The Invention of Peace, by Michael Howard

I love a good bookstore. I can browse for hours. The best bookstore I've ever been to is Leakey's in Inverness — a cathedral to used books and old maps, with a giant wood stove in the middle (fire hazard be damned), and a wrap-around second-floor balcony — jammed with many more books — accessed from a spiral staircase. I went a couple of years ago after a massive lunch of fish tea (that's fish, chips, bread, coleslaws, and a pot of tea). Runners-up for great bookshops include Shakespeare and Co in Paris, the old JW Doull's in downtown Halifax, and St. George's in Berlin. But none of those rank as my all-time favorite bookstore.

My favorite is the Oxfam bookstore in Glasgow's Govanhill neighbhorhood. Claire and I lived in Shawlands, ten minutes away — on the other side of Queen's Park (so-named because that's where Mary Queen of Scots staged her last stand before being captured insurrectionist troops). Govanhill is known as an immigrant neighborhood. It's a beautiful community that branches off of the wide boulevard that is Victoria Road, running from the gates of Queen's Park in the south toward the Clyde River in the North. The low buildings and wide street allow sunlight to fill all of the shops and cafes of Victoria Road, making it a great mid-day stroll when the sun breaks out through the Glasgow clouds.

During my time in Glasgow, I took many mid-day strolls across Queen's Park and up Victoria Road, grabbing a pastry at Short Long Black cafe, dropping off film at Gulabi, perusing the racks at one of the many charity shops, and — almost every time — stopping for a prolonged browse at the tiny Oxfam bookstore. The shop is one room, with shelves on the two long walls, and a row of stacks in the middle. There are always overflowing cardboard boxes on the floor, and usually a hand-written sign in the window saying "Not accepting donations," because they're already at capacity.

When you walk through the door, the cookbooks, arts, crafts, and hobbies are on the left. I got a great photography book and some beautiful art books there. Opposite are the staff picks, rare books, and first editions. Next is the non-fiction: business, economics, philosophy, spirituality, politics, history, local interest. That's where I spent most of my time. Slowly, studiously browsing all of the spines. As I check the two small shelves beside me in my office, I count eight books from that little non-fiction section. There are more on the living room bookshelf, and more still that I donated back to Oxfam or to friends.

There are many Oxfam bookstores in the UK, and I've visited a handful of them. But, the Govanhill location really specialized in critical politics and history books. There I found Piketty, Hobsbawm, Varoufakis, and Marx. Due to its strong worker's movement, Glasgow has been known as "Red Clydeside," and Govanhill is a firmly working-class neighbhood, which probably skews the genres on offer at the Oxfam bookstore.

The Invention of Peace was one of those books that I picked up at the Oxfam bookstore. The first page bears the pencil mark, "WK51 £2.49". The sun barely gets out of bed in the winter in Scotland, so I must have picked up the book on a January day when I was on an essential vitamin–D walk around noontime.

The author, Michael Howard, is a historian of war. A quote on the front acclaims him "Arguably Britain's greatest living historian," giving the air that these 113 pages will have something valuable to say.

I took the book on a flight and read the whole thing between takeoff and landing. Howard teases the book with the thesis that war has always existed, but peace is a novel idea. This may be marketing, however, as the book is mostly a synopsis of the history of war, and the thesis falls largely by the wayside. Inasmuch as the idea of an "invention of peace" remains relevant, I think it's conceivable that "peace" didn't become a major project until "war" became a perennial liability for rulers. "Peace may or may not be a modern invention," writes Howard, "but it is certainly a more complex affair than war."

On a small scale, wars can occur without major destruction. In some societies, war might play out like a sporting event, a rite of passage, or a ritual, but at some point war became much more calamitous.

Howard espouses the conventional view that a warrior culture dominated Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century.

Over centuries of fighting, warrior leaders emerged who provided local protection and whose families became the nuclei of a society whose structure was predicated on the assumption of permanent war.

The church wrote divine law to justify political violence. To this end, St Augustine justified war as part of the fallen condition of man. But, to be religiously justified, a war had to be waged under proper authority, as a last resort, to right a wrong, and in proportion.

Basically, war had the function of upholding or restoring the secular order sanctified by the Church; an order that provided peace, justice and protection for all Christians... War was thus recognized as an intrinsic part of the social and political order, and the warrior was accepted as a servant of God, his sword as a symbol of the Cross. A culture of chivalry developed around the role and activities of the knight, that had little to do with the brute realities of war, and nothing whatsoever with wars against the infidel which could be, and were, fought with unrestrained brutality. This assimilation between warrior and priest was underpinned by the concordat between the most powerful family in Western Europe, the Carolingian dynasty, and the surviving Christian church in the West, which was sealed by the coronation in AD 800 of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor. Legitimized both as the heir of the vanished but still respected hegemony of Rome and as the instrument of the church, Charlemagne did not have the power to sustain this notional hegemony beyond his own generation and it was to be repeatedly devolved and divided. Nonetheless, the concept of the Holy Roman Empire remained one of enormous importance until the Westphalian settlement of 1648, if not until its ultimate demise in 1803.

In the feudal Europe of the Middle Ages, war became a form of litigation to settle property rights, "limited, like all litigation, by the resources of the litigants."

The warrior class regarded peace as a an interval between conflicts, to be filled with tournaments, hunts, and crusades, "a habit that has survived into our own day in the upper-class obsession with hunting and field sports." War was an "almost automatic activity." But war is also expensive and destructive, and gradually weakened the ruling class, with their limited resources. Noble power was "legitimized by the ritual of kingship." Wars were fought with paid soldiers or mercenaries, which forced rulers to raise funds through loans or taxes, creating an evermore important relationship between the ruler, the soldiers who fought for him, the merchants who financed and supplied his campaigns, and the citizens who paid for them, creating a geographical border to encircle a newly emerging legal entity that comprised these parties and their relationships: the state.

The Reformation took power away from the church, shifting the balance of power to the state. Rulers sponsored education to support the growth of their new secular legal system and bureaucracy. "Indeed, the entire apparatus of the state primarily came into being to enable princes to wage war. With few exceptions, these princes still saw themselves, and were seen by their subjects, essentially as warrior leaders, and they took every opportunity to extend their power."

At the end of the Middle Ages, this power-grasping culminated into "a bid by the Habsburgs to sustain a hegemony which they had inherited over most of western Europe against all their foreign rivals and dissident subjects," creating a period of continuous warfare through the sixteen and seventeenth centuries, draining Europe of wealth. Previously, I wrote about the history of human violence, hypothesizing that humanity has become much more deadly since the 1300s, up to (and perhaps including) the current century.

Unpaid armies mutinied, overtaxed citizens revolted, and mercenaries went rogue. "The old order had irretrievably broken down, and a new seemed powerless to be born."

In 1648, the leaders of Europe signed the Peace of Westphalia, which "effectively affirmed the state as the unchallenged guarantor of domestic order and legitimiser of external war."

The borders of the states had been drawn, and the stage was set for a new era of international relations. However, rather than solving war, the new order seemed to create the parameters for it. The treaty was signed in the midst of the English Civil Wars. Within a few years, England and the Dutch Republic went to war. Not long after, England went to war with France. By the end of the 1600s, Europe had fallen back into a near-perpetual state of global conflict that would persist until the present day.

European peace was, by and large, world peace, while European wars had been world wars and had been so since the eighteenth century (the socalled 'First' World War was in fact about the sixth).

Howard ends the book on a pessimistic note.

The West continues to breed its own conflicts. Western societies may now all be peacefully bourgeois; but bourgeois society is boring... So although it is tempting to believe that as the international bourgeois community extends its influence a new and stable world order will gradually come into being, we would be unwise to expect anything of the kind. This was what Norman Angell and others believed in 1914: war had become so irrational a means of settling disputes that sensible people would never again fight one. But alas, they did.

Howard is a capitalist realist. He assumes that liberalism is the only natural order, and so he ascribes discontentment to "boredom," rather than dissent. This feels like a strange oversight, given that he also argues that the state was an invention of princes to wage self-serving wars at the expense of a subjugated populace. If that's true, it also seems natural that the populace might push back sometimes.

Howard's whole view falls quite cleanly into a mainstream narrative of social progress, viewing human history as a march from dirty prehistory to an enlightened future. Nonetheless, his summary offers a useful synopsis of war.

When I picked up the book, it was still clean with a pristine spine — evidently never read. Inside, I found a bookmark — the book's receipt. It was purchased on the fifth of January, 2004, at the Blackwells in Oxford — incidentally, another great bookstore where I picked up a few classics. The receipt reveals that the original purchaser also picked up two textbooks on politics and Islam, looking very much like the reading list for a university class. I imagine this Oxford alum moving to Glasgow, maybe for a masters at the University of Glasgow. And, eventually, dropping off some old textbooks at the Oxfam bookstore, spines unbroken — apparently unenlightened by Howard's tour of military history.

I thought often about Mary Queen of Scots as I walked around her namesake park. I feel a warmth toward her. She was obviously a fierce leader, but she was also a wealthy noble who sought power for her own gain (she repeatedly caused problems by claiming the throne of England, which belonged to her cousin Elizabeth). Elizabeth and Mary were members of the first generation of post-reformation leaders, and they grappled with the question of governance in that new era. They both ushered in the dawning era of perpetual warfare — which we are still puzzling about in university classes and books and long walks today. They both bucked the image of rulers as male warriors. And they both navigated impossible, torturous situations to do what they thought best. In a way, they seem emblematic of the forever war.