Sydney Ideas presents

Civil War from Rome to Iraq

David Armitage

6:30 pm, Thursday 24 July
Tickets: $20/$15 concession
Bookings: Seymour Online Box Office 9351 7940

For much of recorded history, civil war has been both the most fearsome and the most frequent form of human conflict. No other kind of collective violence parallels its impact in lives lost, communities shattered and histories defined. The Greeks suffered it but the Romans gave it a name. Roman history, law and literature formed the idea of civil war until modern Europeans and Americans endured the national traumas that would ever after scar their memories. The world’s great revolutions – American, French, Chinese, Russian – were all, at heart, civil wars; the period 1914-45 has been called a European Civil War; to some the Cold War was a global civil war. For the victims of the almost 150 civil wars around the world since 1945, the much-touted Long Peace among states was a Long Agony of conflict within their states. There are now no formally declared wars between states anywhere in the world, but over 30 civil wars are in progress at an estimated cost of $100 billion a year – or twice the annual global budget for aid to developing countries. This lecture traces the meaning and impact of the idea of civil war from republican Rome to the Republican invasion of Iraq to offer a vital historical dimension to the ongoing discussion of this destructive but distinctively human form of inhumanity.

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University where he teaches international history and intellectual history. He was educated at Cambridge University and Princeton University and taught for eleven years at Columbia University before moving to Harvard in 2004. A prize-winning teacher and writer, he has lectured on five continents and has held visiting fellowships in Britain, the United States, and Australia. Among his nine books to date are The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), which won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award, and The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007), which was chosen as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. In 2006, the National Maritime Museum in London awarded him its Caird Medal for conspicuously important work... of a nature that involves communicating with the public.

David Armitage is a guest of the University of Sydney's International Development Program Fund and SOPHI , Faculty of Arts.