The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 by Geoffrey Parker

Abstract

Essay Review—the “Military Revolution” Revisited The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500—1800. By Geoffrey Parker. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. xvii + 234; illustrations, notes, index. $29.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Geoffrey Parker, whose 1972 study, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, established him as one of the leading Renaissance military historians, has written a sweeping work of military history. Based on the 1984 Lees Knowles lectures on military history given at Trinity College, Cambridge, this slim and lavishly illustrated volume is a tour de force through three centuries of military experience on as many continents. It provides a panorama of changes both on and off the battlefield, changes that, in the author’s view, created the dynamic that carried Europe to its position of world hegemony. It is an important book, deserving of careful reading and a thoughtful response. From the point of view of historians of technology, Parker’s most serious fault is his unwillingness to concede that Renaissance military technology has anything problematic about its nature. To understand why, we need to unpack the terminology in Parker’s title, The Military Revolution, through a brief look at the modern historiog­ raphy of Renaissance military affairs. The phrase “military revolution” was coined by Michael Roberts in his 1955 inaugural lecture at Queen’s University, Belfast, to describe changes in military practices during the period 1560—1660. Within a few years a rather vague military revolution had become the new orthodoxy in early modern European history. The phrase has since come to be used about virtually any phase of military development between about a.d. 1400 and 1800. Parker wrote a critical revision of Roberts’s thesis in 1976, de-emphasizing the centrality of Gustavus Adolphus (Roberts’s hero) and underlining the Spanish Habsburgs’ fundamental contributions to developments in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Now Parker—in a book dedicated to Roberts—has become the principal exponent of a vastly broadened military revo­ lution, which he sees as extending from 1500 to 1800 and influencing political events around the globe. In retrospect, we can see that the Roberts thesis gained the high ground it currently occupies through a rather abbreviated process of Permission to reprint a review printed in this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 500 Essay Review—the “Military Revolution” Revisited 501 debate. The ordinary historiographic dialectic, the discourse of attack and defense that normally surrounds new ideas, was somehow passed over in this case. Although many historians have appropriated Roberts’s words, no one before Parker had produced a wellarticulated version of the military revolution thesis. In its essence, “military revolution” is an organizing metaphor that seeks to make coherent a great many changes in military affairs in the period, some quite divergent and apparently chaotic. Its greatest attraction is that it promises to make sense of what seems at first glance highly confusing. Parker’s military revolution is composed of four main elements (all first put forth by Roberts): first, there was a revolution in tactics; this was followed by a marked growth in the size of armies; this led to increased strategic complexity; finally, all this resulted in a heightened effect of war on society. Parker has a way of moving easily over immense stretches of historical terrain with a grace and charm that some of us can only envy. The doubts begin only after one shakes off the spell of conviction Parker casts so skillfully in his opening chapter, “The Military Revolution Revisited.” Put simply, Parker’s thesis de­ rives most important changes in military operations in the 16th century from shifts in tactics favoring larger armies made up chiefly of infantry. These tactical changes are in turn driven almost entirely by a change in technology—the rise of gunpowder weapons. At bottom, the military revolution is a new statement of technological determinism. Parker begins with a rather curious reading of earlier military history, making the 15th century a prologue to 16th-century “revolu­ tionary” shifts. He then reads the battlefield history of 16th-century Europe as providing evidence for the triumph of firearms, both artillery and shoulder arms...