Review Essay TECHNOLOGY AND WAR: THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVOLUTION OF THE 1980S ALEX ROLAND The 1980s witnessed an unprecedented flowering of scholarly interest in technology and war.1 As if to herald the event, William H. McNeill, then editor of theJournal ofModern History, devoted the June 1979 issue to this topic. The first two articles introduced Jon Sumida, a McNeill graduate student at the University of Chicago, and Daniel R. Headrick, an assistant professor at nearby Roosevelt Uni versity. Both went on to publish important books elaborating their 1979 articles; both will be discussed at length later in this essay. But it was McNeill himself whose work would dominate the decade. The journal issue reflected his own ripening interest in technology and war, which would soon bear fruit as The Pursuit ofPower} None of the many books on this topic that appeared in the 1980s quite rivaled it. The Pursuit ofPower arose from McNeill’s earlier world history, The Rise of the West.3 In that work he concluded that insufficient attention had been paid by Western scholars to two issues, disease and the relationship between technology and war. He addressed the first question in Plagues and People} The Pursuit of Power is his attempt to address the second. Dr. Roland is professor of history at Duke University. ‘More complete surveys of the literature may be found in Alex Roland, “Technology and War: A Bibliographic Essay,” in Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives on the American Experience, ed. Merritt Roe Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 347—79; and “Science and War,” Osiris, 2d ser. 1 (1985): 247-72, republished as Historical Writing on American Science: Perspectives and People, ed. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). ’William H. McNeill, The Pursuit ofPower: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since a.d. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). ’William H. McNeill, The Rise of the W«si.· A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). ’William H. McNeill, Plagues and People (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Press, 1976).© 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X793/3401-0006$01.00 117 118 Alex Roland The Pursuit of Power has much to recommend it. In typical McNeill style, it is elegantly written, broadly focused, widely researched, astutely balanced, and brilliantly conceived. McNeill has, I believe, seven languages and, I know, a capacious mind. He covers the last millennium with intelligence and insight, organizing a mass of information in a readable and engaging narrative. Along the way he offers new interpretations of phenomena we thought we already understood. He argues at one point, for example, that the military-industrial complex was really born in England at the turn of the century in the context of the Anglo-German naval arms race. In the process he offers a definition of the military-industrial complex that is better than any I know. According to McNeill it is nothing more nor less than the active collusion of government officials and arms-industry executives in attempting to shape national security policy. In England, the admirals got their ships, the businesses got their contracts, the citizens got the bill, and the world got a step closer to war. All of this sounds strikingly familiar, proof of McNeill’s point. The problem with this important book is its thesis, or better, its theses. In has three, I think, none of them entirely satisfactory or entirely clear. The first thesis, the clearest of them all, is that the rise of the West can be attributed in part to the relationship among war, technology, public finance, and political power. Europe in the early modern period witnessed a cycle that has since become familiar: superior military technology is used by heads of state to secure or extend their political power. The power is then used to increase state revenue, which in turn supports the development and purchase of new military technology. This may seem an obvious truism to the modern reader, but it was not obvious to earlier generations.5 Nor has it been obvious to many scholars that this helps to explain the...