“We simply don’t have any hope of stopping war unless we understand more about it”

Ellie Cawthorne: Your new book examines the close and often complex relationship between wars and societies throughout history. What do we need to understand about that relationship?

Margaret MacMillan: There’s long been a sense that military history is something apart. It’s toys for boys – all about guns, battles and strategy. Of course, that’s part of it. But we need to understand that war also has a much more intimate relationship with human society. I see the relationship between war and societies as a two-way thing, and in my book I wanted to give a sense of that long intertwining. It’s very difficult to untangle which comes first.

For too long we’ve wanted to avert our eyes from war, viewing it as something distasteful. But we don’t do ourselves any service by that. We need to understand war. I don’t think we have any hope of stopping it, in fact, unless we understand more about it.

How has war impacted on societies throughout history?

Big, demanding, expensive wars have tended to compress the poles of society. In fact, there are those who argue that the greatest times of social equality have been in the face of great catastrophes. Both wages and rates of taxation generally go up in war, which means that those who have a lot give a lot, while those who are at the bottom often come out better. You saw this in the 20th century – taxes went up, largely because of