Military Institutions, Weapons, and Social Change: Toward a New History of Military Technology

Abstract

Military Institutions, Weapons, and Social Change: Toward a New History ofMilitary Technology BARTON C. HACKER Why have we studied the history of military technology? The answer, I think, will do much to explain the current state of the field. Justifying study of the history of technology hardly seems necessary to readers of Technology and Culture, but why military technology? To that question my answer depends on a critical discussion of the traditional history of military technology, the first part of this essay. It will address what many have assumed to be the heart of military technological history— hardware studies. Not only do these go back a long way, they also in a real sense continue to define the field. But they have also long been contested, and I shall briefly discuss alternative approaches that pointed toward a new kind of military technological history before the Second World War. Although without immediate issue, they survived to inspire a later generation. I think another question—Why should we study the history of military technology?—is not only distinct but perhaps also more important. I will use it as the touchstone for my remarks on new developments and needed research, but first a word about the transformed study of history proper. In recent decades new approaches, new methods, new evidence have allowed historians to reclaim a broader range ofhuman experience than the older political-military history could encompass, to open new areas of study within, as well as outside, the Western tradition. Tradi­ tionalists remain skeptical, but the changes since World War II have been both profound and widespread.1 Military history and the history of technology also experienced a renaissance. The new history of military Dr. Hacker is historian at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. An earlier version of this article was prepared for the 1991 Madison, Wisconsin, SHOT/HSS Conference on Critical Problems and Research Frontiers in History of Technology and History of Science. 'See esp. Theodore S. Hamerow et al., “AHR Forum: The Old History and the New,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 654-98. See also Peter Novick, That Noble. Dream: The “Objectivity Question’and theAmerican Historical Profession (NewYork, 1988); Eric Foner, ed., The New American History (Philadelphia, 1990).© 1994 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-l65X/94/3504-0005$01.00 768 Toward a New History ofMilitary Technology 769 technology drew on these vital changes, as it did on corresponding (and perhaps related) innovations in the social sciences and anthropology; these changes are the subject of the essay’s second section. In the final section I evaluate the achievements of this new history, discuss some recent trends, and offer a few suggestions about what still needs doing. Needless to say, I cannot hope to address every nuance of the field or cite every important study, but I will try to provide a framework for understanding the field’s current status and forjudging the directions it should take. Traditional Approaches Traditionally, the history of military technology shared the internalist viewpoint, the nuts-and-bolts approach favored by historians of technol­ ogy in general. Focused on the technology itself—weapons, accoutre­ ments, machinery, fortifications, all the physical relics of war making— the products range from the narrowest monographs to the broadest surveys. Such studies have a long history and still appear regularly without much reference to alternative approaches. Military technology seems persistendy to have fascinated Western minds since the Middle Ages, a curious preoccupation reflected in the long line of technical treatises devoted to, or prominently featuring, the tools of war, old and new, mundane and exotic.2 Intriguing hints suggest a parallel (though perhaps less fully developed) tradition in the Islamic world growing from the same roots. “Military engineering,” Donald Hill explained in 2For the narrowly military technological tradition, see E. A. Thompson, A Roman Reformer and Inventor (Oxford, 1952); A. Rupert Hall, “Guido’s Texaurus: 1335,” in On Pre-modem Technology and Science: A Volume ofStudies in Honor ofLynn White, jr., ed. Bert S. Hall and Delno C. West (Malibu, Calif., 1976), pp. 11-52; BertS. Hall, The Technological Illustrations ofthe So-called “Anonymous of the Hussite Wars’: Codex Latinus Monacensis, Part 1...