It justified its civilizing, its own civilizing mission in Europe and the Mediterranean. And in terms of exercising power over other peoples, which would be good for them. The idea of power for its own sake is also a very important way to understand how warfare's developed. I use the example of the great leaders, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, who set off in the pursuit of power by waging endless warfare. Warfare was, you know, the root of their power.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  And they believed that, you know, war was, you know, essential to underpin it. And these are hubristic individuals who, you know, arrogantly think that they can, you know, take their own people and go off and wage war, destructive war on a huge scale. I argue, I think that that's in some ways the most dangerous explanation of the cause of war, because it's completely unpredictable. Who would have found Napoleon in the 1780s or Hitler in the 1920s capable of waging massive European wide war? Nobody would have, you know, remotely guessed it. There may be somebody, you know, today in 21st century, well, who has the same ambition. And, you know, we have no way of being able to detect who they are.

• 29:31Dan Snow?

  I've said this on the podcast before, it's so fascinating. There is a Cromwell and a Bonaparte just living amongst us. Just cruising around. And if the great seismic plates of history shift their thrust to the fore, and we find the whole of Europe at their whim. But this is the bit where I wonder if psychologists can be useful. I sort of radically shift my opinions on this. And, you know, I was very influenced probably by the Marxist historians who talk about the economic substructure. But Looking at Putin, looking at President Xi, it feels like we are all vulnerable to the individual. Xi seems to be taking his decision over Taiwan in a kind of personal discourse or dialogue with emperors past. And in the same way, we know that Putin

• 30:14Dan Snow?

  has talked about the people he's thinking about, the people he's addressing, Sir Catherine the Great and Peter. These wars, correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like they are, they're quite individually driven. Presumably, you would say the same about Hitler in thirty nine and his decision to invade the Soviet Union forty one. And perhaps, I think, some some of the kind of dystopian thinking in the German High Command in nineteen fourteen as well. So now that we live in these gigantic hierarchical states, individual psychology probably matters quite a lot in terms of what driving us to get, impelling us towards war.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it's right. And power seeking for its own sake is something which which I argue is something that is individualist to others than, you know, elites or, you know, the broader institutional structure of the state. And we have plenty of examples of that. The problem is, is that, you know, for psychologists, it would be difficult to find, first of all, people find the evidence. But secondly, difficult to argue that all these people share the same psychological traits. If we had them all on a carousel, it would be more or less the same, the same kind of thing. So they wouldn't. They're shaped by circumstances as well. They're driven by their own sense of ambition. And

• 31:29Speaker 02

  I think that, you know, suggesting that we need to look out for a particular psychological type and, you know, lock them up is not going to work. I mean, they're ambitious, but they also depend particularly on circumstances and the willingness of others to accept what they're doing and so on. So there are quite complicated psychological themes going on between leaders and led, not just speaking of the leader himself or herself. I wish we could reduce it to a clear set of psychological explanations, but I think it's going to be very difficult to do. And people have studied the psychology of Adolf Hitler, for example, during the Second World War, the Americans had psychologists busy doing that, trying to produce a profile, what is this man like?

• 32:14Speaker 02

  More recent assessments of Hitler have also tried to, you know, to present him as a narcissistic personality and to discuss what that means psychologically. Again, we're really working in the dark, we don't have these people on the couch in a psychiatrist's office, we have to make do with what we see.

• 32:32Dan Snow?

  And not all narcissists require locking up and removing from society, just speaking up for a friend there. You finish off with this definition of security, and you point out that frankly, most wars have been fought between neighbours in the past. I was reading Carton de Wyatt's book, General Carton de Wyatt, who served all around the world in First and Second World War and before. He just had a brilliant summary of why the Poles and the Czechs had problems after the First World War, he goes, because they're neighbours, and so of course they fought. That was the end of his sort of analysis of that situation, but you say there's much in that?

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Well, there is, I mean, you know, there's been plenty of research by scholars to demonstrate that almost all the wars of the last 300 years have actually been between neighbours, and a very high percentage of them have been arguments over the frontier, territorial arguments, irredentist arguments and so on. And it's, I think, evident throughout recorded history, anyway, that the frontier is a tinderbox, that, you know, there are always going to be arguments over the frontier, particularly where frontiers in the past were not very, very clearly defined. So the Romans didn't have, you know, frontier and the border force, they tried to keep outposts, you know, along the rough idea of their frontier, but it was a porous frontier,

• 33:53Speaker 02

  and so, you know, you're often making war to defend what you saw notion as your territory. Now we have to find frontiers, but that doesn't stop the arguments over frontiers, the conflict in Kashmir, the conflict between India and China, or between Pakistan and India. Well, the conflict in Northern Ireland in the 1960s. You know, frontiers are place sites of potential violence. And, I mean, in most cases, of course, frontiers are, you know, secure and defined, people can protect them. But there's no doubt that in a world of nation states, 190 something nation states,

• 34:34Speaker 02

  people are constantly on guard for their frontier, constantly aware of any threat to their frontier. And I think in the 21st century, one of the problems you might face, of course, is mass migration, huge population growth, growing problems caused by climate change and so on. And in Africa, for example, the threat of mass migration across frontiers, which will then, you know, involve a good degree of violence as the states try to suppress the movement of migrants and so on. Frontiers are, as I said, tinderboxes, and they have been throughout history.

• 35:12Dan Snow?

  Particularly when you find large caches of resources just the wrong side of that frontier, or embattled fellow communities of believers on the wrong side of that frontier. So it all links up, as you've said many times. Did you end this book feeling deeply depressed about the state of our species?

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Well, I was depressed before I started.

• 35:32Dan Snow?

  Okay, good.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  I can't say that I'm any less depressed now. I mean, I do think that the human sciences has entered the last century, you know, exploring all the explanations for the causes of war in increasingly sophisticated ways. I think what really depresses me is not that we don't understand the causes of war, because I think we do understand them much better now than we did, is that understanding the causes of war doesn't stop war from happening. I mean, you know, we all wish that Putin had sat down with a couple of history books and said to himself, "Baptism isn't a good idea," but he wouldn't. And even if he had, I think you'd decide on war because of current circumstances. And although we would like to think that it's disappearing, it evidently isn't disappearing,

• 36:17Speaker 02

  certainly not in the 21st century. So that, I think, is really what's depressing us, you know, that whatever institutional and ideological checks we have to try and maintain the peace, to try and maintain international stability, there's a kind of dynamic in the human condition, which means that we reach for war at certain points, you know, when we feel that it's advantageous or necessary. And that's not going away.

• 36:47Dan Snow?

  Well, I was, okay, okay, Professor Richard Overy, I was gonna ask another question, but I'm too depressed to ask one. No, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Tell everyone what your book is called.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  My book's called Why War?, which was the title of a little pamphlet that Einstein and Freud produced in 1932, following their conversation about exactly that question. It seemed to me that it's still a pertinent question a century later.

• 37:12Dan Snow?

  Richard, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Thank you, Dan.

• 37:21Dan Snow?

  Thank you so much to Richard Overy for coming on the podcast. Given how precarious the situation is in Ukraine, in Congo, in Gaza and elsewhere, this felt like a timely episode to share with you. And we'll be following this line of inquiry into our strange, well, perhaps not so strange, human propensity for war in a bonus episode for subscribers tomorrow. We're going to be exploring the Nazi mindset with the brilliant historian Lawrence Ries. It's a fascinating one, so make sure you sign up to get that episode tomorrow. And when you sign up, you get all our episodes ad-free and as well as all our amazing documentaries, our TV documentaries, just click on the link in the show notes. See you tomorrow. Bye-bye.

• 38:11Speaker 01

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• 39:02Dan Snow?

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