I. War and conquest in the age of scarcity

Abstract

The underlying structure, incentives and costs shaping international relations, state behaviour and the nature of power are profoundly different today to how they were in the past, in ways that are scarcely recognised and widely misunderstood. For much of history, world politics was marked by profound scarcity in resources, information and security. A series of historical revolutions has largely tamed this scarcity in ways few could have imagined. These revolutions, however, have generated new, potentially catastrophic challenges for the world – the problems of plenty.

In this Adelphi book, Francis J. Gavin argues that the institutions, practices, theories and policies that helped explain and largely tamed scarcity by generating massive prosperity, and which were sometimes used to justify punishing conquest, are often unsuitable for addressing the problems of plenty. Successful grand strategy in this new age of abundance requires new thinking. New conceptual lenses, innovative policies and processes, and transformed institutions will be essential for confronting and solving the problems of plenty, without undermining the expanding efforts against scarcity.

Notes

4 Saloni Dattani et al., ‘Life Expectancy’, Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy.

5 ‘Burundi – Life Expectancy at Birth’, countryeconomy.com, https://countryeconomy.com/demography/life-expectancy/burundi.

6 Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, ‘Literacy’, Our World in Data, 20 September 2018, https://ourworldindata.org/literacy.

7 US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, ‘Feeding the World: Global Food Production Per Person Has Grown Over Time’, 13 November 2023, https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=107818#:~:text=Feeding%20the%20world%3A%20Global%20food,increased%2013%20percent%20on%20average; and ‘Daily Support of Calories per Person, 2018’, Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-supply.

8 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (London: Verso, 2001), p. 7. India’s famine during the Second World War claimed three million lives, and anywhere from 17m to 45m died during the Great Leap Forward in China in 1959–61. There is disagreement about the relative importance of food and information scarcity on the one hand and the role of malign political forces on the other in these catastrophes.

9 Naomi Williams and Graham Mooney, ‘Infant Mortality in an “Age of Great Cities”: London and the English Provincial Cities Compared, c. 1840–1910’, Continuity and Change, vol. 9, no. 2, August 1994, pp. 185–212.

10 Claude Fischer, ‘A Crime Puzzle: Violent Crime Declines in America’, Berkeley News, 16 June 2010, https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-violent-crime-declines-in-america/; and Kristin Englund, ‘Syphilis 100 Years Later’, Cleveland Clinic, 21 November 2017, https://consultqd.clevelandclinic.org/syphilis-100-years-later/.

11 William H. McNeill, Population and Politics Since 1750 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1990), p. 1.

12 For two of the more important works on the causes of war, see Jack S. Levy and William R. Thompson, Causes of War (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); and Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999).

13 John A. Vasquez, The War Puzzle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 151, 293, cited in John Mueller, ‘War Has Almost Ceased to Exist: An Assessment’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 124, no. 2, Summer 2009, pp. 297–321 at 306–7.

14 T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2007 [1798]), p. 5.

15 United States Census Bureau, ‘Historical Estimates of World Population’, https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/international-programs/historical-est-worldpop.html.

16 Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 25. The terms ‘rebalancing’ and ‘equilibrium’ are McNeill’s.

17 Ibid., p. 55.

18 Ibid., p. 77.

19 ‘Population Change’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/modernization/Population-change.

20 John Burnett, ‘Housing and the Decline of Mortality’, in Roger Schofield, David Reher and Alain Bideau (eds), The Decline of Mortality in Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 158–76.

21 Jörg Vögele, ‘Urbanization, Infant Mortality and Public Health in Imperial Germany’, in Carlo A. Corsini and Pier Paolo Viazzo(eds), The Decline of Infant and Child Mortality: The European Experience, 1750–1990 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1997), p. 110.

22 McNeill, Population and Politics Since 1750, p. 51.

23 Ibid., p. 24.

24 William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 310. Population pressures in eighteenthcentury China drove similar expansion, launching ‘a vigorous and successful expansion across every landward frontier’. Settlers ‘followed in the wake of the armies wherever suitable land existed’, but after 1797 China faced both domestic and international restraints, causing it to descend into a century of ‘civil strife’ and increasing exposure to foreign domination. Ibid., pp. 36–7.

25 Ibid., p. 39.

26 Alison Bashford, Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

27 Alison Bashford, ‘Population Politics Since 1750’, in J.R. McNeill and Kenneth Pomeranz (eds), The Cambridge World History, Volume VII: Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750–Present; Part 1: Structures, Spaces, and Boundary Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 222–3.

28 James Joll, ‘1914: The Unspoken Assumptions: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered 25 April 1968’ (London: London School of Economics and Political Science, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), p. 23.

29 Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 8–9.