new military history

Old, Unhappy, Far-Off Things: The New Military History of EuropeArmies and Societies in Europe, 1494-1789 by André Corvisier; War and Society inRenaissance Europe, 1450-1620 by John R. Hale; War and Society in Europe, 1618-1789 byMatthew Anderson; War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770-1870 by Geoffrey Best;War and Society in Europe, 1870-1970 by Brian Bond; European Empires from Conquest toCollapse, 1815-1960 by Victor G. KiernanReview by: Torbjørn L. KnutsenJournal of Peace Research, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Mar., 1987), pp. 87-98Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/424148 .Accessed: 08/05/2012 04:56

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ISSN 0022-3433 Journal of Peace Research, vol. 24, no. 1, 1987

Review Essay

Old, Unhappy, Far-off Things: The New Military History of Europe* TORBJORN L. KNUTSEN International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, and Department of Political Science, Vanderbilt University

Military history has tended to emphasize politics, chronology, and great men. The narrative often represents attempts to analyze rulers and generals in order to understand the reasons behind their decisions. This traditional approach all too often descends to the level of 'a chronicle of one damn battle after another'. In recent years a 'New Military History' has emerged that eschews narration of events and is primarily interested in the social and institutional context of warfare. Its attention is not focused on battles, tactics, and weapons systems, but on social structures, military attitudes, relationships between officers and the rank-and-file, and on the interrelations between military and civil society. This essay adumbrates the background for this new historiography, reviews some recent volumes which seek to reinvestigate the military history of Europe and sketchily relates these books to the study of the modern world system.

1. The challenge to military history Guided by Leopold von Ranke's dictum to reconstruct the past 'as it really happened', traditional historians have been much concerned with protocolled processes of decisionmaking, notably with the well-chron- icled activities of monarchs, generals and politicians. Their understanding of Ranke's insistence on using only 'the purest and most immediate of documents' made them focus on state activities in general and on wars in particular (Iggers 1962).

At the turn of the century, many scholars opposed the predominance of the Rankean method with its bias toward battles, kings and state affairs. Franqois Simiand wrote with some contempt of its emphasis on individual events strung along a chronological thread. He criticized what he called the

'three idols of the tribe' of historians - the idols of the individual, of politics, and of chronology - suggesting that historians ought to apply more comparative methods and take more interest in long-term, secular trends.' Historians who took Simiand's criticism seriously changed their focus from means of destruction to means of production in their analysis of European History. They concerned themselves less with biography and decisionmaking and more with inter- action between economic classes, political power and social structures; less with single events and more with long-term trends. The 'New History' and the relativist revolts against traditional concerns stimulated a quest for new historical sources and new methods of investigation.

Military historians were particularly con- servative in both regards. When the early decades of this century saw a prolific growth of historical approaches, military historians stuck to their Rankean guns. The reasons for this conservatism may lie partly in the attitudes of its authors and partly in the sources they use. Traditional military historians must believe that battles decide things; that battles 'sway the fortunes of mankind' and 'have helped to make us what we are'. Exactly what battles decide, and how they shape man's fate, are questions

* A review of Andre Corvisier: Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494-1789. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979, ix-209 pp. John R. Hale: War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450-1620. London: Fontana, 1985, 285 pp. Matthew Anderson: War and Society in Europe, 1618-1789. London: Fontana, forthcoming. Geoffrey Best: War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770-1870. London: Fontana, 1982, 336pp. Brian Bond: War and Society in Europe, 1870-1970. London: Fontana, 1984, 256 pp. Victor G. Kiernan: European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815- 1960. London: Fontana, 1982, 285 pp. All the Fontana volumes are available in paperbacks.

88 Torbjorn L. Knutsen

that the individual historian is left free to decide for himself. 'It is a dispensation which whole squads of modern military historians have seized on to justify an endless, repeti- tive examination of battles which by no stretch of the imagination can be said to have done anything but to make the world worse.. ..' (Keegan 1983, p. 60).

They must also believe that battles are formative experiences in the lives of individual men; that war is a game of ultimate stakes, in which victories invite celebrations and defeats demand explanations. Military history is often written by practitioners - by winners as well as losers: by retired soldiers, former government officials and pensioned politicians. These authors are less concerned with debates on methods and sources than with telling a story 'wie es eigentlich gewesen'. Many of them are intimately familiar with the protocolled processes of decisionmaking behind the events; they may have ready access to the type of sources von Ranke recommended; and they may find a vocation in 'setting the record straight'.

Recently, several academic historians have returned to military history. They have been amazed by the richness of military archives and by the new light they shed not only on military history in a narrow sense but on society as a whole.

2. The new military history The single most influential application of these 'new' sources of military history is undoubtedly that of Andr6 Corvisier. He relied on massive official registers of military personnel to write his Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494-1789.

Violence was omnipresent in ancien regime society, writes Corvisier. Civil and military functions overlapped considerably and military values were largely accepted and emulated by members of society at large. By the eighteenth century, the traditionally close civil-military relations were changing in western parts of Europe. Military functions grew more specialized and were differ- entiated from civil society. Also, civil society grew weary of military values. The aristocracy still dominated the European offi-

cers' corps, although their impact was dwindling - in France only one nobleman in four served in the armed forces, and usually only very briefly at that.

Whereas the states in Western Europe developed a civilian emphasis, the opposite evolution took place in Eastern Europe. Here civil society was increasingly milita- rized. In Prussia and Russia active military service became a prerequisite of social prestige and made a military career attractive for the aristocracy. As a result, the military and civilian elites increasingly overlapped. This contrast between Eastern and Western Europe, roughly divided by the Elbe, blazes through Corvisier's account.

The social contrast between the officers' corps and the rank-and-file soldiers is another leitmotif in the book. Corvisier sets out to explore how the military forces of early modern Europe constituted a social macro-system in their own right. He examines the social composition of European armies; he discusses the social origins of the various strata of the military hierarchy; he investigates the various forms of military recruitment - feudal levy, conscription, vol- untary enlistment, and mercenary service - and relates them to the various strata of civil society.

Corvisier's analysis reveals that the new military history, too, has its share of tribal idols. His emphasis on the longue durde and his sensitivity towards social stratification mean that individual decisionmakers, military campaigns and single battles get short shrift. His attempt to define the extent to which the armies of different states formed a specific social macro-system leaves little room for traditional narration.

The English-speakinq world, too, has its new military historians. An increasing num- ber of English and American scholars have in recent years insisted on the importance of studying war and military affairs in their social context. Military forces exist in peace time as well as in war. They interact with civilian institutions in a multitude of ways and should be studied as part of the civil world they purport to serve. Many recent scholarly journals have taken up this challenge. Armed Forces and Society and War

The New Military History of Europe 89

and Society Newsletter are only two cases in point. In another reflection of this rising interest, Fontana has issued a series of paperbacks, the Fontana History of European War and Society, edited by Geoffrey Best. He writes in the preface to the series that 'war and society studies' began largely in reaction to traditional military history:

Sometimes sinking to uniforms, badges and buttons, it rarely rose above campaigns and battles; it viewed them from the professional soldier's angle; it tended to extract the fighting side of war from its total historical context; and it usually meant a view of an army, navy, or air force from within, little concerned about the nature of their connections with the society on whose behalf war was, nominally, being fought. Much might be learned from such books about the way an army did the job set for it and, especially from between the lines, about the way in which soldiers viewed themselves; little, however, about how soldiers got to be like that, and nothing at all about how armed forces fitted into, emerged from, and perhaps in their turn made impressions upon the societies to which they belonged (Best 1982, p. 7).

2.1 Hale on Renaissance wars 1450-1620 John R. Hale's War and Society in Ren- aissance Europe, 1450-1620, shows from its first pages how war was omnipresent in the High Middle Ages - a matter of 'violent housekeeping' in a society which took violence for granted. 'Peace', he writes, is a relatively modern phenomenon; during the Middle Ages, 'peace, overall peace, was a myth ... There was probably no single year throughout the period in which there was neither war nor occurrences that looked and felt remarkably like it.'

What Braudel refers to as the 'long sixteenth century' contained a series of far- reaching military developments. Among the most important ones was the introduction of firearms - artillery as well as portable guns - on a large scale. These changed the conditions and formations which affected the morale and the combat behavior of troops; they altered the equipment that soldiers wore and carried; they affected the nature of combatants' wounds, for they broke bones and led to the loss of limbs by gangrene; and they increased the costs of war.

During the Middle Ages, the superiority of the noble knight hinged on both technical

and social factors. Developed because of his mobility, endowed with large economic means and vast social prestige, he had for centuries enjoyed a virtual monopoly of military activity. But with the advent of firearms, the costs of combat were twisted out of rec- ognizable proportions: Guns enabled a simple footsoldier with little training to launch a small projectile from a great distance against a mounted knight, who was trained and equipped at staggering cost, and kill him.

The new weapons systems spelled the end to the primarily feudal institution of the noble man-at-arms. They brought about the advent of the footsoldier, put a new emphasis on the infantry and caused a rapid increase in the size of European armies. The advent of new military technology also lent a new professionalism to soldiering and helped draw a sharper division between military and civilian society.

The Italian Wars (1494-1525) are commonly viewed as the first 'modern' war because the participant armies consisted of the now traditional three branches - cavalry, artillery, and infantry - deployed in mutually supporting tactical combinations. During these wars, the cavalry component in every army was reduced, whereas the infantry component grew more numerous.

In spite of the rapid growth of infantry during the early part of the Renaissance, armies remained relatively small by later standards. When Charles VIII sought to assemble a fighting force of 20,000 men in 1491 for a campaign against Brittany, this was considered quite a large army. The major reasons for this smallness were, first, the growing expenses associated with the new warfare and, secondly, the difficulty in getting men to serve. Soldiers' pay was usually lower than that of unskilled laborers and tended to decline during the prolonged inflation of the sixteenth century. Those who served, did so for a variety of reasons. A few were driven by honor, some wanted to get away from poverty and drudgery at home, still some were pressed to serve while others fled from the law. But most of them served in the hope of becoming rich through sack and plunder.


More civilians would die than soldiers during the sacking and looting of towns, for combat accounted for only a small portion of the fatalities. During the siege of a town, women, children and other 'useless mouths' would be driven out by the defenders. The besiegers would drive them back again, and in the end most of them would die from hunger and disease under the walls of their own town. In the countryside, too, the means of war made life uncertain and miserable for whole populations. Where soldiers passed through, local populations were forced not only to house and feed them, but often to provide the digging, trenching and carting services as well. On the top of this came the diseases spread by wounded men. In 1627 a French army of 6,000, marching across Europe from La Rochelle to northern Italy, spread diseases which killed over a million civilians according to later estimates.

The Renaissance shows some soldiers being transformed from rags to riches through the looting of wealthy towns - the sacking of Rome in 1527 and of Antwerp in 1576 are two outstanding cases in point. For the large majority of men, however, this turned out to be a vain hope. The great fortunes were made not by soldiers, but by those who organized the expeditions, supplied the armies and financed the wars. Dur- ing the latter part of the sixteenth century, wars were carried on by large international contractors on a commercial basis.

Hale's book is a good introductory volume to the Fontana History of War and European Society. Its emphasis is very much on the 'society' of the title - the society of soldiers no less than the socio-economic implications of soldiering for the various civil strata of European countries. But it is not an easy introduction. Hale asks many questions - why there were wars, why people fought (or sought to avoid combat), what sort of people they were, how they were organized, equipped and paid, what civilians thought about them and what they thought about civilians - but his answers are often multi- faceted and tend to lose their clarity in a kaleidoscopic sparkle of historical detail.

Although Hale has explained well the chief military dynamics of the long sixteenth

century, his book is somewhat weakend by its restricted focus. It emphasizes continental Europe and omits Europe north and east of Germany. Admittedly, the Italian and the Iberian peninsulas dominated the early Ren- aissance world. But as the sixteenth century gave way to the seventeenth, as the Medi- terranean world experienced economic and demographic stagnation, as continental Europe was ravaged by the Thirty Years' War, the centre of Europe moved north- westwards to the areas bordering the English Channel. This movement is linked to a series of naval developments and cannot be satis- factorily accounted for by Hale's book, which emphasizes the evolution of modern land-forces. In naval warfare, too, artillery brought about important changes in force structures. Mounted on ships, the new guns enabled sea-faring nations to launch a rapid north-European expansion along Mediter- ranean, African, Asian and American coasts. This inaugurated an age of colonial expansion which had far-reaching consequences for the socio-economic structure of all of Europe - indeed, for the whole world.

2.2. Anderson on the ancien-rigime period The second volume of the Fontana series, Matthew Anderson's War and Society, 1618- 1789, is still unpublished. However, the series' editor has kindly made available a synopsis of the argument. It is organized into four broad sections tailored to the task of covering the turbulent era between the Thirty Years' War and the French Revolution.

The first section surveys the military situation in Europe in 1618 and follows up many of the long-term tendencies already ident- ified by Hale: The growth of army sizes, the increasing importance of mercenaries and professionals and the expanding role of the military entrepreneurs - a role which reached its climax by the 1630s. In addition, Anderson introduces some of the points which Hale left out: First, that professional, highly trained forces developed primarily west of the Elbe. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the traditional, partly feudal force structures persisted. Second, Ander- son explains how the Mediterranean World


was on the wane and how the areas bordering the English Channel were emerging as the dynamic core of Europe in demographic, economic as well as in military terms.

The second section of Anderson's manu- script emphasizes the decline of the Medi- terranean world and the fall of the military entrepreneur. It discusses how continued military profesionalization boosted government control over land forces. This drew a sharper distinction between soldiers and civilians - although autonomous bodies retained a significant role in naval and colonial warfare with the advent of the char- tered companies.

The third section focuses on the emergence of Sweden, France and Russia and takes the evolution up to about the middle of the eighteenth century. The military forces of these emerging nations were characterized by greater state control, increased professionalism, emergence of standing armies, increasing uniformity in military organization and greater destructiveness of weapons systems. By the 1750s navies, too, grew increasingly professionalized and cen- trally directed, diminishing their reliance on hired merchant ships.

With state-directed, standing armies came the need for permanent camps and barracks, for controlled institutions of supplies and for reliable systems of recruitment. More organizations led to coordinating war- offices, higher but more constant defense expenditures and to institutionalized military budgets. Rising costs were commonly covered by taxation and led to improvements in fiscal systems. In short, the centralization of military forces greatly stimulated the growth of the modern state structures.

Increased centralization of politics, reflected in the advent of the absolute king, affected the relations between states. As the nation states of Europe grew more forma- lized, they also became increasingly accepted as the only organisms entitled to act on the international level. This development accentuated the concept of state sovereignty and helped develop notions about laws of war and rules for international behavior.

The fourth section of the synopsis emphasizes those evolutionary character-

istics which point towards the French Rev- olution and the Napoleonic era. Under Louis XIV the French army was expanded and streamlined into the most efficient military force in Europe. The French Court, led by the absolute monarch who was also the supreme military commander, became an ideal which other monarchs sought to emulate. The aristocracy temporarily increased its influence in the officers' corps in all European countries. This produced a widening gulf between officers and soldiers that characterized the armed forces of Europe's ancien r6gimes.

On the international level, the advent of the nation-state and the tendency to see military forces as a complement to economic power created the possibility for something like world wars. This was first evident in the wars of Louis XIV (1672-1715) and later in the Seven Years' War (1756-63). By the middle of the eighteenth century it was clear that any major war in Europe implied conflict overseas. The settlement of any Euro- pean war would from now on take the situation outside Europe into serious account.

The period between the Thirty Years' War and the French Revolution is a complex era and Anderson seeks to systematize a great deal of the turbulence it contains. England represents a particular problem. It does not conform neatly to the larger evolutionary trends of the Continent - its political centralization is limited and its force structures are exceptionally weak, yet it develops into a dominant power in Europe after the Wars of Louis XIV. The seeds of industrialism were sown in England during the eighteenth century, and there is a hot debate among historians about whether the great wars of the 1760s helped or hindered the Industrial Revolution.

2.3 Best on revolutionary Europe A plethora of recent books discusses the important changes in warfare produced by the French Revolution and by the Napo- leonic Wars. Geoffrey Best's War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770-1870, does not add much to this existing body of literature. What nevertheless makes Best's book different is the way it tells the familiar


story. Best replaces the traditional focus on battles and campaigns with a broader emphasis on the socio-economic, psychological and ideological dimensions of warfare. This new broadness of the discussion is foreshadowed in the very first pages of the book, where Best defines war as containing a horizontal as well as a vertical dimension: War is 'the organized and controlled use of armed force by one state against another', but it is also 'the use of the armed force of the state against the rebel and the law-breaker'. The explicit inclusion of a vertical dimension in the analysis forces us to consider issues of social stratification as well as factors of race, religion and geographical differentiation. It makes us ask questions like 'Whose work is the armed force doing?' 'To what social group or class's idea is it answering?' This book exemplifies well the questions which occupy the 'new military historians'.

Part I of the book, 'Rumblings of the Revolution', is a compact 45-page essay on the Old Regimes of Europe. It discusses the armed forces of the major European countries in terms of defense expenditures, methods of recruitment, the social origins of soldiers and their integration into civil society. Its systematic attention to social stratification complements Anderson's account, and allows Best to present a set of similarities and differences in the military organization of Europe's ancien regimes.

Part II, 'The French and Rest', discusses the military revolution of the French Repub- lic and the Empire: After the Battle of Valmy (1792), when revolutionary France found itself alone and at war with the monarchies of Europe, its revolutionary ideals per- meated the armed forces. The two main branches of the old army were reorganized into a single force and the levie en masse was instituted. The entire nation was with one blow mobilized for war; a new model army of citizens was forged, over one million strong, in which talent was quickly spotted and richly rewarded. In 1793/94 a new style of warfare brought the revolutionary armies a string of victories and brought the Republic into new depths of militarization: 'France became more and more of a military State through the later nineties; to such an extent

that its turning into a military dictatorship marked the end of a logical road', writes Best.

In order to contain the French expansion, the monarchies of Europe were forced to emulate Napoleon's military organization and institutions. Generals of the eighteenth century had fought their largest battles with armies of 50,000 or 60,000 men. Napoleon commanded about 50,000 men at Marengo (1800); at Ulm and Jena (1806) he commanded nearly 200,000 men; the forces assembled for the invasion of Russia (1812) approached 600,000. After a series of military reforms had washed across Austria, Prussia, Russia and England, Napoleon met harder and tougher resistance: Austria assembled some 85,000 men for the Ulm campaign; Prussia mustered nearly 150,000 for the fields of Jena. In 1815, Austria, Russia, Prussia and England agreed to pro- duce nearly 600,000 men to march by con- verging routes on Paris.

Part III of the book, 'After Napoleon', discusses how this rapid growth in military force affected the armed services of Euro- pean nations. Best argues that the French innovations inaugurated a new intensity in warfare by calling people into armed part- nership with government. The Restoration, although it established some distance between the people and the armies that sup- ported the monarchic regimes, never com- pletely eradicated the ideal of popular participation in armed conflict. The ideal emerged half a century later and, bureau- cratically and technologically perfected by Prussia in the 1860s, was to haunt Europe and the world ever since.

This is an excellent account of the decisive impact of the generation of European warfare and the military changes unleashed by the French Revolution. It is highly critical of traditional military history - maybe too much so: In contrast to Hale and Anderson, Best has curiously little to say about technological and demographic changes. He touches the technical and tactical improvements which changed the face of European battle, but he touches them lightly. He is more concerned with the sociological and psychological implications of armed force.


One of the most important legacies of the Napoleonic Wars, Best characteristically argues, was 'its popularization of professional military activity for its own sake, its savoring of war as such'. But there are other important legacies as well - the new scope of warfare, the new weapons systems, the new tactics and strategies and the new scale of destruction made possible by new ways of exploiting technological and demographic resources - which he could have written more about.

2.4 Bond on the period of the World Wars Brian Bond's War and Society in Europe, 1870-1970 opens with an exposition of Ger- many's unification in the 1860s and closes with a discussion of Germany's division nearly a hundred years later. This 'German century' covers a complicated period in European military history. But the high com- plexity of the subject matter cannot entirely excuse the fact that this is a disappointing concluding volume to the Fontana series.

The book opens very well. The two first chapters demonstrate convincingly how the creation of the German empire 'drastically altered the power structure of the European states, and also provided the first dreadful foretaste of the nature of modern "total" warfare between industrialized nations capable of raising huge conscript armies and maintaining them in the field'. Prussia's quick victories over Austria at K6niggritz (1866) and over France at Sedan (1871) sur- prised military observers of the day. Search- ing for the causes of Prussia's new-won invin- cibility, they noted the new weapons - especially the Krupp steel breech-loading, rifled cannons - and the use of railroads for transporting first-line troops. But most of all they emphasized Prussia's superior military organization; particularly the use of short- service conscripts and trained reserves from a complete cross-section of the population, the division of the army into geographically localized corps and the new general staff system.

By the 1880s, other nations were emu- lating Prussia. In some of them conscription transcended its role as a vital component of national security; it became a propaganda

tool - 'an instrument for developing social cohesion and political docility in the masses'. Europe's larger standing armies, Bond remarks, both come to reflect the international tensions of the day and to make their solution more difficult.

The third chapter examines the diplomatic and military arrangements which transformed the Balkan squabble to an all-out European war and explains why a protracted war of attrition occurred despite the pre- dictions of virtually all experts. Most illumi- nating is the discussion of how a popular, militaristic mentality developed in Western Europe at the eve of World War I. This may be the best chapter in the book, convincingly taking issue with some popular miscon- ceptions while retaining a clear focus on civil- military relations.

Unfortunately, during the remaining four chapters, the 'society' of the title drifts into the background and the traditional 'idols of the tribe' take control of the discussion. The analysis lacks that conception of social stratification which is so important in the other volumes of the Fontana series. The questions which characterize the new military history - Which social strata did the soldiers and the officers come from? How were they recruited? Why did some men choose a military career? Why did others seek to avoid battle? - are addressed, but not discussed in depth. The questions which were so central in Best's volume - Whose work was the armed force doing? To what social group or class's idea was it answering? - are not asked at all. The book loses sight of the central issues of the new military history at the very point where it could have shed some historical light on contemporary affairs.

Neither does this volume concern itself with the longue duree of European history. This absence is disappointing for readers who expect the concluding volume of the Fontana series to relate some of the secular trends mentioned by Hale, Anderson, and Best to contemporary issues. For example, one of the themes which blazes through the new military history of Europe is the steadily widening social, economic and military differences between eastern and western


Europe. What impact has this widening gap had on European history since 1850? Was the gap bridged or accentuated by the unification of Germany? Is the present division of Europe a logical outcome of a century- long process? This type of question is strik- ingly absent in the concluding volume of the Fontana series.

2.5 Kiernan on colonial wars Victor G. Kiernan's European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815-1960 is a natural companion volume to the Fontana series. It is a topical examination of Belgian, British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish imperialist activity in every corner of the world. It is organized mainly in a chronological manner; most sections are on campaigns in various theaters but some treat weapons systems and ideologies associated with overseas conquest.

Kiernan expresses concern for the effects that colonial conquest had on European society: 'If conquest was doing something to civilize the outer world', he writes, 'it was also doing something to barbarize Europe'. The imperial frontiers attracted certain elements of Europe's upper classes and for- tified their tendencies toward authoritarian- ism and militarism, claims Kiernan. These effects of imperialism upon Europe varied widely with the political traditions of individual countries, he continues: Colonial effects were noticeable in Ireland, but their effects on English politics and society were generally limited due to Whitehall's control of its proconsuls. In Spain and France, however, colonial soldiers exercized a malign influence. Algeria, for example, had 'an important bearing on the rise of Bonapar- tism, that precursor of fascism', in the 1850s, and was a cause behind the fall of the 4th French Republic a century later. Kiernan presents a series of connections between European society and colonial wars - indeed, he suggests that past imperialism still casts shadows over the European present and is likely to do so far into the future as well. But for the most part, his discussions of the socio-political effects of colonialism are cautious and tentative. The book would have constituted a superior companion vol-

ume to the Fontana series had this issue been more systematically pursued.

Kiernan's focus is not so much on the European context as on the societies brought into conflict with Europe. The book does not emphasize structured theorizing about the causes and the nature of colonial conquest; it rather offers a pointillist picture of the violence and cruelty that Europeans brought to other continents. On the face of it, the book offers a narrative of war, epidemics, genocide, slavery, and other types of violence and suffering. But on a deeper level, it discusses the racism revealed in this inter- ethnic violence, and the domination it brought to large parts of the globe.

On this second level Kiernan asks: Why were small European forces far from home so successful against numerically superior, native armies? Part of the answer is that the Europeans had superior weapons systems. But this technical advantage, Kiernan insists, was of major significance only late in the period. Europe's main advantage, lay in organization, morale, and 61an, he argues. Colonial victories were brought about through clever application of minimum of force with maximum of precision. Although the colonial forces may have been small by contemporary European standards, the consequences were often catastrophic to native societies. Kiernan supplies a long list of campaigns of conquest and repression and notes repeatedly the vast disproportion in casu- alties between the combatants. This imbalance got worse when the colonialists took to using picric acid, melinite, dum-dum bullets, lyddite shells and machine-guns.

Kiernan's sympathies are passionately on the side of the native populations. But he also sympathizes with the European soldiers, basing his accounts on clever use of diaries and autobiographies. The soldiers' ranks were thinned by unknown diseases from which alcohol often offered the only relief. 'Sordid conditions, and boredom, made drinking the only escape, apart from deser- tion, far less easy overseas than in Britain, or the more drastic one of suicide, which was far from rare'. Without this solace, concludes Kiernan, 'the empire could not have been won'.


This detailed summary study is not easily accessible to readers unfamiliar with the subject matter, but it is a rewarding experience for those willing to do some background reading. It addresses issues that are left out by Bond's volume, but it also leaves some stones unturned. For example, were the white conquerors the only villains in the history of colonialism? Were the overseas con- quests a necessary or an accidental aspect of European wars and societies?

3. Consequences for world systems analysis The Fontana History of War and European Society offers more than a new view of Europe's military history, it suggests a new vantage point for analyzing the modern world system. It implies that interstate dynamics, expressed in military competition between territorial nation-states, have contributed more to the emergence and the development of the modern world system than analysts have hitherto assumed. Instead of only focusing on the means of production to explain the advent of the modern world, we ought to consider the impact of means of destruction as well.

For several decades, social scientists have tended to discuss the origins of the modern world in economic terms. The debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, for example, has been dominated by two groups: those who find the decline of feudalism and origins of capitalism in the growth of long- distance trade (Sweezy 1950; Wallerstein 1974), and those who find the key to the transition in the evolution of new means of production (Dobb 1947; Brenner 1977). Authors who have focused on political and military dynamics have hardly been repre- sented in the debate at all. Corvisier, Hale, Anderson - and to a lesser extent Best and Kiernan - redress this imbalance. Hale's volume in particular is an outstanding example of the rich insights that the new military history can bring to bear upon the discussion.

Hale implicitly reminds us that feudalism was just as much a mode of protection as a mode of production. He explains that the social hierarchies of fifteenth century Europe reflected relations of military command more than they reflected relations of production.

He reiterates that in the long sixteenth century wars 'arise from the relationship, at any given moment and depending on the mood (and resources) of the decision-making auth- ority, between greed, fear, and altruism'. Explaining this claim, he stresses a point which economy-centered authors tend to underestimate: viz. that 'greed' must not be understood in economic but in territorial terms. For in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ownership of land still had less to do with the modern notion of private property than with military capabilities, glory and prestige. During the long sixteenth century, 'Political Europe was like an estate map' and 'war was a socially acceptable form of property acquisition'. Land and the glory it brought with it, 'was a far more potent motive for war than any anticipated economic profit' (Hale 1985, pp. 22f). With this caveat in mind, the new military history not only helps explain the breakdown of feudal Europe. It also sheds new light on the advent of the modern European world system characterized by territorial nation states which were led by absolute monarchs aided by representative national assemblies, and which increasingly operated on capitalist principles of production and distribution.

First, the medieval city-state was rendered obsolete as a social formation by the so- called gunpowder revolution. The large- scale use of firearms during the Italian Wars rendered the high, thin walls of medieval fortifications indefensible. Iron balls from the new, large siege guns brought them crashing down. This blow to the ancient institution of the city-state was the first step towards a modern international system in which the territorial nation-state is the dominant social formation (Parker 1980, p. 201; McNeill 1982, pp. 89f).

Second, both Hale and Anderson mention that noble men-at-arms lost their traditional social role due to the new weapons systems. They suggest that footsoldiers equipped with firearms dramatically reversed the costs of war. Furthermore, since the armies suddenly grew in size, and since the new weapons were supplied in rapidly increasing numbers, the costs of equipping a Renaissance army grew so high that local aristocrats could no longer

96 Torbjern L. Knutsen

afford to raise large armies of professional soldiers. Only the king could afford the expenses of costly, modern warfare. 'The man who had at his disposal the taxes of an entire country was in a position to hire more warriors than any other'.3

Third, the increasing cost of warfare in late medieval Europe not only strengthened European monarchies, it also contributed to their peculiar absolutist nature: The kings' need to cover soaring military expenditures vastly stimulated the evolution of more efficient structures and routines of tax col- lection. 'This conception allows us to reconstruct the most profound causes of social change', argues Joseph A. Schumpeter, for 'taxation is not only a superficial phenomenon' it is the very essence of the modern territorial state. Fiscal institutions not only participated in the creation of the state, they also gave it a particular form. 'The fiscal apparatus was the institution which pulled the other institutions in its wake' (Schum- peter 1976, p. 341). The two most important of these other institutions were the modern national assemblies and the capitalist prac- tices of production and distribution.

Fourth, the soaring military expenditures and the growth of new and efficient fiscal institutions alienated important domestic groups, notably the nobility whose position was rapidly eroding. In order to tax the wealthy estates, the monarchs found it wise to include them as participants in matters of national expenditures so as to more easily obtain their consent. It is no coincidence that the characteristic representative institutions of late medieval Europe - Cortes, Reich- stags, Estates-General and Parliaments - appeared at about the same time in a variety of countries.

It is noteworthy that the emergence of representative institutions was more preva- lent in western than in eastern Europe. In the west, socio-economic changes weakened the position of the nobility in the long run; in the east the position of the nobles was strengthened. In the west, new systems of conscription increasingly tended to absorb vagrants, criminals, and the unemployed, not only easing the population pressure in poorer areas, but also offering some oppor-

tunities for social mobility for able men of low birth. In the east, reforms tended to worsen the position of the peasantry and to extend and consolidate serfdom. Such differences in social organization, emphasized by Corvisier and Anderson, exacerbated a widening socio-economic and political gap between western and eastern Europe.

Finally, the development of new fiscal structures and routines did more than stimu- late the growth of representative, par- ticipatory, political institutions in western Europe. According to Schumpeter, it also 'caused profound economic modifications and induced a family-based, private political economy' (Schumpeter 1976, p. 341). The new fiscal institutions, when combined with capital accumulation in the hands of successful merchants and bankers like Wit- tington and Coeur, made an increasing share of the growing national wealth available to the central power of the state. This furnished the monarch with an added power base which - and this was the best of all - was independent of the feudal aristocracy. This base broadened with the increasing com- mercialization of economic life. During the long sixteenth century, many emerging nation states increasingly constituted mili- tarily protected territories (Herz 1959, pp. 41ff) within which early capital accumulation was encouraged to take place with the bless- ings of the Crown (Dorn 1963, pp. lff; Wolf 1982, p. 109).

Economic historians have long debated whether war in early modern Europe retarded or stimulated economic growth and the development of capitalism. The five points above add up to a view which is strik- ingly at odds with the more accepted claim that warfare squanders crucial resources necessary to economic development. Neither Hale nor Anderson are likely to be much impressed by this debate. Hale, for example, appears to think that this whole discussion is based on a faulty premise: Military and economic aspects of social life cannot be separated as easily as oil and water.

Modern weapons are products of economic processes; economic resources, monies and men, are the sinews of war. During the sixteenth century, Hale and Anderson agree,


wars were carried on by international contractors on a commercial basis. Armies were increasingly raised, maintained and led into battle by a class of entrepreneurs whose only bond of loyalty to their employer was the assurance of cash payment, punctually and in full. Warfare and its needs were so intimately interwoven in the economic and social fabric of Renaissance Europe that they cannot be separated. War cannot be analytically removed from society at large for the pur- pose of deciding what would have happened without it.

NOTES 1. Simiand's criticism was taken seriously by many

European and American historians at the turn of the century (Burke 1980, pp. 23ff). Among them were two professors at the University of Strasbourg, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. They launched a movement for a 'new kind of history' and founded a journal to promote it: Annales d'histoire economie et sociale. This journal (later renamed Annales ESC) published some of the most decisive argu- ments for the New History, based upon a confluence of History and the Social Sciences. Febvre was particularly interested in social psychology and human geography; Bloch was preoccupied with the Sociology of Emile Durkheim, especially by his exposition of the comparative method. After World War II the Annales-school's notion of a 'total history' based on historical comparisons was repre- sented by Fernand Braudel.

2. Michael Roberts has long been occupied with issues similar to those of Corvisier; already his inaugural lecture, 'The Military Revolution, 1560-1660' (1967) drew attention to the transformation of war- tare in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Michael Howard's book War in Euro- pean History (1977) is an inexpendable short account. The important overview by Richard A. Preston and Sydney F. Wise (1962) fall partly into the tradition of new military history. William H. McNeill's The Pursuit of Power (1982) is a valuable attempt to chart the relationships between armed forces and economic life from the ancient societies to our own times. Attention must also be drawn to John Keegan's Face of Battle. The first chapter of this remarkable book on the battlefield experience of individual soldiers has supplied the title to this review essay. Keegan, in turn, has borrowed the line from William Wordsworth's poem, The Solitary Reaper:

Will no one tell me what he sings? Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And Battles long ago.

3. Fernand Braudel writes that at the end of the fifteenth century 'it was becoming clear that only the rival of the city-state, the territorial state, rich in

land and manpower, would in the future be able to meet the expense of modern warfare; it could maintain paid armies and afford costly artillery; it was soon to indulge in the added extravagance of full-scale naval wars. Examples of the new pattern emerging at the end of the fifteenth century are Aragon under John II, Louis XI's expansion beyond the Pyrenees; Turkey under Muhammad II, the conqueror of Constantinople; later France under Charles VIII with his Italian ambitions and Spain in the age of the Catholic Kings. Without exception, these states all had their beginnings far inland, many miles from the Mediterranean coast, usually in poor regions where there were fewer cities to pose obstacles' (Braudel 1972, p. 657).

4. Richard A. Preston and Sydney F. Wise write: 'At approximately the same time the characteristic representative institutions of late medieval Europe appeared: The Spanish Cortes and the German Reichstag in the late thirteenth century, the Estates-General of France in 1302, and the "Model Parliament" of Edward I in 1295. In all these assemblies the burgesses of the towns and the prosperous gentry of the countryside were repre- sented, and it is interesting to note the close con- nection, particularly in England, between the mon- etary needs of the king in time of war and the growth in power of these middle-class institutions' (Preston & Wise 1962, pp. 83f).

REFERENCES

Anderson, Matthew (forthcoming). War and Society, 1618-1789. London: Fontana Press.

Best, Geoffrey 1982. War and Society in Revolutionary Europe, 1770-1870. London: Fontana Press.

Bond, Brian 1984. War and Society in Europe, 1870- 1970. London: Fontana Press.

Braudel, Fernand 1972. The Mediterranean. New York: Harper & Row.

Brenner, Robert 1977. 'The Origins of Capitalist Devel- opment', New Left Review, no. 104, pp. 25-92.

Burke, Peter 1980. Sociology and History. London: Allen & Unwin.

Corvisier, Andre 1979. Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494-1789. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Dobb, Maurice 1947. Studies in the Development of Capitalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Dorn, Walter S. 1963. Competition for Empires. New York: Harper & Row.

Hale, John R. 1985. War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450-1620. London: Fontana Press.

Herz, John H. 1959. International Politics in the Atomic Age. New York: Columbia University Press.

Howard, Michael 1977. War in European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Iggers, George G. 1962. 'The Image of Ranke in Ameri- can and German Historical Thought', History and Theory, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 17-40.

Keegan, John 1983. The Face of Battle. Harmonds- worth: Penguin.

Kiernan, Victor G. 1982. European Empires from Con- quest to Collapse 1815-1960. London: Fontana Press.

98 TorbjOrn L. Knutsen

McNeill, William H. 1982. The Pursuit of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Parker, Geoffrey 1980. 'Warfare', in Peter Burke, ed. Companion Volume - vol. XIII in the New Cam- bridge History of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Preston, Richard A. & Sydney F. Wise 1962. Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and its Interrelationships with Western Society. New York: Praeger.

Roberts, Michael 1967. 'The Military Revolution, 1560- 1660', first published in 1956, revised and reprinted in Essays in Swedish History. Minneapolis: Uni- versity of Minnesota Press, pp. 195-225.

Schumpeter, Joseph A. 1976. 'Die Krise der Steuer-

staats', first published in 1918, reprinted in Rudolf Hickel, ed. Rudolf Goldscheid, Joseph Schumpeter: Die Okonomie der Staatsfinanzen. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Simiand, Frangois 1985. 'Methode historique et science sociale', first published in 1903; English translation printed in Review, vol. 9, no. 2 (Fall 1985), pp. 163- 213.

Sweezy, Paul M. 1950. 'A Critique', Science and Society, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 134-57.

Wallerstein, Immanuel 1974. The Modern World System. New York: Academic Press.

Wolf, Eric R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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