Isn't it odd that so much of our history revolves around war?
It does look that way at first blush, but when you think about it--or when _I_ think about it, it comes out differently.
History is an attempt to see the underlying bones of the flow of past events that led to the present.
Now, events significant enough for the student of history to link up with events prior and subsequent to build a shape of history are often unseen, often slow-developing, that move under the earth, so to speak,(ALERT! metaphor coming!) building economic or religious or cultural or business or population pressures that come into contact with other incipient movements.
At some point those pressures coming together create such adversarial strains that they MUST be relieved, often by force. A war is the upshot. The really significant thing that happened is often not the war but the movements, the pressures that clash and result in the war.
Those sometimes "subterranean" movements are a sort of tectonic plate, moving inexorably, often irresistably. When in a clash with other tectonic movements, the strain gets to a point where it must, it WILL be explosively released, in earthquakes, tsunamis. and the like.
When a historian looks at the events of the past, he clearly sees the "earthquakes", the "tsunamis" we call wars, but the really important flow of events is often not so obvious, and the tendency is to write about the visible event, the war. But the history doesn't really "revolve around" the war, but the larger changes that lurk deep down. The wars are merely the manifestation of history happening.