Abstract
A war historian studies the history of war: no one will quibble with that definition. To say that a peace historian studies the history of peace raises more difficult questions. We may disregard the objection of those who believe that peace is merely the absence of war and that consequently the peace historian has very little to work on. All the contributors to this volume, at least, believe that peace is a rich and varied subject and that whole tracts of the subject have yet to be fully explored. We may also resist the criticism that peace historians risk compromising their integrity by becoming advocates of peace. As a generalization, this is no more true than to say that war historians are all advocates of war. Yet the real question for peace historians, and one which complicates the definition of ‘peace history’, is this: to what extent should peace historians confine themselves to the study of peace advocacy and argument in history, and how far should they engage directly with the dominant (and peace-averse) historical narrative of war? Indeed, the subject has been defined in both of these ways. The first task is vast in itself, given the lack of coverage and low visibility of peace advocacy and peace thinking in most orthodox histories. The efforts of the peace societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, still do not feature as prominently as they should in most diplomatic histories of the run-up to the First World War — and are sometimes ignored altogether.
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Notes
Charles Chatfield and Peter van den Dungen, Peace Movements and Political Cultures (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), preface.
Charles Chatfield, ed. Peace Movements in America (New York: Schocken, 1973), xix–xxx.
David S. Patterson, ‘Commentary: The Dangers of Balkanization’, Peace and Change 20, no. 1 (1995): 79. This special issue of the journal marked an important stage in the discussion of peace history.
Pitirim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics: Volume III (New York: American Book Co., 1937);
Lewis F. Richardson, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, eds Quincy Wright and C. C. Lienau (Pacific Grove: Boxwood Press, 1960).
Matthew Melko and Richard Weigel, Peace in the Ancient World (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 1981).
Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, From War to Peace (London: Cape, 1959).
Kenneth Boulding, ‘Peace and the Evolutionary Process’, in The Quest for Peace: Transcending Collective Violence and War among Societies, Cultures and States, ed. Raimo Vayrynen (London: Sage, 1987), 54.
Azar Gat, War in Human Civilisation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (London: Allen Lane, 2011).
Thomas Gregor, ed., A Natural History of Peace (Nashville: Vanderbilt, 1996).
Anja Hartmann and Beatrice Heuser, War, Peace and World Orders in European History (London: Routledge, 2001), xiii.
(George Chapman), Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad and the Odyssey, ed. Jan Parker (Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 2000);
Michael Sage, Warfare in Ancient Greece: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1996), 129.
Simon Hornblower, ‘Warfare in Ancient Literature: The Paradox of War’, in The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare: Volume I, eds Philip Sabin and Hans van Wees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22.
G. Zampaglione, L’Idea della pace nel mondo antico (Turin: Eri-Edizioni Rai, 1967), translated by R. Dunn, The Idea of Peace in Antiquity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973).
See also Nathan Spiegel, War and Peace in Classical Greek Literature (Jerusalem: Mount Scopus Publications, 1990).
Oliver Taplin, ‘The Shield of Achilles within the “Iliad”’, Greece & Rome 27, no. 1 (April 1980), 4.
See also Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles (London: Faber, 2011),
and my own discussion of the Iliad in John Gittings, The Glorious Art of Peace (Oxford: OUP, 2012), 40–47.
Lawrence A. Tritle, From Melos to My Lai: War and Survival (London: Routledge, 2000), 44–45.
John K. Fairbank, ‘Introduction: Varieties of the Chinese Military Experience’, in Chinese Ways in Warfare, eds John K. Fairbank and Frank Kierman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). Fairbank’s approach is shared by Joseph Needham in his introduction to Science and Civilisation in China: Volume V (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6.
Hans van Wees, ‘Peace and the Society of States in Antiquity’, in Peace, War and Gender from Antiquity to the Present: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, eds Jost Dülffer and Robert Frank (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2009), 26.
A. C. F. Beales, The History of Peace (New York: Dial Press, 1931);
John C. Cadoux, The Early Christian Attitude to War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1919).
Robert P. Adams, The Better Part of Valor (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962);
Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle 1636–1936 (Boston: Canner & Co., 1959);
Peter Brock, Pacifism in Europe to 1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991);
Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945 (London: Oxford University Press, 1980);
Cecelia Lynch, Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1999).
Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World before the War 1890–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1962); A. J. P. Taylor ignored altogether the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 in his classic The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918.
See especially Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Study of Protest and Patriotism in the First World War (London: Pan, 2011);
Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War (London: Profile, 2013);
Douglas Newton, The Darkest Days: The Truth behind Britain’s Rush to War, 1914 (London: Verso, 2014).
Blanche Wiesen Cook, Charles Chatfield and Sandi Cooper, The Garland Library of War and Peace [introductory catalogue] (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 9–10.
See also Charles Chatfield and Ruzanna Ilukhina, Peace/Mir: An Anthology of Historic Alternatives to War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994);
David P. Barash, ed. Approaches to Peace: A Reader in Peace Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Nigel J. Young, ed. Oxford International Encyclopedia of Peace, 4 volumes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Merle Curti, Bryan and World Peace (Northampton: Smith College Studies);
Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636–1936 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., [c1936]).
Quoted in Jane Addams, Jane Addams: A Centennial Reader (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 251.
Philip Noel-Baker, The Arms Race (London: John Calder, 1959).
Charles W. Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958).
John Nef, War and Human Progress: An Essay on the Rise of Industrial Civilization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950);
Seymour Melman, The Demilitarized Society: Disarmament & Conversion (Montreal: Harvest House, 1988).
Lawrence Wittner, The Struggle against the Bomb: Volumes I–III (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993–2003);
Lawrence Wittner, Confronting the Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009).
Richard A. Falk, The Costs of War: International Order, the UN, and World Order after Iraq (London: Routledge, 2008);
Andrew Fiala, The Just War Myth (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).
Peter Wallensteen, ‘The Origins of Peace Research’, in Peace Research: Achievements and Challenges, ed. Peter Wallensteen (Boulder: Westview, 1988), 1.
See the essays by Johan Galtung, April Carter and David Cortright in Why the Cold War Ended: A Range of Interpretations, eds Ralph Summy and Michael Salla (Westport: Greenwood, 1995). For British policy, the work of Mark Curtis, including The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (London: Zed Press, 1995), is significant.
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Gittings, J. (2016). Peace in History. In: Richmond, O.P., Pogodda, S., Ramović, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-40761-0_2
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