Gunpowder Revolution Research Articles

Machiavellis Kriegskunst: Die Lehren des Libro dell’arte della guerra

Abstract For the most part, Machiavelli’s Libro dell’arte della guerra has been studied as a military treatise, which had produced different interpretations and applications. Whereas military historians assumed that Machiavelli somewhat underestimated the role of the so-called gunpowder revolution, recent scholarship stresses the political dimensions of the text and its reception in different contexts. This article focuses on the poetics of the dialogue, which cannot be reduced to propositional contents. Instead of teaching specific strategies and tactics of warfare, the Libro engages its readers in a military dialogue in a more radical sense. It enacts the very dynamics of war and battle by staging the complex and often contradictory conditions and foundations of speech and (military and political) theory on the one hand and its potential interactions with conflicting historical realities on the other. By combining different generic traditions of the literary dialogue from Plato to Cicero and Petrarch it performs a Machiavellian arte della guerra as the very form of military and militant intervention which concerns not only the practice of warfare, but human activity as such.

Противостояние Русского государства с государствами Чингизидов: макросоциологический и исторический аспекты

Domestic history of the 13th-17th centuries contains important controversial aspects concerning, among other things, the problem of the confrontation between the Russian lands and the Chingizid states. The article focuses on the consequences of the collision of Russia with the Mongol Empire and its heirs - the Chingizid states. The authors believe that, in the 16th century, the Moscow state experienced a stage of high military tension, which was associated, among other things, with military operations against the Crimean, Kazan, Astrakhan, and Siberian khanates. The high financial burden on the Russian principalities is emphasized due to tributary payments to the Golden Horde. The authors note the positive significance of the changes that took place in the military logistics of the Moscow state. The article examines the reasons for the effectiveness of the “cannon and musket revolutions” in the context of the confrontation between Moscow and the Chingizids. The “cannon and musket revolutions”, which were part of the “gunpowder revolution”, were not in themselves factors of the progress of society and an increase in its defense for Russia, they became such only in combination with socioeconomic, cultural, and spiritual changes. The Moscow principality managed to achieve national unity in the territories subject to it already at the end of the Mongol period. In many respects, the national unity of the Russians turned out to be due to the religion common to all the East Slavic lands, the disappearance of division into tribes in the Kiev period, the development of uniform methods of organizing economic activity and agricultural technologies. The Chingizid states outside Mongolia had an “alien” character, which ultimately led to disintegration in their societies, vivid examples of which are the rebellions in the Kazan and Crimean khanates, as well as in the Golden Horde itself. The authors emphasize that the liberation of Russia from long-term dependence on the Golden Horde was the result not so much of transformations in military affairs as the creation of a single Russian centralized state, the revival and further effective socioeconomic development of the Russian lands, the growth of agriculture and handicrafts, primarily metallurgical production, and national identity. Domestic history of the 13th-17th centuries shows that progress is not only the fruits of the work of various technologies, but a complex multifactorial process, including, first of all, successful economic development, a powerful centralized state, and the Russian national spirit, whose awakening is evidenced by the literary monuments of the Kulikovo cycle, the Tale of the Stand on the Ugra, and folklore tradition.

Przemiany uzbrojenia wojska polskiego na przełomie średniowiecza i nowożytności (1454–1572) jako przejaw (r)ewolucji militarnej

W artykule poddano analizie przemiany uzbrojenia indywidualnego wojska polskiego na przelomie średniowiecza i nowozytności z punktu widzenia teorii rewolucji militarnej. Dowiedziono, ze w omawianym okresie miala miejsce tzw. gunpowder revolution . Jest to jedna z cech dystynktywnych rewolucji militarnej, co wiecej, mozna ją zaobserwowac wcześniej niz w Europie Zachodniej. Mimo to na dluzszą mete nie przyniosla zmian w strukturze administracji wojskowej, a w dalszej konsekwencji w administracji panstwowej.

Arms or the Man II: Epic, Romance, and Ordnance in Seventeenth-Century England

This second part of a two-part essay continues to place the chivalric romance, both as a print and performance genre, more firmly in the context of Renaissance England's contemporaneous gunpowder revolution. Where part I (see vol. 114.3 [2017]) focused on the romance tradition's overarching attempts in the sixteenth century to evade gunpowder technology, part II attends to the ways in which, in the seventeenth century, that tradition came increasingly to make space for it. Beginning with the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605, which resulted in an outpouring of narratives that conveyed and capitalized on the language of artillery, the essay then traces powder's textual presence in—and, on occasion, its shrewd elision from—the romance tradition as composed for the popular stage, the domestic arena, and the royal court. It ends with an examination of how that tradition infused the news coverage of the artillery-laden civil wars, while likewise driving the genre into satirized retreat.

Ivan IV’s Professional Infantry, The Harquebusiers (Strel’tsy): A Question of Numbers

ABSTRACTThe early modern European Military or Gunpowder Revolution did not exclude Muscovy, although the chronology and extent of its impact on Muscovy varied from Western Europe. This article examines the first step in that process, the creation of a standing army of gunpowder infantry, the harquebusiers (strel’tsy). It attempts to measure the influence of this development by determining the number of harquebusiers who served during Ivan’s reign. Previous studies of this question have overlooked the most detailed available data in the military registers for Ivan’s 1577 campaign in Livonia. Although it is impossible to compute an exact number, analysis leads to the conclusion that a field army could contain between 5,000 and 7,000 harquebusiers, which might constitute as much as 20 percent of the troops. However, this total does not include un-mobilized garrison harquebusiers, whose number remains unknown. The creation of the harquebusiers reflects a strategic decision to establish and increase professional gunpowder infantry, a reflection of the Military Revolution.

Arms or the Man I: Gunpowder Technology and the Early Modern Romance

This essay places the chivalric romance, both as a print and performance genre, "under the shadow" of Renaissance England's contemporaneous gunpowder revolution. Only in exposing the sway of artillery on the long sixteenth century can we grasp how the romance was circumscribing, exorcising, and sometimes even wittingly censoring that technology's presence. Authors who were penning, and tournament participants who were acting out, the romances—Philip Sidney among them—were defending a social terrain that gunpowder was rendering obsolete. By additionally placing the romances beside pamphlets written by actual soldiers—some who criticized Sidney outright—a more complicated and fretful picture emerges vis-à-vis the sixteenth-century nexus of literature, technology, and society.

The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War by Alfred J. Rieber (review)

Reviewed by: The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War by Alfred J. Rieber Seymour Becker (bio) Alfred J. Rieber, The Struggle for the Eurasian Borderlands: From the Rise of Early Modern Empires to the End of the First World War (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 640 pp., maps. Index. ISBN: 978-1-107-04309-1. Alfred J. Rieber’s book deals mainly with five dynastic, multicultural Eurasian empires built by conquest, from whose histories he has attempted to fashion a coherent explanation for most of Europe’s wars in the Early Modern and Modern periods. He has produced an encyclopedic political history of mid-fifteenth- through twentieth-century Eastern Europe and much of Asia (except for the Arab and Indian worlds), with many forays into the Middle Ages and an emphasis on the period since 1815. The book includes an imposing wealth of factual material and comparisons, and a vast array of footnotes covering secondary literature in many languages on practically every important question related to the rise and decline of empires. The author’s hypothesis is that the rise, decline, and collapse of his empires is best understood by focusing on their struggle to control their peripheries or borderlands, and on the wars that resulted from that struggle. The validation of his hypothesis rests on, among other things, his definition and use of the concept of “Eurasian borderlands.” Europe and Asia as separate concepts, embracing a cultural as well as a geographic distinction, have never been replaced in common use. This is true despite the proposal by many physical geographers since the mid-nineteenth century to envision Europe and Asia as one continent, Eurasia – a single land mass uninterrupted in any significant way by the Urals or by the Don River (the latter feature had been used for that purpose from Greek antiquity to the eighteenth century). The idea of a single land mass has been both bolstered and limited since the 1960s [End Page 292] by the acceptance of the theory of an underlying Eurasian tectonic plate that extends from Iceland and the Azores to Kamchatka and Japan and is bounded on the south by the African, Arabian, and Indian plates. At the start of the twentieth century, the British geographer Halford MacKinder argued that control of continental Eurasia’s heartland, then occupied by the Russian Empire, was the key to political control of the entire land mass. The Eurasianists of the 1920s – Russian intellectuals in exile after the 1917–21 Revolution – limited the term Eurasia to MacKinder’s heartland, which they claimed was an historico-cultural space distinct from both Europe and Asia. A variant of their usage has become popular since 1991 throughout much of the former Soviet Union and among Western scholars; it was adopted by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in 2010 when that group renamed itself the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Rieber uses the term Eurasia somewhat differently from all of the above by including both the western borderlands of the tsarist empire and most of the post–World War II Soviet bloc in East Central and Southeast Europe – a region he labels “West” or “western” Eurasia. He also uses “western Eurasia” to describe the nomadic Kalmyks’ new home in the mid-seventeenth century on the steppe north of the Caspian Sea (P. 360). The author’s implicit definition of Eurasia is linked closely to the steppe (the mostly treeless grasslands that run from Manchuria to the middle Danube) and its nomadic groups. The nomads’ equine culture and the mobile source of food provided by their herds “gave them a military advantage over the sedentary population on the margins of the grasslands and steppe” for two millennia. Their advantage was eliminated “only with the gunpowder revolution and the manufacture of effective firearms perfected under the centralized leadership of the multicultural agrarian empires.” Rieber gives pride of place among the steppe nomads to the Mongols, who first created “a vast land empire stretching over the 6,000-mile longitudinal expanse of Eurasia” from Russia to Korea and indluding the...

Firearms and Military Adaptation: The Ottomans and the European Military Revolution, 1450–1800

The mass adoption of firearms as a tool of warfare dramatically changed the nature of military conflict from the mid fifteenth century onward, prompting historians of early modern Europe to describe the changes as a “gunpowder revolution” or “Military Revolution”—a thesis that provoked a spirited scholarly debate in the 1990s. Although the original concept, as set forth by Michael Roberts in 1955, did not single out firearms technology, in the influential elaboration of the thesis by Geoffrey Parker (1988), firearms and artillery fortifications ( trace italienne , which were developed in response to artillery firepower) became the main building blocks of the thesis. According to the thesis, the new fortresses required much larger armies to successfully besiege them, leading to a dramatic increase in the size of European armies. To build and main-tain artillery fortifications, large artillery trains, and ever-larger armies in turn required a more centralized government. Thus, the introduction of firearms led to the rise of centralized states in Europe—and, on a global scale, to the “rise of the West.”

The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb (review)

Reviewed by: The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb Jeff E. Long The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb. By Peter A. Lorge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 200 pp. $80.00 (cloth); $24.99 (paper). The Asian Military Revolution is designed as an introductory text for undergraduate students considering the impact of gunpowder weapons upon Asian civilizations, and with it Peter Lorge largely succeeds in his goals to underscore the significance of gunpowder weapons in Asia and in his attempt to counter Western expectations that technological development fueled "modern" Asian historical development. To accomplish these objectives Lorge sets up his chapters examining the Asian military revolution with a superb introduction that presents the [End Page 323] "Military Revolution debate" among Western scholars. As he highlights the military, economic, and technological reasons given by these scholars to explain the "slow" Asian response to gunpowder weapons, Lorge proceeds to undercut these arguments by asserting that Asia had already undergone its gunpowder revolution years before the technology made its way to the West and transformed European societies. As a result, Lorge defines the "Asian Military Revolution" as a pragmatic matter of how different Asian governments following contact with Europeans or their technology chose to make use of the new and improved gunpowder weapons to expand their political control. While most Asian governments were more than willing to accept and incorporate those elements of Western military technology appropriate to their needs, Lorge argues, the political leaders of those governments did not view acceptance of the new gunpowder weapons as an acknowledgment of Western cultural superiority. As his evidence, Lorge then undertakes over the course of several chapters a study of gunpowder weapons in premodern East Asian, Southeast Asian, and South Asian history leading to a final chapter on "modern" Asian history to support this thesis. Here is where Lorge's survey of the Asian military revolution at times suffers from its overdependence on secondary sources. In depicting the emergence of gunpowder weaponry in early Asian history, Lorge's narrative works best when he draws upon his own research of premodern China and when there is enough secondary source information on Asian military history for him to use. Chapter 1 emphasizes the historical role that the twelfth- and thirteenth-century struggles between the Song dynasty armies, the Jurchen Jin armies, and the Mongols played in spurring innovation of gunpowder weapons like fire arrows and fire spears and ultimately the development of the bomb. Building on this historical context, Lorge layers an effective military analysis of the differences between Chinese and Western defense fortifications that led to different siege warfare strategies by the Song, the Jin, and the Mongols, which in turn increased the use of gunpowder weaponry, including bombs to overcome walled cities. Chapter 2 focuses on early Japanese history and traces the rise of the warrior during medieval Japan before shifting to the sixteenth-century Portuguese introduction of the arquebus to the Japanese and Oda Nobunaga's emphasis on infantry that contributed to the unification process finished by the Tokugawa in 1600. Lorge makes good use of recent works by Karl F. Friday, Thomas Conlan, Joeren P. Lamers, and Peter Shapinsky to describe the emergence of the Japanese warrior and to stress the predominant use of the gun, not the cannon, in Japanese warfare. Lorge completes his study of the East Asian military revolution in [End Page 324] chapter 3, in which he employs the late sixteenth-century Hideyoshi invasions of Chosŏn Korea to scrutinize the varying uses of gunpowder weaponry on all sides in this large-scale East Asian conflict. Beginning with the Chinese military revolution Lorge emphasizes the role of naval warfare along China's rivers, in particular the Yangzi River, which contributed historically to the formation of the Ming dynasty and militarily to the creation of cast iron cannons and solid metal roundshot for use in siege warfare often conducted from ships firing upon fortified positions near rivers. Lorge argues that in the battles between Ming Chinese and Japanese troops on the Korean peninsula the deployment of these cannon was devastating for Japanese armies depending mainly on infantry firing volleys of arquebus fire. From...

Review: War Made New

WAR MADE NEW Technology, Warfare and the Course of History, 1500 to Today Max Boot New York: Gotham Books, 2006. 640PP, US$35.00 cloth ISBN 1-592-40222-4This is a sweeping and ambitious book that takes aim at the current debates about the future of warfare. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the notable Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (2002), has looked to the past to inform the reader about what can come to pass. Unsurprisingly, he concludes that despite the rapidly increasing pace and cost of military-technological innovation, the United States needs to continue to innovate to dominate the entire spectrum of military power if it hopes to retain its qualitative lead and great power status (472). Though reaching across a far greater spread of time, Boot's account reflects the intensifying concern among current military analysts over the preservation of US military strength, and is in company with similar recent studies such as Fred Kagan's Finding the Target (2006) and Thomas Mahnken's Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945 (2008).In War Made New, Boot takes the whole modem era (since 1500) for his scope and distils from it four key eras of change, or revolutions, in the character of warfare. The first is what he terms the gunpowder revolution, ranging from the early 1500s to the early 1800s and characterized by the widespread adoption of firearms on land and sea and the corresponding organizational changes that gave European nations great military strength over most other parts of the world. Boot follows this with the industrial revolution, largely the 19th century to the First World War and reflected in the integration of changes in steam transportation and wire communications, as well as mass-produced complex rifled weaponry. The third period he identifies as a second industrial revolution, reflecting the substantive technological changes in industrial societies in the 1920s to the 1940s and culminating in World War II and the hegemonic transfer of power away from central and western Europe to the United States and the Soviet Union. Boot then examines what he sees as the fourth major era, the current information revolution. (He specifically sets aside nuclear weapons as not having had much direct effect on warfare.) Boot does not attempt to recount the developments in each era closely - this is not a rewrite of Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) - but instead retells several key battles in each revolutionary period to illustrate his point. The focus of his analysis is clearly on military technology and how its adaptation by various successive powers changed the character of war and their strategic position. Despite the book's heft, the narrowness ofthat focus will make the reader question at times Boot's argument about how influential certain innovations truly were compared with the deeper underlying roots of a nation's military strength (such as economics, politics, and sociocultural trends) that shaped the great powers' ability to adopt and adapt the new tools of war to maximum effectiveness. …

Imperial Reach Versus Institutional Grasp: Superstates of The West and Central African Sudan in Comparative Perspective

AbstractThe history of five states in the African West and Central Sudan—Songhay, Borno, Segu, Samory and the Sokoto Caliphate—is analyzed for a period from ca. 1500 to ca. 1900. Recent scholarship has stressed the non-territorial nature of these “states without maps”, an issue that needs to be dealt in a more nuanced manner, given the efforts by local regimes to control both multiple urban centers of commerce and rural zones of agricultural production as well as maintaining regular systems of taxation. None of these states used writing or salary payments to maintain an effective bureaucracy, basing their power instead upon various combinations of lineages with claims to ruling or aristocratic status, associations of young unmarried male initiates, segregated occupational groups (bards, smiths and fisher folk) and finally, slaves. Warfare was the main occupation of Sudanic empires but despite the introduction of firearms in the late 1500s, weapons and tactics did not undergo a “gunpowder revolution,” continuing instead to center around horses and armor. Sudanic rulers controlled access to these resources more easily than European monarchs and they also proved effective in the major goal of campaigns: not territorial competition with other states but rather raiding for slaves. Islam played an increasing role in general life and politics of Sudanic Africa (the most powerful of these empires, Sokoto, was a nineteenth-century jihadist state). However, the potential that such a scriptural faith offered for transforming administration, law and commercial life was not fully realized by the time the region came under European rule and thus moved from its early modern to modern history.

Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology through History, and: Warfare in Inner Asian History (500-1800) (review)

Reviewed by: Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology through History, and: Warfare in Inner Asian History (500–1800) Jeremy Black Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology through History. By Alfred Crosby. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 206 + xii pp. $26.00 (cloth). Warfare in Inner Asian History (500–1800). Edited by Nicola Di Cosmo. Leiden: Brill, 2002. 456 + vii pp. $112.00. Between them, these two books contribute much to military history. From the perspective of this journal, the Cosmo volume is more important, not only because it contains far more material, but also because the chapters measure up to the subject and the introduction, a verdict that can be delivered in the case of far too few edited volumes. This is largely because the individual case studies, although disparate in time and space and based on highly detailed research on often difficult sources that require formidable linguistic skills, range widely in seeking to draw out conclusions. The most important, which emerges repeatedly, is the need to avoid a simplistic account of nomadic warfare, in particular an analysis based on innate ecological advantages. Instead, the contributors emphasize the limitations of the nomads, the need to consider inter-nomadic warfare, the extent to which nomad skills and success varied and changed, and the role of nomadic military culture in facilitating the transmission of military ideas and technology. After an effective introduction by Nicola Di Cosmo presenting the major themes, there are ten essays. David Graff considers strategy and contingency in the Tang defeat of the Eastern Turks, 629-630, specifically the Tang ability to emulate the operational behavior and cavalry forces of their opponents, with their emphasis on speed and surprise. The flexibility and skill of the Tang are again in evidence in Michael Drompp's analysis of the Uighur-Chinese conflict of 840-848, while Peter Golden ranges widely in considering war and warfare in the pre-Cinggisid [End Page 246] Western Steppes, in order to indicate common themes in nomadic warfare within a context in which the nomads oscillated between loosely or more tightly structured unions depending to some degree on external pressures. Golden suggests that, with few exceptions, nomads were not interested in large-scale conquests or the takeover of sedentary states. The latter, according to Golden, were better than the nomads at playing the "deadly game of divide and conquer." Michael Biran examines the battle of Herat of 1240, an important, though exceptional, stage in inter-Mongol warfare that played a major role in defining the borders of the independent khanates. For both sides, the main weapon was the bow and arrow, and skill in using arrows was tactically crucial. Reuven Amitai questions John Smith's analysis of Mongol-Mamluk warfare in his study of Ghazan's 1299-1300 invasion of Syria. He argues that their fighting methods and quality were less different than Smith suggested, and also emphasizes the problems of Mongol logistics. Thomas Allsen considers the circulation of military technology in Mongolian Eurasia, specifically the transmission of the trebuchet to China and gunpowder weaponry to the West. He also argues that nomads were only slightly changed by their adoption of gunpowder weapons, whereas in the Latin West it was possible to integrate warriors from other strata of European society who could embrace new technologies. Furthermore, Allsen suggests that peoples with a long history of interaction with the nomads and their "cavalry revolution," such as Russians, were more reluctant to join the gunpowder revolution, while others on the Eurasian periphery, Europe and Japan, were protected from the nomads and able to press forward with gunpowder weaponry. John Herman considers the difficulties the Mongols faced in translating successful advances into lasting control when campaigning in southwest China in the late thirteenth century. Nicola Di Cosmo demonstrates the role of political strategy in the Manchu success against the Mongol Ligdan Khan in 1619-1635. Changes in the character of steppe warfare arising from Manchu intervention are considered, although the evidence islimited.Peter Perdueindicates the crucial role of logistics in Qing success against the Zunghars and also points out shifts in generalship and strategy on both sides. Joanna Waley-Cohen shows how by the end of the eighteenth century military rituals...

Warfare in Atlantic Africa 1500-1800

Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800 investigates the impact of warfare on the history of Africa in the period of the slave trade and the founding of empires. It includes the discussion of: : * the relationship between war and the slave trade * the role of Europeans in promoting African wars and supplying African armies * the influence of climatic and ecological factors on warfare patterns and dynamics * the impact of social organization and military technology, including the gunpowder revolution * case studies of warfare in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Benin and West Central Africa

Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics

Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe explores the history of in Europe from the thirteenth century, when it was first imported from China, to the sixteenth century, as firearms became central to the conduct of war. Bridging the fields of military history and the history of technology -- and challenging past assumptions about Europe's gunpowder revolution -- Hall discovers a complex and fascinating story. Military inventors faced a host of challenges, he finds, from Europe's lack of naturally occurring saltpeter -- one of gunpowder's major components -- to the limitations of smooth-bore firearms. Manufacturing cheap, reliable proved a difficult feat, as did making firearms that had reasonably predictable performance characteristics. Hall details the efforts of armorers across Europe as they experimented with a variety of recipes and gunsmithing techniques, and he examines the integration of new weapons into the existing structure of European warfare.

Prize Essay; Balls of Missive Ruin: Milton and the Gunpowder Revolution

Prize Essay; Balls of Missive Ruin: Milton and the Gunpowder Revolution

The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare: The Triumph of the West (review)

Reviews 231 seems reasonable to describe both as products of a traditional (and oralderived ) system of versification' (p. 124). A m o n g the many other acute observations in this book I single out just a few. A new Aldhelm attribution, in the elegiac mode, is established on prosodic and stylistic evidence. Indications of Aldhelm's familiarity with hexameter scansion when preparing his octosyllabic Carmen Rhythmicum combine with documentation of his successive re-workings of borrowed diction to suggest a relative chronology for the total corpus. N e w evidence is adduced that, while on pilgrimage to Rome, Aldhelm instigated the compilation of versified inscriptions from churches and other monuments. The array of writers known to the Anglo-Saxons has been widened to include Prosper of Aquitaine and others. That Northumbrian and Southumbrian institutions differed in their teaching of Latin verse composition is inferred from discrepant incidences of favoured metrical patterns. Conversely, good evidence is furnished that Bede borrowed from Aldhelm's Carmen Ecclesiasticum and other works. All in all, the book makes a major contribution to knowledge and has important implications well beyond the narrower Anglo-Latin specialism. Orchard successfully rehabilitates Aldhelm as a resourceful, ingenious, influential, and understudied author, unjustly outshone perhaps by the romantic aura that clings to Caedmon. Orchard's promised study of Aldhelm's influence on Carolingian verse will be awaited with interest. This book has been produced with exceptional care. The exposition was uniformly lucid and I noted only an insignificant number of typographical, spelling, punctuation, and other errors. Congratulations are in place to all concerned. Russell Poole Department of English Massey University Parker, Geoffrey, ed., The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare: The Triumph of the West, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995; cloth; pp. 408; R.R.P. AU$59.95. 'War', wrote Clausewitz, 'is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.' In its destructive and violent continuity, the exploits of the Assyrian Tiglath-Pileser are strongly reminiscent of the wars of the later twentieth century: 232 Reviews Their fighting men I cast down in the midst of the hills, like a gust of wind . . . Their blood I caused to flow in the valleys and on the high places of the mountains . . . I burned the city with fire . . . The whole of the city I laid waste, I destroyed, I turned into heaps and ruins. Geoffrey Parker and his contributors have attempted to cover the history of these three thousand years of warfare in the West, and for the most part they do so very thoroughly and carefully. If there is a theme to their work, it is that the West has come to dominate the globe largely because the Western way of war has been so effective. In his introduction, Parker identifies five characteristics of this effectiveness: discipline, innovation in technology, total defeat of the enemy as the military goal,financialmechanisms for long-term credit, and the formation of the state. Other, non-Western approaches to warfare are not discussed or compared. These themes are not used to structure the book, however, nor are they always woven explicitly into its individual essays. These proceed chronologically for the most part, organised into four 'ages': massed infantry, stone fortifications, guns and sail, and mechanised warfare. Interestingly, perhaps, it is only really in essays by Parker himself on the gunpowder revolution and ships of the line that a more thematic approach is separated out from the chronological. In the other essays, the chronological approach dominates and the themes only emerge in passing. The contributors are all experts in theirfields:Victor Davis Hanson on the Greeks and Romans, Bernard Bachrach and Christopher Allmand on the Middle Ages, John Lynn on the eighteenth century, Williamson Murray on the m o d e m world, and of course Geoffrey Parker himself on the Early M o d e m period. Indeed, Parker's chapter on dynastic war between 1494 and 1660 is perhaps the best thing in the book, a masterly summary of all facets of the warfare of that time—tactics, logistics, weaponry, the rise of professional armies, uniforms, and the role of religion—as well as an excellent account of the...

Cannons, castles, and capitalism: The invention of gunpowder and the rise of the west∗

The emergence of institutions which effectively defined and enforced ownership rights was a key prerequisite to the development of the modern capitalist economy. The nation‐state played a major role in supplying this institutional framework for economic growth. Explaining why nation‐states emerged when they did is relevant to explaining the early modern transition to sustained economic growth. Various economic historians have claimed that the Gunpowder Revolution of the fifteenth century was a crucial event which helped trigger these developments. The present paper examines this argument critically. When the relevant military and technological history of the middle ages is closely examined, the claims for the importance of the “gunpowder trigger” can be shown to be seriously flawed.

Muscovite Military Change Revisited

My book, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy, deals with the problem of the interaction between technological and social change. Unfortunately, Thomas Esper's review, in the April 1972 issue of Technology and Culture, contains many flaws and does not tell what the book is really about; hence this letter of elucidation. While it is obvious that the major issues (enserfment, changing military styles) of Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy have been studied for a long time, scholars other than Esper have observed something new and original in my explanation of the interaction of these developments and in my major thesis: the Russian peasants were finally unwillingly enserfed by the government in 1648-49 at a moment of political crisis to satisfy the status demands of the functionally obsolescent middle-service-class cavalry archers (not nobility, as Esper says) who had been technologically dispossessed by the gunpowder revolution. The enserfment was part of the price of the change to a mass infantry army commanded by foreign mercenary officers, for the middle service class, in exchange for the right to exploit the abased peasants, accepted its loss of social function and status while allowing the increasingly absolutist government to rule unchallenged. If Esper has seen this before, and it certainly is not the general thesis he seems to talk about, he should have favored Technology and Culture readers with the name of its originator and an analysis of it-old, as he implies that it is. The truth is that Esper obviously failed to recognize both the and its novelty. If Enserfment were simply the useful survey he claims, his remark about the irrelevancy of the footnotes would have been in order. However, Enserfment is one of the few original lengthy monographs about early modern Russia written in the West

The Implications of Demographic Change for Nationalism and Internationalism

O NE OF THE MOST significant and least studied aspects of the population is its impact on the formation of national communities. Is there a connection between demographic changes and nationalism, between patterns of loyalty to a national group and changes in the size, geographic distribution and group composition of its population? How great is this connection? The continuing importance of both nationalism and the population explosion in world politics today begs exploration of the relationship between these dynamic quantitative and qualitative areas of social change. Diverse changes in the structure of world population do in fact help to forge the structure of social organization, just as do the shifts in military technology and defensibility which John H. Herz shows to have shaped the size and nature of organized social units. While the unprecedented changes in world population which became evident about 1650 paralleled Herz's gunpowder revolution in influencing the rise of national groups, the societal effects of present population changes may someday match the effects of new thermonuclear weaponry. As population trends continue to mold loyalty to national groups, they are even now affecting loyalty to the international group composed of all world inhabitants. Although population is at best only one factor shaping patterns of group loyalty, it may prove worthwhile to trace out the implications of demographic change not only because they are regularly overlooked but also because they in turn influence other factors which shape loyalty such as education and geographic isolation.