International subsystems, 1649-1963

Michael Haas, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research

There are three distinct sets of data related to this study of the structure of the international system and its consequences for national war behavior. In one set, twenty-one subsystems constitute the unit of observation, with variables recording the number of members, the number of wars, alliances, and polarity of each subsystem. In a second set of 457 cases, each member of each subsystem is the unit observed, and national characteristics are reported. A third set reports the war behavior of each of the twenty-one subsystems, with one record for each war as reported in four major studies of war participation: Lewis F. Richardson, Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, Quincy Wright, A Study of War, Pitrim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics, and J. David Singer and Melvin Small, Wages of War.