Notes

1. Arms and Society in Antiquity

1. 2 Kings 19:20–36.

2. G. A. Barton, ed. and trans., Royal Inscriptions of Sumer and Akkad (New Haven, 1929), pp. 109–11.

3. In the words of a contemporary:

Against Kasalla [a neighboring region] he marched, and he turned Kasalla into mounds and heaps of ruins;

he destroyed (the land and left not) enough for a bird to rest thereon.

L. W. King, ed. and trans., Chronicles concerning Early Babylonian Kings (London, 1907), pp. 5–6.

4. Herodotus is of course the basic source for the Persian campaign, but his figures for the size of Xerxes’ forces are hopelessly exaggerated. My understanding of the logistics of Xerxes’ campaign derives primarily from G. B. Grundy, The Great Persian War (London, 1901) and Charles Hignett, Xerxes’ Invasion of Greece (Oxford, 1963).

5. Propitiation of the gods through more splendid ceremonies, and assurance of immortality through more massive tombs, counted as welfare as much as canal and dike construction to extend the area of irrigated land. Such enterprises were all calculated to increase the harvest.

6. A. Heidel, ed. and trans., The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago, 1946), tablet III, col. iv, lines 156–67. The Gilgamesh epic is known through fragments of several different versions, all much later than the historic date of Gilgamesh. Still the texts undoubtedly embody archaic elements, reflecting conditions in Sumer near the beginning of civilized development.

7. Ibid., tablet V, col. iv, lines 20–28.

8. In the Far East, however, in the first century B.C. the Chinese empire established a pattern of “tribute trade” with neighboring rulers. Ritual deference was central in this relationship; indeed the Chinese authorities paid dearly in tangible commodities for the ceremonial acknowledgment of their superiority. Yet in another sense the Hsiung-nu and other border folk, in submitting deferentially to the Chinese court rituals, opened themselves to Sinification, paying thereby a high, if intangible, price. Cf. the interesting analysis of this relationship in Yü Ying-shih, Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967).

9. Conclusive proof of Xerxes’ time of march is unattainable, but cf. the careful discussion of what a century or more of scholarship has been able to surmise in Hignett, Xerxes’ Invasion of Greece, app. 14, “The Chronology of the Invasion,” pp. 448–57. Herodotus tells us that Xerxes’ army took three months to go from the Hellespont to Athens (8.51.1).

10. The points raised in the balance of this chapter are more extensively discussed in William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963).

11. Whether compound bows, which get extra power by facing wood with expansible sinew on one side and by compressible horn on the other, were new with the charioteers or had been known earlier is a disputed point. Yigael Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands in the Light of Archaeological Study, 2 vols. (New York, 1963), 1:57, says that these bows were invented by the Akkadians of Sargon’s era. The basis for this view is a stele representing Naram Sin, Sargon’s grandson and successor, with a bow whose shape resembles that of later compound bows. But how to interpret the curve of a bow recorded in stone is obviously indecisive. On the compound bow and its capacities see W. F. Paterson, “The Archers of Islam,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 9 (1966):69–87; Ralph W. F. Payne-Gallwey, The Crossbow, Medieval and Modern, Military and Sporting: Its Construction, History, and Management (London, 1903), appendix.

12. See, for example, book 16, lines 426 ff. However absurd, Homer’s report may be accurate. The tactics he describes may have been a function of numbers and terrain. To succeed, a chariot charge required a critical mass—enough arrows and charging chariots to break opposing infantry and persuade foot soldiers to flee. But in a land like Greece, where hills abound and fodder for horses is short, chariots had to remain few—too few, perhaps to achieve decisive effect in battle. Yet, like Cadillacs of the recent past, the prestige of the chariot after its victories in the Middle East was such that every local European chieftain was eager to have one, whether or not he could use it effectively in war.

13. Judges 21:25 (Theophile J. Meek, trans.).

14. Men occasionally rode horseback as early as the fourteenth century B.C. This is proved by an Egyptian statuette of the Amarna age, now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. See photograph in Yadin, Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands, 1:218; another equestrian figure, from the British Museum, of the same age is reproduced, ibid., p. 220. The difficulty of remaining firmly on a horse’s back without saddle or stirrups was, however, very great; and especially so if a man tried to use his hands to pull a bow at the same time—or wield some other kind of weapon. For centuries horseback riding therefore remained unimportant in military engagements, though perhaps specially trained messengers used their horses’ fleetness to deliver information to army commanders. So, at least, Yadin interprets another, later, representation of a cavalryman in an Egyptian bas-relief recording the Battle of Kadesh (1298 B.C.).

15. For photographs of a bas-relief portraying Assyrian paired cavalrymen see Yadin, 2:385.

16. Karl Jettmar, “The Altai before the Turks,” Museum of Far East Antiquities, Stockholm, Bulletin 23 (1951): 154–57.

17. Nevertheless, peasants were uprooted from most of the loess soils of north China at least twice. Mongol raids of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and nomad attacks in the centuries after the collapse of the Han Dynasty in the third century A.D. were severe enough and prolonged enough to destroy agricultural settlement in wide districts of north China—or so imperfect population statistics suggest. Cf. Ping-ti Ho, Studies in the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), and Hans Bielenstein, “The Census of China during the Period 2–742 A.D.,” Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, Bulletin 19 (1947): 125–63.

18. Assyrian bas-reliefs show cavalrymen with metaled corselets. As in so many other military matters, the Assyrians seem to have pioneered armored cavalry too.

19. A field planted to alfalfa in effect cost next to nothing, for grain fields had to be fallowed every other year to keep down weeds. By planting alfalfa in the ground instead of leaving the soil fallow, a useful crop could be garnered while bacterial action on the roots of the alfalfa actually enriched the soil with nitrogen and so made subsequent grain harvests richer than would otherwise have been the case. Even the amount of work required to plant and harvest a field of alfalfa was not notably greater than the mid-season plowing necessary for a field left fallow; for it was only thus that the natural seeding of weeds could be interrupted and the soil readied for grain. Alfalfa kept back unwanted weeds almost as well as mid-season plowing simply by shading the soil with its leaves.

20. John W. Eadie, “The Development of Roman Mailed Cavalry,” Journal of Roman Studies 57 (1967): 161–73.

21. This Byzantine policy resembled the way the New Kingdom of Egypt reconciled the superior technology of chariot warfare with Old Kingdom traditions of bureaucratic centralism.

22. On stirrups and knights see Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962); John Beeler, Warfare in Feudal Europe, 730–1200 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), pp. 9–30.

23. Shadowy survival of older command structures had also occurred in the chariot age and facilitated the rebuilding of Iron Age monarchies.

24. James Lee, pending Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago.

25. Cf. the perceptive remarks of Denis Twitchett, “Merchant Trade and Government in Late T’ang,” Asia Major 14 (1968): 63–95, on the role of merchants in China.

26. A rich find of cuneiform tablets from about 1800 B.C. in Anatolia shows merchant colonies from a mother city, Assur, flourishing as part of a trade net that extended from the Persian Gulf northward through Mesopotamia. These ancient Assyrian traders shipped tin eastward and carried textiles manufactured in central Mesopotamia west ward. They appear to have behaved as private capitalists, quite in the spirit of medieval merchants three thousand years later. Family firms exchanged letters: hence the archive. Profits were high—up to 100 percent in a single year, if all went well. Cf. M. T. Larsen, The Old Assyrian City-State and Its Colonies, Studies in Assyriology, vol. 4 (Copenhagen, 1976). Clearly rulers and men of power along the way permitted their donkey caravans to get through, perhaps because of the strategic value of the tin. But the archive is silent about such arrangements. For traders and their role in ancient Mesopotamia generally, see also A. Leo Oppenheim, “A New Look at the Structure of Mesopotamian Society,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 10 (1967): 1–16.

2. The Era of Chinese Predominance, 1000–1500

1. This is the population total suggested by Ping-ti Ho, “An Estimate of the Total Population in Sung-Chin China,” Etudes Song I: Histoire et institutions, ser. 1 (Paris, 1970), p. 52.

2. Stefan Balazs was the great pioneer with his “Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte der T’ang Zeit,” Mitteilungen des Seminars für orientalische Sprachen zu Berlin 34 (1931): 21–25; 35 (1932): 27–73, and his later essays gathered in two overlapping collections, Etienne Balazs, Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy (New Haven, 1964) and La bureaucratie céleste: Recherches sur l’économie et la société de la Chine traditionelle (Paris, 1968). Yoshinobu Shiba, Commerce and Society in Sung China (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1970) offers a sample of recent Japanese scholarship, which also influences the essays collected in John W. Haeger, ed., Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China (Tucson, Ariz., 1975), and a bold effort at synthesis by Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, Calif., 1973). For an interesting attempt to put China’s economic history into the context of contemporary theory of economic “development” see Anthony M. Tang, “China’s Agricultural Legacy,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 28 (1979): 1–22.

3. Robert Hartwell, “Markets, Technology and the Structure of Enterprise in the Development of the Eleventh-Century Chinese Iron and Steel Industry,” Journal of Economic History 26 (1966): 29–58; “A Cycle of Economic Change in Imperial China: Coal and Iron in Northeast China, 750–1350,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO), 10 (1967): 103–59; “Financial Expertise, Examinations and the Formulation of Economic Policy in Northern Sung China,” Journal of Asian Studies 30 (1971): 281–314.

4. Joseph Needham, The Development of Iron and Steel Technology in China (London, 1958), p. 18.

5. The use of coal as fuel in ironworking also was of long standing; but the method used to prevent the iron from becoming useless by contamination with sulphur from the coal was to encase the ore to be smelted in cylindrical clay containers. This meant small-scale production and high fuel consumption. Cf. ibid., p. 13, and pl. 11, showing modern craftsmen using such hand-sized crucibles.

6. Hartwell, “Markets, Technology and the Structure of Enterprise,” p. 34. As Hartwell points out, these statistics parallel British output in the early phases of the industrial revolution. As late as 1788, when Britain too had begun to shift to coke fuel for ferrous metallurgy, total iron output in England and Wales was only 76,000 tons, just 60 percent of China’s total seven hundred years earlier!

7. Chinese population estimates encounter this same difficulty, as had long been recognized.

8. Only in Szechuan; elsewhere coinage was copper.

9. Cf. Esson M. Gale, Discourse on Salt and Iron (Leiden, 1931).

10. Iron and steel were used in bridges, pagodas, and statues. Cf. Needham, Iron and Steel Technology, pp. 19–22; Hartwell, “A Cycle of Economic Change,” pp. 123–45; Hartwell, “Markets, Technology and the Structure of Enterprise, pp. 37–39.

11. Hartwell, “Financial Expertise,” p. 304.

12. Yang Lien-sheng, Money and Credit in China: A Short History (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 53. Robert Hartwell, “The Evolution of the Early Northern Sung Monetary System, A.D. 960–1025,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 87 (1967): 280–89. Paper money was, initially, backed by silver. “If there was the slightest impediment in the flow of paper money, the authorities would unload silver and accept paper money as payment for it. If any loss of popular confidence was feared, then not a cash’s worth of the accumulated reserves of gold and silver in the province concerned would be moved elsewhere.” Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past, p. 160, translating Li Chien-nung, Sung-Yüan-Ming ching-chi-shih-kao (Peking, 1957), p. 95. A cash was a small coin, punctured in the center and used for larger transactions attached to strings of standard length.

13. Edmund H. Worthy, “Regional Control in the Southern Sung Salt Administration,” in Haeger, Crisis and Prosperity, p. 112.

14. Yang, Money and Credit, p. 18.

15. Yoshinobu Shiba, “Commercialization of Farm Products in the Sung Period,” Acta Asiatica 19 (1970): 77–96; Peter J. Golas, “Rural China in the Song,” Journal of Asian Studies 39 (1980): 295–99.

16. Quoted in Hugh Scogin, “Poor Relief in Northern Sung China,” Oriens extremus 25 (1978): 41.

17. Ting-ch’iao was located in the lower Yangtse region. This passage comes from a local gazetteer, written between 1330 and 1332, quoted from Yoshinobu Shiba, “Urbanization and the Development of Markets on the Lower Yangtse Valley,” in Haeger, Crisis and Prosperity, p. 28. Shiba’s essay admirably connects the commercialization of specific localities with landscape variations (hill vs. flood plain), transport networks, and population growth. Obviously, not all of China was as highly developed as the region of the lower Yangtse valley. But it was what happened in that region and in the lower reaches of the Yellow River plain that set the pace for the new social and economic developments of the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries.

18. Ibid., p. 36, translating Ch’en Fu, Treatise on Agriculture, first printed in 1154.

19. Cf. Etienne Balazs, “Une Carte des centres commerciaux de la Chine à la fin du XIe siècle,” Annales: Economies sociétés, civilisations 12 (1957): 587–93.

20. Shiba, “Urbanization,” p. 43.

21. A phrase attributed to anonymous Confucian literati in a remarkable debate on state economic policy that occurred in 81 B.C. Cf. Gale, Discourse on Salt and Iron, p. 74.

22. Hartwell, “A Cycle of Economic Change,” p. 147.

23. Cf. Herbert Franke, “Siege and Defense of Towns in Medieval China,” in Frank A. Kierman, Jr., and John K. Fairbank, eds., Chinese Ways in Warfare (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), pp. 151–201.

24. Laurence J. C. Ma, Commercial Development and Urban Change in Sung China (960–1279) (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1971), p. 100. An encyclopedia of the Sung period summed up the military policy of the founder of the dynasty as follows: “He comprehended the value of strengthening the root and weakening the branches.” Wang Ying-lin, Yü Hai, cited in Lo Ch’iu-ch’ing, “Pei-sung ping-chih yen-chiu” (The military service of the northern Sung Dynasty), Hsin-ya Hsueh-pao (New Asia Journal), 3 (1957): 180, translated by Hugh Scogin.

25. The risk of military rebellion by border troops had been vividly demonstrated under the Tang when a barbarian general rebelled in 755 and nearly toppled that dynasty from the throne. The rebellion did paralyze the central civilian administration, making the next two hundred years of Chinese history a period of thinly veiled local warlordism. It was in reaction to this experience that Sung military policy was devised soon after the country was (mostly) reunited under an unusually successful warlord, Chao K’uang-yin, the founder of the dynasty. He, in effect, set out to throw down the ladder by which he had ascended to the throne by establishing administrative patterns that would put every conceivable obstacle in the way of armed rebellion by military commanders. On the T’ang revolt cf. Edwin G. Pulleybank, The Background of the Rebellion of An Lu-shan (London, 1955); on Sung military policy see Jacques Gernet, Le monde chinois (Paris, 1972), pp. 272–75; Edward A. Kracke, Jr., Civil Service in Early Sung China, 960–1067 (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 9–11; Karl Wittfogel and Feng Chia-sheng, History of Chinese Society, Liao, 907–1125 (Philadelphia, 1949), pp. 534–37.

26. For details of the Jürchen conquest, see Jing-shen Tao, The Jürchen in Twelfth Century China: A Study of Sinicization (Seattle and London, 1976), pp. 14–24.

27. No satisfactory account of the development of the crossbow in China seems to exist. A Chinese text, Spring and Autumn Annals of Wu and Yüeh, attributes the invention of the crossbow to a man named Ch’in, from whom the invention passed to three local magnates and from them to Ling, ruler of the state of Ch’u in south central China from 541 to 529 B.C. Archaeological evidence tends to support this dating, for several tombs of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. contained crossbows. The first notable improvement in crossbow design came in the eleventh century, when Li Ting invented the foot stirrup (about 1068), allowing use of the back and leg muscles for cocking the bow. Correspondingly stronger bows could then be brought into use. I owe these bits of information to personal communications from Steven F. Sagi of the University of Hawaii and Robin Yates of Cambridge University. Published materials seem hopelessly inadequate. Cf. C. M. Wilbur, “History of the Crossbow,” Smithsonian Institution Annual Report, 1936 (Washington, D.C., 1937), pp. 427–38; Michael Loewe, Everyday Life in Early Imperial China (London, 1968), pp. 82–86; Noel Barnard and Sato Tamotsu, Metallurgical Remains of Ancient China (Tokyo, 1975), pp. 116–17. For European crossbows the admirable work by Ralph W. F. Payne-Gallwey, The Crossbow, Medieval and Modern, Military and Sporting: Its Construction, History and Management (London, 1903), offers clear and abundant information, and includes a little on modern Chinese crossbows as well.

28. Corinna Hana, Berichte über die Verteidigung der Stadt Te-an während der Periode K’ai-hsi, 1205–1209 (Wiesbaden, 1970). As we shall see in chapter 3, powerful crossbows checked the expansion of knighthood in the thirteenth century when these weapons became common in Mediterranean Europe. In China, crossbows may have helped to discourage reliance on the Iranian style of heavily armored cavalry, for if a crossbowman could knock even an armored cavalryman off his horse, it made no sense to invest in the heavy horse and the expensive armor that put Iranian barons and European knights at the apex of their respective societies. Heavily armored cavalry, after some three centuries of importance in China, disappeared in the seventh century. It is, however, not certain that Chinese crossbows were powerful enough to penetrate armor before the invention of the foot stirrup in the eleventh century. Cf. Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London, 1969), pp. 168–70.

29. For a literary account of bowmaking and prints showing crossbow artisans at work, see Sung Ying-Hsing, T’ien-Kung K’ai-Wu, translated as Chinese Technology in the 17th Century, by E-tu Zen Sun and S. C. Sun (Univeristy Park, Pa., 1966), pp. 261–67. Weaker bows could be made of simpler material; indeed it was even possible to shape a workable trigger entirely out of wood; but such weapons lacked the power needed to penetrate armor. For an account of nineteenth-century Chinese crossbows made of wood and designed to fire a magazine of arrows at a very rapid rate, see Payne-Gallwey, The Crossbow, pp. 237–42. These weak but ingenious weapons (actually used against British troops in the 1860s) relied on poisoned arrows to make their wounds dangerous.

30. Sergej Aleksandrović Skoljar, “L’artillerie de jet à l’époque Song,” in Françoise Aubin, ed., Etudes Song, ser. 1 (Paris, 1978), pp. 119–42; Joseph Needham, “China’s Trebuchets, Manned and Counter-weighted,” in Bert S. Hall and Delno C. West, eds., On Pre-modern Technology and Science: A Volume of Studies in Honor of Lynn White, Jr. (Malibu, Calif., 1976), pp. 107–38.

31. Joseph Needham, “The Guns of Khaifengfu,” Times Literary Supplement, 11 January 1980; Herbert Franke, “Siege and Defense of Towns in Medieval China,” in Kierman and Fairbank, Chinese Ways in Warfare, pp. 161–79; L. Carrington Goodrich and Feng Chia-sheng, “The Early Development of Firearms in China,” Isis 36 (1946): 114–23; Wang Ling, “On the Invention and Use of Gunpowder in China,” Isis 37 (1947): 160–78.

32. Quoted from Wang Ling, “Gunpowder,” p. 165. According to Wang Ling, the fire arrows in question may have been tipped with gunpowder that exploded on impact.

33. For a detailed account of how machines and men were mobilized to defend a provincial city against the Jürchen see Hana, Berichte iiber die Verteidigung der Stadt Te-an.

34. Kracke, Civil Service in Early Sung China.

35. The quotation and figures for the army’s cost come from Hsiao Ch’i Ch’ing, The Military Establishment of the Yüan Dynasty (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), pp. 6–7.

36. Wolfram Eberhard, “Wang Ko: An Early Industrialist,” Oriens 10 (1957): 248–52, tells this tale.

37. Ma, Commerical Development and Urban Change in Sung China, p. 34. The phrases come from an imperial decree issued in 1137.

38. Ibid., p. 38. Cf. Lo Jung-pang, “Maritime Commerce and Its Relation to the Sung Navy.” JESHO 12 (1969): 61–68.

39. Herbert Franz Schurmann, Economic Structure of the Yüan Dynasty (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 3–4. Herbert Franke, “Ahmed: Ein Beitrag zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte Chinas unter Qubilai,” Oriens 1 (1948): 222–36, describes the rise and fall of the most spectacularly successful of these outsiders. He was a Moslem born in Transcaucasia who became chief administrator of the salt and other monopolies. Yet the greater scope the Mongols accorded to merchants went along with such an energetic mobilization of shipping for state purposes that Chinese seaborne trade suffered serious setback, according to Lo Jung-pang, “Maritime Commerce,” pp. 57–100.

40. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge, 1971), 4, pt. 3:476.

41. For details of the naval war see Jose Din Ta-san and F. Olesa Muñido, El poder naval chino desde sus origenes hasta la caida de la Dinastía Ming (Barcelona, 1965), pp. 96–98.

42. Needham, Science and Civilization in China 3, pt. 3, sec. 29, “Nautical Technology,” pp. 379–699, constitutes a thorough and persuasive study of Chinese shipbuilding and naval history. My remarks on naval development derive mainly from this work, supplemented by Din Ta-san and Olesa Muñido, El poder naval chino, and by three articles by Lo Jung-pang, “China as a Sea Power,” Far Eastern Quarterly 14 (1955): 489–503; “The Decline of the Early Ming Navy,” Oriens extremus 5 (1958): 149–68; and “Máritime Commerce and Its Relation to the Sung Navy,” JESHO 12 (1969): 57–107.

43. Needham, Science and Civilization in China 4, pt. 3:484.

44. It is possible that Cheng Ho’s first voyage was undertaken to secure China’s sea approaches at a time of an anticipated overland attack by Tamurlane, who died in 1405 while preparing a massive assault on China. For this suggestion see Lo Jung-pang, “Policy Formulation and Decision Making on Issues Reflecting Peace and War,” in Charles O. Hucker, ed., Chinese Government in Ming Times: Seven Studies (New York, 1969), p. 54.

45. For details of how Chinese overseas shipping and trade were financed, and how ships were commanded, controlled, and crewed, see Shiba, Commerce and Society in Sung China, pp. 15–40. For a survey of what Chinese merchants knew about the world beyond the oceans, see Chau Ju-kua, On the Chinese and Arab Trade in the 12th and 13 th Centuries, trans. Friedrich Hirth and W. W. Rockhill (St. Petersburg and Tokyo, 1914).

46. August Toussaint, History of the Indian Ocean (Chicago, 1966), pp. 74–86; Paul Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the Malay Peninsula before 1500 A.D. (Kuala Lumpur, 1961), pp. 292–320; K. Mori, “The Beginning of Overseas Advance of Japanese Merchant Ships,” Acta Asiatica 23 (1972): 1–24.

47. Lo Jung-pang, “The Decline of the Early Ming Navy,” pp. 149–68; Kuei-sheng Chang, “The Maritime Scene in China at the Dawn of the Great European Discoveries,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 94 (1974): 347–59

48. Cf. John V. G. Mills, ed. and trans., Ma Huan, Ying-yai Sheng-ian: Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores [1433] (Cambridge, 1970), Introduction.

49. For a detailed account of this ill-fated military enterprise see Fredrick W. Mote, “The Tu-mu Incident of 1449,” in Kierman and Fairbank, Chinese Ways in Warfare, pp. 243–72.

50. A memorial written by Fan Chi and quoted by Lo Jung-pang, “The Decline of the Early Ming Navy,” p. 167. For details of this decision to withdraw see Lo Jung-pang, “Policy Formulation and Decision Making,” in Hucker, Chinese Government in Ming Times, pp. 56–60.

51. Prohibition of overseas trade was renewed in 1390, 1394, 1397, 1433, 1449, and 1452 according to Matsui Masato, “The Wo-K’uo Disturbances of the 1550’s,” East Asian Occasional Papers 1 (Asian Studies Program, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, 1969), pp. 97–107.

52. Jitsuzo Kuwabara, “P’u Shou-keng: A Man of the Western Regions,” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko 7 (1935): 66.

53. On the “Japanese” pirates see Kwan-wai So, Japanese Piracy in Ming China during the 16th Century (Lansing, Mich., 1975); Louis Dermigny, La Chine et I’occident: la commerce a Canton au XVIIIe Steele (Paris, 1964), 1:95–99

54. For examples, admittedly from a later age, see Ping-ti Ho, “Salt Merchants of Yang-chou,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 17 (1954): 130–68.

55. Archibald Lewis, “Maritime Skills in the Indian Ocean, 1368–1500,” JESHO 16 (1973): 254–58, compiled a long list of goods traded.

56. On Malacca see Wheatley, The Golden Khersonese, pp. 306–20.

57. Sung records nicely illustrate how the system worked. In 1144 officials raised import duties to 40 percent of declared value, only to see trade languish and receipts diminish, with the result that in 1164 the old rate of 10 percent was restored. Lo Jung-pang, “Maritime Commerce,” p. 69.

58. My conception of how merchants and rulers interacted along Asia’s southern shores is largely shaped by Niels Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (Chicago, 1974), pp. 22–111. Steensgaard describes a situation existing about 1600, and he is concerned primarily with caravan trade; but the strategy of trade and taxation probably did not much alter from early times until after 1600, and rulers’ relations with merchants who traveled overland were not notably different from those who came in ships. The concept of “protection rent” was invented by Frederic Lane, “Economic Consequences of Organized Violence,” Journal of Economic History 18 (1958): 401–17, and his investigations of medieval Italian enterprise in the Mediterranean also provided me with a model for what I believe happened along the shores of the Indian Ocean. Lewis, “Maritime Skills in the Indian Ocean,” pp. 238–64, offers a very suggestive survey of the subject, though he does not raise the question of relations between rulers and merchants directly.

59. Sura IV, 29: “O Believers, consume not your goods between you in vanity, except there be trading by your agreeing together.” Arthur J. Arberry, trans., The Koran Interpreted (London, 1955).

60. This is the central thesis of Stefan Balazs, “Beiträge zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte der T’ang Zeit” (n. 2 above), and of Jacques Gernet, Les aspects économiques du Bouddhisme dans la société chinoise du Ve au Xe siècle (Saigon, 1956).

61. My late colleague, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago, 1974), 2:403–4, made the same suggestion several years ago, with the same lack of evidence to back up the hypothesis.

62. Cf. William H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081–1797 (Chicago, 1974), pp. 1–39.

63. Cf. Archibald R. Lewis, The Northern Seas: Shipping and Commerce in Northern Europe, A.D. 300–1100 (Princeton, 1958).

64. Robert Lopez, Genova Marinara nel Duecento: Benedetto Zaccaria, ammiraglio e mercanti (Messina-Milan, 1933).

65. For the Mediterranean, Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (New York and London, 1955), is a useful starting place. For the Indian Ocean, Michel Mollat, ed., Sociétés et compagnies de commerce en orient et dans l’océan indien: Actes du huitième colloque internationale d’histoire maritime, Beyrouth, 1966 (Paris, 1970) is the best available summary of what little is known. For China, Shiba, Commerce and Society in Sung China, pp. 15–40. For interesting sidelights on the India trade, and its congruence with Mediterranean patterns, see S. D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden, 1968), pp. 329–50.

66. Luc Kwanten, Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia, 500–1500 (Philadelphia, 1979), conveniently summarizes the current state of knowledge.

67. Cf. Yü Ying-shih, Trade and Expansion in Han China: A Study in the Structure of Sino-Barbarian Economic Relations (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967), p. 209 and passim.

68. According to Hsiao Ch’i Ch’ing, The Military Establishment of the Yüan Dynasty, pp. 59–60, between 200,000 and 300,000 shih of grain were delivered annually to Karakorum. A shih weighed 157.89 pounds, or roughly three bushels of millet, two and three-fourths bushels of wheat.

69. Jacques Gernet, le Monde chinois (Paris, 1972), p. 351.

70. On the alliance between pastoralists and city people in Islam see Xavier de Planhol, Les fondements géographiques de l’histoire de l’Islam (Paris, 1968), pp. 21–35. On the phenomenon in Christian Balkan society, see William H. McNeill, The Metamorphosis of Greece since World War II (Chicago, 1978), pp. 43–50.

71. For the Kitan as representative of a new “generation” of nomad society see Gernet, Le monde chinois, p. 308; for Middle Eastern slave soldiers see Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (New York, 1980); Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (New Haven, 1981).

72. Arguments and evidence for this reconstruction of events are presented in William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1976), pp. 149–65, 190–96.

73. John E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, and Empire: A Study in 15thl9th Century Turko-lranian Politics (Minneapolis, 1976), offers a sample of how urban and tribal elements interacted and (usually) allied with one another to form one of the many unstable states into which the realm of Islam divided after A.D. 1000.

74. Cf. S. D. Goitein, “The Rise of the Near Eastern Bourgeoisie in Early Islamic Times,” Journal of World History 3 (1957): 583–604.

75. I am not aware of any scholarly discussion of climate change in the Middle East in these centuries. For Europe see Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, Histoire du climat depuis I’an mil (Paris, 1967).

3. The Business of War in Europe, 1000–1600

1. Cf. J. F. Fino, “Notes sur la production de fer et la fabrication des armes en France au moyen âge,” Gladius 3 (1964): 47–66.

2. The rise of knighthood did not produce a submissive, nonviolent peasantry in Europe. Habits of bloodshed were deep-seated, perennially fed by the fact that Europeans raised both pigs and cattle in considerable numbers but had to slaughter all but a small breeding stock each autumn for lack of sufficient winter fodder. Other agricultural regimes, e.g., among the rice-growing farmers of China and India, did not involve annual slaughter of large animals. By contrast, Europeans living north of the Alps learned to take such bloodshed as a normal part of the routine of the year. This may have had a good deal to do with their remarkable readiness to shed human blood and think nothing of it. Cf. the Saga of Olav Trygveson for the primal ferocity of northern Europe. Also Georges Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century (London, 1973), pp. 96, 117, 163, 253, and passim.

3. Light cavalry and small scratch plows were cheaper than their west European equivalents and fitted an environment in which seed-harvest ratios were lower than in the more fertile west. The firmness of connection between lord and peasant was less in the east, and ties to a particular set of fields were weaker for nobles and peasants alike because scratch plow cultivation made it comparatively easy to start afresh on new land prepared for cultivation by the age-old technique of slash and burn.

4. The closest parallel from the European past takes us back to classical times when Greek mercenaries responded to a Mediterranean-wide market, both within Greece and beyond its borders. See. H. W. Parkes, Greek Mercenary Soldiers from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Ipsus (Oxford, 1933) for interesting details about the first stages of this development. The rise of Rome, however, meant monopolization of the Mediterranean market for military service after 30 B.C. Victory for the old-fashioned command principle of mobilizing resources for war ensued, and became applicable to peaceable as well as to military affairs after depopulation set in during the third century A.D. It was no accident that the major period of weapons development in the ancient Mediterranean world occurred in the centuries when competing rulers applied commercial principles to the tasks of military mobilization. On the remarkable development of artillery in the Hellenistic age, see E. W. Marsden, Greek and Roman Artillery: Historical Development (Oxford, 1969); Barton C. Hacker, “Greek Catapults and Catapult Technology: Science, Technology, and War in the Ancient World,” Technology and Culture 9 (1968): 34–50; W. W. Tarn, Hellenistic Military and Naval Development (Cambridge, 1930).

5. Cf. William H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe (Chicago, 1974), pp. 48–51. The new ships relied mainly on crossbows for defense—probably a critical factor in increasing the prevalence and importance of that weapon in Mediterranean warfare from the eleventh century onwards.

6. No satisfactory account of the techniques of European mining before the sixteenth century seems to exist. Maurice Lombard, Les métaux dans l’ancien monde du Ve au XIe siècle (Paris, 1974) breaks off just when European mining surged ahead. T. A. Richard, Man and Metals (New York, 1932), 2:507–69, has scattered data; Charles Singer, ed., A History of Technology (Oxford, 1956), 2:11–24, marks no advance; John Temple, Mining: An International History (London, 1972) is equally uninformative. The difficulty presumably lies in the fact that mining skills developed on an artisan basis and were not recorded in writing until 1555 when George Bauer’s masterwork was published as Agricola, De re metallica, complete with instructive illustrations of technical procedures. Richard, Singer, and Temple depend entirely on what Agricola has to say for technical matters. Painstaking archaeology will be required before modern scholars can discover when and where technical advances took place before De re metallica suddenly opens up a view of what European miners of the sixteenth century had accomplished.

7. On the shift from town militia to professional soldiery see Michael E. Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (London, 1974), pp. 1–51; D. P. Waley, “The Army of the Florentine Republic from the 12th to the 14th Centuries,” in Nicholai Rubenstein, ed., Florentine Studies (London, 1968), pp. 70–108; Charles C. Bayley, War and Society in Renaissance Florence: The “De Militia” of Leonardo Bruni (Toronto, 1961).

8. And had been initiated by hiring Balkan Christians, the so-called “stradioti,” shortly before the venture onto the Italian mainland began. Cf. Freddy Thieret, La Roumanie vénetienne au moyen âge (Paris, 1959), p. 402.

9. These remarks on Italian military organization depend primarily on Mallett’s magnificent book Mercenaries and Their Masters, and his chapter “Venice and Its Condottieri, 1404–54” in John R. Hale, ed., Renaissance Venice (London, 1973), pp. 131–45. Cf. also John R. Hale, “Renaissance Armies and Political Control: The Venetian Proveditorial System, 1509–1529,” Journal of Italian History 2 (1979): 11–31, and Piero Pieri, Il Rinascimento e la crisi militare italiana (Turin, 1952), which offers abundant information but generally endorses the traditionally negative appraisal of mercenary soldiering.

10. Ralph W. F. Payne-Gallwey, The Crossbow, Medieval and Modern, Military and Sporting: Its Construction, History and Management (London, 1903), pp. 62–91 and passim.

11. Cf. L. Carrington Goodrich, “Early Cannon in China,” Isis 55 (1964): 193–95; L. Carrington Goodrich and Feng Chia-sheng, “The Early Development of Firearms in China,” Isis 36 (1946): 114–23; and Joseph Needham, “The Guns of Khaifengfu,” Times Literary Supplement, 11 January 1980. On early guns in Europe innumerable books exist, of which O. F. G. Hogg, Artillery, Its Origin, Heyday, and Decline (London, 1970) is a worthy recent example.

12. Feudal service had already been partially monetized by the fact that after a stated period of time (usually forty days) the lord was expected or required to pay his knights a daily allowance to permit them to remain under arms. Since the English remained in France winter and summer, their arrival put an intolerable strain on traditional patterns of short-term feudal service among the French. Among the English, earlier wars of conquest in Wales and Scotland had already triggered the development of a semiprofessional royal army of mercenaries. On recruitment into English expeditionary forces, see Kenneth Fowler, ed., The Hundred Years War (London, 1971), pp. 78–85; H. J. Hewitt, The Organization of War under Edward III, 1338–62 (Manchester, 1966), pp. 28–49.

13. Cf. the masterful work by Phillipe Contamine, Guerre, état et société à la fin du moyen âge: Etudes sur les armées des rois de France, 1337–1494 (Paris, 1972). On English armies: Hewitt, Organization of War under Edward III, 1338–62; K. B. McFarlane, “War, Economy and Social Change: England and the Hundred Years War,” Past and Present 22 (1962): 3–17; Edward Miller, “War, Taxation and the English Economy in the Late Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries,” in J. M. Winter, ed., War and Economic Development (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 11—31; and the essays in Fowler, The Hundred Years War (n.12 above) are pertinent. For the economic consequences of plunder, cf. Fritz Redlich, De Praeda Militare: Looting and Booty, 1500–1800 (Wiesbaden, 1956), and especially his major work The German Military Enterpriser and His Work Force, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1964), 1:118 and passim. Redlich’s data come from a later time, but the fact that he was trained as an economist and brought an economist’s vocabulary to bear on the phenomena of plunder and mercenary soldiering gives his work a unique value.

14. These figures come from Contamine, Guerre, état et société, pp. 317–18. In 1478 France’s 4,142 “lances” outnumbered Milan’s more than 4 to 1. This offers a rough measure of the way in which the French monarchy had outstripped the Italian city-state scale of war by the close of the fifteenth century. Ibid., p. 200.

15. Cf. Thomas Esper, “The Replacement of the Longbow by Firearms in the English Army,” Technology and Culture 6 (1965): 382–93. Sexual symbolism presumably attached itself to guns from the beginning, and perhaps goes far to explain European artisans’ and rulers’ irrational investment in early firearms. I owe this idea to Barton C. Hacker, who explored parallel psychological drives behind the development of tanks in the interwar decades in “The Military and the Machine: An Analysis of the Controversy over Mechanization in the British Army, 1919–1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1968). Yet even if this sort of psychological resonance explains otherwise unintelligible behavior, it does not explain why Europeans were especially susceptible. The character of western Europe’s political institutions and the militaristic habits of urban dwellers who manufactured (and paid for) the new guns seem necessary factors in converting psychological drives from mere fantasy into hard metal. Cf. J. R. Hale, “Gunpowder and the Renaissance: An Essay in the History of Ideas,” in Charles H. Carter, ed., From Renaissance to Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garret Mattingly (London, 1966), pp. 133–34.

16. Theodore A. Wertime, The Coming of the Age of Steel (Leiden, 1961), pp. 67–69; H. R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry from c. 450 B.C. to A.D. 1775 (London, 1957), pp. 164 ff. On the Continent, cast iron cannon actually dated back to the mid-fifteenth century but were often defective, so the cheapness of the metal was counteracted by the frequency of failure. England retained an effective monopoly of serviceable cast iron cannon for half a century, largely because minute chemical trace elements in the ore used by the Sussex ironmasters made the metal less likely to develop flaws as it cooled.

Military demand for cannon slacked off after 1604 when England made peace with Spain (and the Dutch soon followed suit). Growing fuel shortages deepened the economic depression that then set in in Sussex; and two decades later Sweden began casting iron guns of high quality, thanks to the import of Walloon techniques of blast furnace construction and metal casting. Thereafter the Swedes dominated the international market in iron cannon until late in the eighteenth century. Cf. Eli Heckscher, “Un grand chapître de l’histoire de fer: le monopole suèdois,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 4 (1932): 127–39.

17. Maurice Daumas, ed., Histoire générale des techniques (Paris, 1965), 2:493.

18. Cf. Léon Louis Schick, Un grand homme d’affaires au début du XVIe siècle: Jacob Fugger (Paris, 1957), pp. 8–27.

19. A convenient shorthand to refer to the territories gathered together by dukes of Burgundy between 1363 and 1477. The Low Countries constituted the richest part of their domains, which, however, extended irregularly southward to the Swiss border. For half a century before the death of Charles the Bold in 1477 the dukes of Burgundy seemed about to reconstitute the kingdom of Lotharingia which had been interposed between France and Germany by the division of the Carolingian empire in 843.

20. Daumas, Histoire générale des techniques, 2:487.

21. Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns, Sails and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400–1700 (New York, 1965), pp. 1–73, is by far the most incisive account of early development of artillery in Europe that I have seen. In the nineteenth century, detailed and more or less antiquarian writing on artillery achieved striking refinement with such works as A. Essenwein, Quellen zur Geschichte der Feuerwaffen, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1877; republished in facsimile, Graz, 1969). On the Burgundian development of artillery, cf. C. Brusten, L’armée bourguignonne de 1455 à 1468 (Brussels, 1954); Claude Gaier, L’industrie et le commerce des armes dans l’anciennes principautés belges du XIIIe à la fin du XVe siècle (Paris, 1973).

22. Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494–1660 (London, 1979), pp. 8–923.

23. The Hapsburgs shared the Burgundian inheritance with the French in 1477 and thus fell heir directly to the gunfounding capabilities of the Low Countries. For the Ottomans cf. John F. Guilmartin, Jr., Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the 16th century (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 255–56.

24. Albrecht Dürer, a pupil of Italians in many things, came back from his Italian travels with an interest in the problem, and has the distinction of having published the first book on fortification ever printed, Etliche Underricht zur Befestigung der Stett Schloss und Flecken (Nuremberg, 1527). This volume is more remarkable for the grandiose works Dürer recommends as protections against cannon than for the practicality of his designs. Cf. Duffy, Siege Warfare, pp. 4–7.

25. Duffy, Siege Warfare, p. 15.

26. John R. Hale, “The Development of the Bastion, 1440–1534,” in John R. Hale, ed., Europe in the Late Middle Ages (Evanston, Ill., 1965), pp. 466–94.

27. Halil Inalcik, “The Socio-Political Effects of the Diffusion of Firearms in the Middle East,” in V.J. Parry and M. E. Yapp, eds., War, Technology and Society in the Middle East (London, 1975), pp. 199–200.

28. Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago, 1971), pp. 152–68.

29. Cf. John F. Guilmartin, Jr., Gunpowder and Galleys, for a very penetrating discussion of the rationality behind the conservatism of Mediterranean sea tactics.

30. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip 11 2 vols. (New York, 1972, 1973).

31. Garret Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (London, 1959), pp. 215–16.

32. Investors received a dividend of 4,700 percent, according to ibid., p. 87.

33. An Admiralty Court judge in 1590 wrote: “Her Majesty hath gotten and saved by these reprisals since they began [five years previously in 1585] above 200,000 pounds.” Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering, 1585–1603 (Cambridge, 1964), p. 22. Since Elizabeth’s annual income amounted to about £300,000, this was no trivial increment.

34. Other factors, especially tax rates and timber costs, also worked against private Iberian maritime enterprise. Cf. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering.

35. Richard Bean, “War and the Birth of the Nation State,” Journal of Economic History 33 (1973): 217, calculated that central government tax revenues in western Europe doubled in real, per capita terms between 1450 and 1500, but grew more slowly thereafter.

36. Cf. Richard Ehrenberg, Capital and Finance in the Age of the Renaissance (London, n.d.); Frank J. Smoler, “Resiliency of Enterprise: Economic Crisis and Recovery in the Spanish Netherlands in the early 17th century,” in Carter, From Renaissance to Counter-Reformation, pp. 247–68; Geoffrey Parker, “War and Economic Change: The Economic Costs of the Dutch Revolt,” in Winter, War and Economic Development, pp. 49–71.

37. Cf. Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567–1659 (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 336–41.

38. On mutiny in the Spanish army see the very enlightening discussion by Geoffrey Parker, “Mutiny in the Spanish Army of Flanders,” Past and Present 58 (1973): 38–52; and his Army of Flanders, chap. 7. Parker counts forty-six separate mutinies by troops in the Spanish service between 1572 and 1607.

39. These figures all come from the admirable book by I. A. A. Thompson, War and Government in Hapsburg Spain, 1550–1620 (London, 1976), pp. 71, 73, 103. For year-by-year figures on the number of soldiers in Spanish service (most of them not Spaniards) in the Netherlands, 1567–1665, see Geoffrey Parker’s equally admirable Army of Flanders, p. 28. Variations from year to year were very great, depending on what operations were planned and what money was available; but after the initial mobilization against the rebels in 1572, the Spanish forces in Flanders usually exceeded 50,000 men.

40. These figures come from Geoffrey Parker, “The ‘Military Revolution’ 1550–1660—a Myth?” Journal of Modern History 48 (1976): 206. Europe’s second army, the French, was only one-third as large as the Spanish in the 1550s.

41. Thompson, War and Government in Hapsburg Spain, p. 72.

42. According to Parker, “The ‘Military Revolution’ 1550–1660,” p. 206, the numbers of men in the Spanish and French armies varied as follows:

Other armies lagged far behind in size even when technically abreast of French and Spanish. The Dutch army, for example, numbered only about 50,000 in the 1630s and 100,000 in the 1700s. In the north, the Swedes counted 45,000 in the 1630s, 100,000 in the 1700s; Russia, 35,000 in the 1630s, 170,000 in the 1700s. Ibid. Parker’s figure for the French army in the first decade of the eighteenth century is high, however. Other authorities give Louis XIV only 300,000 men in the War of the Spanish Succession. See below, chap. 4.

43. Cf. photos in Kiyoshi Hirai, Feudal Architecture in Japan (New York and Tokyo, 1973). Protection against small-arms fire was, however, more important for the Japanese than protection against cannon. This was because Japanese armies lacked logistical resources for conducting prolonged sieges where cannon would have been decisive; and the national economy, correspondingly, failed to develop a technical base for cannon manufacture on anything approaching the European scale. Samurai ideals, emphasizing hand-to-hand combat, may have inhibited efforts to develop artillery; fuel shortages were also probably important. I owe these suggestions to private correspondence with John F. Guilmartin, Jr.

44. Cf. Jean Le jeune, La formation du capitalism moderne dans la principauté de Liège au XVI siècle (Liège, 1939), p. 181; Claude Gaier, Four Centuries of Liège Gunmaking (London, 1977), pp. 29–31.

4. Advances in Europe’s Art of War, 1600-1750

1. As we have already seen, technologically innovative Spanish soldiers swiftly overthrew the incipient French hegemony by relying on handguns and developing new tactics to take advantage of them. The decisive disaster to the Swiss occurred at the hands of their usual allies, the French, in the Battle of Marignano (1515), when suitably emplaced artillery fired upon the massed pikemen with devastating effect. Cf. Charles Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Middle Ages (London, 1898), 2:279. If Charles the Bold had been able to bring his artillery to bear against the Swiss in 1476–77, the history of Europe might have taken a very different turn.

2. On Landesknechten see Eugen von Frauenholz, Das Heereswesen in die Zeit des freien Söldnertums, 2 vols. (Munich, 1936, 1937); Fritz Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser and His Work Force, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1964); Carl Hans Hermann, Deutsche Militärgeschichte: Eine Einführung (Frankfurt, 1966), pp. 58 ff.

3. On Wallenstein see Golo Mann, Wallenstein (Frankfurt am Main, 1971); Francis Watson, Wallenstein: Soldier under Saturn (New York, 1938); G. Livet, La Guerre de Trente Ans (Paris, 1963); Redlich, The German Military Enterpriser, 1:229–336; Fritz Redlich, “Plan for the Establishment of a War Industry in the Imperial Dominion during the Thirty Years War,” Business History Review 38 (1964): 123–26.

4. Bellum se ipse alet is the Latin phrase attributed to the Swedish king. Cf. Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (Minneapolis, 1967), p. 73.

5. Eli Heckscher, “Un grand chapître de l’histoire de fer: le monopole suèdois,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 4 (1932): 127–39

6. Cf. Louis André, Michel Le Tellier et Louvois, 2d ed. (Paris, 1943); Louis André, Michel Le Tellier et l’organization de l’armée monarchique (Montpelier, 1906). On Masselini and his administrative reforms, see Michael E. Mallett, Mercenaries and Their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (London, 1974), pp. 126–27.

7. Translated from Camille Rousset, L’histoire de Louvois, 4 vols. (Paris, 1862–64), 1:209. Garrison regulations settled down to a routine of drill exercises in the presence of an officer twice a week, with the entire garrison parading in battle formation once a month before a high-ranking officer or other important personage. André, Michel Le Tellier, pp. 399–401.

8. Roberts, Essays in Swedish History, p. 219.

9. Aelian was a Greek who wrote a book on tactics in the time of Trajan, when the Roman Empire and its army were at their peak. It was translated into Latin in 1550, and so combined the authority of antiquity with an aura of novelty when Prince Maurice began his military reforms. According to Werner Halbweg, Die Heeresreform der Orianer und die Antike (Berlin, 1941), p. 43, Aelian provided the main inspiration for Maurice’s reforms.

10. The gun had to be loaded with powder, followed by a wad to hold the powder in position; then a ball and a wad to hold the ball in place; then the primer pan had to be filled with a different sort of powder. The lighted match (held in the meanwhile in the left hand) was then affixed to the firing mechanism and the gun was at last ready to be aimed and fired. The match had to be detached from the gun before the cycle could be safely repeated.

11. On Maurice’s reforms, in addition to Halbweg’s previously cited work, see the provocative remarks by M. D. Feld, “Middle Class Society and the Rise of Military Professionalism: The Dutch Army, 1589–1609,” Armed Forces and Society 1 (1975): 419–42.

12. I am not aware of any really perceptive discussion of the psychological and sociological effects of close-order drill on human beings in general or within European armies in particular. My remarks are derived from reflections on personal experience—and surprise at my own response to drill during World War II.

Some military writers of the age hint at the power of drill and its relationship to dancing. Cf. Maurice de Saxe, Reveries on the Art of War, trans. Thomas R. Phillips (Harrisburg, Pa., 1944), pp. 30–31: “Have them march in cadence. There is the whole secret, and it is the military step of the Romans. . . . Everyone has seen people dancing all night. But take a man and make him dance for a quarter of an hour without music, and see if he can bear it. . . .

“I shall be told, perhaps that many men have no ear for music. This is false; movement to music is natural and automatic. I have often noticed while the drums were beating for the colors, that all the soldiers marched in cadence without intention and without realizing it. Nature and instinct did it for them.”

The military music of Christian Europe, incidentally, derived from Ottoman fife and drum corps. These in turn were adaptations of steppe traditions of drumming which had filtered into the Moslem world via dervish communities of young men. But Ottoman troops did not drill incessantly as Christian troops started to do, nor did they march in step, thereby muting the elemental resonance that moving in unison arouses.

13. Jacob de Gheyn, Wapenhandelinghe van Roers, Musquetten ende Spiessen, Achtervolgende de Ordre van Syn Excellentie Maurits, Prince van Orangie (The Hague, 1607). The edition I saw was a facsimile (New York, 1971), with an informative commentary by J. B. Kist appended. According to Kist, Maurice first held a review of his troops, with field maneuvers, in 1592. At that time his battalions numbered 800 men each; later he reduced the size of the battalion—the primary unit of maneuver—to 550 to make it nimbler in the field and easier for a single voice to control. De Gheyn’s book was often pirated subsequently; most significantly by Johann Jacob Wallhausen, Kriegskunst zu Fuss (1614), who used the same copper plates as the original work, but wrote in German.

14. Richard Hellie, Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy (Chicago, 1971), pp. 187–88.

15. On Ottoman failure to respond to European drill see V. J. Parry, “La manière de combattre,” in V. J. Parry and M. E. Yapp, eds., War, Technology and Society in the Middle East (London, 1975), pp. 218–56.

16. For details see James P. Lawford, Britain’s Army in India from Its Origins to the Conquest of Bengal (London, 1978).

17. Cf. Frauenholz, Das Heereswesen in die Zeit des freien Söldnertums, 1:36–39. Discharged veterans provided key manpower for the Peasants’ War of 1525, for example.

18. In 1479 Louis XI of France disbanded his French infantry forces and made a contract with the Swiss instead. The Swiss reputation as the premier pikemen of Europe undoubtedly influenced this decision; but so did their political distance from French social turmoils. Cf. Phillipe Contamine, Guerre, état et société à la fin du moyen âge: Etudes sur les armées des rois de France, 1337–1494 (Paris, 1972), p. 284. On the use of foreign mercenaries in general see V. G. Kiernan, “Foreign Mercenaries and Absolute Monarchy,” in Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe, 1360–1660 (New York, 1967), pp. 117–40.

19. The Ottoman Empire competed with the Venetians from the 1590s for the mercenary services of Christian infantrymen from the western Balkans. See Halil Inalcik, “Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700” Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980). North of the Black Sea, however, technical and geographical conditions favored cavalry for some two centuries after primacy had passed to infantry in west European landscapes and battlefields. The cheap horses available on the steppe allowed mounted Cossacks to play a role in the east analogous to that of the Swiss in the west. Like the Swiss, they became military egalitarians and wavered between alternative foreign employers once their military value had been recognized among neighboring states. In the end the Cossacks affiliated with the Russian tsars but only at the price of betrayal of their earlier egalitarian tradition. Cf. William H. McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (Chicago, 1964).

20. In Islamic lands, similar difficulties had sometimes been met by reducing foreign soldiers to the status of slaves; but a slave soldier, too, was hard to control, and in several Islamic states slave captains seized power in their own right, founding “slave dynasties” in which power passed from slave captain to slave captain instead of from father to son. The Mameluke state of Egypt was the most famous of these; it lasted from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century. On slave soldiery in Islam see David Ayalon, “Preliminary Remarks on the Mamluk Military Institution in Islam,” in Parry and Yapp, War, Technology, and Society in the Middle East, pp. 44–58; Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam (New Haven, 1981); Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (New York, 1980).

21. The psychic force of drill and new routines was such as to make a recruit’s origins and previous experience largely irrelevant to his behavior as a soldier. This deprives studies of class and local origins of enlisted men of more than antiquarian interest, despite the fact that military records sometimes lend themselves admirably to such analysis. French historians, perhaps influenced by Marxism, have been particularly active in this endeavor, without shedding any notable light on what the French army actually did either in war or in peace. The great monument of this genre is A. Corvisier, L’armée française de la fin du XVIIe siècle au ministère de Choiseul, 2 vols. (Paris, 1964).

22. Standardization and routinization, applied to industrial production in the eighteenth century, were pioneered in army administration and supply in the seventeenth. Similar results—sharply enhanced productivity and lowered unit costs—occurred in both cases. This point is argued, perhaps a little too emphatically, in Jacobus A. A. van Doorn, The Soldier and Social Change: Comparative Studies in the History and Sociology of the Military (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1973), pp. 17–33; Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934), pp. 81–106.

23. On the uncertainty surrounding the invention and introduction of the ring bayonet, see David Chandler, The Art of War in the Age of Marlborough (New York, 1976), pp. 67, 83.

24. Matchlocks of Prince Maurice’s day gave way to flintlocks and correspondingly simplified drill by about 1710, at least in the best-managed European armies. Flintlocks had been invented as early as 1615, but were at first too expensive to displace the matchlock, despite a far higher rate of fire (about twice as fast) and superior reliability (ca. 33 percent misfire vs. 50 percent for matchlocks). I take these statistics from Chandler, The Art of War, pp. 76–79

25. A stricter definition reduces the period in which the same pattern prevailed to a mere century: 1730 to 1830. For details of the many minor variations in design, and of the way the Board of Ordnance handled sudden crises when large numbers of muskets had to be procured in short periods of time, see Howard L. Blackmore, British Military Firearms, 1670–1850 (London, 1961).

5. Strains on Europe’s Bureaucratization of Violence, 1700-1789

1. Europe’s population rose from about 118 million in 1700 to 187 million in 1801. The population of England and Wales grew from something like 5.8 million at the beginning of the century to 9.15 million in 1801; and French population rose from about 18 to 26 million between 1715 and 1789. Cf. Jacques Godechot, Les revolutions, 1770–1799 (Paris, 1970), pp. 93–95; Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959: Trends and Structure, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1967), p. 103; M. Reinhard and A. Armengaud, Histoire générale de la population mondiale (Paris, 1961), pp. 151–201. A convenient summary of demographers’ opinions about the causes for population surge in the eighteenth century is to be found in Thomas McKeown, R. G. Brown, and R. G. Record, “An Interpretation of the Modern Rise of Population in Europe,” Population Studies 26 (1972): 345–82. Perhaps the most important single factor was an altered incidence of lethal infectious disease; cf. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1976), pp. 240–58.

2. In 1730, Sultan Mahmud I initiated an effort to improve Ottoman defenses by imitating Christian methods. A French renegade, Claude-Alexandre, comte de Bonneval (1675–1747), played the leading role in this effort. He took the name of Achmet Pasha and was appointed commander-in-chief of Rumelia, the highest post in the Ottoman service. Ironically, real military successes against both the Austrians and Russians, 1736–39, did not prevent a sharp reversal of policy after the war. De Bonneval’s ungovernable temper led to his disgrace and imprisonment in 1738 and his removal allowed pious Moslems, who preferred to rely on the will of Allah rather than on newfangled hardware, to return to power. A second abortive effort at modernization was set off by the unexpected appearance of the Russian fleet in the Aegean in 1770. A Frenchified Hungarian, Baron François de Tott (1733–93), was entrusted with emergency powers to block the Dardanelles; then he undertook a more general effort to improve the fortification of the capital and modernize the Ottoman artillery and fleet. When war ended in 1774, however, the energy behind these efforts evaporated. De Tott, who had not been required to accept Islam, as de Bonneval had done, was doubly suspect as a foreigner and an infidel; and the reforms he had introduced withered away to triviality after he returned to France in 1776. On de Bonneval see Albert Vandal, Le pacha Bonneval (Paris, 1885); on de Tott, see his own Mémoires sur les Turcs et les Tartares (Amsterdam, 1784).

3. March states conquered older, smaller polities at least three times in the ancient Near East: Akkad (ca. 2350 B.C.); Assyria (ca. 1000–612 B.C.); and Persia (550–331 B.C.). Mediterranean history offers a similar array of instances: the rise of Macedon (338 B.C.) and then of Rome (168 B.C.) in classical times followed in modern times by the Spanish domination over Italy (by 1557) which we looked at briefly in the preceding chapter. Ancient China (rise of Ch’in, 221 B.C.) and ancient India (rise of Magadha, ca. 321 B.C.) as well as Amerindian Mexico (Aztecs) and Peru (Incas) all seem to exhibit a parallel pattern. This is not surprising. A given level of organization and technique, if applied to a larger territorial base, can be expected to yield greater results. This was often possible on the margins of specially skilled centers of civilization; and whenever a ruler managed to confirm his power over a comparatively vast, marginal territory, the possibility of conquering older centers of wealth and skill with a semibarbarian force organized along civilized lines regularly arose and was often acted on.

4. Cf. François Crouzet, “Angleterre et France au XVIIIe siècle: Essai d’analyze comparée de deux croissances économiques,” Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 21 (1966): 261–63 and passim.

5. On population phenomena in the New World see Nicholas Sanchez-Albornoz, The Population of Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1974), pp. 104–29; Shelbourne F. Cook and Woodrow W. Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean, 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971, 1974). As subsequently among Polynesians and other island dwellers of the Pacific, the drastic population die-off that followed initial contacts with white men was due mainly to exposure to imported infections.

6. The Royal Navy, for example, was chronically short of funds in Samuel Pepys’ time, whereas by the early decades of the eighteenth century, the financial expedients—postponement of payment and laying up of ships for part of the year which had been common practice in the late seventeenth century—ceased to be necessary. Cf. Daniel A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965), p. 496 and passim; Robert G. Albion, Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652–1862 (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), p. 66. For parallel improvement in the punctuality of French army pay and tightening of financial administration in the eighteenth century see A. Corvisier, L’armée française de la fin du XVIIe siècle au ministère de Choiseul: le Soldat (Paris, 1964), 2:822–24; Lee Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years War (Durham, N.C., 1967), p. 95.

7. Cf. James P. Lawford, Britain’s Army in India, from its Origins to the Conquest of Bengal (London, 1978). At the Battle of Plassey (1757) Robert Clive commanded 784 European soldiers, 10 field guns, and about 2,100 Indians trained and equipped according to European methods. He routed an army of some 50,000. Cf. Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India (New York, 1974), pp. 133–43.

8. Cf. the summing up of the impact of the slave trade on Africa in Paul Bohannan and Philip Curtin, Africa and Africans (New York, 1971), pp. 273–76.

9. For an account of these struggles, see William H. McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (Chicago, 1964), pp. 126–221.

10. Cf. Anton Zottman, Die Wirtschaftspolitik Friedrichs des Grossen mit besondere Berücksichtigung der Kriegswirtschaft (Leipzig, 1937); W. O. Henderson, Studies in the Economic Policy of Frederick the Great (London, 1963).

11. Cf. Otto Büsch, Militarsystem und Sozialleben im alten Preussen (Berlin, 1962), pp. 77–99 and passim; Herbert Rosinski, The German Army (New York, 1966), pp. 21–26.

12. Naval technique was harder to master, and the Russian navy that sailed into the Mediterranean in 1770 to attack the Turks was not really up to French or British standards, though it overwhelmed the Turkish navy easily enough. By 1790, moreover, the Russian navy had won secure mastery among Baltic powers by outclassing the Swedes permanently. Cf. Nestor Monasterev and Serge Terestchenko, Histoire de la marine russe (Paris, 1932), pp. 75–80; Donald W. Mitchell, A History of Russian and Soviet Sea Power (New York, 1974), pp. 16–102.

13. Maurice de Saxe held that no general could effectively control more than 40,000 men in the field. Cf. Eugène Carrias, La pensée militaire française (Paris, n.d.), p. 170. Jacques-Antoine Hypolite de Guibert, Essai générale de tactique, in 1772 fixed 50,000 as the ideal size of an army, and 70,000 as an absolute ceiling. Only so, he believed, could real field mobility be sustained. Cf. Robert A. Quimby, The Background of Napoleonic Warfare: The Theory of Military Tactics in 18th Century France, Columbia University Studies in the Social Sciences, no. 596 (New York, 1957), p. 164.

14. Christopher Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (Newton Abbot, 1974), pp. 135–36. For French supply limitations see Kennett, French Armies in the Seven Years War, pp. 100–111. For a general overview, Martin L. van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge, 1977) also offers interesting data.

15. According to an official reckoning made soon after the Seven Years War ended, only 13 percent of Prussia’s total expenditure in that war went to pay for materiel; and weapons, powder, and lead, together, required a mere 1 percent. Paul Rehfeld, “Die preussische Rüstungsindustrie unter Friedrich dem Grossen,” Forschungen zür brandenburgischen und preussischen Geschichte 55 (1944): 30.

16. Violet Barbour, Capitalism in Amsterdam in the 17th Century, reprint (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1963), pp. 36–42; J. Yerneaux, La métallurgie liègeoise et son expansion au XVIIe siècle (Liège, 1939); Claude Gaier, Four Centuries of Liège Gunmaking (London, 1977).

17. I have been unable to find a copy of A. Dolleczeck, Geschichte der österreichischen Artillerie (Vienna, 1887) for details.

18. Use of contour lines to indicate slopes was a critical invention for making maps useful to military commanders. Symbols for marshes and other obstacles to cross-country movement were also important but far easier to devise. Topographic contour lines seem to have been first proposed in 1777 by a French lieutenant of engineers, J. B. Meusnier; but use of lines to show water depths was far older, dating back among the Dutch as far as 1584. Scarcity of data delayed resort to contour lines, which became standard on small-scale maps only after about 1810 when improved surveying instruments made gathering data far easier and more rapid. Cf. François de Dainville, “From the Depth to the Heights,” Surveying and Mapping 30 (1970): 389–403; Pierre Chalmin, “La querelle des Bleus et des Rouges dans l’artillerie française à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 46 (1968): 481 ff.

19. Dallas D. Irvine, “The Origins of Capital Staffs,” Journal of Modern History 10 (1938): 166–68; Carrias, La pensée militaire française, pp. 176 ff.

20. Stephen T. Ross, “The Development of the Combat Division in Eighteenth Century French Armies,” French Historical Studies 1 (1965): 84–94.

21. Quoted from Geoffrey Symcox, ed., War, Diplomacy and Imperialism, 1618–1763 (London, 1974), p. 194. Cf. also Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great, p. 134.

22. Baron Vom Stein as a relatively junior Prussian official canalized the Ruhr River, for example, in the hope of expanding coal production. Cf. W. O. Henderson, The State and the Industrial Revolution in Prussia, 1740–1870 (Liverpool, 1958), pp. 20–41.

23. By using crushed stones of different sizes to form three distinct layers, a French engineer named Pierre Trésaguet developed a relatively cheap way to build an all-weather road. His methods were widely used in France after 1764; other European countries followed suit as far east as Russia, where a road between Moscow and St. Petersburg was built on Tresaguet’s principles. In Great Britain John Loudon McAdam became interested in the problems of road building in the 1790s and developed a very similar method for making durable road surfaces. McAdam used only one size of crushed rock, thus simplifying procedures. Cf. Gösta E. Sandström, Man the Builder (New York, 1970), pp. 200–201; Roy Devereux, The Colossus of Roads: A Life of John Loudon McAdam (New York, 1936).

24. Cf. Emile G. Leonard, L’armée et ses problèmes au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1958); Louis Mention, Le comte de Saint-Germain et ses réformes, 1775–1777 (Paris, 1884); Albert Latreille, L’armée et la nation à la fin de l’ancien régime: les derniers ministres de guerre de la monarchie (Paris, 1914); Jean Lambert Alphonse Colin, L’infanterie au XVIIIe siècle: La tactique (Paris, 1907).

25. Great Britain set the fashion in 1757. Cf. Rex Whitworth, Field Marshal Lord Ligonier: A Story of the British Army, 1702–1770 (Oxford, 1958), p. 218. The United States did the same by importing Baron von Steuben to drill the Continental Army in 1777.

26. On the tactical debate, cf. Colin, L’infanterie au XVIIIe Siéecle; Mention, Le comte de Saint-Germain, pp. 187–210; Quimby, The Background of Napoleonic Warfare; Robert R. Palmer, “Frederick the Great, Guibert, Bülow: From Dynastic to National War,” in Edward M. Earle, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, 1943), pp. 49–74; Henry Spenser Wilkinson, The French Army before Napoleon (Oxford, 1915). For tactics and enclosure see Richard Glover, Peninsular Preparation: The Reform of the British Army, 1795–1804 (Cambridge, 1963), p. 124. For skirmishing and light infantry see Gunther Rothenberg, The Military Border in Croatia, 1740–1881: A Study of an Imperial Institution (Chicago, 1966), pp. 18–39 and passim; Peter Paret, Yorck and the Era of Prussian Reform, 1807–1815 (Princeton, 1966), pp. 24–42.

27. Several thousand breech-loading muskets were manufactured, but when the breech mechanism proved faulty, the inventor committed suicide, according to Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years War, pp. 116, 140.

28. After 1794, when the French annexed Liege, gunmakers of that city, the most practiced of all Europe, were compelled to upgrade their performance by the new French inspectors. For details see Gaier, Four Centuries of Liége Gunmaking, pp. 95 ff.

29. Grande Encyclopédie, s.v. Maritz, Jean; P. M. J. Conturie, Histoire de la fonderie nationale de Ruelle, 1750–1940, et des anciennes fonderies de canons de fer de la Marine (Paris, 1951), pp. 128–35.

30. In 1763 the Prussians imported a Dutch artificer to set up cannon-boring machines at the armaments works in Spandau. He was captured by the Russians when they occupied Berlin in 1760 and persuaded to perform the same service for them at Tula. Cf. Rehfeld, “Die preussische Rüstungsindustrie unter Friedrich dem Grossen,” p. 11.

31. Clive Trebilcock, “Spin-off in British Economic History: Armaments and Industry, 1760–1914,” Economic History Review 22 (1969): 477.

32. Very instructive diagrams illustrating how late eighteenth-century artillery worked may be found in B. P. Hughes, Firepower Weapons’ Effectiveness on the Battlefield, 1630–1850 (London, 1974), pp. 15–36.

33. E. W. Marsden, Greek and Roman Artillery: Historical Development (Oxford, 1969), pp. 48–49, says that the primary loci of invention were the court of Dionysios I of Syracuse (399 B.C.) and that of Ptolemy II of Egypt (285–246 B.C.).

34. Among other factors, this “noble reaction” may have reflected population growth. With more younger sons to look after, noble families presumably looked more eagerly for army commissions and resented untitled upstarts all the more warmly.

35. On Frederick’s motivation see Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (Oxford, 1956), p. 16. On the aristocratic reaction in the French army see Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years War, p. 143; David Bien, “La réaction aristocratique avant 1789: L’example de l’armée,” Annales: Economies, sociétés, civilisations 29 (1974): 23–48, 505–34; David Bien, “The Army in the French Enlightenment: Reform, Reaction and Revolution,” Past and Present, no. 85 (1979): 68–98.

36. I depend heavily on Howard Rosen, “The Système Gribeauval: A Study of Technological Change and Institutional Development in Eighteenth Century France” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1981). Some of his insights are available in his “Le système Gribeauval et la guerre moderne,” Revue historique des armées 1–2 (1975): 29–36. For details see Jean Baptiste Brunet, L’artillerie française au XVIIIe síecle (Paris, 1906); and for the internal struggle in the army, Chalmin, “La querelle des Bleus et des Rouges,” pp. 490–505.

37. In 1791 the French field artillery totaled only 1,300 guns according to Gunther Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), p. 122.

38. Charles K. Hyde, Technological Change and the British Iron Industry, 1700–1870 (Princeton, 1977), pp. 194–96.

39. Bertrand Gille, Les origines de la grande industrie métallurgique en France (Paris, 1947), pp. 131–35 and passim; Conturie, Histoire de la fonderie nationale de Ruelle, pp. 248–80; Theodore Wertime, The Coming of Age of Steel (Leiden, 1961), pp. 131–32; Joseph Antoine Roy, Histoire de la famille Schneider et du Creusot (Paris, 1962), pp. 11–15.

40. Gaier, Four Centuries of Liège Gunmaking, p. 60.

41. Most of the labor needed was provided by ascribing serfs to the new enterprises. Much of the work was done in winter when there was nothing to do in the fields; hence the extra burden on the serfs cut into their agricultural productivity only slightly. By generous resort to compulsion, in other words, the Russian government instituted a far more efficient distribution of labor through the year—and acquired an iron industry, basic for armaments, for little more than the cost of supporting supervisory personnel and a few imported master workmen. Cf. James Mavor, An Economic History of Russia, 2d ed. (New York, 1925), 1:437–38. By 1715 Peter’s factories had produced no fewer than 13,000 cannons; in 1720 the annual production of muskets reached 20,000—fully equivalent to French production. Cf. Arcadius Kahan, “Continuity in Economic Activity and Policy during the Post-Petrine Period in Russia,” in William L. Blackwell, ed., Russian Economic Development from Peter the Great to Stalin (New York, 1974), p. 57.

42. See above, p. 122.

43. W. O. Henderson, Studies in the Economic Policy of Frederick the Great (London, 1963), p. 6.

44. Trebilcock, “Spin-off in British Economic History,” p. 477.

45. Hyde, Technological Change and the British Iron Industry, p. 115. Inasmuch as some of the iron sold privately ended up in muskets purchased by the government in a finished or semifinished state from private producers, Hyde’s estimate of 17–25 percent as the government’s share of the total production of iron is, presumably, minimal; indeed it seems to me that he systematically underrates the importance of armaments and state purchasing in the rise of the British iron industry, despite, or perhaps because of, his sophisticated use of economic measures and concepts. For example: the pioneer iron foundries in Wales and then in Scotland both started up on the strength of contracts with the navy to manufacture cannon. Cf. Harry Scrivenor, History of the Iron Trade, 2d ed. (London, 1854), pp. 122–23; Arthur Henry John, The Industrial Development of South Wales (Cardiff, 1950), pp. 24–36, 99 ff. An assured large-scale market helped entrepreneurs to overcome the start-up costs in what, to begin with, was almost uninhabited country. It offers on British soil an example of a much wider phenomenon: for, as we have just seen, state arms contracts often provided a basis for establishing new and relatively expensive technology on new ground: Russia’s Urals, Prussia’s Spandau, France’s Le Creusot, are parallel examples of this same phenomenon.

46. Two excellent books cast much light on this fateful turn in state policy and power balances: John Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III, 1689–1697: Its State and Direction (Cambridge, 1953), and Geoffrey Symcox, The Crisis of French Sea Power, 1688–1697: From the Guerre d’Escadre to the Guerre de Course (The Hague, 1974).

47. To accommodate these large caliber (and thin-walled) guns on shipboard, it was necessary to lessen the charge, since otherwise recoil became too great for wooden construction to withstand. This meant lesser muzzle velocity and shorter range; but the projectiles’ extra weight nevertheless proved more destructive than standard cannon fire. First manufactured in 1774, carronades were initially sold to merchant vessels and then in 1779 the Royal Navy accepted them as supplementary armament. The carronade thereafter provided the technological basis for Nelson’s famous injunction to lie close alongside the foe, since its fire became effective only at short ranges.

48. On the technical constraints of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century naval vessels, see the very instructive pages in Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III, pp. 3–37; G.J. Marcus, Heart of Oak: A Survey of British Seapower in the Georgian Era (London, 1975), pp. 8–9, 39, and passim. Shipbuilding remained an affair of artisan skill, fitting odd-shaped timbers to the curves of the hull, etc. Efforts to bring theory to bear on how best to proportion hull and sails made little difference, though the French began such attempts as early as 1681.

49. Cf. Vauban’s memorandum of 1695 to Louis XIV: “. . . fitting out fleets has cost enormous sums; and these expenses have been a complete loss.” Quoted from Symcox, War, Diplomacy and Imperialism, p. 240.

50. Timber suppliers in the Baltic preferred the English to the French because French payment procedures were undependable. This reinforced strategical difficulties the French faced in getting timber from the Baltic past their Dutch and British foes. Cf. Paul Walden Bamford, Forests and French Sea Power, 1660–1789 (Toronto, 1956).

51. In the War of Jenkins’ Ear, for example, British naval manpower rose from just under 10,000 in 1738 to over 40,000 in 1741 and reached a peak of 60,000 in 1748. After the war, in turn, naval personnel was cut back to 20,000 by 1749. Daniel A. Baugh, British Naval Administration in the Age of Walpole (Princeton, 1965), p. 205.

52. Cf. Ehrman, The Navy in the War of William III, p. 171: “Maritime war did not merely help her [Great Britain] to gain wealth, its progress directly increased wealth, and the expensive fleet did not exhaust trade and industry. . . . Power and wealth reacted upon each other, and increasing costs were met with increasing resources.”

53. Public reaction to naval defeats in the Seven Years War allowed the duc de Choiseul, minister of marine 1761–66, to pay for sixteen new warships by subscriptions, more or less voluntary, from various monied groups—tax farmers, provincial estates, country gentlemen, Paris merchants, etc. Cf. the list of ships built by subscription in E. H. Jenkins, A History of the French Navy (London, 1973), p. 142.

54. Symcox, The Crisis of French Sea Power, pp. 221 ff., argues this point convincingly.

55. Musket manufacture was organized at four centers where a handful of “entrepreneurs” contracted with the government for the delivery of specified numbers of guns each year. The muskets were actually manufactured by artisans who worked at the order of the entrepreneurs; and the whole process was supervised by a government officer, whose duty it was to make sure that each musket came up to official specifications. The best account of French gunmaking I have found is Louis Joseph Gras, Historique de l’armurerie stéphanoise (St. Etienne, 1905), pp. 36–40, 59, and passim. Production fluctuated between 10,000 and 26,000 muskets per annum in the second half of the eighteenth century—a not inconsiderable figure but falling far short of the scale of manufacture at Liège, where about 200,000 muskets were produced yearly, according to Gaier, Four Centuries of Liège Gun Making, p. 42.

56. For army bread contractors and their tendency to dictate troop movements in the field, see Kennett, The French Armies in the Seven Years War, pp. 97–104. On the absence of a nationwide commercial integration in France, see Edward Fox, History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York, 1971).

57. P. K. Crimmin, “Admiralty Relations with the Treasury, 1783–1806: The Preparation of Naval Estimates and the Beginnings of Treasury Control,” Mariner’s Mirror 53 (1967): 63–72; Bernard Pool, Navy Board Contracts, 1660–1832 (Hamden, Conn., 1966), pp. 111–15; Albion, Forests and Sea Power, pp. 45 ff. British army reform, for the most part, waited until after 1795. See Richard Glover, Peninsular Preparation, 1795–1809 (Cambridge, 1963).

58. Three fine books discuss details of the British logistical effort during the War of American Independence: Piers Mackesy, The War for America, 1775–1783 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); David Syrett, Shipping and the American War, 1775–1783: A Study of British Transport Organization (London, 1970); R. Arthur Bowler, Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America, 1775–1783 (Princeton, 1975). Norman Baker, Government and Contractors: The British Treasury and War Suppliers, 1775–1783 (London, 1971) is also informative.

59. A. H. John, “War and the English Economy, 1700–1763,” Economic History Review, 2d ser. 7 (1954–55): 329–44.

6. The Military Impact of the French Political and the British Industrial Revolutions, 1789-1840

1. This argument is developed as fully as sketchy data allow in W. H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1976), pp. 240–56.

2. George Rudé, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century: Studies in Popular Protest (New York, 1971), pp. 35–36; Jacques Godechot, La prise de la Bastille (Paris, 1965), p. 75.

3. Oliven F. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford, 1974) provides a masterful overview.

4. Y. LeMoigne, “Population et subsistence à Strasbourg au XVIIIe siècle,” in M. Bouloiseau et al., Contributions à l’histoire démographique de la révolution française, Commission d’histoire économique et sociale de la révolution, no. 14 (Paris, 1962), pp. 15, 44.

5. On the Gordon riots cf. Rudé, Paris and London, pp. 268–92. As Rudé is at pains to point out, the London crowds attacked established figures—those who had advocated Catholic emancipation—rather than assaulting the poor Irish of London; hence the social character of the rioting was not so very different from that of revolutionary Paris.

6. The Minoan civilization of Crete appears to have concentrated resources at Knossos more by trade than by raid. Sea empires of Java and Sumatra did the same in the first millenium A.D. But islands divided among rival political masters, as Japan was through most of its history, characteristically conform to continental patterns of mobilization, in which command plays a more prominent part and the market remains subordinate.

7. Use of regular troops against civilian crowds was an awkward matter for eighteenth-century armies. Cf. Tony Haytor, The Army and the Crowd in Mid-Georgian England (London, 1978). A volley of muskets at close range was murderous; yet no other tactics were available. Crowd control was not systematically developed by European police forces until the 1880s. The London dock strike (1889) established the principles of “Keep moving, please,” i.e., of allowing marches and peaceful demonstrations to pass through designated streets by arrangement. This marks the dawn of modern techniques for allowing an angry crowd to expend its energy harmlessly with hours of muscular exertion and shouting, without having to disperse it by brute force. But such sophistication was far in the future in 1789; so, for that matter, were disciplined civil police forces. On the police of Paris see Godechot, La prise de la Bastille, pp. 95–115.

8. A. Corvisier, L’armée française de la fin du XVlle siècle au ministère de Choiseul (Paris, 1964), pp. 784–90.

9. Samuel F. Scott. The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, 1787–1793 (New York, 1978), pp. 26, 34. Most of what follows about how the army responded to the first years of the revolution derives from this excellent book.

10. Godechot, La prise de la Bastille, pp. 289 ff

11. Scott, Response of the Royal Army, pp. 17, 45.

12. Louis Gottschalk and Margaret Maddox, Lafayette in the French Revolution: Through the October Days (Chicago, 1969), pp. 159–90, 256–340.

13. Scott, Response of the Royal Army, pp. 98–120; Henry S. Wilkinson, The French Army before Napoleon (Oxford, 1915), pp. 99–143.

14. The elective principle for appointment to junior officer ranks was not entirely given up; but the right to vote on a new appointment was limited to holders of the rank to be filled. In addition, 33 percent of all vacancies was to be filled by promotion based on seniority in length of service. Scott, Response of the Royal Army, pp. 157, 165, 180. In 1795, election of officers was discontinued.

15. Jean-Paul Bertaud, “Voies nouvelles pour l’histoire militaire de la révolution,” Annales historiques de la révolution française 47 (1975): 83.

16. This is the translation of Crane Brinton et al., in Edward Mead Earle, Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton, 1941), p. 77.

17. Richard Cobb, Les armées révolutionaires: Instrument de la Terreur dans les départements, avril 1793–floreal an II, 2 vols. (Paris, 1961), offers enormous detail.

18. It also encouraged counter-revolution, as at Lyons, Toulon, and in the Vendée. For a while in 1793 it was unclear which reaction would prevail. By the end of that year, the superior organizational effort from Paris, centering in the famous Committee of Public Safety, and the appeal of liberty, even when paradoxically it meant conscription, combined to tip the balance.

19. In June 1794 an official rapporteur told the Convention that the French army was three times as large as a year before yet cost only half as much. S. J. Watson, Carnot (London, 1954), p. 88. On military service and the poor see Alan Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor (Oxford, 1981), pp. 138–67.

20. Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution from 1793 to 1799 (London, 1964), p. 145. On the weakening of crowd action by withdrawal of young men into the armies see his remarks, ibid., p. 70. Jacques Godechot, Les revolutions, 1770–1799 (Paris, 1970), pp. 94–95.

21. Lefebvre, French Revolution, p. 315.

22. One hundred thousand muskets had been sent from French armories to the Americans between 1778 and 1783, according to Gunther Rothenberg, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), pp. 120–21.

23. In 1789 the French army possessed only 1,300 pieces of Gribeauval’s new field artillery; by 1795 the number almost doubled, thanks to an intense revolutionary effort, using melted-down church bells as the prime source of metal. Ibid., p. 123.

24. Theodore Wertime, The Coming of Age of Steel (Leiden, 1961), p. 249, says that Paris produced 1,100 muskets a day under the Committee of Public Safety.

25. These figures come from Louis Joseph Gras, Historique de l’armurerie stéphanoise (St. Etienne, 1905), pp. 99, 225–27.

26. Grande Encyclopédie, s.v. LeBlanc, Carny.

27. Lefebvre, French Revolution, pp. 101–3; Shepard B. Clough, France: A History of National Economics (New York, 1939), p. 51.

28. In 1694 Louis XIV’s army totaled about 300,000 men, the highest figure of his reign according to David Chandler, The Art of War in the Age of Marlborough (New York, 1976), p. 65. I take the figure for the size of the revolutionary army from Lefebvre, French Revolution, p. 81.

29. Other considerations, notably widespread illness in the Prussian army, also affected this decision. Curt Jany, Geschichte der Königlich Preussiscben Armee (Berlin, 1928–37), 3:257 says that, on 20 October 1792, 12,864 men out of 15,068 reported in sick! In general, Prussia and Austria found it impossible to concentrate attention on France when the final partitioning of Poland was still in process (1793, 1795). Nonetheless, it is symbolic of the continuity in matters military between the Old Regime and the revolutionary management of armed force that this initial success against the vaunted Prussian army depended on superior weaponry, inherited from Gribeauval’s reforms. The recovery of Toulon (1793), where Napoleon played his first conspicuous role, also turned upon the accuracy and rate of fire of the new French field artillery.

30. Marcel Reinhard, Le grand Carnot (Paris, 1952). 2:81–82.

31. The superiority of the Roman legions over the Greek-Macedonian phalanx rested on a similar adaptability of Roman cohorts to hilly ground. In this as in other respects, the French revolutionaries consciously identified themselves with Roman republican models.

32. As always before the twentieth century, disease killed far more soldiers than enemy action; but statistics as to disease deaths were not kept and cannot be reconstructed.

33. These were sometimes in kind, i.e., an armed contingent, and sometimes in cash. In 1804, for example, Napoleon wrested 16,000 soldiers from Holland as well as having Dutch shipyards build many of the invasion barges intended to carry his troops across the Channel. From Spain he extracted a heavy money payment, though it required an ultimatum to persuade the Spanish government to pay up. Georges Lefebvre, Napoleon (Paris, 1947), p. 165.

34. Ibid., pp. 191, 195, 379, 513–14. According to Lefebvre, the Grande Armée totaled 700,000, of whom 611,000 crossed the Russian frontier. Of this number, only 300,000 were French and 230,000 were from “old France.” The really heavy draft hit France only in 1812–13 when Napoleon called up more than 1 million new soldiers, and succeeded in mobilizing about 41 percent of all the men registered with the Ministry of War. On population pressure in Germany and its political expression see Karl H. Wegert, “Patrimonial Rule, Popular Self-Interest and Jacobinism in Germany, 1763–1800,” Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 450 ff.

35. Alexander was implicated in the murder of his father, Paul; and soon after his accession to the throne enthusiasm for enlightened French ideas competed in his mind with mystical pursuit of communion with God. His flip-flops from a French to a British alliance and back again were often associated with shifts in his intellectual posture, before as well as after his well-known conversion by Mme. de Krüdener to Christian ideals in 1815. Cf. Alan Palmer, Alexander I: Tsar of War and Peace (New York, 1974).

36. L. Bergeron, “Problèmes économiques de la France Napoléonienne,” Annales historiques de la révolution française 42 (1970): 89.

37. The gap was easy to exaggerate. Napoleon had no difficulty in supplying his armies with all the military hardware they could carry. Annual production of iron cannon grew from 900 to 13,000 a year, and seventeen new foundries turned out no fewer than 14,000 bronze guns per annum, according to Clough, France, p. 49. One near-contemporary calculation held that between 1803 and 1815 the French produced 3.9 million muskets, rifles, carbines, and pistols, whereas Great Britain turned out only 3.1 million in the same period. F. R. C. Dupin, Military Force of Great Britain (London, 1822), quoted in Richard Glover, Peninsular Preparation in 1795–1809 (Cambridge, 1963), p. 47. This may understate British production: Birmingham alone turned over 1,743,383 handguns and 3,037,644 gun barrels to the Board of Ordnance between 1804 and 1815, according to William Page, ed., The Victoria History of the County of Warwick II (London, 1908), “The Gun Trade of Birmingham,” pp. 226–32.

France and French-controlled regions of Europe also saw spurts of entrepreneurship into new branches like cotton-spinning. Cf. Fernand Lelux, A l’aube du capitalisme et de la révolution industrielle: Lieven Bauwens. industriel Gaulois (Paris, 1969). Irregularities in access to raw cotton hurt the latter venture, however; and, in general, industries dependent on goods imported from overseas languished. Indeed the main effect of the war years was to choke off the Atlantic face of France and build up industry in the Rhine-Rhone valleys. Cf. François Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade and Economic Change in Europe, 1792–1815,” Journal of Economic History 24 (1964): 567–88; Bertrand Gille, Les origines de la grande industrie métallurgique en France (Paris, 1947), pp. 206 ff.

38. Experiments, later to be important, were made with sugar beets; likewise cotton-growing in the Po valley was initiated; but these never came near filling the gap created by the cutoff of colonial goods. Realizing this weakness of his position, Napoleon kept hoping to be able to challenge Britain on the seas once again. After Trafalgar (1805) reduced the French navy to a mere 30 ships of the line, he set about rebuilding. By 1814 103 ships of the line and 65 frigates were ready for sea. But the new vessels huddled uselessly in port, and in 1812 Napoleon took many of their crew members into the army for the invasion of Russia, thus tacitly admitting his inability, for the time king, to challenge his rival effectively. Cf. Joannes Tramond, Manuel d’histoire maritime de la France: Des origines à 1815 (Paris, 1947). pp. 772 ff.

39. The Spanish guerrillas, together with Spanish and Portuguese regular troops who served under Wellington’s command, did much to supplement the action of the British army. Without them, the old-fashioned tactics Wellington used so successfully would perhaps not have won so many victories. On the Peninsular War see Charles W. C. Oman, A History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1902–08).

40. On Napoleon’s supply arrangements for 1812 see David G. Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (New York, 1966), pp. 757–59.

41. At least in principle. I have not been able to find any discussion of how the Russian troops were actually supplied in 1812; but an examination of the map shows that the line of their retreat and advance crossed a series of river lines whose banks, on either side of the route of march, were securely controlled by the Russian government. I assume, therefore, that supplies came along the rivers; and even if deliveries were ill organized, as is probable, they clearly surpassed French arrangements. The fact that the Russian army remained in being and was able to harass the retreating Grande Armée throughout the winter months stands as proof of this elementary fact.

42. This was the central thesis of Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth. 1688–1959 (Cambridge, 1962) and, ten years later, W. A. Cole, “Eighteenth Century Economic Growth Revisited,” Explorations in Economic History 10 (1973): 327–48, reaffirmed the idea. Cf. also H. J. Habakkuk, Population Growth and Economic Development since 1750 (New York, 1971), p. 48 and passim; D. E. C. Eversley, “The Home Market and Economic Growth in England, 1750–1780,” in E. L. Jones and G. E. Mingay, eds., Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1967), pp. 206–59.

43. It is worth noting, perhaps, how closely this development, along with the simultaneous rise of the coke and iron technology in Great Britain, paralleled the much earlier Chinese developments discussed above in chapter 2.

44. Robert R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1959, 1964).

45. This figure is from Glenn Hueckel, “War and the British Economy, 1793–1815: A General Equilibrium Analysis,” Explorations in Economic History 10 (1972): 371. Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power and Resources of the British Empire (London, 1814), p. 47, gives figures that add up to 511,679

46. Official statistics were not kept on either side of the Atlantic, but historians are of the opinion that a total of about 225,000 Ulstermen arrived in America between 1718 and 1775, and that when emigration resumed after 1783 the flow was somewhat smaller than it had been before the War of Independence. Cf. H. J. M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy, 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1972), pp. 6–7. The beginnings of emigration to Canada and the Carolinas from the Scottish Highlands dates from after the Seven Years War, when discharged veterans were offered land in the New World. Cf. Helen I. Cowan, British Emigration to British North America: The First Hundred Years, rev. ed. (Toronto, 1961), pp. 3–64. But the numerical scale of this movement was too slight to have much demographic effect back home.

47. Named for the place where justices of the peace from Berkshire met in 1795 to set up a schedule for outdoor relief payments which became a model, widely imitated, in the following years. See Michael E. Rose, The English Poor Laws, 1780–1930 (New York, 1971), pp. 18–20.

48. John U. Nef, War and Human Progress (Cambridge, Mass., 1950) perhaps expresses an extreme view, but W. W. Rostow, “War and Economic Change: The British Experience,” The Process of Economic Growth, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1960), pp. 144–67, comes to a similar conclusion. Phyllis Deane, “War and Industrialization,” in J. M. Winter, ed., War and Economic Development (Cambridge, 1975), p. 101, concludes that the war of 1793–1815 “does not seem to have caused more than superficial fluctuations in the pace and content of the British Industrial revolution.”

49. Government expenditure in 1814 was no less that 29 percent of the estimated GNP, according to Alan T. Peacock and Jack Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom (Princeton, 1961), p. 37.

50. John T. Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder: British Foreign Aid 1793–1815 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 345.

51. This was not lost on contemporaries. Joseph Lowe, The Present State of England in Regard to Agriculture, Trade and Finance (London, 1833), pp. 29 ff., attributes Britain’s wartime prosperity to full employment resulting from taxation and government borrowing, whose tonic effect was “distributed over the country, for . . . our total expenditure . . . with trifling exception, was circulated at home” (p. 33).

52. J. L. Anderson, “Aspects of the Effects on the British Economy of the War against France, 1793–1815,” Australian Economic History Review 12 (1972): 1–20. The short-barreled, extra-large gun used with greater effect aboard Nelson’s ships at Trafalgar, the carronade, was named for the Carron works in Scotland where it was first designed; and the wharf in Cardiff where the products of the South Wales ironworks were loaded is still known as Cannon Wharf. Popular speech in this fashion recorded the importance of armaments for the new iron industry of Great Britain. Even the Quaker firm founded by Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale made cannon in the mid-eighteenth century, but discontinued the practice before 1792. Cf. Arthur Raistrick, The Coalbrookdale Ironworks: A Short History (Telford, 1975), p. 5.

53. Wilkinson’s cannon-boring machine allowed Watt’s steam engine to become efficient by making possible a close fit between piston and cylinder. Cf. Clive Trebilcock, “Spin-off in British Economic History: Armaments and Industry, 1760–1914,” Economic History Review 22 (1969): 477.

54. As Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1965), p. 110, does. Cf. also the otherwise admirable work, Charles K. Hyde, Technological Change and the British Iron Industry, 1700–1870 (Princeton, 1970), p. 129: “In the absence of fighting, overall demand for iron might have been higher.” Hyde offers no explanation for this surprising judgment; he just tosses it off as an aside. The most careful assessment of the impact of war on the British iron industry I have seen is Alan Birch, The Economic History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, 1784–1879: Essays in Industrial and Economic History with Special Reference to the Development of Technology (London, 1967), pp. 47–56.

55. Public expenditure increased from £22 million in 1792 to £123 million in 1815, or almost six times.

56. Figures from Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, p. 8.

57. Jacques Dupaquier and Christine Berg-Hamon, “Voies nouvelles pour l’histoire démographique de la révolution française: Le mouvement de population de 1795 à 1800,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 47 (1975): 8, offer a total for French war losses of 1.3 million; but by adding Lefebvre’s total of 600,000 war losses for the years 1792–99, cited in n. 21 above, to a new total of 900,000 for losses under the empire worked out by J. Houdaille, “Pertes de l’armée de terre sous le premier Empire,” Population 27 (1972): 42, one gets a total of 1.5 million. Inasmuch as Houdaille’s data and methods are clearly superior to previous calculations, the larger figure is likely to be correct. Houdaille calculates that no less than 20.5 percent of all French males born between 1790 and 1795 inclusive died before 1816 from war-related causes. These were the age classes most severely affected. Ibid., p. 50.

58. What happened to French birthrates to set them off from the rest of Europe is a capital question of historical demography. The prevalence of peasant property in land must have mattered; postponing marriage until inheritance of land was in sight for the newlyweds could have a powerful effect in slowing population growth, as the history of Ireland after the famine of 1845 proves. But the French must also have resorted to deliberate birth control on a scale other European peoples did not approach until the twentieth century. It seems possible that French soldiers’ experiences with prostitutes in the wars may have spread familiarity with birth control methods among the French, and this, with the general secularization and break with Catholic teachings that the revolution brought, may explain what happened to French birthrates. Jacques Dupaquier, “Problèmes démographiques de la France napoléonienne,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 42 (1970): 21, is the only authority I have seen who recognizes the possible importance of wartime military experiences of sex as affecting French family patterns after 1800; but any veteran of twentieth-century wars can confirm the plausibility of this suggestion—and the improbability of finding written sources as evidence.

59. Translation by Gordon A. Craig in The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (Oxford, 1955), p. 43.

60. Scharnhorst’s ideas reflected the fact that he was both a gunner and a commoner born.

61. Civil officials in Prussia had, since the seventeenth century, been recruited from the universities of Germany, and from 1770 had to validate their studies by passing an examination. Hence the 1808 ordinance concerning Prussian officer recruitment simply assimilated army management to that of the civilian state.

62. Samuel F. Scott, The Response of the Royal Army to the French Revolution, 1787–1793 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 153, 161. Examinations continued for the artillery and engineers as in the days of the Old Regime.

63. The Prussian army had been limited to 42,000 men by Napoleon’s fiat in 1808. In 1814 its field strength was 358,000 men with an additional 30,000 or so in the rear to perform various service and supporting roles. Figures from Jany, Geschichte der Königlich Preussischen Armee, 4:114.

64. The era of Prussian reform was long a favorite field for German patriots. The little essay by Friedrich Meinecke, The Age of German Liberation, 1795–1815 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977; originally published 1906) is an elegant summary of mainstream opinion. On military matters, in addition to Gordon Craig’s magistral book, already referred to, William Shanahan, Prussian Military Reforms, 1786–1813 (New York, 1945) and Peter Paret, Yorck and the Era of Prussian Reform, 1807–1815 (Princeton, 1966), which corrects Shanahan on some minor details, are especially informative.

65. These weapons were invented by an Englishman, William Congreve (1772–1828), in the first decade of the nineteenth century. He was stimulated by reports of how the Indian prince, Tipoo Sahib, had used rockets against British soldiers in 1792 and 1799. His rockets attained a range about twice that of contemporary field artillery; they were used with considerable effect against Boulogne in 1806 (after a failure the year before), and in subsequent attacks against Copenhagen (1807), Danzig (1813) and at the battle of Leipzig (1813). Congreve rockets also played a conspicuous part in the War of 1812, a fact commemorated in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They may indeed have allowed the British to reach and burn the new American capital of Washington.

Rocket corps were set up in most European armies after 1813; but after the 1840s spectacular new developments in artillery made rockets seem too inaccurate to be worthwhile. They disappeared from war towards the end of the nineteenth century, to be revived in a big way only in World War II. Cf. Willy Ley, Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space (New York, 1968), pp. 61–75; Wernher von Braun and Frederick I. Ordway III, Rocketry and Space Travel, 3d ed. (New York, 1975), pp. 30–34. On Wellington’s rejection of Congreve’s rockets, see Glover, Peninsular Preparation, pp. 68–73.

66. The Russian tsar, in effect, sought to match the British “two power” naval standard by maintaining an army equal in size to the forces of any two other European powers. To lessen the cost, Alexander resorted to so-called military colonies which put about a third of his peacetime army on a life-routine close to that of the peasantry. On the Russian military colonies see Alan Palmer, Alexander: Tsar of War and Peace (New York, 1974), pp. 344–48.

67. Douglas Porch, Army and Revolution: France, 1815–1848 (London, 1974), pp. 138–39 and passim.

7. The Initial Industrialization of War, 1840–84

1. Cf. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

2. British mail subsidies, administered by the Admiralty between 1839 and 1860, were given only to ships deemed potentially useful in war. Specifications required, for example, that the mail carriers be capable of mounting heavy guns in case of need. Until experiences of the Crimean War proved differently, commercial steamships were presumed to be capable of swift conversion into warships. This recapitulated the situation that prevailed from 1300 to 1600, when stoutly built commercial vessels doubled as warships as a matter of course. In the nineteenth century the presumed convertibility of the new steamers lasted less than two decades—a measure of the heightened pace of technical change after 1800. On steamers as reserve ships of war see David B. Tyler, Steam Conquers the Atlantic (London, 1939), pp. 77–81, 170–72, 231–32.

3. These statistics come from W. A. Baker, From Paddle Steamer to Nuclear Ship: A History of the Engine-Powered Vessel (London, 1965), pp. 41–58. Cf. Francis E. Hyde, Cunard and the North Atlantic: A History of Shipping and Financial Management (London, 1975); Tyler, Steam Conquers the Atlantic.

4. Quoted from Michael Lewis, The History of the British Navy (Baltimore, 1957), p. 224.

5. As early as 1827, private initiative and British philhellenism had in fact armed a steamship with one of Paixhans’ shell guns for use in the Greek War of Independence against the Turks. This ship, the Karteria, gave sovereignty over the Aegean to the Greek insurgents; but it never really was tested, since British, French, and Russian warships of the old design had already destroyed the only important Moslem counter-force at the Battle of Navarino (1827), before the Karteria came on the scene. Cf. Christopher J. Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power, 1815–1853 (Oxford, 1963), p. 200.

6. Cf. Stephen S. Roberts, “The Introduction of Steam Technology in the French Navy, 1818–1852” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1976).

7. On the technical revolution provoked by the Gloire see Paul Gille, “Le premier navire cuirassé: La Gloire” in Michel Mollat, ed., Les origines de la navigation à vapeur (Paris, 1970), pp. 43–57.

8. In addition to works already cited on the mid-nineteenth-century French-British naval rivalry see James Phinney Baxter, The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship (Cambridge, Mass., 1933); Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power; Oscar Parkes, British Battleships. “Warrior” to “Valiant,” rev. ed. (London, 1970), pp. 2–217; Bernard Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age. 2d ed. (Princeton, 1942); Wilhelm Treue, Der Krimkrieg und die Entstehung der modernen Flotten (Göttingen, 1954); William Hovgaard, Modern History of Battleships (London, 1920).

9. Its manpower totaled 980,000 before hostilities began in 1853, and by the war’s end had expanded to a total of no less than 1,802,500 men, despite some 450,000 casualties. John Shelton Curtiss, Russia’s Crimean War (Durham, N.C., 1979), p. 470.

10. I take these figures from Curtiss, ibid., pp. 339–40, 448.

11. Howard L. Blackmore, British Military Fire-arms, 1650–1850 (London, 1961), pp. 229–33; O. F. G. Hogg, The Royal Arsenal: Its Background, Origin and Subsequent History (London, 1963), 2:736–40; James E. Hicks, Notes on French Ordnance, 1717–1936 (Mt. Vernon, N.Y., 1938), p. 24.

12. Dennis Showalter, Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology and the Unification of Germany (Hamden, Conn., 1975), pp. 81, 96–98.

13. Such machines were not particularly difficult to design. The principle was the same as that used to make extra keys from an original today: that is, mechanical linkages forced a cutting tool to follow a path defined by a tracer that moved along the contours of an original master shape or jig. This pantograph principle had been known since Hellenistic times, when such machines had been used to mass-produce statuary for export from Alexandria. Cf. Gisela M. A. Richter, The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, 4th ed. (New Haven, 1970), p. 246. Americans developed these machines partly because skilled gunsmiths were in short supply; partly because after the War of 1812, U.S. government policy, by giving long-range contracts to suppliers, encouraged heavier capital investment. Cf. Felicia Johnson Deyrup, Arms Makers in the Connecticut Valley, Smith College Studies in History, No. 33 (Northampton, Mass., 1948).

14. On American arms-making, in addition to Deyrup, see Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977); Robert J. Woodbury, “The Legend of Eli Whitney and the Interchangeability of Parts,” Technology and Culture 1 (1960): 235–51. For British arms trade and the revolution brought to it in the 1850s, see Nathan Rosenberg, ed., The American System of Manufactures: The Report of the Committee on the Machinery of the United States, 1855, and the Special Reports of George Wallis and Joseph Whitworth, 1854 (Edinburgh, 1969), Introduction; H.J. Habakkuk, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1962); A. Ames and Nathan Rosenberg, “Enfield Arsenal in Theory and History,” Economic Journal 78 (1968):825–42; Russell I. Fries, “British Response to the American System: The Case of the Small Arms Industry after 1850,” Technology and Culture 16 (1975): 377–403.

15. O. F. G. Hogg, Royal Arsenal 2:783, 792.

16. S. B. Saul, “The Market and the Development of the Mechanical Engineering Industries in Britain,” Economic History Review 20 (1967): 111–30; Fries, “British Response to the American System”; Conrad Gill, History of Birmingham: Manor and Borough to 1865 (London, 1952), p. 295.

17. This, at any rate, was the proud boast of Charles H. Fitch, “Report on the Manufacture of Interchangeable Mechanisms,” U.S. Congress, Miscellaneous Documents of the House of Representatives, 4th Cong., 2d sess. 1882–82, 13, pt. 2: 613–14. Unfortunately, Fitch gives no details and I have not found confirmatory evidence from all of the purchasers.

18. Cf. Claude Gaier, Four Centuries of Liège Gunmaking (London, 1977), p. 122.

19. Ibid., pp. 190–95.

20. Dennis Showalter, Railroads and Rifles, pp. 81–82, 95–98; Curt Jany, Geschichte der Königlich Preussischen Armee (Berlin, 1928–37) 4:199–202.

21. John D. Goodman, “The Birmingham Gun Trade,” in Samuel Timmins, ed., History of Birmingham and the Midland Hardware District (London, 1866), p. 415. In that same year, the “trade” produced 460,140 gun barrels in Birmingham and 210,181 in London, of which most were sold overseas and only 19,263 were proved and accepted for government use.

22. Napoleon III reacted to Prussia’s victory over Austria by ordering a new arsenal built at Puteaux in August 1866, capable of making 360,000 new chassepôt rifles annually. By 1870 over a million of the new rifles were in stock, according to Louis César Alexandre Randon, Mémoires (Paris, 1877), 2:236–42. This extraordinary feat was, however, only achieved by calling on gunmakers in Birmingham, Liège, and Brescia to supplement Puteaux’s output. Cf. François Crouzet, “Recherches sur la production d’armement en France, 1815–1913,” Révue historique 251 (1974): 54. Prussia fixed on a new rifle model, the Mauser, in 1869. It could not be manufactured before the war with France broke out. Nevertheless, the new weapon was ready for issue to the now much enlarged German army in 1873. For the acceptance of American machines in Germany after 1869 see Ernst Barth, Entwicklungslinien der deutschen Maschinenbauindustrie von 1870 bis 1914 (Berlin, 1973), pp. 48–49. The Austrians went over to the “American system” of automated manufacture of small arms after 1862, according to Gunther Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (West Lafayette, Ind., 1976), p. 43. For Russia see J. G. Purves, “Nineteenth-Century Russia and the Revolution in Military Technology,” in J. G. Purves and D. A. West, eds., War and Society in the Nineteenth-Century Russian Empire (Toronto, 1972), pp. 7–22.

23. The Patent Office in Great Britain issued a total of about 300 patents for inventions pertaining to firearms between 1617 and 1850, but approved more than 600 such patents in the single decade beginning in 1850, according to Rosenberg, American System of Manufactures, p. 29.

24. Hogg, Royal Arsenal 2: 756–60.

25. Sir Henry Bessemer, An Autobiography (London, 1905), pp. 130–42, gives a vivid if perhaps incomplete and self-serving account of how he made his discovery. Theodore A. Wertime, The Coming of Age of Steel (London, 1961) offers an excellent account of metallurgical history, blessedly accessible to nontechnical readers. For resistance to the use of steel guns, the Prussian case is the most telling. Cf. W. A. Boelke, Krupp und die Hohenzollern in Dokumenten (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), pp. 106, 123.

26. J. D. Scott, Vickers: A History (London, 1962), p. 25.

27. Instead of being cast in one piece, as big guns had been since the fifteenth century, Armstrong’s gun was built around a core, either by winding iron strips (eventually steel wire) around the barrel lining, usually of steel, or by “sweating” hoops of iron around the core, to build the gun up in a series of layers. “Sweating” refers to the practice of heating a hoop of metal to make it expand, and then slipping it over the already assembled pans of the gun. The hot hoop shrank as it cooled, but not back to its room temperature dimensions. Instead, a lasting internal tension squeezed the exterior band tightly against the interior layers, thus creating a force to oppose the expansive force of a powder explosion inside the gun. In this ingenious way a gun could be made stronger for a given weight than anything that could be fashioned out of a homogeneously cast block of metal. Armstrong’s method of gunmaking had the additional advantage of allowing a rapid increase in size, since it was feasible to manufacture and assemble component parts of guns much too big to cast in a single piece.

28. Whitworth combined scientific and technical with pecuniary entrepreneurship in quite extraordinary degree, and developed connections with Liberal as Armstrong did with Conservative politicians. Whitworth tested different forms of rifling and projectile shapes more systematically than others had done and was able to develop a flat-nosed, elongated, armor-piercing projectile that was indeed superior to all others. Cf. James E. Tennant, The Story of the Guns (London, 1864), for Whitworth’s side of the story, and David Dougan, The Great Gunmaker: The Story of Lord Armstrong (Newcastle-on-Tyne, n.d.) for Armstrong’s.

29. Whitworth’s guns had oval or polygonal bores, twisted in such a way as to impart rotation to an elongated projectile, shaped to fit the bore. To manufacture such complex planes precisely enough to assure a smooth passage in loading and firing was a formidable assignment for the metalworking methods of the age. Whitworth’s lasting claim to fame was the invention of ways to shape metal far more accurately than had been possible before. But his prototype guns achieved their high performance only by straining the technical proficiency of his shop to the limit.

30. Cf. Peter Padfield, Guns at Sea (New York, 1973), pp. 174–76; Ian V. Hogg, A History of Artillery (London, 1974), pp. 59–70; O. F. G. Hogg, Royal Arsenal 2:773–78, 812–14; Charles E. Caldwell and John Headlam, The History of the Royal Artillery from the Indian Mutiny to the Great War, 2 vols. (Woolwich, n.d.), 1:151 ff.

31. Comité des Forges de France, La sidérurgie française, 1864–1914 (Paris, n.d.), p. 310.

32. Stanley Sandler, The Emergence of the Modern Capital Ship (Newark, 1979) gives a clear, narrative of these developments; Parkes, British Battleships, “Warrior” to “Vanguard” is the standard authority for Royal Navy ships and provides very full technical details. Brodie, Sea Power in the Machine Age offers a briefer, more incisive account.

33. The Austrians, eager to exploit the power of their new rifles, fired at extreme range, with little effect. Their subsequent volleys mostly passed over the heads of the charging French, owing to inadequate instruction in aiming. Even so, French losses at Solferino and Magenta were heavy; and Napoleon’s taste for war was permanently dampened by his personal inspection of the two battlefields. On the Austrian army in 1859, see Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph, pp. 43–84.

34. Pierre Chalmin, L’officier français de 1815 à 1870 (Paris, 1957).

35. For the French army under Napoleon III see Ludovic Jablonsky, L’armée française à travers les âges (Paris, n.d.), vols. 4, 5; Chalmin, L’officier français de 1815 à 1870; David B. Ralston, The Army of the Republic: The Place of the Military in the Political Evolution of France, 1871–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), chap. 1; Alphonse Favé, The Emperor Napoleon’s New System of Field Artillery, trans. William H. Cox (London, 1854); Raoul Girardet, La société militaire dans la France contemporaine, 1815–1939 (Paris 1953); and Joseph Montheilhet, Les institutions militaires de la France, 1814–1924 (Paris, 1932).

36. The Austrians had 736 new rifled cannon and 58 old smooth-bores to the Prussian 492 rifled and 306 smoothbores, according to Gordon A. Craig, The Battle of Königgrätz (Philadelphia, 1964), p. 8.

37. The Dreyse needle gun could be fired five to seven times a minute, more than twice as rapidly as the Minié rifle. This Was because the needle gun relied on “bolt action” to open the breech, allowing ball and cartridge to be inserted, after which the reverse motion closed the breech and locked the bolt into firing position. The firing pin was automatically drawn back and cocked by the movement of the bolt. Cf. Peter Young, The Machinery of War (New York, 1973), pp. 73–76.

38. This aspect of the reformers’ plans was particularly offensive to the Landtag. Liberals suspected that the real motive was simply to capture the Landwehr for the forces of reaction so that the Prussian army could safely be used for suppression of revolution at home. Cf. Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945 (New York, 1964), pp. 138–48.

39. Moltke was fearful of inhibiting his commanders in the field by issuing too many commands from the rear and so intervened only sparingly. Cf. Dennis Showalter, “Soldiers into Postmasters? The Electric Telegraph as an Instrument of Command in the Prussian Army,” Military Affairs 27 (1973): 48–51. In any case, Moltke lost telegraph contact with the crown prince’s army just before the Battle of Königgrätz began, and had to fall back on a dispatch rider to summon the prince’s army to the place of battle. Craig, Königgrätz, p. 98.

40. Systematic use of available means at full capacity was the main secret of successful industrial management in the 1880s, according to Chandler, The Visible Hand, pp. 259 ff. Military staff officers and captains of industry had more in common than either party recognized when, in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were learning how to apply managerial techniques to the parallel problems of destruction and production. In this connection it is worth noting that production of anything involved destruction of something else. The consumption of fuel and raw materials in heavy industry bears detailed comparison with the consumption of resources in war; even the fate of the labor forces involved offer interesting parallels.

41. Martin Van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 79–82; Craig, Königgrätz, p. 49.

42. On chassepôt and mitrailleuse, see Maréchal Randon, Mémoires, 2:234–36; E. Ann Pottinger, Napoleon III and the German Crisis, 1865–66 (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), pp. 94–97; G. S. Hutchison, Machine Guns: Their History and Tactical Employment (London, 1938), pp. 9–15; Louis Etienne Dussieux, L’Armée en France: histoire et organization (Versailles, 1884), 3:233; Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Invasion of France (London, 1961), p. 56.

43. Howard, The Franco-Prussian War is by far the best military narrative and analysis of the subject. Alistair Horne, The Fall of Paris (New York, 1961) provides a vivid account of the Paris Commune. Cf. also Melvin Kranzberg, The Siege of Paris (Ithaca, N.Y, 1950).

44. I have not found a persuasive analysis of European armies’ sociopsychological pattern in the pre–World War I era. The above remarks derive largely from personal experience of the American army in World War II, where, of course, an aristocratic officer corps was lacking. But cf. Martin Kitchen, The German Officer Corps, 1890–1914 (Oxford, 1968); Girardet, La société militaire, pp. 198–291. The fact that both the German and British armies were organized into territorially based regiments gave regimental esprit de corps a remarkable importance in civil society. Draftees and volunteers often made lifelong friends during their military service, and renewed contact at regimental reunions throughout their adult lives. The camaraderie of army life, prolonged in this way, colored and often dominated local male society, especially in the countryside, since no other linkages united so many men so strongly. I owe this insight to personal communication from Professor Michael Howard.

45. Cf. Brian Bond, ed., Victorian Military Campaigns (London, 1967), pp. 7–8; Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men (London, 1974). The Cardwell reforms of the British army, 1870–74, constituted a kind of halfway house between the Old Regime patterns of long-term service that had prevailed until that time and the continental conscript and reservist system that Prussia had made de rigueur.

46. Bond, Victorian Military Campaigns, pp. 309–11, counts no fewer than seventy-two separate British campaigns during Victoria’s reign, or more than one per year.

47. B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 396–97.

48. Cf. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981).

49. Cf. John Bushnell, “Peasants in Uniform: The Tsarist Army as a Peasant Society,” Journal of Social History 13 (1980): 565–76; John Bushnell, ‘The Tsarist Officer Corps 1881–1914: Customs, Duties, Inefficiency,” American Historical Review 86 (1981): 753–80.

50. Overseas settlement as a safety valve for British and other European populations was enormously facilitated by the fact that vast and fertile regions of the earth were drastically depopulated when diseases of civilization attacked the native populations of such places as Australia, South Africa, North and South America. It consequently became possible to settle and develop these half-emptied lands without using any but the most trifling military force. Russian expansion into central Asia required rather more resort to force because it impinged on populations already inured to civilised diseases; the same was true in other Moslem lands, whether of Africa or the Middle East. On disease and European expansion, cf. W. H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1976), chap. 5.

51. An adequate account of nineteenth-century European migration—both of industrial techniques and of population—remains to be written, but cf. D. F. Macdonald, “The Great Migration,” in C. J. Bartlett, ed., Britain Pre-eminent: Studies of British World Influence in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1969), pp. 54–75 for a brief conspectus of one half of the phenomenon. He estimates that 23 million persons left Europe for overseas destinations between 1750 and 1900, of whom 10 million came from the British Isles.

8. Intensified Military-Industrial Interaction, 1884–1914

1. Fast, heavily gunned cruisers proved very salable. Altogether, Armstrong’s built no fewer than eighty-four warships for twelve different foreign governments between 1884 and 1914. More than once in the course of these thirty years, a technical advance introduced on behalf of a foreign customer compelled the Royal Navy to tag along and order equivalent improvements in its warships. In addition to the Chilean cruiser of 1882, the eight-inch guns Armstrong’s provided for the Russian cruiser Rurik (launched 1890) is the best-known instance of this kind of whipsaw. Cf. David Dougan, The Great Gunmaker: The Story of Lord Armstrong (Newcastle-on-Tyne, n.d.), pp. 138–44; Donald W. Mitchell, A History of Russian and Soviet Sea Power (New York, 1974), p. 193.

2. Wheat prices fell from 56s. 9d. a quarter in 1877 to a nadir of 22s. 10d. in 1894. Acreage under wheat dropped by about 50 percent between 1872 and the end of the century; rents declined, though not as much; emigration from the countryside assumed almost catastrophic proportions. Yet real wages rose by something like 77 percent between 1860 and 1900. These statistics are from R. C. K. Ensor, England, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1936), pp. 115–16, 275, 284–86.

3. Volkmar Bueb, Die “Junge Schule” der französischen Marine: Strategie und Politik, 1875–1900 (Boppard am Rhein, 1971) gives the best account I have seen. For a French point of view, see Henri Salaun, La marine française (Paris, 1932), pp. 18 ff. The shift of naval policy between 1881 and 1887 in France duplicated earlier turns away from all-out competition with England, and largely for similar reasons: French taxpayers’ resistence to the excessive cost of naval armament (cf. chap. 5 above). For British responses see Brian Ranft, “The Protection of British Seaborne Trade and the Development of Systematic Planning for War, 1860–1906,” in Brian Ranft, ed., Technical Change and British Naval Policy, 1860–1939 (London, 1977), pp. 1–22.

4. “Torpedo” initially referred to any explosive package designed to strike a ship under the water line. Water being far denser than air, such an explosion could exercise a much greater force against the ship’s side than a similar one occurring in thin air. This made torpedoes particularly lethal. The problem of bringing a charge up against an enemy ship’s side was first resolved by towing torpedoes from projecting spars. But as self-propelled torpedoes began to achieve a degree of accuracy, weapons of this design supplanted all others. On the history of torpedoes see Edwin A. Gray, The Devil’s Device (London, 1975).

5. R. F. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone (Oxford, 1973), pp. 144–45; William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp (Boston, 1964), pp. 176–77; Ian V. Hogg, A History of Artillery (London, 1974), pp. 82–92.

6. Cf. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone, p. 187.

7. Pall Mall Gazette, 18 September 1884, p. 6.

8. Ibid., 8 December 1884, p. 1.

9. For Cooper Key’s views see Richard Hough, First Sea Lord: An Authorized Biography of Admiral Lord Fisher (London, 1969), p. 83.

10. The Daily Telegraph, as quoted in the Pall Mall Gazette, 11 October 1884.

11. Hansard, 2 December 1884, col. 410. The Earl of Northbrook referred to the letting of private contracts four separate times in his speech, and in rebuttal mentioned the government’s intention of encouraging “the great manufacturers of steel” by refraining from giving Woolwich the capacity to produce the new gunmetal.

12. In 1914 less than one-seventh of the work force in Britain paid income tax, according to Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London, 1965), p. 21.

13. Conservatives, who supported defense expenditures more warmly than the Liberals, were nonetheless troubled by the drift towards graduated taxation as the way to pay for more ships and guns. In 1889, for example, Lord Salisbury wrote confidentially to the Chancellor of the Exchequer urging him to meet the increased naval appropriations of that year by raising excise as well as property taxes, since “it is dangerous to recur to realized property alone in difficulties because the holders of it are politically so weak that the pernicious financial habit is sure to grow.” Quoted from Gwendolyn Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (London, 1932), 4:192.

14. J. D. Scott, Vickers: A History (London, 1962), pp. 34–44. Before 1878 Krupp had concentrated on field artillery and tacitly left the manufacture of naval artillery to the British. His big guns of 1878–79 threatened to overturn that division of the market. Hence the energy of Armstrong’s reaction.

15. Private firms handled only 35.7 percent of the navy’s total expenditure for munitions between 1881 and 1890, but the proportion of contracts let to private firms steadily increased, to 46.1 percent in 1890–1900 and 58.5 percent in 1900–1910. Clive Trebilcock, “Spin-off in British Economic History: Armaments and Industry, 1760–1914,” Economic History Review 22 (1969): 480.

16. Gray, The Devil’s Device, pp. 71, 88. Whitehead did subsequently set up a private company in England to manufacture torpedoes for sale to foreign countries. It merged into Vickers in 1906.

17. Cf. John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (London, 1975), pp. 79–109. Mockery is easy in view of what happened in 1914–18; but an army that sought to achieve mobility in the field, as all European armies did before 1914, simply lacked the transport capacity to supply more than a token population of guns that spat forth bullets at the rate of 600 a minute.

18. Change, radical enough measured against older standards, was modest only by comparison to the galloping transformation in naval armament. Brass cartridges (1867 onwards), steel artillery (1883), magazine rifles (1888), and control and communications devices to allow accurate indirect artillery fire (from 1906) added up to a revolution in tactics and fire power. Cf. Arthur Forbes, A History of the Army Ordnance Services (London, 1929), 3:112–34; Charles E. Caldwell and John Headlam, The History of the Royal Artillery from the Indian Mutiny to the Great War, 2 vols. (Woolwich, n.d.), 2:105 and passim.

19. Documents reproduced in W. A. Boelke, Krupp und die Hohenzollern in Dokumenten (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1970), pp. 104–6, 123, show how stubbornly the German army officers held aloof from collaboration with private arms makers, despite the fact that both Wilhelm I and Wilhelm II entered into personal relations with Alfred Krupp and his heir. Oddly, admirers and critics of the house of Krupp agree in distorting the relationship between German army officers and the firm. Cf. Wilhelm Berdrow, The Krupps: 150 Years of Krupp History, 1787–1937 (Berlin, 1937), and William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp (Boston, 1964). Gert von Klass, Krupps: The Story of an Industrial Empire (London, 1954) does better justice to the social distance and mutual distrust that prevailed between buyer and seller.

20. Cf. Frederic Manning, The Life of Sir William White (London, 1923).

21. A notably cantankerous and inventive naval officer, he successfully sued Vickers in 1920 for withholding some of his royalties. Cf. Peter Padfield, Aim Straight: A Biography of Admiral Sir Percy Scott (London, 1966), pp. 262–68.

22. The two-power standard was attributed to William Pitt the Elder and thus acquired a respectable ancestry. But it had not been a guiding principle of British naval policy throughout the intervening years as its proponents in 1889 declared to be the case. Cf. Arthur Marder, British Naval Policy, 1880–1905: The Anatomy of British Sea Power (London, n.d.), pp. 105–16.

23. Hansard, 14 May 1888, vol. 326, col. 100.

24. Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury, 4:186.

25. In memoirs written after World War I, Lord George remarked: “The great additions to the electorate by the Reform Bill of 1884 had, to a large extent, swamped the old niggardly and skinflint policy of the Manchester School. It is true that the mass of the recently enfranchised escaped direct taxation out of which new burdens of expenditure were mainly defrayed; but independently of this personal consideration, the wage earning classes are very proud of the Navy.” Lord George Hamilton, Parliamentary Reflections 1886–1906 (London, 1922), pp. 220–21.

26. Arthur J. Marder, “The English Armaments Industry and Navalism in the Nineties,” Pacific Historical Review 7 (1938): 241–53, cites industrial spokesmen on this point. It is worth noting, perhaps, that Royal Navy ships built under the 1889 bill were the first to use nickel steel armor and to rely wholly on steam propulsion. Remodeling older ships to remove masts and rigging was an important (and expensive) part of the 1889 naval building program.

27. Naval appropriations were substantially cut back from £36.8 million in 1905 to £31.1 million in 1908. B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 397–98.

28. Cf. Philip Noel-Baker, The Private Manufacture of Armaments (London, 1936), 1:449–51 for details of how threatened idleness at Coventry Ordnance Works provoked the manager to launch a campaign of scare publicity and political wire-pulling with the result that the eight-dreadnought program did indeed provide his company with the new business it needed.

29. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, abridged and rev. ed. (London, 1931), p. 39.

30. Full specifications included: a three-man crew, six-pound projectile, overall weight of not more than a thousand pounds, etc. See William Laird Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History from Earliest Times to the Death of Queen Victoria (London, 1903), 7:48.

31. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone, p. 252.

32. Cf. Stanley Sandler, The Emergence of the Modern Capital Ship (Newark, N.J., 1979), pp. 306–13.

33. Hugh Lyon, “The Relations between the Admiralty and Private Industry in the Development of Warships” in Ranft, Technical Change and British Naval Policy, pp. 37–64, offers a useful conspectus.

34. Very elaborate and powerful machinery for pointing and loading the big guns had also to be developed—and constantly improved. By 1914, enormous revolving turrets descended deep into the bowels of the ship. Inside each turret loading machinery moved with the guns so as always to be able to serve them, no matter what their azimuth and elevation.

35. Oscar Parkes, British Battleships: “Warrior” to Vanguard,” rev. ed., (London, 1970), p. 377; Clowes, The Royal Navy, 7:39, 54.

36. At Manila Bay, 5,895 shots resulted in only 142 hits; at Santiago, 8,000 shots achieved only 121 hits, according to official reckoning afterwards. Donald W. Mitchell, History of the Modern American Navy from 1883 through Pearl Harbor (London, 1947), PP. 73, 105.

37. Parkes, British Battleships, p. 461.

38. On the dreadnought revolution in naval architecture see ibid., pp. 466–86; Arthur Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A History of British Naval Policy in the Pre-Dreadnought Era, 1880–1905 (New York, 1940), pp. 505–43; Arthur Marder, From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, vol. 1, The Road to War, 1905–1914 (London, 1961), pp. 43–70; Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone, pp. 293 ff.; Richard Hough, First Sea Lord: An Authorized Biography of Admiral Lord Fisher (London, 1969), pp. 252 ff.

39. Parkes, British Battleships, pp. 560, 592; Peter Padfield, Guns at Sea (New York, 1974), pp. 195–252. Elting E. Morison, Men, Machines and Modern Times (Cambridge, Mass., 1966) has some perceptive things to say about the strains that the first phase of this revolution in naval gunnery put on older patterns of shipboard relationships.

40. A table of guaranteed performance levels supplied by the Whitehead torpedo factory for its longest-range models in successive years show highlights:

Year		Torpedo Range (in yards)
1866		220
1876		600
1905		2,190
1906		6,560
1913		18,590

These figures come from Gray, The Devil’s Device, Appendix.

41. I have not found any really satisfactory account of French naval policy between 1884 and 1914, but see Ernest H. Jenkins, A History of the French Navy (London, 1973), pp. 303 ff.; Bueb, Die “Junge Schule” der französischen Marine; Joannès Tramond and André Reussner, Eléments d’histoire maritime et coloniale contemporaine, 1815–1914, new ed. (Paris, 1947), pp. 652 ff.; Salaun, La marine française, pp. 1–75.

42. Gray, The Devil’s Device, p. 206.

43. Trebilcock, “Spin-off in British Economic History,” pp. 474–80.

44. W. Ashworth, “Economic Aspects of Late Victorian Naval Administration,” Economic History Review 22 (1969): 492.

45. Marder, Anatomy of British Sea Power, pp. 25–37. This is probably an exaggeration, but I have not found a responsible econometric calculation. See also William Ashworth, An Economic History of England, 1870–1939 (London, 1960), pp. 236–37 for remarks on the navy’s economic role.

46. Scott, Vickers. p. 81.

47. Restrictions of this kind became increasingly important. Secrecy, indeed, tended to supplant patents as a mode of protecting new technology, if only because the public deposit of plans and drawings required to support a patent allowed rival firms and countries to borrow what they liked (perhaps with minor variations to make patent infringement legally debatable), or to develop a superior device with full knowledge of the performance characteristics of the rival product.

48. Scott, Vickers, pp. 20, 42.

49. Two excellent books, Scott, Vickers, and Give A. Trebilcock, The Vickers Brothers: Armaments and Enterprise, 1854–1914 (London, 1977) provide the main basis for these remarks. Noel-Baker, Private Manufacture of Armaments, vol. 1, and Helmut Carl Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen, Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armaments Industry (New York, 1934) express the hostile, scandal-mongering outlook that prevailed in the 1930s; Dougan, The Great Gunmaker: The Story of Lord Armstrong partakes of the apologetic tradition instead, though all contain relevant if sometimes unreliable information.

50. Trebilcock, The Vickers Brothers is especially perceptive in treating the way private managers strove to minimize risks and react rationally to the market they served. In a series of articles he discussed these same issues more concisely and more generally. All by Clive A. Trebilcock, they are: “Legends of the British Armaments Industry: A Revision,” Journal of Contemporary History 5 (1970): 2–19; “A ‘Special Relationship’—Government, Rearmament and the Cordite Firms,” Economic History Review 19 (1966): 364–79; and “British Armaments and European Industrialization, 1890–1914,” Economic History Review 26 (1973): 254–72. The last is an especially striking article. Trebilcock argues that the scale and economic importance of public investment in arms manufacture between 1890 and 1914 deserve comparison with the earlier effort governments made to build railroads. Both strategies for modernization used public credit to channel massive investment along new lines where private capital would not, by itself, have gone. He even argues that spin off from armaments affected local economies at large almost as much as railroads had done earlier. At the peak of the official effort to import new arms technologies, he calculates that Spain spent 2 percent of its national income on the task (in 1906) while Japan devoted no less than 10.3 percent of its national income to the same purpose in 1903. Other countries that went along this path fell between these extremes; but in each case the effort was massive and made a major difference to the national economy as a whole by establishing new skills, new demands, and a new flow of public credit and taxes.

51. The personality of Tom Vickers, the engineering enterpriser behind the rise of Vickers, illustrates how technology can become an end in itself. Tom Vickers lived wholly for his work. Wealth, ownership, and the trappings of property meant little or nothing to him. Cf. Trebilcock, The Vickers Brothers, p. 33.

52. Cf. the acerbic iconoclasm of Peter Wiles, “War and Economic Systems,” in Science et conscience de la société: Mélanges en honneur de Raymond Aron (Paris, 1971), 2:269–97.

53. Even here, the British Admiralty found to its regret at Jutland in 1916 that shells hitting an armored surface at an acute angle behave differently from shells that hit head on. Tests had always been conducted for right-angled hits only; as a result many British armor-piercing shells, striking German vessels at far greater range than had been anticipated, simply glanced off or exploded before penetrating the armor. German shells had been tested for glancing fire and behaved more effectively, thanks to an appropriate design.

54. A Royal Commission in 1926 officially recognized this infringement of patent rights, awarding Pollen a sum of £30,000 in compensation. Cf. Anthony Pollen, The Great Gunnery Scandal: The Mystery of Jutland (London, 1980), p. 145. This book, written by the inventor’s son, polemically corrects earlier misinformation about Pollen’s work. Playing fast and loose with private patent rights was not unprecedented. In a famous instance, Admiral Fisher himself sent copies of Alfred Yarrow’s boiler designs for the new destroyers to rival shipbuilders. Yarrow advertised publicly for information that might lead to the discovery of the culprit; and a public apology was made by the navy, but without ever openly implicating Fisher. Hough, First Sea Lord, p. 101; Eleanor C. Barnes, Alfred Yarrow, His Life and Work (London, 1923), pp. 102–5.

55. Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 30 June 1913, vol. 54, col. 1478.

56. Pollen was a friend of Admiral Beresford. This made him persona non grata to Fisher and his followers, who remained in control of the Admiralty after 1906.

57. After deciding against Pollen’s fire control devices in 1912 the company he had founded was stricken from the list of contractors with whom the Admiralty was authorized to do business. Like Armstrong in 1863, Pollen then proceeded to try to sell his product to other navies, and did so to the Russians. As his son points out, however, he patriotically did not offer his know-how to the Germans. On the other hand, negotiations with the United States Navy, and with Brazil, Chile, Austria, and Italy must have made the principles of Pollen’s fire control devices readily accessible to German naval experts, if they had been interested. Pollen, The Great Gunnery Scandal, pp. 96, 108, 114. Pollen’s company was in dire financial straits once Admiralty advances were turned off—a history that illustrates the perils of armaments business for a small company attempting to enter it.

58. Ibid., p. 116.

59. Parkes, British Battleships, p. 486.

60. Stephen Roskill, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Beatty: The Last Naval Hero (London, 1980), pp. 59–72.

61. My understanding of these fire control controversies depends on Jon T. Sumida, “British Capital Ships and Fire Control in the Dreadnought Era: Sir John Fisher, Arthur Hungerford Pollen and the Battle Cruiser,” Journal of Modern History 51 (1979): 205–30, and on his remarkable Ph.D. dissertation “Financial Limitation, Technological Innovation and British Naval Policy, 1904–1910” (University of Chicago, 1982).

62. Personnel selection, training, and promotion underwent systematic rationalization in the same tumultuous decades when naval material was being radically transformed. Cf. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (New York, 1976), and Michael A. Lewis, The History of the British Navy (Harmondsworth, 1957).

63. A similar paradox inhered in the chronologically parallel triumphs of industrial management. From the 1880s, big corporations could plan production and achieve enormous economies by nursing a smooth flow of appropriate factors of production through shop floors, steel mills and assembly lines; but before World War II, their capacity to manage their own internal affairs did not extend to the economy as a whole, where, indeed “sticky” administered prices for industrial products probably began to accentuate the dysfunctional effect of the business cycle from the 1873 crash onwards.

64. Duncan L. Burn, The Economic History of Steel Making, 1867–1939: A Study in Competition (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 52–53.

65. James Dredge, Modern French Artillery (London, 1892) trumpeted French technical virtuosity to the English-speaking world.

66. In 1893 Schneider-Creusot introduced the famous French 75mm quick-firing field gun. It revolutionized artillery design because of its unprecedented stability. Despite its lightness, which allowed easy and rapid deployment and redeployment in battle, the 75mm, perfected in 1898, remained on target shot after shot without needing any adjustment whatsoever, and consequently could fire about four times as fast as other guns—up to twenty rounds a minute—with no loss of accuracy. The secret was an exact equilibrium between the energy of recoil and the force of the compressed air that returned the gun to firing position. Krupp designs did not catch up for several years. Cf. Bernhard Menne, Krupp, or the Lords of Essen (London, 1937), p. 237. British artillery remained inferior throughout World War I. Cf. O. G. F. Hogg, The Royal Arsenal, (London, 1963), 2:1421; I.V. Hogg, A History of Artillery, pp. 95–97.

67. Joseph A. Roy, Histoire de la famille Schneider et du Creusot (Paris, 1962), pp. 88–89, says that Schneider sold half of its guns and nearly half of its armor plate abroad between 1885 and 1914. Fifteen countries bought armor plate. Italy, Spain, and Russia were the leading customers. Twenty-three countries bought artillery, with Russia by far the most important buyer, Spain and Portugal next. For statistics on the growth of French metallurgical output see Comité des Forges, La sidérurgie française, 1864–1914 (Paris, n.d.). Newly opened coalfields at Briey near the German border contributed to the spectacular rise of French steelmaking.

68. Raymond Poidevin, Les relations économiques et financières entre la France et l’Allemagne de 1898 à 1914 (Paris, 1969), pp. 290–98, 709–11, 811; René Girault, Emprunts russes et investissements français en Russie, 1887–1914 (Paris, 1973), pp. 435–44, 536–40; Herbert Feis, Europe, the World’s Banker, 1870–1914 (New Haven, 1930), pp. 212–31; Rondo E. Cameron, France and the Economic Development of Europe, 1800–1914: Conquests of Peace and Seeds of War (Princeton, 1961), pp. 494–501; Trebilcock, “British Armaments and European Industrialization,” pp. 254–72.

69. W. A. Boelcke, Krupp und die Hohenzollern in Dokumenten, (Frankfurt am Main, 1970), Appendix.

70. Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, Vita Rathenau, Grand Master of Capitalism (forthcoming) corrects looser estimates of Krupp’s export of arms in the prewar decades to be found in Gert von Klass, Krupps, p. 308, and Boelke, Krupp und die Hohenzollern, pp. 178–84. For Schneider’s foreign sales see Roy, Histoire de la famille Schneideret du Creusot, p. 89; for Vickers see Trebilcock, The Vickers Brothers, pp. 20–22.

71. Cf. the excellent and detailed study by Poidevin, Les relations économiques et financières entre la France et l’Allemagne de 1898 à 1914, which dates the definitive expiry of the apolitical market in international loans to 1911.

72. Paul Allard as quoted by Noel-Baker, The Private Manufacture of Armaments, 1:57.

73. François Crouzet, “Recherches sur la production d’armements en France, 1815–1913,” Révue historique 251 (1974): 50. Alan S. Milward and S. B. Saul, The Development of the Economies of Continental Europe, 1850–1914 (London, 1977), pp. 79, 86–89, note the importance of armaments in French metallurgical expansion just before World War I.

74. For details, see Donald W. Mitchell, History of the Modern American Navy from 1883 through Pearl Harbor (London, 1947).

75. Cf. Cabinet memorandum reproduced in Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian Britain, 1830–1902 (Oxford, 1970), p. 461.

76. A convenient, and I think judicious, summary of the German naval program is offered by Volker R. Berghahn, Die Tirpitzplan: Genesis und Verfall einer innerpolitischen Krisenstrategie unter Wilhelm II (Düsseldorf, 1971). Berghahn also published a summary of his views in Geoffrey Best and Anthony Wheatcroft, eds., War, Economy and the Military Mind (London, 1976), pp. 61–88. Holger H. Herwig “Luxury Fleet”: The Imperial German Navy, 1888–1918 (London, 1980) is excellent for the technical side of German naval administration.

77. The idea that the German naval program reflected internal political strains was first propounded by Eckhardt Kehr, Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik, 1894–1901 (Berlin, 1930). Anathema under the Nazis, Kehr’s ideas have become normative among German historians since World War II. But it seems to me that German scholarship, reacting against older idealist traditions, has gone to an opposite extreme by emphasizing interests more exclusively than they deserve. The belief that national greatness and prosperity could only be won by war narrowed public choices in all European countries before 1914. When pecuniary self-interest attached itself to such an idea, it made a heady brew; but the idea surely continued to have a semiautonomous life of its own, and affected the behavior of millions of Germans who had no clear or immediate personal interest in making the navy strong. Jonathan Steinberg, Yesterday’s Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet (New York, 1965) emphasizes the deliberate manipulation of public opinon more than German historians seem to do; but he also puts greater weight on economic self-interest and pecuniary rationality than I think the circumstances truly warrant.

78. Kehr, Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik, p. 101. Cf. Wilhelm Diest, Flottenpolitik und Flottenpropaganda: Das Nachrichtenbureau des Reichsmarineamptes, 1897–1914 (Stuttgart, 1976).

79. Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (London, 1975), pp. 116 ff. Cf. the interesting analysis of the German army’s dilemma in Bernd F. Schulte, Die deutsche Armee, 1900–1914, zwischen Beharren und Verandern (University of Hamburg dissertation, 1976).

80. On the Schlieffen plan, see Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth (London, 1958).

81. Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army (New York, 1964), pp. 193–216.

9. World Wars of the Twentieth Century

1. Marc Ferro, La Grande Guerre (Paris, 1969), and Emmanuel Todd, Le fou et le proletaire (Paris, 1979) address themselves to this question more imaginatively than most. Todd suggests that the artisan and shopkeeper classes were especially under pressure before 1914 and sublimated sexual as well as economic frustration by transferring hostility to the foreign enemy.

2. For a concise statement of this view of the German wars of the twentieth century, see Ludwig Wilhelm Dehio, The Precarious Balance: The Politics of Power in Europe, 1494–1945 (London, 1963). For a more philosophical study cf. Martin Wight, Power Politics (Harmondsworth, 1979).

3. Lenin in Russia, like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States, made a career of repudiating balance-of-power politics as evil and outmoded. Even Hitler sometimes disregarded the rules of the game, most strikingly in 1941 when he relieved Roosevelt of an otherwise intractable dilemma by taking the initiative in declaring war on the United States after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Americans reciprocated by declaring war on Germany on 10 December, and were thus able to pursue the “Germany first” strategy already agreed on with Great Britain. Had Hitler not taken the initiative, however, it is hard to see how Roosevelt could have asked Congress to start a war with Germany when the Japanese attack in the Pacific was still to be avenged.

4. On the concept of a “vital revolution” see K. F. Helleiner, “The Vital Revolution Reconsidered,” in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, Population in History (London, 1965), pp. 79–86; Ralph Thomlinson, Population Dynamics: Causes and Consequences of World Demographic Change (New York, 1965), pp. 14 ff.

5. For an overview of the population phenomena of the war era see Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move: War and Population Changes, 1917–1947 (New York, 1948).

6. Britain’s Irish problem was not exactly solved by the catastrophe of the potato blight and resultant famine of 1845–46; but population growth abruptly gave way to population wastage in Ireland, thanks to accelerated emigration and rigorous postponement of the age of marriage until the newlyweds could inherit land. After 1845 the political tensions of Ireland were therefore no longer fed by rising population but took especial venom from the prolonged sexual frustration which became the normal lot of Irish countrymen waiting to inherit land before they dared to marry. On the psychological and sociological consequences of the remarkable demographic regime that prevailed in Ireland after the famine see Conrad Arensburg, The Irish Countryman (London, 1937).

7. Chain migration whereby one successful emigrant saved money to finance his relatives’ emigration made it possible for even the very poor to get across the ocean in statistically significant numbers. As a result the emptying-out of English villages with the decay of crop farming after 1873 produced no serious political disturbance in Great Britain. It did raise the tide of emigration from the British Isles to an all-time high in the years 1911–13. Cf. R. C. K. Ensor, England, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 1936), p. 500.

8. Marcel Reinhard, André Armengaud, and Jacques Dupaquier, Histoire générale de la population mondiale, 3d ed. (Paris, 1968), pp. 401, 470; Donald W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration (Princeton, 1957), pp. 33–35.

9. Between 1880 and 1914 nearly half a million German farm workers left the east. According to William W. Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: The Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772–1914 (Chicago, 1980), the total was 482,062.

10. Analysis of how the “archaic” character of German political leadership on the eve of the war helped to precipitate the catastrophe has become standard among German historians since Fritz Fischer pioneered this approach with his famous books, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Düsseldorf, 1961) and Krieg der Illusionen (Düsseldorf, 1969) translated as Germany’s War Aims in the First World War (London, 1967) and War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (London, 1975).

11. Paralleling similar failures within the British Isles in such parts as the Scottish Highlands and southern Ireland.

12. About 4 million persons left Hapsburg lands for overseas destinations between 1900 and 1914. Emigration from Russia’s western provinces was about 2.5 million, and from Italy was so massive as to depopulate some southern villages. Reinhard et al., Histoire générale, pp. 400–401, gives a table of European emigration showing relevant statistics for the pre–World War I decades.

13. In Serbia, the Radical party, founded in 1879, set up a rural party machine and agitational network that changed the basis of politics in that country within a decade or so. Cf. Alex N. Dragnich, Serbia, Nikola Pašić and Yugoslavia (New Brunswick, N.J., 1974), pp. 17–22. For Bulgaria, see Cyril Black, The Establishment of Constitutional Government in Bulgaria (Princeton, 1943), pp. 39 ff.

14. Nationalism appealed more than socialism to east European peasants and former peasants because it could be interpreted as meaning the dispossession of ethnically alien landlords and urban property owners without infringing peasant property in the slightest. The Serbian Radical party, accordingly, shed its founders’ socialism as it succeeded in gaining peasant support. On socialist beginnings of the Radicals see Woodford D. McClellan, Svetozar Marković and the Origins of Balkan Socialism (Princeton, 1964).

15. This figure is the remainder when French and British war losses are subtracted from the global figure of 13 million for World War I casualties offered by Reinhard et al., Histoire générale, p. 488. Estimates are very loose at best, for record keeping broke down in all defeated countries, and epidemics of typhus and influenza killed many civilians as well as soldiers. Such deaths are sometimes classed as war related, sometimes excluded.

16. Ibid., p. 573. Margin for error is even greater in World War II than in World War I calculations, if only because more than half the casualties were civilian.

17. Cf. Ansley J. Coale et al., eds., Human Fertility in Russia since the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1979); David M. Heer, “The Demographic Transition in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union,” Journal of Social History 1 (1968): 193–240; Reinhard et al., Histoire générale, p. 610.

18. With the exception of Albania and Albanian populations inside Yugoslavia, among whom a Moslem heritage and mountainous habitat combined to preserve traditional sexual and family patterns. Cf. John Salt and Hugh Clout, Migration in Post-war Europe: Geographical Essays (Oxford, 1976), p. 13. Political manifestations of the resulting population pressure became troublesome in Yugoslavia in 1981.

19. About 40 million died in that rebellion; and an additional 8 million Chinese emigrated to borderlands and overseas in ensuing decades. The country’s population of about 430 million in 1850 was cut back to only 400 million in 1870 according to Reinhard et al., Histoire générale, p. 476.

20. For China cf. M. P. Redfield, ed., China’s Gentry: Essays in Rural-Urban Relations by Hsiao-tung Fei (Chicago, 1953).

21. Japan’s population rose as follows:

Source: Reinhard et al., Histoire générale, pp. 479, 566, 640.

22. For Japanese rural population growth and political protest see Takehiko Yoshihashi, Conspiracy at Mukden: The Rise of the Japanese Military (New Haven, 1963); Tadashi Fukutake Japanese Rural Society (Tokyo, 1967); Ronald P. Dore, Land Reform in Japan (London, 1959); Cyril E. Black et al., The Modernization of Japan and Russia (New York, 1975), pp. 179–85, 281; Carl Mosk, “Demographic Transition in Japan,” Journal of Economic History 37 (1977): 655–74.

23. The phrase was invented by Winston Churchill, according to Samuel J. Hurwitz, State Intervention in Great Britain: A Study of Economic Control and Social Response, 1914–1919 (New York, 1949), p. 63.

24. The cult of the offensive had been held very high in the prewar French army with the result that charges across open country in face of magazine rifle and machine gun fire killed about 640,000 men between 1 August and 1 December 1914, according to Joseph Montheilet, Les institutions militaires de la France, 1814–1924 (Paris, 1932), p. 350. This initial bloodbath amounted to nearly half of French losses during the whole war.

25. No less than 64 percent of French pig iron capacity and 26 percent of French steel capacity was in German hands, together with 85 out of 170 blast furnaces. Cf. Robert Pinot, Le Comité des Forges en service de la nation (Paris, 1919), p. 76.

26. Prewar plans called for production of 10,000–12,000 75mm shells per day in time of war. A work force of 7,600 was therefore kept back at the time of mobilization while the balance of arsenal workers, who totaled 45,000–50,000, were drafted. At Le Creusot, 6,600 out of a work force of 13,000 remained after mobilization in 1914. These figures come from Gerd Hardach, “La mobilization industrielle en 1914–1918: Production, planification et idéologie,” in Patrick Fridenson, ed., 1914–1918: L’autre front (Paris, 1977), p. 83.

27. In all previous wars, field artillery spent nearly all the time trying to get into firing position. Active bombardment of the foe usually lasted only a few hours so that consumption of ammunition had remained correspondingly modest. The trench warfare of 1914–18 reversed matters, for the guns were perpetually in position to fire, and worthwhile enemy targets were always within range. The supply of shells (and of small arms ammunition) therefore became the effective limit on operations as never before. Logistics and, ultimately, industrial capacity to manufacture guns and ammunition became decisive. All the combatants came to recognize this quite unanticipated industrialization of war by the spring of 1915.

28. Not until August 1915 did a public law regulate the status of workers released from the army to work in war production. They remained under military command, but were paid civilian wages, wore a distinctive badge, and could be assigned where most needed without the right to refuse any proffered form of work. Return to the front was the alternative such men faced for any act of indiscipline. See Gilbert Hatry, Renault: Usine de guerre, 1914–1918 (n.p., n.d.), pp. 79, 92–93.

29. The first such conference took place on 20 September 1914 when a goal of 100,000 75mm shells per day was promulgated by the minister of war. Weekly meetings thereafter changed first to biweekly and then to monthly meetings; and a new Ministry of Munitions took over political responsibility after May 1915. Three perspicacious accounts of French war mobilization explain how things were done: Arthur Fontaine, French Industry during the War (New Haven, 1926); John F. Godfrey, “Bureaucracy, Industry and Politics in France during the First World War” (D.Phil. thesis, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, 1974); and Etienne Clémentel, La France et la politique économique interaliée (New Haven, 1931). Gerd Hardach’s brief essay, cited above, may also be recommended.

30. The most famous and controversial was a new state arsenal at Roanne, planned in September 1916 and never completed. For details see Godfrey, “Bureaucracy,” pp. 314–33. For an upbeat account of a similar venture that barely got under way see Albert G. Stern, Tanks, 1914–1918: The Logbook of a Pioneer (London, 1919), pp. 185–201. Stern constructed a factory on French soil using Annamese labor, designed to turn out 300 tanks a month by importing motors from the United States and steel plate from England.

31. Two excellent books illumine the wartime growth of the Renault firm: Hatry, Renault; Patrick Fridenson, Histoire des usines Renault, vol. 1, Naissance de la grande entreprise, 1898–1939 (Paris, 1972). For Citroën’s and other firms’ similar successes see Gerd Hardach, “Französiche Rüstungspolitik 1914–1918” in H. A. Winkler, ed., Organizierter Kapitalismus (Göttingen, 1974), pp. 102–4.

32. Gerd Hardach, The First World War, 1914–1918 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977), p. 86, gives the following summary of workers in French arms plants in November 1918: 497,000 soldiers; 430,000 women; 425,000 male civilian Frenchmen; 169,000 foreigners and colonials; 137,000 youths below draft age; 40,000 POWs; 13,000 mutilated veterans; making a total of 1,711,000.

33. The biography by B. W. Schaper, Albert Thomas: Trente ans de réformisme sociale (Assen, 1959) is apologetic in tone but very informative.

34. In 1917 the French grain harvest dropped from its 1909–13 average of 8.5 million tons to a mere 3.1 million. At one time the food situation became so critical that the army had only a two-day supply of grain in stock; but disaster was forestalled by allocating shipping to bring supplies from overseas. Accordingly, American grain flooded in and food stocks were again adequate early in 1918. See Clémentel, La France et la politique économique interalliée, p. 233.

35. Practically all the AEF’s artillery and tanks were French; so were 4,791 of a total of 6,287 airplanes used by the Americans, not to mention 10 million 75 mm shells. Cf. André Kaspi, Le temp des Américains: Le concours américain à la France, 1917–1918 (Paris, 1976), pp. 244–45.

36. Cf. figures for production of different types of arms in Hardach, The First World War, p. 87. France led the allies in every category except rifles and machine guns according to this compilation. In some lines, e.g., airplanes, France also exceeded German production. See James M. Laux, “Gnôme et Rhône: Une firme de moteurs d’avion durant la Grande Guerre,” in Fridenson, 1914–1918: L’autre front, p. 186.

37. Before the army reforms of 1913 Germany called up only 53.12 percent of the eligible age class, whereas France called up 82.96 percent, i.e., all who were physically fit. These figures come from Hans Herzfeld, Die deutsche Rüstungspolitik vor dem Weltkrieg (Bonn-Leipzig, 1923), p. 9.

38. Prewar planning had not entirely neglected this problem, but German officials assumed that Dutch firms would be able to import everything needed on ships flying the United States flag. Remembering the War of 1812, the Germans assumed that the British would not dare to intercept American ships on the high seas. Cf. Egmont Zechlin, “Deutschland zwischen Kabinettskrieg und Wirtschaftskrieg,” Historische Zeitschrift 199 (1964): 389–90. In fact, however, Great Britain did persuade the Americans to acquiesce in a long-range blockade of Germany, though friction on details of how to implement the blockade continued to trouble Anglo-American relations until American belligerency turned United States policy around. On the blockade and its complications see the official British account, A. C. Bell, A History of the Blockade of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey, 1914–1918 (London, 1961); M. C. Siney, The Allied Blockade of Germany, 1914–1916 (Ann Arbor, 1957); Hardach, The First World War, pp. 11–34.

39. Walther Rathenau, Tagebuch, 1907–1922 (Düsseldorf, 1967), pp. 186–88. According to L. Burchardt, “Walther Rathenau und die Anfange der deutschen Rohstoffswirtschaftung im Ersten Weltkrieg,” Tradition 15 (1970): 169–96, an engineer employed by AEG named Wichard von Moellendorf was the real initiator of the Kriegsrohstoffsabteilung.

40. Ernst von Wrisberg, Wehr und Waffen, 1914–1918 (Leipzig, 1922), pp. 86–92. Wrisberg was the officer of the War Ministry in charge of supply and wrote to defend his record against subsequent reproaches of too much “business as usual.”

41. Rumania’s king was a Hohenzollern and close relative of the kaiser. His betrayal of kinship added piquancy to the German reaction.

42. Cf. Clive Trebilcock, “War and the Failure of Industrial Mobilization, 1899 and 1914,” in J. M. Winter, ed., War and Economic Development (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 139–64.

43. The spirit of the new regime was reflected by a remark attributed to Lloyd George: “Take Kitchener’s maximum, square it, multiply that result by two; and when you are in sight of that, double it again for good luck.” R. J. Q. Adams, Arms and the Wizard; Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions, 1915–1916 (College Station, Tex., 1978), p. 174.

44. Something like 50,000 on the first day; 419,652 in all by official count. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1977), pp. 204–80, provides a superb analysis of the reasons for the British failure at the Somme and, incidentally, explains the realities of trench warfare for the entire 1915–18 period more concisely and luminously than anyone else has been able to do.

45. Beginning in 1915 negotiations between Britain and the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Scandinavian countries restricted imports to the presumed level needed for local consumption.

46. But cf. Robert J. Wegs, Die österreichische Kriegswirtschaft 1914–1918 (Vienna, 1979) for a record of what was accomplished.

47. Norman Stone, The Eastern Front (New York, 1975), pp. 149–52 and passim disproves the notion that Russian armies were starved of munitions in World War I.

48. The following statistics tell the tale.

* 1 pood = 56 pounds. Source: Stone, The Eastern Front, pp. 209, 287, 295.

49. A striking statistic: Russian rifles fired off 125 rounds per man per month, whereas the French used only 30 rounds and the British 50. Ibid., p. 135. Camouflage and indirect fire, which became normal on the Western Front in 1915, left Russian artillery methods far behind. Using these techniques, German gunners had little difficulty in silencing Russian batteries at long range. Russian infantrymen preferred to attribute the resulting weakness of artillery support to civilian bungling in the rear, whereas in fact deficiencies of Russian military training went far to nullify Russia’s real industrial successes in expanding war production.

50. Louis Renault inaugurated his production line for car bodies in 1911 after a visit to the United States. This provoked a strike, but he won it, thus preparing for rapid expansion in the war years when all phases of car, truck, and plane manufacture were organized into assembly lines. Cf. Hatry, Renault: Usines de guerre, p. 15; Fridenson, Histoire des usines Renault, vol. 1, pp. 73–75.

51. Basil Lidell Hart, The Tanks: History of the Royal Tank Regiment and its Predecessors, 2 vols. (London, 1959) is a semiofficial British account. Cf. also J. F. C. Fuller, Tanks in the Great War, 1914–1918 (London, 1920); and for Plan 1919, R. M. F. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War, 1914–1918, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1936), p. 547.

52. For Renault’s efforts along these lines see Hatry, Renault: Usines de guerre, pp. 94–102.

53. This is a major theme of Gerald Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton, 1966).

54. Cf. Hatry, Renault: Usines de guerre, pp. 119–45, for Renault’s difficulties with unions beginning in 1917. For the United States, David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York, 1980), pp. 70–73, 258–64 and passim, has interesting things to say about the wartime roles of rival AF of L and IWW labor leaders. For Russia, Isaac Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions (London, 1950), pp. 1–17.

55. Estimates of deaths from influenza in 1918–19 start at 21 million and rise indefinitely higher. This was more than twice battle deaths in World War I. Cf. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., Epidemic and Peace (Westport, Conn., 1976), p. 207. Venereal disease also attained epidemic proportions in the British army, partly because it was treated as a moral rather than as a medical problem.

56. Rival groupings of industrialists responded to and profited from expansion of munitions production in diverse ways. For an interesting analysis of the splits in German industry see Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, “Widersprüche in Modernisierungsprozess Deutschlands,” in Bernd Jürgen Wendt et al., eds., Industrielle Gesellschaft und politisches System (Bonn, 1978), pp. 225–40. Army officers shared with union leaders and socialists a profound distaste for the pecuniary calculations of industrialists. In the closing phases of the war, when worker morale became critical, Ludendorff toyed with the idea of eliminating profits by étatisation of munitions firms. Cf. Gerald Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914–1918 (Princeton, 1966), pp. 494–96. The Marxist view that businessmen called the tune to which the army officers danced, expressed for example in J. Martin Kitchen, The Silent Dictatorship: The Politics of the German High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, 1916–1918 (London, 1976), seems naively misguided—a clinging to nineteenth-century notions about the sovereignty of market relations in a time when these were being subordinated to the ancient principle of command mobilization.

57. August Skalweit, Die deutsche Kriegsnährungswirtschaft (Berlin, 1927) provides much detail of the mismanagement of agriculture.

58. The fact that the Allied blockade was maintained after the armistice through the worst months of food shortage in the winter of 1918–19 made it natural to blame the blockade for the food crisis. But Germany would have been capable of feeding itself, if resources had been reserved for that purpose.

59. Ludwig Wartzbacker, “Die Versorgung des Heeres mit Waffen und Munition,” in Max Schwarte, ed., Der Grosse Krieg (Leipzig, 1921) 8:129. Von Wrisberg, Wehr und Waffen, 1914–1918, pp. 57, 84, although bitterly critical of the Hindenburg program also proudly concludes that manpower and horses, not artillery and munitions, were what limited the German army in its final offensive.

60. On Clémentel’s ideas and the influence of the Ministry of Commerce on the French war effort see Godfrey, “Bureaucracy, Industry and Politics in France during the First World War,” pp. 95–215. Clémentel’s own book, La France et la politique économique interalliée, was written for the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and is understandably discreet in describing his unrealized hopes for an anti-German and anti-American European economic community.

61. J. Arthur Salter, Allied Shipping Control: An Experiment in International Administration (Oxford, 1921) offers a detailed account of how the chairman of the Council looked back on his accomplishments. For the French side see Jean Monnet, Mémoires (Paris, 1976), pp. 59–89.

62. Hardach, The First World War, pp. 123–31. The high priority accorded to agriculture in Great Britain contrasted sharply with German (and French) policy. No doubt Britain’s obvious vulnerability to starvation explained the difference.

63. William Beveridge, British Food Control (London, 1928), pp. 217–32.

64. French inattention to agriculture equalled or exceeded German neglect. Cf. Clémentel, La France et la politique économique interalliée, p. 233. The United States sent no less than 8.42 million metric tons of food to France between 1914 and 1924 according to William C. Mallendore, History of the United States Food Administration, 1917–1919 (Stanford, 1941), p. 42.

65. Godfrey, “Bureaucracy, industry and politics in France during the First World War,” pp. 84–86; Clémentel, La France et la politique économique interalliée, p. 321.

66. The United States’ GNP approximately doubled during World War I; and for the first time the 1920 census found more than half the population to be urban dwellers. Perhaps the most important result of World War I for the United States was the decisive impetus it gave to the transformation of American agriculture from family farm to agribusiness. High prices, guaranteed by the government, induced a surge in output and encouraged heavy investment in tractors and other farm machinery. On the wartime transformation of United States rural life see David Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900–1930 (Ames, Iowa, 1979), pp. 97–109.

67. John Ericson, The Soviet High Command: A Military-Political History (London, 1962), pp. 303–6.

68. John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel (London, 1942), pp. 8–9: “Ever since 1931 or thereabouts, the Soviet Union has been at war. . . . People were wounded and killed, women and children froze to death, millions starved, thousands were court martialed and shot in the campaigns of collectivization and industrialization. I would wager that Russia’s battle of metallurgy alone involved more casualties than the battle of the Marne.” For the Five-Year Plans as a species of war economy see Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates from Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton, 1974), pp. 102–12.

69. F. C. Jones, Manchuria since 1931 (London 1949), pp. 140–60. In 1936 the Japanese inaugurated a five year plan for Manchukuo consciously imitating the Russian model.

70. Jerome B. Cohen, Japan’s Economy in War and Reconstruction (Minneapolis, 1949), p. 2.

71. Ericson, The Soviet High Command, pp. 494–99, 517–22, 532–37, offers a clear account of these relatively little known battles.

72. These treaties also headed off an incipient Anglo-American rivalry. They were formally denounced by the Japanese in 1934, with effect in 1936. Competitive naval building therefore escalated sharply as of 1937. Cf. Stephen Roskill, Naval Policy between the Wars, vol. 1, The Period of Anglo-American Antagonism (London, 1968), and vol. 2, The Period of Reluctant Rearmament, 1930–1939 (London, 1976).

73. Cf. Edwin O. Reischauer, Japan Past and Present (New York, 1964), pp. 158–68. Within the Japanese islands themselves the Japanese people expanded from an initial base in the south through a centuries-long process of conquest and colonization. Hokkaido in the north was settled intensively by Japanese only in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

74. Yoshihashi, Conspiracy at Mukden, pp. 116–18.

75. General Georg Thomas, chief of the Economic Staff of the Ministry of War, 1934–42 (rechristened Defense Economics and Armaments Office in 1939), was the principal advocate of what he called “armament in depth” as against Hitler’s “armament in breadth.” Cf. B. A. Carroll, Design for Total War: Arms and Economics in the Third Reich (The Hague, 1968), pp. 38–53 and passim. For a penetrating study of the policy of the German army leaders see Michael Geyer, Rüstung oder Sicherheit: Die Reichswehr in der Krise der Machtpolitik, 1924–1936 (Wiesbaden, 1980), pp. 489–505 and passim.

76. Ellis W. Hawley, “The New Deal and Business,” in John Braeman et al., eds., The New Deal: The National Level (Columbus, Ohio, 1975), p. 61; William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” in John Braeman et al., eds., Change and Continuity in Twentieth Century America (Columbus, Ohio, 1964), pp. 82–143; John A. Garraty, “The New Deal, National Socialism, and the Great Depression,” American Historical Review 78 (1973): 907–44.

77. John F. Milson, Russian Tanks, 1900–1920 (London, 1970), pp. 59–64. Of some 24,000 Russian tanks operational in June 1941, only 967 were of a new design equivalent or superior to the German tanks of that time. Cf. Andreas Hillgruber, Hitler’s Strategie: Politik and Kriegsführung 1940–1941 (Frankfurt am Main, 1965), p. 509.

78. D. C. Watt, Too Serious a Business: European Armed Forces and the Approach of the Second World War (London, 1975) is a wise and informative book. See also M. M. Postan, British War Production (London, 1952), pp. 9–114; Robert Paul Shaw, Jr., British Rearmament in the Thirties: Parties and Profits (Princeton, 1977); Walter Bernhardt, Die deutsche Aufrüstung 1934–1938: Militärische und politische Konzeptionen und ihre Einschätzung durch die Aliierten (Frankfurt am Main, 1969); Edward L. Homze, Arming the Luftwaffe: The Reich Air Ministry and the German Aircraft Industry, 1919–1939 (Lincoln, Neb., 1976). I have been unable to find any comparable survey of French rearmament.

79. W. K. Hancock and M. M. Gowing, British War Economy (London, 1949) is an admirable official history that highlights critical decisions of policy. Postan’s British War Production is an equally admirable official history of arms manufacture.

80. Ericson, Soviet High Command, pp. 575–83.

81. Alan S. Milward, The German Economy at War (London, 1965), pp. 43–45; Barry A. Leach, German Strategy against Russia, 1939–1941 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 133–46 and passim; B. Klein, Germany’s Economic Preparation for War (Cambridge, Mass., 1959); Andreas Hillgruber, Hitler’s Strategie: Politik und Kriegsführung, 1940–1941 (Frankfurt am Main, 1965), pp. 155–66 and passim.

82. Edward L. Homze, Foreign Labor in Nazi Germany (Princeton, 1967), pp. 232. Ironically, the experience of work in Germany was a factor in paving the way for postwar European integration. Hitler and his brutal subordinate Fritz Sauckel deserve to rank with Jean Monnet and General George Marshall among the makers of the European Economic Community.

83. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (London, 1970); Milward, German Economy at War; Alan S. Milward, The New Order and the French Economy (London, 1970); Friedrich Forstmeier and Hans-Erich Volkmann, eds., Kriegswirtschaft und Rüstung, 1939–1945 (Düsseldorf, 1977); and from a Marxist perspective, Dietrich Eicholtz, Geschichte der deutschen Kriegswirtschaft, 1939–1945 (Berlin, 1969).

84. Cohen, Japan’s Economy in War and Reconstruction, pp. 56, 267.

85. The following figures tell the tale (Index: 1940 = 100):

Source: Alec Nove, An Economic History of the USSR (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 272.

86. In addition to Nove, cited above, see Nikolai Voznesensky, The Economy of the USSR during World War II (Washington, D.C., 1948), and Roger A. Clarke, Soviet Economic Facts, 1917–1970 (London, 1972) for a very convenient summary of officially published statistics.

87. Official figures may be found in U.S., Civilian Production Administration, Industrial Mobilization for War: History of the War Production Board and Predecessor Agencies, 1940–1945 (Washington, D.C., 1947). Donald M. Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy (New York, 1946) is a personal account by the principal administrator of the War Production Board.

88. Jean Monnet, whose public career had started as French representative on the Allied Maritime Transport Council in 1917, was a leading figure in persuading Americans to draw up the Victory Program in 1941. Cf. his Mémoires, pp. 179–212. John Maynard Keynes also played an important role in transmitting macroeconomic concepts and expertise to Americans. Cf. Roy F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes (London, 1951), pp. 505–14, 525–623.

89. Many books have described the Allied strategic management of World War II. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York, 1948) was the earliest inside view and remains one of the most interesting. William H. McNeill, America, Britain and Russia: Their Cooperation and Conflict, 1941–1946 (London, 1953) represents an early synthesis and interpretation. Opening of archives has not changed the overall picture very much as reference to such a work as John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947 (New York, 1972) will show.

90. Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men (London, 1974), pp. 495–522; Bisheshwar Prasad, ed., Expansion of the Armed Forces and Defense Organization, 1939–1945 (n.p., 1956).

91. R. F. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone (Oxford, 1973), pp. 506–9; Richard Hough, First Sea Lord (London, 1969), p. 238.

92. Cf. L. F. Haber, Gas Warfare, 1916–1945: The Legend and the Facts (London, 1976), p. 8. Why poison gas was not used in World War II, despite the common expectation beforehand of murderous attack from the air in the first hours of combat, is an interesting and important question. Psychological distaste among military men for a weapon that seemed somehow stealthy and unheroic in use must have played an important part in diverting attention from gas to tanks and airplanes. Barton C. Hacker, “The Military and the Machine: An Analysis of the Controversy over Mechanization in the British Army, 1919–1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1968) offers a persuasive psychological interpretation of this choice. For German deliberations, see Rolf-Dieter Müller, “Die deutschen Gaskriegsvorbereitungen, 1919–1945: Mit Giftgas zur Weltmacht?” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteillungen 1 (1980): 25–54.

93. For the British side see John M. Sanderson, The Universities and British Industry, 1850–1975 (London, 1972), pp. 228–30; for the United States, Daniel Kevles, The Physicists (New York, 1978), pp. 117–38.

94. M. M. Postan et al., Design and Development of Weapons: Studies in Government and Industrial Organization (London, 1964) is limited to Great Britain but makes clear the scale and systematic character of scientific involvement in weapons design, especially pp. 433–58, 472–85. For the United States, James Phinney Baxter III, Scientists against Time (Boston, 1946) is a well-written official history. P. M. S. Blackett, Studies of War: Nuclear and Conventional (Edinburgh, 1962), pp. 101–19 and 205–34 offers a more personal view; Reginald Victor Jones, Most Secret War (London, 1978) is even more personal in describing counterintelligence coups. I have not found any serious account of German, Japanese, or Russian scientific mobilization.

95. Alan S. Milward, War, Economy and Society, 1939–1945 (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 184–93; Postan, British War Production. The British Spitfire underwent more than 1,000 technical modifications between 1938 and 1945, adding 100 miles per hour to its top speed in the process.

96. Cf. Walter Dornberger, V2 (London, 1954), pp. 93, 100; Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (New York, 1948), p. 260.

97. Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (New York, 1975) is a recent and readable as well as judicious account. Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945 (London, 1964) is a fine official history.

98. A typhus epidemic in Naples in 1943 was nipped in the bud by wholesale delousing with DDT; and two outbreaks of bubonic plague in North Africa were no less expeditiously snuffed out by Allied medical teams. Cf. Harry Wain, A History of Preventive Medicine (Springfield, Ill., 1970), p. 306.

10. The Arms Race and Command Economies since 1945

1. In an interview with the American politician Harold Stassen on 9 April 1947, published in New York Times, 4 May 1947. For a collection of Stalin’s most striking references to the inevitable final conflict between capitalism and socialism see Historicus, “Stalin on Revolution,” Foreign Affairs 27 (1949): 175 ff.

2. Cf. the astringent exploration of the interface of politics and economics to be found in Robert Gilpin, United States Power and the Multinational Corporation (New York, 1975); Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World’s Political-Economic Systems (New York, 1977); Gavin Kennedy, The Economics of Defense (London, 1975).

3. At the conclusion of World War II the United States organized a strategic airforce and soon developed bases from which airplanes could carry atomic bombs to any part of the USSR. For a decade thereafter, a strong vested interest in piloted planes as the supreme deterrent inhibited American research and development of long-range rockets. Cf. Edmund Beard, Developing the ICBM: A Study in Bureaucratic Politics (New York, 1976).

4. The first Sputnik weighed 84 kilograms; a second, launched a month later, weighed 508 kilograms; and in 1965 the Russians put a payload of no less than 12,200 kilograms into orbit. Cf. Charles S. Sheldon, Review of the Soviet Space Program with Comparative United States Data (New York, 1968), pp. 47–49.

5. Robert A. Divine, Blowing in the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954–1963 (New York, 1978) explores these political and psychological strains persuasively.

6. Donald W. Mitchell, A History of Russian and Soviet Sea Power (New York, 1974), pp. 518–19. For a convenient summary of divergent interpretations of the Cuban missile crisis see Robert A. Divine, ed., The Cuban Missile Crisis (Chicago, 1971).

7. John M. Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell, The Origins and International Economics of Space Exploration (Edinburgh, 1973).

8. Robert Gilpin, France in the Age of the Scientific State (Princeton, 1968) offers a sympathetic analysis of French reaction to American example in the 1960s. I also owe much to two unpublished papers by Walter A. McDougall, “Technology and Hubris in the Early Space Age” and “Politics and Technology in the Space Age—Towards the History of a Saltation.”

9. A. C. B. Lovell, The Origins and International Economics of Space Exploration (Edinburgh, 1973), p. 28.

10. For what little it is worth, a Swedish estimate of research and development expenditures came up with a figure of between 4.1 and 6.1 billion dollars for Soviet military spending in 1972 compared to 7.2 billion for the United States. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Resources Devoted to Military Research and Development (Stockholm, 1972), p. 58. These figures exclude NASA’s disbursements, despite the military relevancy of many NASA programs. Military items masquerading in civilian dress in the Soviet budget were probably equally massive, and perhaps greater. The additional difficulty in equating American with Russian prices makes comparison wellnigh impossible, as the authors of this study admit.

11. The accelerating pace of technical advance resulting from massive and systematic research and development programs is illustrated by the fact that it took forty years for self-propelled torpedoes to increase their range from 220 yards when first invented in 1866 to 2,190 yards in 1905, but only six to rise to 18,590 in 1913, whereas the range of the Polaris missiles, installed in U.S. submarines for the first time in 1959, increased from 1,200 to 2,500 miles in a mere five years. For torpedo ranges see Edwin A. Gray, The Devil’s Device (London, 1975), Appendix; for Polaris ranges see SIPRI Yearbook, 1968–69 (London, 1969), p. 98.

12. See above, chap. 8.

13. Between 16 July 1945 and 31 December 1979 known atomic explosions were as follows: USA, 667; USSR, 447; France, 97; UK, 33; China, 26; and India, 1. SIPRI Yearbook 1981, App. 11B, p. 382.

14. In 1979 no fewer than thirty-six countries had nuclear power plants within their borders capable of producing fissionable material. Efforts to monitor and control the use of such material by the United States and other suppliers were fragile to say the least. Some countries (Israel for example) had probably breached such regulations. But, if so, the matter remained secret and rumor often may have outrun reality.

15. International arms sales remained under governmental control after World War II, as much in the free world as in the Communist. Evasions of official regulations, though real, were marginal. For a perspicacious account see John Stanley and Maurice Pearton, The International Trade in Arms (London, 1972).

16. Two books aptly illustrate aspects of this impasse: the cocky assurance of Alain C. Enthoven and K. Wayne-Smith, How Much Is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program, 1961–1969 (New York, 1971) and the quizzical skepticism of Don K. Price, The Scientific Estate (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

17. Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates from Bukharin to the Modern Reformers (Princeton, 1974), pp. 127 ff. offers an intriguing overview.

18. Cf. Gavin Kennedy, The Military in the Third World (London, 1974), pp. 174–89.

19. Morris Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations (Chicago, 1977), p. 35, says that expenditures for police forces in Africa, 1966–75, rose by 144 percent while costs of armies rose by only 40 percent in the same decade. His figures show that almost every government in the world has increased expenditures for the means of internal coercion more rapidly than other defense costs. There is some indication, too, that police consolidation made coups d’état harder to pull off and therefore fewer in the 1970s than had been true in the 1960s. Ibid., pp. 42, 70.

20. For remarks about the conflict between heroic and technocratic roles see Jacques van Doorn, ed., Military Profession and Military Regimes: Commitments and Conflicts (The Hague, 1969).