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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7400919" data-attributes="member: 4937">This theory reminds me of the 'all wars are religious' theory, in that you can sort of sustain it by providing a couple of examples if you don't squint too closely, but as soon as you list out every war and start checking it off and looking closely at the causes, the theory starts looking absurd.   The Civil War wasn't fought over population pressure.   The American Revolution wasn't fought over population pressure.   If we listed out the all the armed conflicts in the world since 1800, most of them would not be fought over population pressure.Population pressure can contribute to a war being fought and it is certainly the reason that stone age tribal bands of hunter-gathers go to war but it's not the singular explanation for all wars.And you'll notice that I gave myself a bit of an out in that I didn't actually say all wars had an ideological basis; I said that all great wars have an ideological basis (or I could have  just as well said a cultural basis, because IMO that amounts to much the same thing).  Wars with only an economic basis tend to be more limited in scale.As for prosperity, nothing in history is more aggressive than a newly prosperous nation.  Newly prosperous Republics tend to be particularly bad.</blockquote>