Military Revolution Research Articles

Fiscal policies and the institution of a tax state in Anglo‐Saxon England within a comparative context1

This article begins by noting that military revolutions and civil wars in early modern Europe provide an unduly narrow framework for understanding the transition from a domain to a tax state. Taking Anglo‐Saxon England as a case study, it is suggested that political restrictions led to the establishment of direct and indirect taxation, thereby providing rulers with revenues which surpassed those from domain resources. The main section of the article uses sources from coinage and wills to poetry and letters in order to give a general idea of the chronological development of a medieval tax state. This analysis challenges the views of the new fiscal historians, who argue that a collapse in a medieval domain state acts as the precondition for the emergence of a tax state. Instead, this article suggests that new policies arose because of the need of Anglo‐Saxon kings and their advisers to take account of the requirements of ecclesiastical authorities, as well as a heavy revenue imperative, in paying for resistance against the Vikings. The article ends with a discussion of the comparative applications of the contexts and catalysts which lead to the adoption of pioneering fiscal policies.

Death by Moderation: The U.S. Military's Quest for Useable Weapons. By David A. Koplow. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 284p. $88.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. - The Iraq Wars and America's Military Revolution. By Keith L. Shimko. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 264p. $85.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

Death by Moderation: The U.S. Military's Quest for Useable Weapons. By David A. Koplow. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 284p. $88.00 cloth, $29.99 paper. - The Iraq Wars and America's Military Revolution. By Keith L. Shimko. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 264p. $85.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.

Realism’s Military/Technical Wing and International Politics1

The Limits of U.S. Military Capability: Lessons from Vietnam and Iraq. By James H. Lebovic Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 297 pp., $50.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-801-89472-5). The Problem of Force: Grappling with the Global Battlefield. By Simon W. Murden Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009. 233 pp., $55.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-588-26649-1). The Iraq Wars and America's Military Revolution. By Keith L. Shimko New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 249 pp, $27.99 paperback (ISBN-13: 978-0-521-12884-1). The Vietnam War and the Iraq wars of 1990–91 and 2003 extended debates on military doctrine which had been under way since President Truman and General MacArthur's fallout over the more appropriate military strategy for the Korean War in 1950. In purely military terms, since then the division has been between the Never-Again School on the one hand and the Limited War School on the other. The former argued for all-or-nothing interventions, that is, “either the United States should be prepared to do everything necessary to win or it should not intervene at all” (George/Craig 1995:261). As for the latter, it suggested that the United States “might well have to fight limited wars again” after Korea and, in order to prevent escalation in the nuclear age, “the United States would most likely have to limit its objectives and the military means it employed” (ibid., 261, 262). The 1991 Iraq War reflected the Never-Again approach, while both the Vietnam War and 2003 Iraq War, in their respective ways, drew on the Limited War School . Since the most recent of these wars is a major concern in the books under consideration, the interplay between technological change and the conduct of foreign policy should be expected to deserve extended attention. This is especially true since one line of thinking about US foreign policy was to proactively take advantage of the “unipolar moment,” which was assumed would last only for a limited period in time, and the use of cutting-edge RMA technologies for specific policies (for example, regime change) under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld would have offered an interesting field for the analysis of the tension between technology and politics (Buzan/Hansen 2009:53–4).2 Unfortunately, the books do not assess this aspect. From the viewpoint of a recent sociology of International Security Studies, the …

The Dutch army and the military revolutions, 1588-1688

The Dutch army is central to all discussions about the tactical, strategic and organisational military revolution of the early modern period, but this is the first substantial work on the subject in English. This book addresses the changes that were effected in the tactics and organisation of the Dutch armed forces between 1588 and 1688. It shows how in the first decades of this period the Dutch army was transformed from an unreliable band of mercenaries into a disciplined force that could hold its own against the might of Spain. Under the leadership of Maurits of Nassau and his cousin Willem Lodewijk a tactical revolution was achieved that had a profound impact on battle. However, the Dutch army's organisational structure remained unchanged and the Dutch Republic continued to rely on mercenaries and military entrepreneurs. It was not until the latter half of the seventeenth century that the Dutch, under William III of Orange, Captain-General of the Union, introduced revolutionary changes in military organisation and established an efficient standing army. This army withstood attacks by Louis XIV and the Dutch reforms were copied by the English. OLAF VAN NIMWEGEN has held a number of research posts in the Netherlands. He has an extensive publication record in Dutch and has published several articles on the Dutch army in English. In 2004 he was awarded the Schouwenburg Prize for an outstanding publication on Dutch military history for De Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden als grote mogendheid (The Republic of the United Netherlands as a great power), about the role and position of the Dutch Republic in the European system of states in the period 1713 to 1756.

The hybrid military establishment of the East India Company in South Asia: 1750–1849

AbstractDuring the seventeenth century, the East India Company (EIC) was a minor power in South Asia, repeatedly defeated in battle. However, this changed rapidly, beginning in the 1750s, as the EIC started projecting power from its coastal enclaves into the interior. One after other, the indigenous powers were defeated and destroyed. This article argues that the EIC’s military success was not merely the result of importing the military institutions that emerged in western Europe: there was no military revolution in early modern South Asia. Rather, the EIC blended imported British military institutions and techniques with South Asia’s indigenous military traditions, creating a hybrid military establishment in which South Asian manpower, animals, and economic resources were crucial. The article focuses on the construction of the EIC’s military establishment by concentrating on three spheres: military technology, manpower management, and logistics.

Swedish Naval Administration, 1521-1721: Resource Flows and Organisational Capabilities, by Jan Glete

The untimely death of the Swedish historian Jan Glete has extinguished an original and penetrating intelligence. Though he was only sixty-one, he has left a formidable body of work (including twelve substantial monographs) which deserves to be better known than it is; many historians would have saved themselves time and embarrassment by reading it. The core of his interests was summed up in the title of one of his earlier books, the centenary history of the Swedish engineering concern ASEA which he published in 1987, ‘a study in the organisational, technical and economic development of a great enterprise’. He was an economic historian with a keen interest in state formation. His work was both fully informed by theoretical insights (though it was characteristic of him to have little time for the most fashionable theoreticians), and founded on extensive archival research in several countries. He read prodigiously in at least seventeen languages. Above all, he took technology seriously as a fundamental component of modern history; he did not disdain to master the details, and he did not run away from the complexity of modern states and organisations to take refuge in simple theories about simple structures. ‘Technology is part of many political, social and economic processes studied by historians and economists’, he argued, ‘and technical skills are often decisive for success and failure in human activity’. While the rest of the historical world was obsessed with the ‘military revolution’, Glete early identified navies as the most complex and technically advanced organisations in early modern Europe. ‘In an environment of fragmented and unorganised resources’, as he writes in this book, ‘a complex organisation has power far beyond the individual resources accreted to it’. Over a series of monographs, he examined the links between naval development and state formation from different perspectives, and in different countries. In most of these studies comparisons are drawn with the Swedish case, but only in this, his last book, did Glete comprehensively tackle the naval history of his own country. Swedish naval archives are rich but scattered and disorganised, and for some periods of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries even the outline of wars and battles (always the first interest of an older generation of historians) has not been properly defined. Shipbuilding, gun-founding, manning and victualling have never been covered on this scale. Indeed, scarcely any country's naval administration has been studied in this sophisticated manner, as the key to state formation. This is our first detailed analysis of the beginnings of what Patrick O’Brien has called the ‘fiscal-naval state’, and what he and Glete regard as the prototype of the modern industrial economy. It was characteristic of Glete that he made available to other scholars not only his analysis but the raw materials which underlay it; in this case numerous statistical tables, and a sixty-two page fleet list with details of every Swedish warship over two centuries, and the strength of the fleet for every year.

Military Transformation in the Ottoman Empire and Russia, 1500–1800

Military Transformation in the Ottoman Empire and Russia, 1500–1800 Gábor Ágoston (bio) By the early 16th century, the Ottoman Empire had emerged as a major military power in Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. The Ottomans were feared and admired by contemporaneous Europeans from Niccolò Machiavelli to Ivan Peresvetov. The latter regarded the empire of Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444–46, 1451–81) as a model to be emulated by his own ruler, Ivan IV of Muscovy (r. 1547–84), and indeed Ottoman (and Islamic, Mongol) methods of resource mobilization and warfare were taken into consideration during the military reforms of Ivan III (r. 1462–1505) and Ivan IV. Yet by 1783, the Ottomans had lost the northern Black Sea littoral and the Crimea, an Ottoman client state with a predominantly Muslim population, to the Russians. Writing his advice to Sultan Mahmud I (r. 1730–54) in 1732, Ibrahim Müteferrika, the founder of the first Arabic-letter printing press in the empire and an ardent proponent of Ottoman reforms, cited the military reforms of Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) as an example worthy of imitation. Ivan Peresvetov's and Ibrahim Müteferrika's contrasting opinions reflect major shifts in Ottoman and Russian military fortunes, changes that await explanation. Military historians of Central and Eastern Europe have long been obsessed with the European "military revolution" as observed in certain parts of Western Europe and have tried to measure military developments in their regions against those in Western Europe.1 This article argues that comparing and contrasting Ottoman, Austrian Habsburg, Polish-Lithuanian, and Muscovite/Russian military capabilities, performance, and transformations can be just as fruitful as [End Page 281] comparing these empires to those of the leading states of the European military revolution.2 Comparisons of strategies of recruitment and resource mobilization, as well as of bureaucratic–fiscal developments, help us better understand the divergent paths these empires' governments took, and thus the nature of their empires. Such comparisons also help us qualify both the military-revolution approach and its more recent critique that uses cultural arguments. Based ultimately on Weberian assumptions that war acted as a catalyst for political and social change, the military-revolution approach views war "as a force driven by its own internal dynamics of technological developments and organizational innovation," which led to force optimization and thus greater military effectiveness. The cultural argument counters these assumptions with its claim that war ultimately is "culturally determined" and is a product of the cultural context of specific societies. According to this assumption, "the degree to which a technological or organizational innovation is accepted and developed depends upon the cultural context."3 This article is the first attempt at comparing Ottoman and Russian military capabilities from circa 1500 through 1800. My main focus is on military, fiscal, and bureaucratic–institutional transformations and on the changing role of the central government in warmaking. The article pays special attention to the following questions: How did recruitment strategies and methods of resource mobilization change? Were the changes the result of planned reforms or a response to internal and/or external challenges? What causal connections existed between changes in the composition and effectiveness of the armed forces and changes in the relationship between rulers and their elites? Since these questions will ultimately require a monograph or two, the present article's aim is to introduce the questions and give preliminary answers to some of them. The main argument set forth here is that whereas in the patrimonial Ottoman Empire of the 16th century, the sultan and his central government had more control over their empire's resources and the means of organized violence than their Muscovite counterparts, by the 18th century Istanbul lost its edge over St. Petersburg. Despite its failure in the 1711 Pruth campaign, by the early 18th century Russia had considerably strengthened its military capabilities vis-à-vis the Ottomans due to a series of autocratic military, bureaucratic, and [End Page 282] fiscal policies, some of which were devised and implemented as responses to Tatar and Ottoman threats or introduced as imitations of Ottoman military–bureaucratic practices. In this process, Romanov Russia evolved into an autocratic centralized empire, described...

Género, imprenta y espacio social: una "poética de la pólvora" para la épica quinientista

Renaissance epic poetry has traditionally been regarded as a highly learned and aristocratic genre. The present essay, however, explores the relation between the emergence and success of the Hispanic epic by the second half of the sixteenth century and the social and cultural practices of a very specific socioprofessional group: the plebeian and hidalgo soldiery of Charles V's and Philip II's imperial armies. In contrast with the Italian romance and Spanish chivalric literature, as literary practices associated with the nobility of European aristocratic courts, epic will be the discourse of the professional soldiers ( soldados pláticos ) of the Habsburg military corporation, a social group articulated around the practices and spaces derived from the Renaissance's military revolution. Furthermore, the new epic will be shaped by a set of specific printing practices entailing important consequences for the distribution and reading of epic prints.

Adam Smith on the cyclicity of the rise and fall of civilization

As a historical framework, Adam Smith used the four-stages theory of social development, which was included in a broader one, namely, the history of civilization. First, in narrating history, Smith criticized the perspective of the historical cycle of the rise and fall of civilization adopted by Machiavelli and other writers. On that occasion, he inquired into the unique mechanism and development of the modern European civilization through comparing it with the ancient classical civilization and the uncivilized feudal past. Furthermore, Smith attributed the unique mechanism of the modern civilization to some important aspects of it: the invention of fi re-arms (the military revolution), the production system based on the division of labor without slavery, and the establishment of absolute power. For Smith, the system of natural liberty suited modern civilization in which many governments were not republican. However, he regarded republican self-government as indicating the progress of society. In the long run, Smith recognized the contradictions and ambivalence in the modern civilization.

Prices, the military revolution, and western Europe's comparative advantage in violence

Price data from England, France, and Germany show that the military sector in western Europe experienced rapid and sustained productivity growth well before the industrial revolution. The productivity growth has implications for the history of the military revolution in early modern Europe and helps explain why western Europe gained a comparative advantage in violence. It also raises questions about the economic impact of the military revolution.

Bloodied Banners: Martial Display on the Medieval Battlefield (review)

Reviewed by: Bloodied Banners: Martial Display on the Medieval Battlefield Judith Collard Jones, Robert W., Bloodied Banners: Martial Display on the Medieval Battlefield, Woodbridge, Boydell, 2010; hardback; pp. 228; 14 b/w illustrations, 9 colour plates; R.R.P. £50.00; ISBN 9781843835615. Robert Jones has produced an engagingly readable and clear account of the role of military display on the medieval battlefield. It will be useful for undergraduates and for more specialized audiences from a variety of fields, including literature and art history, not just military history. The structure is straightforward. The first seven chapters individually explore heraldic display, badges, armour, swords, and audible display – such as war cries and the use of musical instruments – and examine their particular roles. These include very practical requirements such as the need to identify friend from foe, or how useful armour was as protection in relation to its symbolic and psychological roles. The penultimate chapter examines religious symbolism on the battlefield and its broader theological and secular contexts. It briefly touches on the Church’s accommodation of the warrior and his role in society, transforming him into a symbol of spiritual struggle. The final chapter contains a discussion of the debates around the idea of a ‘military revolution’ in warfare, first proposed by Michael Roberts in his 1955 paper ‘The Military Revolution, 1560–1660.’ It is in this final chapter that Jones argues most forcefully for his project. Just as the castle has been reconsidered in terms of its social and domestic roles, as well as its military architecture, this work makes the case for a similar reconsideration for military display. Jones argues cogently for such display as being ‘a fundamental part of military warfare, serving as an outward expression of its motivations and drives’, as an integral part of military culture and its exploration, and an important avenue for historical research. The usefulness of this avenue of research is demonstrated by the manner in which such an examination can bring nuances to the debates about the identification of moments of change in warfare, and the outlining of the distinction between the development of methods of warfare and the broader cultures out of which these changes emerge. Change and continuity coexist in this approach. One of the real pleasures of this work is the use made by Jones of contemporary textual and visual records. The book opens with the ignominious death of Sir John Chandos in 1396 in battle. After grandly challenging the French army, Chandos dismounted and advanced towards them, skidding and tripping over his elaborate robes, and was then killed by a squire’s lance thrust. Jones uses this account to explore both contemporary prejudices about such seeming vainglory, as well as possible explanations [End Page 209] for such elaborate dress. Presumably Chandos, an experienced military commander, had not been regarded as a buffoon before this incident. Jones’s use of such vivid anecdotes adds substantially to making his book so accessible. They include the discovery of William Marshall, after a tournament, with his head on a smith’s anvil having his helmet cut to pieces because it was too battered to remove and the description of Frankish knights leaving a battle in the First Crusade, looking like porcupines because their armour was covered with arrows. His knowledge of military accoutrements means that he convincingly challenges the oft-repeated interpretation of Bishop Odo’s baculus in the Bayeux Tapestry as reflecting ecclesiastical prohibitions of clerics spilling blood, arguing instead that it was an early equivalent of a field marshal’s baton. Jones’s discussion of the practicalities of battle seems grounded in common sense. He discusses the role of war cries, drums, and trumpets in the field as means to penetrate the numbing effect of armour-enclosed headgear, and to communicate, galvanize or terrify the enemy, as well as discussing the chilling effect of an enemy’s silence. He talks of the impact of armour on sight, hearing, and mobility. It is only when he steps out of the medieval arena that Jones is less convincing. I found the parallels he draws with the natural world or his crosscultural comparisons with such groups as the Wola warriors of Papua New...

Reappraising the Elizabethan and Early Stuart Soldier: Recent Historiography on Early Modern English Military Culture

For much of the 20th century, historians could muster little praise for the late Tudor and early Stuart soldiery, often portraying them as amateurs who were part of a decaying and moribund military tradition isolated from the transformations shaping warfare on the European continent. In the 1980s and 1990s, these theories were tested and found wanting by those who argued that the English were fully engaged in the so-called early modern military revolution. Instead of decline and decay, England is now considered to have been engaged in the military revolution from early in the 16th century, with scholars arguing that the English art of war was in step with continental practice. This article weighs the contributions of a new generation of historians to the ongoing reappraisal of late Tudor and early Stuart soldiering over the last decade. Along with examining England and the military revolution, new work has focused much attention on the motivations and mentalities of English officers serving in France, the Low Countries and Ireland, with confessional zeal, honour and economic hardship seen as the primary factors motivating English volunteers to serve abroad. At the same time, scholars are also taking a fresh look at how military administration and improvements to training affected the lives of common soldiers.

State Capacity and Military Conflict

Powerful, centralized states controlling a large share of national income only begin to appear in Europe after 1500. We build a model that explains their emergence in response to the increasing importance of money for military success. When fiscal resources are not crucial for winning wars, the threat of external conflict stifles state building. As finance becomes critical, internally cohesive states invest in state capacity while divided states rationally drop out of the competition, causing divergence. We emphasize the role of the “Military Revolution”, a sequence of technological innovations that transformed armed conflict. Using data from 374 battles, we investigate empirically both the importance of money for military success and patterns of state building in early modern Europe. The evidence is consistent with the predictions of our model.

An Accelerating Divergence? The Revisionist Model of World History and the Question of Eurasian Military Parity: Data from East Asia

Over the past few years, this journal has hosted a debate central to world history and historical sociology: Joseph M. Bryant’s bold assault on the revisionist model of global history and the revisionists’ equally trenchant defense. A key point of disagreement concerns Europeans' relative military advantages vis-a-vis Asians. Both sides cite literature from historians’ Military Revolution Model, but each takes different lessons from that literature. The revisionists see a slight military imbalance in favor of Europe but deny that it reflects a general European technological lead. Bryant believes that the European technological lead is significant and reflects a more general modernizing trend. This article tries to resolve the disagreement by appealing to data from East Asia. First, it argues that recent work in Asian history points to what we can call a Chinese Military Revolution, which compels us to place the European Military Revolution in a larger, Eurasian context: not just western European but also East Asian societies were undergoing rapid military change and modernization during the gunpowder age. Second, it adduces evidence from a new study of the Sino-Dutch War of 1661-1668 (a war that both Bryant and the revisionists cite, each, again, taking divergent lessons) to come to a more precise evaluation of the military balance between China and western Europe in the early modern period: western cannons and muskets didn’t provide a discernible advantage, but western war ships and renaissance forts did. The article concludes that the revisionists are correct in their belief that Asian societies were undergoing rapid changes in military technology and practices along the lines of those taking place in western Europe and that the standard model Bryant defends is incorrect because it presumes that Asian societies are more stagnant than is warranted by the evidence. At the same time, the article argues that counter-revisionists like Bryant are correct in their belief that military modernization was proceeding more quickly in Europe than that in Asia, which may indicate that the counter-revisionists are correct on a basic point: there was an early divergence between the west and the rest of Eurasia. At first this divergence was slight – so slight, indeed, that it probably left little clear evidence in the noisy and poor early modern data we have available. But the divergence increased over time. Thus, we can speak of a small but accelerating divergence.

The Iraq wars and America's military revolution

The Iraq wars and America's military revolution

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...

The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb, by Peter A. Lorge

<i>The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb</i>, by Peter A. Lorge

“Red East”: Soviet Central Asia in the 1920s

The Soviet absorption of Central Asia in the 1920s followed the usual path of modern colonization, i.e. military intervention and subsequent Cultural Revolution which strived to rapidly transform a “backward people” into “civilized citizens” by changing their traditions and altering their nature (Khalid, 2006). The success of such a conquest required control over the conquered territories by establishing law and order. By the 1920s, the Red Army was winning battles over the Central Asia which included territories of Turkistan, Bukhoro and Semirechie. Soviet hopes the immediate “victory” of the socialist system in Central Asia was however shattered. The demise of the traditional hierarchical system did not automatically lead to the establishment of modern and secular republics. Instead what followedwas a decade of insurgency, lawlessness, and

Renaissance France at War: Armies, Culture and Society, c. 1480–1560 (review)

Reviewed by: Renaissance France at War: Armies, Culture and Society, c. 1480–1560 Brian Sandberg Renaissance France at War: Armies, Culture and Society, c. 1480–1560. By David Potter. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell & Brewer, 2008. ISBN 978-1-84383-405-2. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Appendixes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xviii, 405. $115.00. Renaissance France at War brings to life the powerful French royal army that fought in the Italian Wars and the Habsburg-Valois wars of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. David Potter crafts a highly detailed and well-documented description of all facets of the French royal army: command, infantry, cavalry, artillery, garrisons, and support personnel. Potter has exploited massive and disparate manuscript collections in numerous French archives to assemble documentation for this impressive study. This methodology demonstrates the vital importance of avoiding a strictly institutional approach to war and society in early modern France, especially when studying periods prior to the creation of war archives in the mid-seventeenth century. Potter’s rich appendices provide [End Page 1314] ample additional data on army strength, troop composition, and war finance drawn directly from manuscript sources. Renaissance French kings engaged in serious formulation of strategy, according to Potter. Royal ministers drew up elaborate campaign plans and maintained intense correspondence networks with military commanders and advisers (pp. 53–62). This finding parallels Geoffrey Parker’s conclusion that Spanish military policies under Philip II reflected a grand strategic vision. Potter is hesitant to fit the royal army of Renaissance France into the wider debate on the Military Revolution, however, despite its technically impressive artillery and formidable siege train, which could be seen as heralding an “artillery revolution.” Potter discovers massive fortification programs underway in the early sixteenth century, suggesting that France was significantly involved in the expansion of bastioned fortifications earlier than some historians had previously thought. “Vauban in effect systematised and strengthened a network of fortresses that had begun in the later 15th and early 16th centuries” (p. 159). Paying for artillery pieces, fortifications, and an expanding army increasingly strained French war finances, imperiling the “sinews of war” and adversely affecting French society by the mid-sixteenth century (pp. 235, 248–254). In addition to gauging warfare’s effect on the kingdom, the book reveals fascinating intersections between Renaissance warfare and French culture. Renaissance French armies relied heavily on mercenaries in addition to “national” troops, producing ethnically diverse armies that effectively dealt with complex linguistic and cultural issues (pp. 94–102, 124–125). Potter implies that family networks and political alliances may explain the service of “foreigners” better than mercenary economic motives. He examines other cultural dimensions of warfare, including memoir-writing, battle cries, speeches before combat, musical celebrations, artistic representations, and ritualized conventions. Unfortunately, the book relies on problematic and dated methodological concepts such as “mentality” in building an analysis of war and culture. Potter’s suggestive discussion of Renaissance battlefields as “places of remembrance” alludes to Pierre Nora’s influential notion of lieux de mémoire, but fails to develop an extended examination of history and memory surrounding evocations of combat sites (pp. 187–190). Renaissance France at War goes well beyond conventional institutional histories of warfare in examining the connections between the royal military system and a growing French “public sphere.” Potter demonstrates that French kings and their advisors felt a need to mobilize popular support for their military policies. Royal entry ceremonies, festivals, poems, songs, and speeches could all serve as well-argued justifications for engaging in warfare. Printed edicts, books, pamphlets, and engravings communicated complex rhetorical messages to a French public that was eager to hear news about the latest military maneuvers, battles, and sieges—but also prepared to ridicule failures and defeats through biting satire. Potter’s findings here could have achieved even more resonance by addressing the theoretical debates about the “public sphere” in France involving Jürgen Habermas and his critics. The book’s approach to art, music, and warfare might have benefited from excellent recent studies by Rebecca Zorach and Kate Van Orden. [End Page 1315] David Potter’s book offers readers an impressive comprehensive examination of warfare, society, and culture in Renaissance France. Potter successfully traces the growth of...

The Indian Saltpeter Trade, the Military Revolution, and the Rise of Britain as a Global Superpower

Between 1601 and 1801, ships made thousands of voyages carrying goods from Asian ports to the primary European markets for East Indian commodities: Amsterdam, London, l'Orient, Copenhagen, Lisbon, ...