This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part One begins with the political and economic revolutions of the late 1700s and tracks the transformation of the world during the 1800s. Part One concludes as these bewildering changes seem to be running beyond the capacity of older institutions to handle them. Throughout the course we try to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? And the answers often turn on very human choices.
The Military Revolution
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En provenance du cours de University of Virginia
The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910
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À partir de la leçon
From the Traditional to the Modern - Commercial and Military Revolutions (1760-1800)
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Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
Hi, welcome back.
This time, we're going to talk about a military revolution
that benefits the great powers of Eurasia.
But above all, the European powers during the 1700s.
So you have the traditional world for a long, long time.
People had spears.
They had knives.
They have bows and arrows.
Maybe in some societies, they even had field vehicles like chariots,
then there's the gunpowder revolution.
In the 1400s and 1500s, people developed firearms.
For instance, like this early musket called a matchlock.
This is a picture of the kind used during the 1600s, but the military
revolution I want to focus in on has several particular elements not just guns.
One of them is artillery.
Cannons that can knock down walls.
Cannons that can sink ships.
Cannons that packed with a lot of small fragments,
can blow apart densely packed formations of soldiers and
here's an example of how canons are being made more mobile.
So, they can be carried on ships.
Pulled around from place to place.
So in addition to artillery, another key ingredient in the military revolution
that picks up in the 1700s are advances in military engineering.
For example, how to design intricate fortifications?
Like this one, developed by Frenchman named.
This is a design for fortress on the Rhine River.
I know it looks like some sort of intricate artistic design, but
these are actually walls.
Various star shapes that create interlocking fields of fire.
An enemy charging here could be fired on from here and from here.
And then if they breach this rampart, there's another set of ramparts beyond it.
Often, the walls were sloping.
So that if a cannonball hits them, it won't have as big an impact and so on.
Very advanced fortifications, that's a kind of military engineering and
military engineering also applied at sea in the development of navies.
In the last presentation, we talked about the rise of navies.
The rise of ships that can carry dozens of heavy cannon
can wage heavyweight battle at sea as you see depicted in this painting.
Also, different kind of armies not just masses of charging horsemen or
running soldiers.
Professional, drilled armies.
Let me just take a moment to explain.
Professional, long service, well-trained experienced.
Drilled, why?
To use the guns more effectively.
To use them in unison in mass.
To use them in situations where some people are firing while some people
are loading.
To be able to do that under fire requires drill and training.
No country more epitomized the drilled robotic quality of these new
kinds of armies than the Prussian army.
Here are Prussian soldiers advancing across a field.
You see a few soldiers are getting hit, following the rest of them marching on.
This painting depicts French soldiers fighting against mounted horsemen,
mamluk warriors of the Ottoman Empire in 1798 in Egypt.
One thing to notice here, both sides have firearms.
It's not that guns give the French the advantage, both of them have guns.
Look at the French, however,
in ranks against the charging horsemen of the mamluk cavalrymen.
Drawn up into what are called infantry squares,
they can deliver ordered salvos into the cavalry breaking their charges.
Now, the counter against that infantry square would be if the mamluk cavalryman
could have brought up artillery that could fire into that square.
But that again, requires a kind of army that the Ottoman Empire then did not have.
Another feature of the military revolution, kind of a dry, technical one,
but absolutely important was the rice of staffwork and logistics.
Think about the kind of armies we're talking about or navies.
Think about the supplies they need.
They need stockpiles of gunpowder, of shells,
all these resources that they're going to need for these armies on the march.
They're going to need food supplies laid down for
all the horses that are pulling the baggage trains.
That meant that these armies needed to have expert professionals capable of
planning out all the staff work and supply arrangement associated with all of that.
Since they're forced to develop those kinds of capabilities, that ends up giving
them, much more capable organizations than they had before.
As I mentioned in an earlier presentation, the gunpowder revolution alone and
the countries that can mobilize resources that give them firearms,
that helps lead to the emergence of great powers in Eurasia.
For instance, in the Qing dynasty, they have firearms.
The nomads of Mongolia and Turkestan do not.
In the 1700s, the Qing Empire with its drilled armies,
well-equipped with firearms.
Advance and enormously expand the Qiing Empire's domain as you can see here.
The Russian Empire too expands rapidly during the 1600s and
1700s as it can leverage the military revolution against the nomadic
tribesmen of Central Asia, and you've seen this map before.
It reminds you of the significance of Eurasian land empires
becoming more and more dominant during the 1700s.
So now, you've got part one of the story.
That in general, the Eurasian land empires were better off including the Chinese,
but the Europeans have a distinct advantage even among them.
That's clear by the end of the 1700s and early 1800s.
Why? Why do they have that advantage?
Partly because Europe is so fragmented with several warring states that
they constantly are having to up the quality of their military technology
in order to do better against their rivals who are right nearby.
Therefore, they have a kind of problem, solution dynamic in which each of
them have to keep raising the levels of their game,
but that means all of them together are getting more advanced.
They also aided by the wide spread use of printing presses.
Their disseminating knowledge in ways that not everyone else in the world does.
They can disseminate knowledge about the latest military practices and
techniques like this one, for example, written by a British general
laying down exactly how to create a drilled professional army.
Now, noticed how this military revolution I've described.
Interacts with the commercial revolution I talked about in the last presentation.
The commercial revolution is also creating powerful incentives and the money to
build up those important navies with these extraordinary shipbuilding industries
capable of assembling these incredibly complex sailing, and fighting machines.
The commercial revolution is spurring science and finance, but
the science is not just in the botany.
It's also the science of metallurgy, creating more refined cannons.
The finance creates loans and resources available to build much larger armies.
In other words, here's that phenomenon again of the fiscal-military revolution.
The way the military revolution and the commercial revolution blend together
to create new kinds of more powerful states, especially in Europe,
because the European powers have the extra stimulus of the Atlantic world and
the South Seas world and those opportunities.
Now having built those large organizations, more and
more you also develop and you can think about this in your own business lives.
Kind of that intangible software of training,
organization that extends the capabilities even more.
The result of all that then is that by the year 1800, Eurasian military
powers generally, but European powers in particular have a distinct
advantage militarily against any rival they will encounter in the world.
Now I not here, it's a distinct advantage, but not an unlimited one.
We're still in a period before the Industrial Revolution takes off and
a lot of people can have firearms on both sides.
So, the Europeans don't have an absolute military edge.
They're beaten in different battles.
Their power's often limited to the range of their naval forces or
how far an expeditionary army can travel inland,
when it can face powerful local opposition.
So no panacea, but a distinct advantage in a lot of different places
in the world is going to turn out to be a tipping point for
some critical conflicts in the late 1700s.
I'll explore some of that next.
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