JOHN HALSTEAD

This article originally appeared in the latest issue of Works in Progress, Issue 18. Read the full issue, including stories on the history of pineapples and Chinese urbanism, on our website. We are naturally a highly violent species with a thin veneer of civilization that masks a brutal proclivity for violence – or so many people think. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that human life without government is ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.

Life in the state of nature was pleasant, cooperative and longer than you might think. Most of our ancestors avoided conflict. But this made them vulnerable to a few psychopaths.

35 Mins The Hanseatic League united merchants to bargain with kings, blockade cities, and even win wars. But when technology changed, defections began and the coalition fell apart. Today, we typically think of coalitions in the context of modern electoral politics. So it might be surprising that one of the greatest case studies in the history of coalitions is a community of medieval German merchants known as the Hansa.