Now let's try a thought experiment. What if that same tribal rate were true for modern states? In this purely hypothetical situation, we would be seeing 165 thousand Canadian deaths every year from warfare alone, 2.5 million deaths in the European Union, and 6.6 million in China! Clearly nothing like this is happening.
Here is another way of thinking about it: Richard Rhodes once calculated that warfare of all kinds caused 100 million military and civilian deaths worldwide during the 20th century. But if the entire world had been suffering war-related deaths at the tribal rate then, as Keeley points out, there would have been two billion deaths due to war over the course of that war-torn century.
The dramatic decline in the risk of death due to warfare during the last two or so millennia demands for explanation. There are numerous theories, of course, but essentially all of them include the idea that the growth of states has acted to decrease the risk of death due to warfare — despite the well-documented propensity of states to engage in war, and the staggering growth in military firepower
http://tqe.quaker.org/2007/TQE159-EN-War.html
