War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.-- Henry Maine

In the early 1950s, two eminent British scholars reflected on the history of war and ventured predictions on what the world should expect in the years to come. One of them was Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), perhaps the most famous historian of the 20th century. Toynbee had served in the British Foreign Office during both world wars, had represented the government at the peace conferences following each one, and had been chronicling the rise and fall of twenty-six civilizations in his monumental twelve-volume work A Study of History. The patterns of history, as he saw them in 1950, did not leave him optimistic:

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