"The purpose of an introduction is to tell the reader what a book is and is not about. This book has three goals. One is to modify an interpretation of economic and political development constructed by North, Wallis, and Weingast (2009) that focuses on the emergence of limited and open access societies. Their interpretation already has an explanation for domestic violence; we want to alter it so that it can also account for international violence. We also think it needs more attention to what drives developmental change. As it stands now, their discussion hints strongly about causation but prefers to keep such issues as exogenous to its argument. We prefer to endogenize at least some part of the causal drivers of greater pacification. However, there are major limits to the extent to which we can test this macro-theory currently. More ambitious testing will come with time. In the interim, our second goal is to demonstrate the role of industrialization and movement away from an agrarian political economy, one of the primary causal drivers of economic and political development, in reducing interstate violence. We do this by delineating the reasons why and how "de-agrarianization" is critical to understanding contemporary war and peace issues. We do this in part by focusing on four of the main peace arguments: the democratic peace, the capitalist peace, economic interdependence, and boundary settlement or territorial peace. All four are linked to the transition from the dominance of agricultural strategies to the dominance of industrial strategies in various ways. We also think that they are not really explanatory competitors but rather complementary interpretations that choose to focus on different dimensions of pacification phenomena. This point of view becomes clearer when we compare the explanatory power of each of the four alternatives in the context of an indicator of de-agrarianization. Most of the alternatives survive these empirical tests but at much reduced explanatory power while the strength of the transition in macro-economic strategies fares quite well at predicting decreases in international conflict"--
Many debates in interstate conflict and peace research address an important yet complex question: how, and to what degree, are the behavior of states and their relationships among one another fundamentally changing? The period after 1945 has seen a significant decline in the degree and intensity of warfare among states. While civil wars remain common, numerous scholars argue that a "long peace" has taken hold in which militarized interstate violence has become less common. Some argue that war has become obsolete as cultural attitudes toward war have changed, while others emphasize cognitive shifts that have reduced overall levels of human violence. Others favor material factors that have altered the historical net benefit of warfare among states.
In Piecing Together the Peaces, Alexander K. Antony and William R. Thompson provide a novel explanation for how peace took hold in the international system and why state behavior drastically changed. According to the standard line of reasoning, states need only democratize, liberalize their trade, modernize their economic culture, or choose to forego territorial pursuits to reach peace with another state. As Antony and Thompson argue, most, if not all, of the processes put forward as causes of modern peace are highly intertwined with the macro-process of industrialization. Marshaling a long-view perspective, they show how the introduction of mechanization into production significantly altered nearly all aspects of economic and social life, including the costs and benefits of warfare. Rather than outlining a universal pathway through which states can arrive at peace, Antony and Thompson make the case that industrialization provides the starting point from which we can begin to unpack the transformation in conflict propensities among certain states. A bold challenge to the conventional wisdom that dominates interstate peace research, Piecing Together the Peaces shows that industrialization serves as the foundation for all other factors and processes fueling interstate peace.
In Piecing Together the Peaces, Alexander K. Antony and William R. Thompson provide a novel explanation for how peace took hold in the international system and why state behavior drastically changed. According to the standard line of reasoning, states need only democratize, liberalize their trade, modernize their economic culture, or choose to forego territorial pursuits to reach peace with another state. A bold challenge to the conventional wisdom that dominates interstate peace research, Antony and Thompson make the case that industrialization provides the starting point from which we can begin to unpack the transformation in conflict propensities among certain states.
