Peace: A World History by Antony Adolf

Reviewed by Scott Bowen

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4125-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4126-3(pb)
Polity Press, 2009

Antony Adolf, an independent scholar with a background as varied as history’s many points of view, opens Peace: A World History with the following citation by Ivan Bloch: “…from the year 1496 BC to 1861 of our era, that is, in a cycle of 3357 years, there were but 227 years of peace and 3130 years of war…”

Such an inauspicious beginning to a work focused on the study of peace seems as daunting and antithetical as peace itself. In light of these figures, the idea of peace appears to be more of a quietly cooling ember of hope than a bastion of light for humanity. Adolf’s scholarship however, objects. With history as his backdrop, he reminds us that even in humanity’s infancy we developed a biological need for peace, and thus violence in general and war specifically became evolutionary mutations during the development of the human condition.

Given the absence of developed reasoning and language skills in primates—with whom we otherwise share 99 percent of our genes—their capacity for peaceful coexistence most likely has a biological basis, reinforced by environmental adaptation and enculturation processes necessary to pass on peace instincts from one generation to the next.

Adolf goes on to make hypotheses that synchronize our physical evolution with our humanistic development of war and peace respectively. “Walking upright, made possible by locking knees and a specific spinal structure, may arguably be the earliest origins of organized warfare as we know it…” By making such an argument, Adolf embraces an apparent dichotomy between evolution’s genetic chemistry for humanity’s communal benevolence and an anatomical design in preparation for conflict.

And as for peace, Adolf believes that:

...[P]rimates are mostly nomadic and use their larger teeth for protection and as safeguards against changing food sources. Homo habilis’ smaller molars are ineffective ways to threaten and masticate food from unpredictable sources. Such a pronounced adaptation implies that social relations and food sources had become and/or were made more stable and secure.

As Adolf locks humanity in place with these bio-genetic foundations, he moves us forward through time, beginning with the early agricultural and proto-superpower civilizations of Mesopotamia, to the dawn of international state craft with the rise of Egypt and her Western neighbors, the Greeks and Romans. With stark neutrality, he unfolds the development of religions and as they evolve from personal and/or clan effigies of early man’s mysterious surroundings to a pervading impetus to war.

Through this historical narrative, mankind also reaches a new level of peace-making. The evidence lies in historical phenomena such as the Age of Reason, Jesus, the Buddha, and Mahatma Gandhi’s (among others) non-violent movements, and other philosophies that engendered conquest by words rather than by the sword. In the last century, Winston Churchill summed up this ideal through the observation that “…the empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” Adolf continues,

Replacing armed conflict with debate, preventing violence by compromise, and expediting reconciliation through agreement, Sophistic abilities fetched a high price in turbulent Athens. But the open, critical dialog Protagoras practiced has proved invaluable to peace and conflict resolution throughout history.

Spanning millennia, Antony Adolf explores—from the Fertile Crescent, to the Pax Romana, the One Hundred School in China’s dynastic period, to our present, global society—mankind’s pulse rate between times of war and a seemingly elusive peace, oppressive or otherwise. Coincidentally, it seems the proportion of scholarly material dedicated to the history of warfare and that of peace is as equally distributed as Ivan Bloch’s static of 227 years of peace and 3130 of war. With Peace: A World History, Adolf seeks to tip the scale.

In an unbiased historical context and accessible discourse, Adolf’s analysis steadily makes a case not only for peace being an imperative for mankind’s survival, but one achievable through dedication and a now well-lit precedent.

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