WARFARE HAS BEEN one of the most significant forces to shape social relations throughout history. Although scholars still disagree about how old the institution of war is, there is a consensus that once it emerged on the historical scene warfare radically transformed the patterns of social stratification, political institutions and polity formation, economic relations and forms of production, religious structures, gender divisions, and citizenship rights. Wars have also framed the dynamics of collective attachments. In this chapter, I briefly explore the relationship between war and peoplehood through time. The chapter focuses on the debates within historical sociology, exploring the following questions: How have wars shaped collective identities over long periods of time? When do cultural attachments attain political meaning and what role do violent conflicts play in this process? What are the key mechanisms that make the relationship between war and peoplehood possible and sociologically meaningful? The first part of the chapter offers a critical review of the debate on the relationship between war and nationalism in modern and premodern contexts. I identify the strengths and weaknesses of the two leading perspectives (the modernist and the ethno-symbolist) and then make a case for an alternative approach. In the second part of the chapter, I provide the contours of the sociological longue durée perspective which attempts to move beyond the modernist versus ethno-symbolist debate. In addition to articulating the key propositions of this perspective, I also illustrate its heuristic relevance by briefly exploring several examples from the Middle Ages.

War and Cultural Difference: The Classical and Contemporary Debates

One of the key questions that preoccupied late nineteenth and early twentieth-century social science was: Are cultural differences the cause or the consequence of violent conflicts? The popularity of Darwinian and Lamarckian biology at the time deeply influenced social thought and many scholars were adamant that shared cultural and biological mores are the root cause of organized violence. Hence, the leading fin de siècle sociologists and social psychologists such as Ludwig Gumplowitz, Gustav Ratzenhofer, William McDougall, William James, and Benjamin Kidd argued that the cultural and biological differences between groups ultimately lead to conflict.