Requiems for forgotten wars

[Sean Manning]

This thread has wandered far afield, but I'll chime in anyway. There is evidence that the western world has made progress away from war, but it also seemed so in the post-Napoleonic pre-WWI century from 1815-1914. In fact, European powers fought many wars in that period, they just didn't fight them on a big scale in Europe.

But between 1854 and 1871, there were a series of bloody wars involving all of the European powers at least once (Crimean, Austro-Sicilian, Austro-Prussian, Franco-Prussian). Each involved tens of thousands of dead and altered the international pecking order, so while they weren't on the scale of the Seven Years' War they were still major wars. There was another string of wars among small powers as the European half of the Ottoman empire broke up, and on the fringes of the great powers around 1900 (the Boer War, Spanish-American War, and Russo-Japanese War plus a few scares like Fashoda). So the recent peace in Europe and the Americas is still unusual ... the question being whether that's just luck or reflects structural changes. Its an interesting question, but you're right that trying to falsify either theory is probably beyond the scope of a thread on music