Ride of the Second Horseman: The Birth and Death of War

by Robert L. O'Connell

Book Overview

"Accurst be he that first invented war," wrote Christopher Marlowe--a declaration that most of us would take as a literary, not literal, construction. But in this sweeping overview of the rise of civilization, Robert O'Connell finds that war is indeed an invention--an institution that arose due to very specific historical circumstances, an institution that now verges on extinction.
In Ride of the Second Horseman, O'Connell probes the distant human...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195119207
• ISBN13: 9780195119206
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Complementary readings to O'Connell's book

There are already some good reviews, so I will only suggest reading the following books on war in addition to O'Connell's: a) "War in human civilization" by Azar Gat; b) "War before Civilization. The Myth of the Peaceful Savage", by Lawrence Keeley; c) "How War Began" by Keith F. Otterbein; d) "War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires" by Peter Turchin; and e) "War and the Law of Nations: A General History" by Stephen Neff.

An excellent synthesis of disciplines

This book greatly impressed me with its synthesis of recent evolutionary theory, anthropology, and history. It goes far beyond earlier histories of the genesis of war, presenting a cogent overall hypothesis: that a culture's means of obtaining food determined the character of it conception warfare. He shows how China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mexico, and Peru all developed different notions of warfare that arose directly from their agricultural economies. This book has much in common with Jared Diamond's magnificent Guns, Germs, and Steel. I wish that it enjoyed more of the latter's commercial success.