Sorry, we don't allow throughout history questions. These tend to produce threads which are collections of trivia, not the in-depth discussions about a particular topic we're looking for. If you have a specific question about a historical event or period or person, please feel free to re-compose your question and submit it again. Alternatively, questions of this type can be directed to more appropriate subreddits, such as /r/history or /r/askhistory.

This may be more suited for /r/history as it's far more open ended than can be reasonably put by one person or one solid post. It's less "ask an expert about a targeted question" (ie: here) and more "a discussion/conversation among a common group of people" (there). It won't be as rigorous as an answer but then again I'm finding it hard to create a very rigorous answer to this question without writing 1500 pages and selling it for $39.99.

To just say "why do people go to war" is just...hard. Hell just writing "Why did Europeans go to war" could reasonably take up an entire book. Hell I'm sure "Why the Austrians have gone to war" could take up those 1500 pages very reasonably. Different ethnic groups, cultures, religious groups, and whatever other brush you want to paint people with have gone to wars for many different reasons over thousands of years. How can we meaningfully put Sengoku-era Japanese reasons for war, 8th century Frankish reasons for war, Hittite reasons for war in 1600 BCE , and 19th century German reasons for war in the same discussion? You see where I'm going with this?