Bronze Age war (as per James Scott) was primarily war for captives, because the Bronze Age model was kings ruling agricultural dystopias amidst virgin land where people could easily escape and become hunter-gatherers. The laborers would gradually escape, the country would gradually become less populated, and the king would declare war on a neighboring region to steal their people to use as serfs or slaves.
Iron Age to Industrial Age war (as per Peter Turchin) was primarily war for land, because of Malthus. Until the Industrial Revolution, you needed a certain amount of land to support a unit of population. Population was constantly increasing, land wasn’t, and so every so often population would outstrip land, everyone would be starving and unhappy, and something would restore the situation to equilibrium. Absent any other action, that would be some sort of awful civil war or protracted anarchy where people competed for limited resources—aided by wages being very low (so they could hire soldiers easily) and people being very angry (so becoming a pretender and raising an army against the current king was a popular move). Kings’ best way to forestall this disaster was to preemptively declare war against a foreign enemy. If they won, they could steal the enemy’s land, which resolved the land/population imbalance and fed the excess population. If they lost, then (to be cynical about it), they still eliminated their excess population and successfully resolved the imbalance.
The only part of this that doesn’t make sense to me is “they still eliminated their excess population”. Unless I’m mistaken about the numbers, no war before WWI ever had a large enough number of combatants or was deadly enough in general to make a real dent in the population. An exception to this might be prehistoric intertribal warfare in which the combatants include “all healthy adult males of the tribe”, but that obviously doesn’t apply to Iron Age to Industrial Age warfare as you claim.
No war before WWI ever had a large enough number of combatants or was deadly enough in general to make a real dent in the population.
I think that’s fairly inaccurate. Just to pick the first example that came to mind:
By all accounts, the population of Asia crashed during Chinggis Khan’s wars of conquest. China had the most to lose, so China lost the most—anywhere from 30 to 60 million. The Jin dynasty ruling northern China recorded 7.6 million households in the early thirteenth century. In 1234 the first census under the Mongols recorded 1.7 million households in the same area. In his biography of Chinggis Khan, John Man interprets these two data points as a population decline from 60 million to 10 million.
Bronze Age war (as per James Scott) was primarily war for captives, because the Bronze Age model was kings ruling agricultural dystopias amidst virgin land where people could easily escape and become hunter-gatherers. The laborers would gradually escape, the country would gradually become less populated, and the king would declare war on a neighboring region to steal their people to use as serfs or slaves.
Iron Age to Industrial Age war (as per Peter Turchin) was primarily war for land, because of Malthus. Until the Industrial Revolution, you needed a certain amount of land to support a unit of population. Population was constantly increasing, land wasn’t, and so every so often population would outstrip land, everyone would be starving and unhappy, and something would restore the situation to equilibrium. Absent any other action, that would be some sort of awful civil war or protracted anarchy where people competed for limited resources—aided by wages being very low (so they could hire soldiers easily) and people being very angry (so becoming a pretender and raising an army against the current king was a popular move). Kings’ best way to forestall this disaster was to preemptively declare war against a foreign enemy. If they won, they could steal the enemy’s land, which resolved the land/population imbalance and fed the excess population. If they lost, then (to be cynical about it), they still eliminated their excess population and successfully resolved the imbalance.
The only part of this that doesn’t make sense to me is “they still eliminated their excess population”. Unless I’m mistaken about the numbers, no war before WWI ever had a large enough number of combatants or was deadly enough in general to make a real dent in the population. An exception to this might be prehistoric intertribal warfare in which the combatants include “all healthy adult males of the tribe”, but that obviously doesn’t apply to Iron Age to Industrial Age warfare as you claim.
I think that’s fairly inaccurate. Just to pick the first example that came to mind:
Source: Twentieth Century Atlas—Historical Body Count (necrometrics.com)
I haven’t checked how much of the decline is due to battles, and how much to indirect causes such as disease or famine.
What about people just going somewhere else? I would think migrations would play a role here but not sure just how much to expect.