Author Description

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-- Provided By Publisher.