Michael Bryant - A World History of War Crimes: From Antiquity to the Present

For Shirley Crowe and Brenda Sparks,
The best of all aunts

Charcoal images of four horses drawn on the wall of the Chauvet Cave in southern France

Ashurnasirpal II hunting lions

Basalt stele of Hummurabi talking with Marduk

The Narmer Palette

Panel from funerary chest, tomb of King Tutankhamen

Panel from the same funerary chest, depicting King Tutankhamen hunting gazelles

Five figures of Tlaloc appearing in the Codex Borgia

The Techcatl, or Aztex sacrifice altar

Xipe Totec mask, the flayed god

Three Sioux Indians on horseback

An Arikara village on the Missouri River

Map of the initial nations of the Iroquois Confederacy

Puebloan Granaries at Nankoweap

Painting of Pookongahoya, one of the twin war gods of Hopi myth

Tillys siege of Magdeburg

Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, Third Duke of Alba

Ovandos massacre of Queen Anacoana and her people on Hispaniola

Attack of Cortes on the Quetzalcoatl temple in Cholula

Qumarkaj, capital of the Quiche Mayan kingdom

Walter Devereux, First Earl of Essex

Engraving depicting the attack by Massachusetts Bay Colony and its Mohegan allies on the Pequot village

Destruction of the Pequot village by Connecticut Militiamen and their Indian allies

Cotton Mather, American Puritan Minister

Colonial Village of Brookfield Massachusetts burnt by Native Americans during King Philips War

Helmuth von Moltke, chief of the Prussian General Staff

Bushwhacker attack on Lawrence, Kansas

Francis Lieber

Nazi defendants sitting on the dock at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg

Alfred Jodl on the witness stand

Judges presiding over the International military tribunal at Nuremberg

Defendants in the dock at the American Einsatzgruppen trial in Nuremberg, Germany

Defendants in the dock at the American Medical trial in Nuremberg, Germany

General Tomoyuki Yamashita and staff surrendering to the Americans in northern Luzon, Philippines

Dehumanization of the enemy: the skull of a Japanese soldier adorns a makeshift sign on the atoll of Tarawa298

A sacred murder: Phinehas impaling Zimri and Cozbi

A giant Buddha image at Bamyan, Afghanistan

Two women walk past the gaping cavity in which one of the Buddhas of Bamyan was housed

The American destroyer the USS Colebeing towed from the port city of Aden, Yemen

The devastating aftermath of a suicide car bombing in Baghdad, Iraq

Results of a suicide truck bombing on the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, Iraq

When Bloomsbury approached me a couple years ago about doing a second edition of this book, my reaction was excitement mixed with trepidation. On the one hand, I was thrilled by the prospect of adding new materials to a book that had done little more than scratch the surface of an enormously complex subject. On the other, I blanched when confronted by the challenges of such an undertaking. The very topic of the bookthe human species efforts over millennia to normalize warfare, to bring the business of fighting and killing into alignment with cultural conceptions of how the world works or should workseemed to me to require a writer far more talented than myself. The subject demanded a Homer, Tolstoy or Melville to tell humankinds story of organized violence in its infinite richness. It should be painted, as Booth Tarkington said of a book by Charles Fort, with a brush dipped in earthquake and eclipse. Shaking off my reservations, I reasoned that, having already written a first edition, I could only improve my history with publication of a second.

If there is an analytical perspective holding this book together, it is the view that rule-based limitations on warfare become explicitly humanitarian only in the nineeenth century, and that before this time the limitations imposed on waron both its declaration and the conduct of its participantswere largely determined by cosmo-religious belief systems. I had arrived at the realization that contemporary scholarship underrated the degree to which religion had affected the Law of War. Skewed, perhaps, by the sensible Enlightenment position that we are essentially rational rather than religious, and convinced that religion would eventually dissipate like morning mist in the scorching rays of reasons sun, modern intellectuals had discounted the power of religious belief in human psychology. When the repressed returned it exacted a heavy price for this miscalculation.