Acclaimed historian and military expert Gwynne Dyer tells the story of war from its earliest origins up to the present age of atom bombs and algorithms. Dyer chronicles the advent of warfare in the first cities; the rise of inequality and tyranny as humans multiply; the thousand-year classical era of combat until the firearm and the Thirty Years' War, which changed everything. He traces how the brief interlude of limited war before the popular revolutions of the eighteenth century ushered in "total war