A long-standing debate about most of human history lies between those that argue that the fate of nations is shaped by deep structural forces- economic, political etc.- and those who credit individuals as being agents of change. In this book project, we make progress on these questions by making the case that there is a common, though often hidden, structure to who has agency. We argue that individuals, particularly those from non-elite backgrounds, gain agency when they acquire local monopolies over a particular set of skills or credentials that allow them to coordinate others within novel hierarchical networks. And throughout human history, a common environment in which both of these traits emerge is in times of war and external threat, when elites have little option but to allow non-elite groups to acquire organizational skills and heroic credentials and to develop such networks.
We argue that such wars not only create opportunities for individuals to gain credentials as heroes– those who have demonstrated their willingness to engage in extreme sacrifice for others – but also often leads an otherwise unlikely set of non-elite individuals to learn how to fight and organize. Thus the wars do not often end when the history textbooks say that they do: veterans with heroic credentials and organizational skills are often specially placed, should they so choose, to fight for new causes when they return home. Further, we can predict when these new struggles are likely to lead to strengthened democracy and the spread of freedoms for all, and when they instead can lead to civil conflict, ethnic cleansing, revolution and repression instead.
Yet, these challenges born of war have also often provided the opportunity for another set of people with agency– political and economic problem-solvers– to apply novel financial and organizational ideas to mitigating such conflicts and building new nations. Thus understanding the hidden structure to agency can help us understand both how political freedoms and democracy emerged, how our democracies may die, and what we can still do about it.
To provide evidence for this structure we draw upon natural experiments across places and moments of history, including the Partition of South Asia (see Does Combat Experience Foster Organizational Skill below), the American and French Revolutions (see Revolutionary Contagion), World War I and II (see Heroes and Villains), the English Civil War and the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Meiji Japan, the Mau Mau rebellion, among others. We conclude by evaluating the links to extremist movements and democratic backsliding around our contemporary world.
