Historians consider the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 not only to have put out the Wars of Religion but to have established the first version of the modern international order. Europe was now partitioned into sovereign states rather than being a crazy quilt of jurisdictions nominally overseen by the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. This Age of Sovereignty saw the ascendancy of states that were still linked to dynasties and religions but that really hung their prestige on their governments, territories, and commercial empires. It was this gradual consolidation of sovereign states (culminating a process that began well before 1648) that set off the two opposing trends that have emerged from every statistical study of war we have seen: wars were getting less frequent but more damaging.

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