Ian Matthew Morris (born 27 January 1960) is a British historian and archaeologist who is the Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford University.

[11] Morris plans to develop his views on the first-millennium BC transformations (the shift from religion-based power to bureaucratic and military one, and the rise of Axial thought) in his new book.

It provides details of the evidence and the statistical methods used by Morris to construct the social development index that he used in Why the West Rules to compare long-term Eastern and Western history.

: Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US and Profile Books in Britain in April 2014.

[18][19][20][21] Morris argues that there is enough evidence to trace the history of violence across many thousands of years and that a startling fact emerges.

For all of its horrors, over the last 10,000 years, war has made the world safer and richer, as it is virtually the only way that people have found to create large, internally pacified societies that then drive down the rate of violent death.

The German translation of the book, Krieg: Wozu er gut ist, was published by Campus Verlag in October 2013.