Introduction

Just a brief glance through the contemporary textbooks that narrate events over the last 2,000 years of human history would show that if there are any near universal processes that have shaped our global past, these must have been collective violence and social exclusion. While it is certainly true that much of early historiography is full of overblown descriptions of imperial power, embellished portrayals of social hierarchies and inflated narratives of battlefield deaths, there is no doubt that violence and inequalities were prevalent for most of recorded human history. Notwithstanding this fact, contemporary sociology has ignored and, for the most part, continues to ignore, the relationships between organised violence and social hierarchies. Although social stratification is one of the most extensively studied topics in sociology, an overwhelming body of empirical research and theorising in this field has focused exclusively on social inequalities between people in times of peace. Rather than looking at warfare and organised coercion sociologists were preoccupied with the role economic and cultural forces such as capitalism, globalisation, individual self-interests, social norms and discourses play in generating social inequalities. However, this chapter starts from the proposition that since, as demonstrated later in the chapter, social stratification originated in warfare and violence, it cannot be properly explained without tackling this inherent link between the two. Moreover, I argue that despite its apparent invisibility in the modern age, organised violence remains one of the most important factors in the maintenance and proliferation of social inequalities.