Historians relate the totalizing of war to long-term historical transformations. Whereas some stress the impact of commercialization and industrialization, others refer to claims for and the spread of mass participation in politics. This structuralist argument ignores, however, a cultural shift that prepared the ground, namely, an increasing readiness for violence against “others.”

Movements claiming missionary goals, in particular, tend to commit unrestricted violence against those on the outside or in the way. Medieval crusades established the precedent. But during the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the opposing factions intensified tremendously the brutality used against foes of their respective “good cause.” Groups that set out from European “centers” to colonize “the rest of the world,” moreover, displayed similar attitudes. They promised religious and cultural redemption. In practice, however, the colonizers resorted to mutilating or killing their audiences, at least when the latter exhibited skepticism toward the new order of things. Colonialist assumptions about the sociocultural inequality of peoples resonated with appeals to “the national,” which had been voiced in Europe since the late eighteenth century. As a consequence, religion was not the only basis on which the exclusion, and sometimes the wholesale murder, of others was legitimized.