William H. McNeill
Violence & submission in the human past
The retreat of Gandhian ‘nonviolence’
in public affairs from its high points in
the 1930s when the might of the British
Raj in India was so seriously challenged
by Gandhi and his followers, and since
the 1950s and 1960s when Martin Luther
King, Jr., led civil-rights demonstrators
in facing police dogs and truncheons in
the American South, is obvious today.
That is scarcely surprising. It takes enor-
mous self-discipline to invite attack and
refrain from retaliation, and the moral
effect of nonviolence depends on who
witnesses such confrontations and how
that larger public reacts. Violence exer-
cised in secret against helpless victims,
as at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, es-
capes the price of public disapproval as
long as it remains secret. And all too ob-
William H. McNeill, a Fellow of the American
Academy since 1964, is Robert A. Milikan Dis-
tinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Histo-
ry at the University of Chicago. Among his nu-
merous publications are “The Rise of the West”
(1963), “Plagues and Peoples” (1976), "IL
Pursuit of Power” (1982), “Keeping Together
in Time” (1995), E, most recently, “The Pur-
suit of Truth: A Historian’s Memoir” (2005).
© 2007 dall'Accademia Americana delle Arti
& Scienze
viously, the art of shaping public opinion
by managing the news has become a far
more potent ally of established authori-
ty, even (or especially) in the exercise of
violence, than it used to be.
Yet it is still true that violence has seri-
ous limits and that command of superi-
or force is a very precarious basis for
government. As Napoleon is supposed
to have remarked, one can do anything
with bayonets except sit on them. Effec-
tive and sustained public action requires
at least tacit consent of the governed; ac-
tive support is much more effective, if it
can be contrived. More generally, human
society depends on perpetual interaction
between leaders and followers, and the
exercise of violence and the threat of vi-
olence is part of that interaction. So is
submission and obedience; and in prac-
tice the great majority of humankind
has always submitted for very good rea-
sons. Only so can collective action be ef-
½ciently exercised, only so can home ter-
ritory be effectually defended, E, in un
word, only so can conditions for group
survival be optimized.
In all probability, violence and threats
of violence played a prominent part in
de½ning which of several competing
males achieved leadership of the proto-
human, and then the ½rst fully human,
bands of foragers from whom we all de-
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William H.
McNeill
SU
nonviolence
& violence
scend. Recent studies of “chimpanzee
politics” by Franz de Waal and others
offer a plausible model for what proba-
bly existed among our remote ancestors.
Among chimps, careful observation
showed that the alpha male maintains
his position only by facing down repeat-
ed challenges from one or more of his
subordinates–encounters usually limit-
ed to gestures of de½ance before the
challenger backs away without engaging
in actual combat. But every so often, af-
ter years of backing down, a challenger
does ½ght, and sooner or later one of
them displaces the older alpha male,
thus assuring a succession of physical-
ly vigorous leaders. Inoltre, male
chimpanzees guard their home territo-
ry against intruders from neighboring
bands and, when unopposed, cross those
borders to pick up extra food. Di conseguenza,
band territories are elastic, widening or
shrinking with population growth or
collapse, and with the corresponding
vigor of local defense and aggression.
Effective local defense requires coop-
eration. That means subordination of
most males to their established leader.
Rivalry only goes so far: the common
defense, on which the band’s food sup-
ply depends, requires everyone’s readi-
ness to ½ght against intruders to the
death if need be, using hands and teeth.
Females are different; they migrate
across band boundaries to mate, così
assuring dissemination of genes across
longer distances and among larger popu-
lations.
Contemporary chimpanzee behavior,
especially mating patterns, may not be
the same as what prevailed among our
human ancestors; but ef½cient cooper-
ation in defense of territory, particolarmente
against fellow humans, was surely essen-
tial for them, and the subordination of
other males to a single leader seems a
very likely–almost necessary–means
to that result. No one can be sure, Ma
since 99 percent of human time was
spent in such foraging bands, we can be
reasonably con½dent that human in-
stincts and proclivities were shaped by
that experience.
And how amazingly successful they
were, rising to the top of the food chain
and spreading around the habitable
globe as no species before them had ev-
er done. To all appearance, ready resort
to violence against other humans–as
well as killing animals for food–played
a large part in that success.
But settled village life, starting per-
haps as much as (or more than) eight
thousand years ago, altered life patterns
profoundly–as did the subsequent rise
of cities and civilizations. Generalmente,
the effective scale of human societies
expanded so that ½rst hundreds, Poi
thousands, and presently hundreds of
thousands and millions, of individual
persons began to interact within a loose
E, at ½rst, very slenderly integrated
web. Older patterns of violence altered.
Hierarchies of command and obedience
embraced larger and larger numbers
of persons, and age-old alternatives be-
tween violent self-assertion and submis-
sion became correspondingly complicat-
ed, compelling the same individual and
local groups to shift back and forth be-
tween the two roles when encountering
strangers, depending on who the partic-
ular strangers might be and where they
ranked in the larger web.
Again, every such encounter was what
it was, often beset by uncertainties on
both sides. Generalization becomes
more reckless as complication increased.
Yet it seems to me that some general ob-
servations about the changing roles of
violence are plausible or at least interest-
ing and worth suggesting in print.
First of all, early agricultural settle-
ments were of two contrasting kinds.
6
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Violence &
submission
in the hu-
man past
Tropical gardening may well have been
older than grain agriculture, but it left
only scant archaeological traces that still
remain almost entirely unexplored. IL
reason so little is known about the histo-
ry of tropical gardeners is that they did
not support cities and civilizations: Essi
simply left their crops in the ground un-
til they were ready to consume them. As
a result, outsiders could not carry stored
harvests away by force or threat of force.
It follows that new forms of human par-
asitism that grain farmers submitted to
could not arise among tropical garden-
ers, who therefore remained in small,
comparatively dense, but independent,
village communities, like those discov-
ered in interior New Guinea as recent-
ly as the 1930s. Cities and civilization
passed them by; and local forms of vio-
lence, though real enough, conformed
closely to the hypothetical patterns of
violence among ancestral foraging
bands. That is to say, local defense of ter-
ritory played the central role: choice of
local leaders was tied to the conduct of
armed clashes with neighbors, and all
adult males were expected to take part
in such exercises. Costs as measured by
death in battle varied widely, and we
have too little information to make
worthwhile generalizations.
By contrast, grain agriculture and the
stored harvests it required provoked far
more social diversity and, in the long
run, sustained amazing transformations
of human life. The whole trajectory of
what we think of as human history de-
pended on an initial differentiation be-
tween subjected villagers and urban
dwellers, who lived on rents and taxes
collected forcibly in kind from those
who raised the food city folk consumed.
Such an inequity could only be sustained
if rent- and tax-takers allowed villagers
to keep enough grain to feed themselves
and leave enough for next year’s seed.
The necessary restraint was presumably
achieved by trial and error.
The basic fact was that exposure to
natural disasters–hail, drought, flood,
and blight–as well as the risk of total
con½scation by human predators might
bring death by starvation to grain farm-
ers. Separate, isolated villages of a few
hundred persons could not hope to safe-
guard their harvests unless a larger poli-
ty, supporting specialists both in the su-
pernatural and in violence, were avail-
able to help protect them. Quello, in turn,
required feeding such specialists by sub-
mitting to rents and taxes.
Both parties gained if custom regulat-
ed the transfer of food from producer
to consumer so as to allow both to sur-
vive. Villagers had to work harder and
consume less than they produced; urban
specialists in protection–priests and
warriors–probably consumed more
per capita than rural dwellers did from
the start, and protected themselves and
their rural dependents as best they
could. That partnership is what we call
civilization, and civilized partnerships
soon proved capable of raising monu-
mental buildings and leaving other con-
spicuous archaeological traces wherever
grain agriculture prevailed, in western
Asia, Egypt, India, China, and Mexico.
Overall, this arrangement meant that
the great majority of persons ceased to
take an active part in defending their
home territory. Submission to powerful
outsiders who carried off part of the har-
vest every year was a heavy price to pay,
but early grain farmers had no choice
E, in western Asia, soon found ways of
producing more grain than they needed
for their own consumption by harness-
ing animals to plows, thus expanding the
area of cultivation per capita substantial-
ly. In effect a new sort of symbiosis be-
tween draught animals and humans sup-
plemented and sustained the emerging
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William H.
McNeill
SU
nonviolence
& violence
symbiosis between village dwellers and
city folk. Domesticated animals also
supplemented human food supplies by
giving milk (and eggs); their bodies con-
stituted a sort of food bank in times of
famine when grain was short. On top
of that, domesticated animals could be
made to carry heavy loads, both for short
distances between ½eld and barnyard,
and cross-country for trading or military
purposes.
The West Asian pattern of human and
animal symbiosis eventually spread very
widely through the Old World. As a re-
sult, in most of Eurasia and in parts of
Africa, urban exploitation of rural peas-
antries was much facilitated by the par-
allel and harsher exploitation of domes-
ticated animals by village farmers. It
was different in the Americas, Dove
pre-Columbian civilizations flourished
without much in the way of large-bod-
ied domesticated animals–a difference
that eventually made Spanish conquest
easier than it would otherwise have
been.
To begin with, it looks as though in all
parts of the world, protection from natu-
ral disasters by experts in the supernatu-
ral was what mattered most. But priests
were supplemented from the start by
military leaders, and even the most pow-
erful priesthoods were eventually subor-
dinated to military rulers when protec-
tion against outside human attack be-
came more critical for local survival.
Hence, it is not surprising that warriors
or their descendants remained in charge
of civilized governments until recent
times.
Yet the polarity between specialized
protectors against destructive violence
and rural rent-payers and taxpayers was
complicated from the beginning by new
scope that civilized societies gave to ar-
tisans and merchants. Professional ar-
tisans were able to produce superior
goods, thanks to specialization and life-
long practice. Equipping suitably splen-
did rituals for pleasing and appeasing
the gods constituted an insatiable mar-
ket for artisan skills–so did the manu-
facture of superior weapons and armor.
Hence, growing numbers of skilled arti-
sans could and did claim a share of the
food coming from the countryside as
rent and taxes.
Merchants were just as important, for
it was they who traveled far and wide,
supplying artisans with the rare and pre-
cious goods they needed–raw materi-
COME, like metals, gems, pigments, timber,
and much else. But securing raw materi-
als peaceably from afar required giving
something in return that local persons
wanted and could not produce for them-
selves. To be sure, violent seizure was
an alternative, and to judge by the Baby-
lonian Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes
an armed foray into the forests of Leb-
anon in search of timber, military expe-
ditions in search of strategic raw mate-
rials were sometimes launched when
cities were new in the land of Sumer.
But just as agreed arrangements be-
tween local payers and receivers of rent
and taxes were more conducive to sur-
vival than violent seizure, so it was in
interregional encounters. Both parties
gained if local people could be induced
to part with raw materials–or, better
yet, prepare them for transport to dis-
tant urban markets–and accept manu-
factured goods in return. This created
yet another elastic demand for the hand-
iwork of urban artisans. As both sides
came to recognize the advantages of
such peaceful exchanges, regional spe-
cialization slowly assumed signi½cant
proportions throughout urban hinter-
lands. Large-scale efforts to mine metals,
fell timber, dive for pearls, and ½nd other
specially attractive commodities allowed
local elites, who organized such efforts,
8
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Violence &
submission
in the hu-
man past
to acquire luxury goods manufactured in
distant urban workshops.
Resulting networks of exchange trans-
mitted ideas and skills in both direc-
zioni, as well as distributed material ob-
jects, thus hastening the civilizing pro-
cess whereby more and more people
over widening areas began to share in
a common evolutionary process of dif-
ferentiation and specialization that ran
across political, linguistico, and cultural
boundaries. That process eventually
linked most of the Old World into a far
more closely interacting whole than had
prevailed when only foraging bands col-
lided and peacefully exchanged preciosi-
ties with one another on festival occa-
sions. A similar but weaker web of ex-
change also arose in the Americas, ham-
pered by the absence of pack animals
capable of carrying burdens as heavy as
those that donkeys, mules, and camels
did in the Old World. Flotation was al-
ways more capacious and sometimes
safer than overland transport. Conse-
quently, as rafts, boats, and ships be-
came more elaborate, river and overseas
trade routes grew in importance, E
eventually connected the entire globe
into a single web after 1500 ce.
Traveling merchants were the most
prominent instruments of long-range
human interactions. They often faced
ambiguous situations when encounter-
ing strangers with respect both to prices
and to violence. Prices were set in two
different ways: by generous gifting, con
expectation of spontaneous, honorable
reciprocity; or by bargaining between
buyer and seller for the lowest price.
Economists commonly concentrate
wholly on bargaining, but gifting played
(and continues to play) a larger role in
human affairs than we often realize.
Gift-giving was what carried the gem
dealer, Marco Polo, across Asia in the
thirteenth century, Per esempio. E
gifting still plays a central role in Amer-
ican politics in the form of political
contributions, where the old rule–the
greater the gift, the greater the return–
still prevails.
With respect to violence, raid and
trade were and remain alternative ways
of getting hold of someone else’s goods.
But resort to violence was always cost-
ly. It was dif½cult to sustain, since rob-
bery discouraged other merchants from
showing up and did not usually yield a
suitable array of goods. Hence, pirates
and robbers often had to seek out peace-
able markets in some special, BENE-
guarded location, where they could sell
their booty and buy the things that ½tted
their actual needs.
Parallel ambiguity prevailed in the
metropolitan centers where merchants
clustered together, forming marginal,
often unstable, and semiautonomous
communities of their own. To tax or not
to tax–and, if so, how much–was a
question local rulers always had to ask.
A ready supply of goods–later of money
–levied on visiting merchants was a wel-
come source of revenue; but charging
too much discouraged visitors and re-
duced total revenue. Those rulers who
charged least often gained most by at-
tracting larger numbers of richer mer-
chants to their cities.
Merchants were also capable of be-
coming rulers of independent city-
stati, like Venice, and of forming influ-
ential interest groups within territorial
stati, like medieval and early modern
England. As such they sometimes exer-
cised political and military force for
their own purposes rather than submit-
ting to armed superiors, as was more
commonly the case.
Overall, one can safely say that mer-
chants were a disturbing, quicksilver ele-
ment in civilized society–upsetting old
ways by bringing novelties from afar to
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William H.
McNeill
SU
nonviolence
& violence
new places and peoples. Inhabitants
of remote urban hinterlands suffered
most. Local ways and traditions regular-
ly crumbled as such populations were
folded into the larger human web, E
their new roles as suppliers of raw ma-
terials and manpower to distant urban
markets were usually unattractive at
best. Metropolitan centers also suffered
strains when adjusting to novelties, since
changing markets could destroy urban
livelihoods without always creating new
ones.
Above all, merchants made a living by
crossing political and other boundaries,
exposing themselves and those they
dealt with to ambiguous situations in
which resort to violence was often near
the surface. Over time, recognition of
the high cost of violence accumulated,
and legal systems capable of settling dis-
putes peaceably extended their jurisdic-
tion over wider and wider territories.
But crossing jurisdictional boundaries
remained precarious, and merchants
who did so reaped correspondingly
swollen pro½ts when they did not suffer
crippling loss. Everywhere and always
change and instability followed in their
footsteps, interdependence of distant
populations increased, as well as vulner-
ability to catastrophe whenever sudden
breakdown of exchanges interrupted the
generation of increasing wealth that
drove the entire civilizing process.
What I have referred to as the civiliz-
ing process also brought far-reaching
changes to religion. From the time mil-
itary commanders began to compete
with priestly leaders of civilized society,
compromise of some sort between the
two kinds of leaders prevailed. They
needed each other. Supernatural sanc-
zione, con½rmed and certi½ed by priests,
legitimated military rule, while priests
needed military protection against out-
side raiders as well as heretics and/or
missionaries of alien faiths. More or less
settled alliances between throne and al-
tar usually prevailed, but there was a de-
½ciency built into the human experience
of life in large cities that recurrently up-
set such arrangements among the privi-
leged leaders of society.
It took a long while for attachment
between a population and local divini-
ties to give way to universal faiths, E
longer still for the new universal faiths
to accommodate sectarian variation. IL
so-called higher religions–Buddhism,
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, E (more
ambiguously) Confucianism–mark the
arrival of universal faiths between about
550 bce and 634 ce. They were applica-
ble in principle to every human being;
but despite all the missionary effort they
exhibited, these faiths divided most of
humankind along new religious lines,
and a wide variety of more local reli-
gions also continued to command de-
voted followings.
Propagation of the higher religions
certainly helped innumerable human
beings to adjust to urban living. Quello
was what made these religions so suc-
cessful. Yet their teaching, rituals, E
institutional expression in monasteries,
congregations, churches, mosques, E
schools did not bring anything like reli-
gious stability. Invece, heresy and sec-
tarianism continued to thrive and divide
urban populations.
The problem was this. Most human
beings need to belong to small primary
groups. Only so does everyday personal
life have meaning; only so are questions
of what to do and when to do it unam-
biguous. Our descent from members of
foraging bands, where everybody knew
everyone else and also knew how to be-
have in everyday situations, undoubted-
ly explains this fact. Agricultural villages
of a few hundred people were not too
large to satisfy that need, and the conser-
10
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Violence &
submission
in the hu-
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vative stability of village life in most of
the world until very recently reflects
that circumstance. But cities where
thousands congregated, where special-
ized occupations multiplied, and where
different expectations and rules of be-
havior prevailed among different social
classes could not do so. Smaller, subordi-
nate groups were necessary, and among
the variety of such groups, religiously
de½ned linkages proved to be the most
enduring, most flexible, and most pow-
erful.
By de½nition, a functioning primary
group has to be small so everyone can
know everyone else. Markers distin-
guishing ‘us’ from ‘them’ help to de½ne
and con½rm group boundaries. Details
of clothing–especially headgear–and
physical bearing or appearance com-
monly serve that purpose. Cities, ac-
cordingly, became an uneasy amalgam
of separate, self-aware groups, often liv-
ing close together in distinct neighbor-
hoods and treating outsiders differently
from the way they treated fellow mem-
bers of the particular group to which
they belonged.
One can think of such urban group-
ings as quasi-villages, with enough in
common to sustain meaningful person-
al life and channel everyday behavior
along ½rm customary lines. Occupation-
al convergence and/or ethnic common-
ality was often a factor. Ma, as I said,
the most flexible, enduring, and pow-
erful cement for such groups was a reli-
gion that differed from other, particolarmente
of½cial, forms of worship.
The power of sectarian religion rested
on two realities. First and foremost,
such faiths had priests or teachers who
de½ned, propagated, and defended it
against challenges of every kind–for-
cible, logical, or merely snobbish. Such
specialists also adjusted details to ever-
changing circumstances, partly deliber-
ately, but mostly without admitting or
realizing they were doing so. When
wisely done, such adjustments kept the
faith alive and vigorous across genera-
tions and centuries.
Secondo, these religions dealt directly
with the standard human crises–birth,
marriage, sickness, and death–offering
solace and ritual resolution for the hopes
and fears such events provoke. Life with-
out such support was dif½cult and unsat-
isfying. With it, ordinary persons could
carry on even in time of extreme distress
and endure yet another day. Tight-knit
communities sustained by sectarian
faiths, in short, contributed to survival
within big cities just as much as protec-
tion by military specialists did; these
faiths were even more effective because
they were more immediately personal
than more splendid rituals conducted by
priests of of½cial, state-supported forms
of religion.
But religious differences also invited
violent persecution. Minority religious
groups normally submitted. Some, like
Quakers and Jains, made nonviolence
an article of faith. Sometimes, Tuttavia,
new winds of doctrine attracted so much
enthusiasm that followers attempted to
overthrow the established forms of wor-
ship, either by conversion or by force.
Consequently, reform movements in
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history
have frequently provoked large-scale
violence; and religiously justi½ed or in-
spired militancy remains active in sev-
eral parts of the world today, as the so-
called war on terror surely suggests.
Peaceable coexistence of separate reli-
gious groups, and legal toleration of di-
verse practices and belief, is always pre-
carious. In proportion to the emotional
attachment to a particular form of reli-
gion, the cohesion of fellow-believers
is strengthened. Encounters with unbe-
lievers become correspondingly pricklier
Dedalo Inverno 2007
11
l
D
o
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of human numbers seems sure before
much longer; but whether wealth and
comfort will collapse as violence spreads
more widely, or whether means for con-
straining destructive violence and sus-
taining collaboration on a global scale
will be found, seems still an open ques-
zione.
It has been an open question through-
out the past, so I see no need to despair
but much need for ingenuity and wis-
dom, together with the common sense
that stubbornly prefers survival to de-
struction, and compromise, even sub-
mission, to victory by enforcing our will
(whoever ‘we’ may be) on everyone else.
l
D
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w
N
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UN
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F
R
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UN
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–
P
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2
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D
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B
sì
G
tu
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2
3
William H.
McNeill
SU
nonviolence
& violence
and at least potentially violent. To be
sure, the weaker normally submit to the
stronger, enduring whatever hardships
and indignities may be imposed upon
them. But the gain from belonging to
a small, incandescent community of be-
lievers is always countered by the costs
of collision with outsiders, together with
ever-present possibilities for hurtful vio-
lence.
It seems clear that human proclivity
for violent action will always be with
us. Violence was essential to survival
among our remote ancestors–it is iron-
ic that self-destruction on a global scale
is now within human capability, thanks
to atomic bombs and other forms of
mass destruction. It is equally true that,
since the invention of agriculture, most
human beings submitted to others and
seldom even tried to kill anyone else,
though killing domesticated animals re-
mained essential to most farming popu-
lations. Specialization and peaceable ex-
changes have gradually enriched human-
kind over millennia, and recently did so
beyond the imagination of older times.
But violence, magni½ed by modern wea-
ponry, has also increased beyond any-
thing our ancestors ever thought possi-
ble.
How the civilizing process will stum-
ble or advance under such circumstances
–complicated by increasingly obvious
environmental constraints–remains to
be seen. But human ingenuity is enor-
mous, and new ways of satisfying our
wishes and needs are contagious and
tend to spread. They can do so very rap-
idly today when instantaneous commu-
nication assaults our ears and eyes every
day. Mighty states and rich corporations
crumble precipitously when old attach-
ments yield to new; and so far, almeno,
human numbers and wealth have con-
tinued to grow. An end to the increase
12
Dedalo Inverno 2007
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