MILITARY REVOLUTIONS: A FORUM
Geoffrey Parker, "Military Revolutions, Past and Present"
Jeremy Black, "On Diversity and Military History"
Dennis Showalter, "Thinking about Military Revolution"
Jeffrey Clarke, "On the Once and Future RMA"
Geoffrey Parker, "Random Thoughts of a Hedgehog"

Michael A. Ledeen, "Terrorism in Historical Context"

Miriam R. Levin, "September 11 as a Transforming Event"

Timothy M. Roberts, "1848 and American Frustrations with Europe"

Paul Lyons, "From Vietnam to Iraq: Lessons from the City of Brotherly Love"

THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND GLOBALIZATION: A FORUM
Niall Ferguson, "British Imperialism Revisited: The Costs and Benefits of 'Anglobalization'"
P.J. Marshall, "Beneficial for Whom?"
Robert E. Lucas, Jr., "Colonialism and Growth"
Andrew Porter, "'Anglobalization': A Conceptual Step Backward"
Andrew J. Bacevich, "Does Empire Pay?"
Niall Ferguson, "Globalization without Gunboats?"

Interview with David Brooks

David J. Staley, "Computers, Visualization, and the Representation of History"

“Anglobalization”: A Conceptual Step Backward
by Andrew Porter 

Let us take “globalization” as a starter. How is it to be understood, either in chronological terms or functionally? His terminology refers to “modern globalization,” but also to “the previous era of globalization” conventionally dated we are told to the years 1850-1914. This period may also have been “the first era of globalization.” His argument, however, also knits the two together in a single period and process. At different points in the paper, globalization may be taken to mean either little more than the far-flung existence of even limited economic activity involving a major power’s (e.g. Britain’s) nationals, or an active process of territorial integration into a worldwide market economy. In both cases, “globalization” is apparently a continuing feature, albeit one, Ferguson argues, in which the phase 1850-1945 was characterized by the equalization of incomes. The second half of the 20th century, on the other hand, witnessed mounting economic divergence and inequality. There is a fuzziness here in the handling of globalization—whether as concept, descriptive category, or economic process—that needs to be cleared away.

This need for clarity is further indicated by Ferguson’s lack of attention to the possibility that globalization, however it is defined, may have had a history stretching back well before 1850. There is much in the history of the 17th and 18th centuries to support the view that a process of globalization was then underway. Doubtless the balance of power and wealth among (and so the contribution made by) participating states was different then from that which developed later on; and “globalization” had perhaps not yet become global in its reach. It may be debated whether there was a distinctly “early modern globalization,” or merely an earlier phase of a single process. It is more important, however, to recognize that the prominence of war and economic protection or monopolization meant that the characteristics of that earlier age were very different from those that Ferguson suggests operated during the British-dominated phase of globalization after 1850.

If it is accepted that there was an early modern globalization underway well before the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars; that its momentum owed much to war both internationally and on local colonial frontiers; and that the prominent role of Britain in the Caribbean, North America, and parts of Asia means that it too deserves the ghastly appellation of “Anglobalization,” then this has implications for Ferguson’s portrayal of the post-1850 period. From then on Ferguson seems to allow that the global accumulation of wealth was promoted only by an increasing absence of restraint on the movement of people (labor migration), the flow of capital (external investment), and produce from land (overseas commerce). This argument is unpersuasive because it ignores the role of war, economic protection, and strategic calculation—persisting from that earlier period—in the continuing growth of a global economy. Britain’s many colonial wars in the 19th century and beyond were an essential aid to the incorporation of new territories into her own empire, and to the expansion of free trade both within her colonies and into areas beyond the reach of her direct rule. Furthermore, in Ferguson’s contemporary age of “modern globalization,” echoes of the early modern period are to be found in the way in which world economic patterns are being decisively shaped by the protectionist agenda of the United States and many other European countries, notably in respect of their domestic agriculture.

This last observation directs us not only to the compatibility of continuing globalization with partially-closed economies, but also to the limitations of free trade arrangements historically associated with the pursuit of an open global economy. Contrary to much current thinking, Ferguson wishes us to accept that the priority attached by Britain to free trade, free labor migration, and unfettered capital movements was beneficial to Britain itself, to her empire, and to the world at large. The extension of her empire not least contributed to the global growth of GDP, because Britain was the “least protectionist” of all the great powers. By this yardstick, the British Empire was “a good thing,” British rule “on balance conducive to economic growth.” I would argue that this simple standard requires a more critical consideration than it receives in Ferguson’s essay. 

Two points are fundamental. First, it is surely necessary to bear in mind that the pattern of free trade, particularly in the form of unlimited exchange of foodstuffs and raw materials for manufactured capital and consumer goods, generally operates over any significant period of time to the decided disadvantage of commodity producers. Free trade might have been one of the pillars of “Anglobalization,” but at the same time it was likely to restrict and impoverish the less economically “modernized” party. The second follows from that: free trade cannot necessarily be equated with freedom of choice and opportunity. The time at which any territory is drawn through the opening up of its trade into the globalizing economy can have a critical impact on its future development. The great variety of combinations of climate, geographical position, and natural endowment of resources inevitably means that each territory may be more or less well placed to find its own niche in the range of economic openings prevailing at any one time. Hence, as Donald Denoon demonstrated in his Settler Capitalism (1983), temperate lands of white settlement, faced with exclusion from industrial and manufacturing options, not only evolved their own forms of capitalism but did so largely irrespective of their colonial or independent status. Moreover, their contribution to the globalization process was evidently compatible with a distribution of any gains within individual states that was often very far from equalizing incomes. Fergusonis to be applauded for his realism in calling on historians to consider not ideal worlds but inescapably imperfect worlds in which the option of “Anglobalization” was if not the best then perhaps the least bad course available. However, the reality of the imperialism of free trade which underlay that option was far more constraining and less benign than Ferguson, at least here, seems to acknowledge. It was, of course, greatly to Britain’s own advantage as the world’s major industrial power for much of the 19th century that she should insist on the expansion of free trade while at the same time facing little serious competition in the new markets she was exploiting.

My last comment relates still more directly to the issue of costs and benefits. As befits any public performer, Ferguson is fond of catching his audience’s attention with striking juxtapositions of images and arguments. Stark intellectual polarities, however, can be snares and delusions, especially in the history of empire, so riddled as it is with complexities and ambiguity. In seeking to argue that the empire was not “economically bad for both Britain and her colonies,” Ferguson sets up an Aunt Sally no less grand and vulnerable than that constructed by some of the historians he criticizes.

Consider his reference to Robert Huttenback and Lance Davis’s Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, a book extensively debated when it appeared in 1986. Whatever the problems presented by that work (and they were numerous), Davis and Huttenback did not make quite the bald claim for Britain’s losses and colonial benefits from empire that Ferguson’s compressed opening paragraph suggests. They confirmed above all the need to ask of imperial commitments and colonial possessions who benefited, from what, and when. In demonstrating that fortunately placed individuals, particular social classes, and identifiable types of business in both metropole and colonies gained or lost in varying degrees and at different times, they argued convincingly for a more discriminating and nuanced scrutiny of the empire’s political economy than was currently available. They also proved beyond doubt the centrality of the incidence of taxation and the costs of defense to any assessment of costs and benefits. Ferguson seems in effect to argue that the association of global economic growth with both the element of redistribution inherent in the workings of a free market system and the existence of Britain’s free trade empire was sufficient—as Lewis Carroll would put it—for all to have prizes. That surely represents a significant retreat from the ground so usefully opened up to debate some fifteen years ago.

Andrew Porter is Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College, London . He is editor of The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1999; 2001). 
 

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Does Empire Pay?
by Andrew J. Bacevich

Niall Ferguson advances “at least a prima facie case that the British Empire was economically beneficial, not only to Britain herself, but also to her empire—perhaps even to the world economy as a whole.” For the most part, that is, “Anglobalization” paid, producing results that “were in many ways astounding.” Where results fell short of that standard, the culprit was insufficient exertion. Britain’s imperial sins were those of “omission rather than commission.” Indeed, when, the sun finally set on Britain ’s empire, independence in all too many cases left the Crown’s former subjects worse off.

In offering this argument at this particular moment, Ferguson adds his voice—knowingly, one assumes—to a swelling chorus heard throughout much of the Anglo-American world. Already discernible before the terrorist attack of September 11, these voices have become altogether insistent since.  Empire, they argue, has gotten something of a bum rap. Indeed, if a planet awash with religious fanatics and rogue regimes is to have any hope of enjoying order and predictability—and by extension, prosperity and civility—a little dose of empire might be just what the doctor ordered.

Among those former colonials who were the very first to throw off British rule, this idea has met with growing favor. In public discourse, a preference for rhetorical evasions persists—“global leadership” being the euphemism of choice—but the truth is that especially since September 11 more and more Americans have warmed to the notion that as the sole remaining superpower the United States ought to call the shots. 

In words and actions, the present Bush administration has with alacrity seized upon this imperial moment. The administration’s National Security Strategy, published precisely one year into the so-called war on terror, offered a breathtaking assertion of American primacy. More telling still, the battle dress-clad legionnaires sweeping into such formerly British imperial precincts as Central Asia and the Persian Gulf—and settling in for what promises to be a protracted stay—testify in ways both symbolic and real to this administration’s willingness to don the mantle of empire.  Although not quite willing to say so out loud, Washington and Wall Street have laid claim to the prerogatives once reserved for London and its City. 

A new variant of globalization, informed by American values and American aspirations, has emerged, a successor of sorts to the Anglobalization that made life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries comparatively tolerable. Noting the resemblance between today’s Washington consensus and the Londonconsensus of that earlier age, Ferguson finds hopeful similarities between the two projects. When it comes to economic and political ground rules, the United Statesarguably stands today as the true successor of Great Britain in its imperial heyday. 

Implied but not stated is the suggestion that by following the wise example of their cousins across the pond, the architects of today’s American Empire just might manage to create a global imperium approaching Britain’s in durability and (by Ferguson’s measure) decency, to the benefit of all.

A nice thought but don’t count on it—at least not without Americans having to pay a helluva price.

Ferguson’s empire is a business proposition, its success measured in terms of capital flows, advances in per capita GDP, and the anticipated vs. actual return on government bonds. In that empire, the practitioner of “gentlemanly capitalism” occupies center stage. (Rudyard Kipling, T. E. Lawrence, and Winston Churchill, meanwhile, are nowhere to be seen). It is an empire devoid of grandeur and, seemingly, of moral purpose.

To be sure, the American Empire is also a business proposition.  But it is not only just that. When any modern president describes America’s purpose—and here George W. Bush differs little from his immediate (and now all but forgotten) predecessor—he speaks the language not of the corporate CEO or accountant but of the prophet and revolutionary. It is not gentlemanly capitalism that informs the American Empire but a conviction that providence has charged America with the salvation of the world. The patron saint of the American Empire is not J. P. Morgan; it is Woodrow Wilson.

Do sophisticated, worldly American statesmen—people like Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld—really believe all of the Wilsonian blather about democracy, freedom, and world peace that routinely washes across the top of the bully pulpit? Maybe, maybe not. But in either case they can’t stop pretending that they do, and that’s what counts. The continuing legitimacy of the empire prohibits them (and us) from admitting any doubts about America ’s responsibility (and capacity) to steer history to its intended destination. 

As a consequence, in the Age of Bush empire demands of its subjects much more than it did in the Age of Victoria. It is not simply a matter of trade balances and gold reserves. It is about ideology and culture. Come, be like us: this is America ’s message to the world—sometimes an invitation, at other times a command. In this empire, the ultimate proof of loyalty is not obedience but conformity, a willing embrace of that package of values and taste and lifestyle known as the American Way of Life. 

That in some quarters—most notably at present across much of the Islamic world—this expectation evokes antagonism and resistance is to put things mildly. Thus, the future of the American Empire promises to be a bloody one—indeed, the leaders of the Bush administration promise that we face many years of apparently unavoidable armed struggle. 

Few subjects demand more careful thought today than the prospects and problems awaiting America s experiment in global empire. History may well hold some useful lesson for how best to guide the great enterprise to which the United States has committed itself. But the British Empire—at least as depicted by Ferguson in this essay—seems unlikely to provide a useful model. 

In the meantime (at least if the present administration has its way), we will not shirk our duty. If we fail, it will not be due to sins of omission. Rather, adhering to the tradition of Woodrow Wilson, we will get on with teaching others—Arabs, this time—to elect good men, at the point of a bayonet if need be.

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of international relations at BostonUniversity and director of that institution’s Center for International Relations. His most recent book is American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy (HarvardUniversity Press, 2002).
 

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Globalization without Gunboats?
by Niall Ferguson

In November 2002 British foreign secretary Jack Straw made some remarks to the New Statesman magazine which seem apposite here:

I’m not a liberal imperialist. There’s a lot wrong with liberalism, with a capital L, although I am a liberal with a small L. And there’s a lot wrong with imperialism. A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now are a consequence of our colonial past.

Reading the comments on my essay by Andrew J. Bacevich, Robert E. Lucas, Jr., P.J. Marshall, and Andrew Porter, I was sometimes reminded of Straw’s words. His misunderstanding of Britain’s imperial legacy is, of course, absurdly crude. Yet at least two of the commentators’ criticisms seem to be based on the same underlying assumption that there was, from a liberal standpoint, a “lot wrong” with the British Empire.

Central to my argument is that there was such a thing as liberal imperialism and that on balance it was a good thing. From the 1850s until the 1930s the British approach to governing their sprawling global imperium was fundamentally liberal both in theory and in practice. Free trade, free capital movements, and free migration were fostered. The rule of law was institutionalized. Colonial government practiced the strict rules of Gladstonian fiscal and monetary policy: balanced budgets and a stable currency. This policy “mix” encouraged British investors to put a substantial portion of their capital in what we would now call emerging markets. New technologies like railways and steam power were therefore spread across the world, reaching countries they would not have reached had those countries been self-governing or under some other less liberal form of imperial rule. The results of liberal imperialism were mixed, to be sure. Not everywhere grew as rapidly as the colonies of white settlement. But even those countries (like India) that achieved only very slow increases in per capita income fared better than they would have fared under alternative regimes.

In short, Peter Marshall is right to infer from the essay a counterfactual question: “What if British capital, British financial services, the demand of British markets, British technology, and British skilled personnel had not been diffused throughout the world largely through the mechanism of empire?” I have little doubt that the global economy would have grown less rapidly in such an alternative 19th century. I certainly do not think it plausible that these things would have happened on the same scale without the “mechanism” of empire. And yes, as Porter says, that mechanism did indeed rely on “war” and “strategic calculation” to promote the growth of a “global economy.” This was, as I have written elsewhere, “globalization with gunboats.”[1]

Political Independence and Economic Growth
Robert E. Lucas, Jr. admits that “in common with many British thinkers from Adam Smith onward” he “think[s] of imperialism as almost an opposite of liberalism.” This was certainly true in Adam Smith’s day, when the empire was thoroughly mercantilist in its policies.[2] Less than a century later, however, Smith’s Wealth of Nations had been enshrined as one of the sacred texts of Victorian liberalism. Policy makers took it for granted that laissez faire was superior to state intervention and monopoly. This was not true in other European empires, which from the late 1870s onward steadily increased the level of both agricultural and industrial protectionism. In failing to make this distinction, Lucas errs.

He further errs when he imputes to me the argument that “the economic growth of the successful societies in the post-colonial years can be viewed as a continuation of their economic performance under the British Empire.” This is the very reverse of what I say. By comparing the economic performance of Britain’s former colonies before and after British rule, I show that a majority—27 out of 41—fared worse under independence than they had fared under British rule, in that the economic gap between Britain and them widened after the 1960s. Because he uses highly aggregated data in assessing the economic performance of Africa and Asia, Lucas fails to distinguish between the economic performance of British colonies and those of other empires, to say nothing of China . To say that “these colonial subjects had the same living standards at the end of the colonial period as they had had two centuries later” is therefore to miss the point that (for example) in South Africa they rose while in the Congo they collapsed, or that in India they held steady while in China they declined.

Lucas insists that the real distinction to be made is between “the economics of the dominions and the economics of the colonies of Africa and Asia.” But the real distinction we need to consider is that between British colonies and comparable economies in Asia and Africa that had different forms of government. My question remains unanswered: given that the British imposed superior economic institutions wherever they ruled, did it make a discernible difference? Such questions are not easy to answer when the data for 19th-century Africa and Asia are so patchy. But Lucas’s ballpark figures certainly do not help us. 

For that reason, his claim that the diffusion of the industrial revolution “was between independent nations, not within the empires of Europe” is a generalization too far. India acquired an immense railway network, coal mines, and a modern textile industry under British rule. South Africa did the same. Where the prerequisites for industrialization were present in the territories under British rule, it was encouraged not hindered (with one caveat, which follows). The implication—that India would have performed as well as Japan had it remained independent—is not plausible, because it does not compare like with like. When P.J. Marshall talks enthusiastically of “vigorous ‘national’ governments, as in the United States, Tsarist Russia, or Japan,” he is not offering credible role models for the great majority of British colonies. Indeed, when many former colonies self-consciously sought to follow the Russian example in the 1960s, the results were dire.

Lucas claims that “living standards for masses of people in these populous, poor societies finally began to grow after independence.” As a global generalization this seems uncontroversial, but once again it does not make any distinction between British colonies and other economies. It is also somewhat cavalier with chronology. To repeat: most British colonies—especially those in Africa—lagged further behind Britain after independence. Among the minority that closed the gap, India began to do so only in 1979 (see chart below). The “economic development” of the “post-colonial period” largely refers to the very recent past, when governments like India’s abandoned the unsuccessful protectionism and socialism of the post-independence period. As Lucas rightly says, the Indians and others got the ideas for some of these policies from Britain, but not (he omits to mention) from the British imperialists. The ritish Empire can be blamed for many things, but surely not the London School of Economics.
 

The Imperialism of Free Trade versus Tariffs 
The most important criticism advanced—not surprisingly by the two experts in the field—relates to the role of tariffs. Here there is an important distinction to be drawn and it is one that I discuss more fully in my book than was possible in the allotted space here. This is the distinction between those colonies which secured, through the granting of “responsible government,” the right to set their own tariffs. Canada did so in 1879, an example soon followed by Australia and New Zealand. Recent work on the late 19th and early 20th century by Jeff Williamson and Michael Clement has shown that there was a positive correlation—an apparently awkward one for the proponents of unconditional economic “openness”—between the imposition of tariffs and growth.[3] This has important implications for any economic history of the British Empire. If Canada and the other dominions benefited from protection, then the question becomes: would India have done better with tariffs? That is certainly the implication of P.J. Marshall’s assertion that “the free trade order was a damagingly unequal one, stunting the economic, social, and even the political development of those countries that exchanged primary products for British manufactures”; and Andrew Porter’s even more sweeping claim that “free trade . . . generally operates over any significant period of time to the decided disadvantage of commodity producers.”

Yet there is a difficulty with this line of argument. First, as Douglas Irwin has pointed out, the tariffs imposed by Canada and others were revenue tariffs, not protectionist tariffs. Canadian growth came from exports of agricultural products, not import substitution by domestic manufacturers.[4] Second, the argument ignores the far more damaging effects of unfree trade on primary producers during the 1930s. The Depression was hard on everyone, but harder on primary producers outside the system of imperial preference than inside it. Porter’s generalized argument against free trade— which is explicitly repudiated by Clemens and Williamson—also ignores the continuing harm inflicted on primary producers today by European Union tariffs and subsidies. Finally, it is to lapse into the economically inexact rhetoric of an earlier anti-imperialist era to claim that Britain “insisted on the expansion of free trade while at the same time facing little serious competition in the new markets she was exploiting.” The evidence that imperial markets were open to and were successfully penetrated by German firms in the late 19th century is well known and often adduced as proof of British entrepreneurial decline.
The Distribution of Costs and Benefits
Three out of four commentators argue that the benefits of British imperialism were unevenly distributed. Only “small elites and some European settlers and administrators” gained, while much more numerous peasant cultivators did not (Lucas). I am, of course, well aware of the arguments advanced by Davis and Huttenback, particularly their point that the lion’s share of the financial returns on empire flowed to a tiny group of politically influential investors. As the author of the history of perhaps the greatest of all the financial houses interested in the empire—the Rothschild bank[5]—I think I can claim to have contributed important evidence in support of that point. However, Lucas’s own data relate to per capita income growth and tell us nothing about the relative gains made by the rich and the poor, then or now. If the world economy grows, then at least all may have prizes. But if it does not, then there are no prizes for anyone.

In fact, there is good reason to question his assumption that the empire as a whole increased inequality. To speak of “some European settlers” is to underestimate the many millions of such beneficiaries. The effect of mass migration to land rich, labor poor colonies like Canada , Australia, and New Zealand was, as Jeffrey Williamson has argued, to reduce global inequality.[6] It is also possible (and the British certainly believed) that their rule in India tended to reduce social inequality.[7]
Lessons of History? 
A final point worth making is that my essay has very different implications for the United States in our own time than the two American authors seem to recognize. Strikingly, Lucas leaves out of his account of post-1945 economic growth any acknowledgement that this was due in some measure to America ’s “imperialism of free trade.” Like many economists, he assumes that the rapid growth of trade after the Second World War was naturally occurring, whereas historians would tend to emphasize the “hegemonic” role of successive U.S. administrations, who had learned the lesson of the 1930s and committed themselves to trade liberalization as a policy goal.

Even more puzzling is Andrew Bacevich’s allegation that the empire I portray was “an empire devoid of grandeur and, seemingly, of moral purpose.” If he wishes to be reminded of the share scale of the undertaking and the crucial role of evangelical Christianity in providing its rationale, he need look no further than my book. Kipling, Lawrence, and Churchill are all there.

Of course, an essay as broad in its scope and ambition as this is unlikely to command universal assent. But I am grateful to all four commentators for their contributions and I am content to let one of them provide one of my concluding reflections: “For all its imperfections, the British order may have been the best path on offer in the later 19th century for countries with the economic potential of India and perhaps some of the Latin American republics.” One might infer from that another counterfactual question: what if Argentina, Brazil, and Chile had been able to enjoy the benefits of formal as well as informal British imperialism? 

Such questions may not be politically correct. It is much more gratifying to blame economic under-performance on dependence rather than independence. But it behooves us as scholars interested in the history of the global economy to pose awkward questions. And though I do not go as far as Andrew Bacevich thinks—I doubt very much that Americans today are capable of following the British path to formal empire—I do believe that there are valuable lessons to be learned from the British experience of empire. 

Andrew Bacevich thinks that the American Empire is informed not by “gentlemanly capitalism” but by “a conviction that providence has charged American with the salvation of the world,” and that therefore “in the Age of Bush empire demands of its subjects much more than it did in the Age of Victoria.” For this reason, he concludes, “the British Empire . . . seems unlikely to provide a useful model.” This is quite wrong. Britain in the early 1820s was in the grip of one of the greatest religious revivals in her history.  The evangelical movement played a crucial role in legitimizing and inspiring British expansion in mid-19th century. To any student of the Victorian empire, the mood of pious bellicosity which hangs over the White House at the time of writing is all too familiar. 

The true difference between then and now lies in the very short time horizon of nearly all America ’s quasi-imperial undertakings. The American view, paraphrased by Bacevich, is that “others” can be “taught to elect good men, at the point of a bayonet if need be,” allowing American troops to return home swiftly from the scenes of their interventions. President Bush insists that it is not his intention to “determin[e] the precise form of Iraq ’s new government”:

We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary and not a day more. America has made and kept this kind of commitment before in the peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments.

The United States, in short, forswears the traditional techniques of imperial rule and instead anticipates swift transitions to democracy in the wake of its military interventions.

To American voters, this is no doubt reassuring. To the historian, however, it seems unrealistic. The problem of our time, I venture to conclude, may prove to be not the liberal imperialism feared by Jack Straw but the conservative “non-imperialism” propagated by George W. Bush.

END OF FORUM 
 

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Interview with David Brooks
conducted by Joseph S. Lucas

David Brooks, author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon and Schuster, 2000) and editor of the anthology Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing (Vintage Books, 1996), is working on a book called How to Be American (forthcoming from Simon and  Schuster). His essays on American culture and politics have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Weekly Standard, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, the Washington Post, the TLS, Commentary, and the Public Interest.

Joseph Lucas: When you were in college, at the University of Chicago, you planned to become an academic historian. What got you interested in history? Did you have an idea back then of what you would write about once you became a history professor? 

David Brooks: I grew up in an academic household. My father was an English professor who worked at New YorkUniversity and then WestchesterUniversity teaching mostly 19th-century English literature. And my mother wrote her history dissertation at ColumbiaUniversity—on Wimbledon Common—and then went on to teach Western Civ. as a traveling, starving professor. So history was basically something I grew up with. It was normal for me to want to become a history professor. It was the family business. 

I became interested in American history, particularly late 19th- and early 20th-century technological history, and social and cultural history. One of my professors at the University of Chicago was Neil Harris. He was my senior paper advisor, and I took a number of courses from him on the effects of technology and other things on culture. 

Even at an early age I fixated on the books of the late 1950s and early 1960s—Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), William Taylor’s Cavalier and Yankee (1961), Cesar Graña’s Bohemian versus Bourgeois (1964), and the books that came from that American historical tradition of Richard Hofstadter and Henry Steele Commager. Those were the books I liked the most. 

Lucas: Do you still like those books?

Brooks: Absolutely. I go back to those books all the time. I’m writing a book now that’s sort of an updated version of David Potter’s People of Plenty (1954). In the 1950s historical writing was more for the general public—sometimes a little too broad, maybe, but usually more interesting than the stuff that came before and after. 

Lucas: At that time, historians were in the habit of taking on big themes. They didn’t hesitate to conceive of and then tackle subjects like “the history of the American mind.” 

Brooks: My favorite example is Reinhold Neibuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, which I always say covers a lot of ground. I admire the serious scholarship of that era—on Neibuhr’s part or Commager’s (his book The American Mind). But there was also a willingness to generalize and the understanding that you were writing for the educated lay reader. 

Lucas: What do you think has changed since then? 

Brooks: I would say professionalization and scientism are the two main culprits. I didn’t become an academic in part because I didn’t want to write for journals whose readers numbered only in the single digits. 

When I was a senior in college I went to a conference which was put on by the Chicago literary magazine Triquarterly. Lots of academic all-stars were there, mainly from literary studies, but not exclusively: Wayne Booth, Edward Said, RonaldDworkin. There were about fifteen or twenty superstars, very impressive people. I sat there for twenty-two hours, and I barely understood a word they said. I wrote in the school paper that maybe this language is useful, and I could go to graduate school and learn it. But suppose it turns out to be a racket? Then I’ll have wasted ten years, and then I’ll have to unlearn what I’ve learned. So I ended up not going to graduate school, and went into journalism instead. 

Lucas: Yet it’s clear from your writing that you keep tabs on what academics are up to. 

Brooks: I look at the catalogues of academic presses, and I spend a lot of time cruising the better bookstores. When Lingua Franca was around, they would have people in the field describing what they thought were the best books in the field, and you could pick up a few of those if you were interested. 

I need to keep in touch with the world of scholarship for the sort of reporting I do. Every reporter needs to bring something to the table. Some people bring the fact that they’ve just gotten off the phone with somebody who was at a meeting with the president. I don’t do that sort of reporting, so I try to bring the world of ideas to bear on modern politics and modern events. I just went down to Nashville to look into Bill Frist’s background, and I needed to find books about either Nashville or the South, or the “southern mind.” 

Lucas: What did you read to prepare for the Nashville trip? 

Brooks: I read John Egerton’s The Americanization of Dixie. I went back and read a book I mentioned already, Cavalier and Yankee, which is a favorite of mine. It’s about the cavalier mentality of the Confederacy and its anti-commercial feeling. I have a reasonable knowledge of the Southern Agrarians—I’ll Take My Stand was assigned to me in college. 

I just wrote a piece about why Americans lack class consciousness. There you can go back to Seymour Martin Lipset and his writings on American exceptionalism. Or you can go further back to Puritanism. One of the writers I often turn to is SacvanBercovitch (named after Sacco and Vanzetti). His description of the eschatological framework of the Puritan mind is something I find very applicable to a lot of current public policy debates. 

Lucas: So you believe that ideas from the colonial period still inform American culture?

Brooks: Why does George Bush—who, as he said during the campaign, has no interest in nation-building, who doesn’t have a great interest in history and probably hasn’t read too many books—react to September 11 in such an overtly moralistic way? I’d say it’s because he subconsciously has inherited certain ideas about what America should be and certain religious impulses. And those ideas and impulses are deep and longstanding, as many historians have described them. 

Lucas: Are these the kind of ideas you write about in your forthcoming book, How to Be American? 

Brooks: Essentially the question of the book is: if you drive around your basic fast-growing suburb in America , are these people as shallow as they look? I hope to show that while there are many excesses of materialism and shallowness and complacency, the ideas that, say, Bercovitch talks about, and some of the nobler impulses that Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt talked about, are still alive, if submerged, in these people. 

Lucas: You started your first book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, by writing about the changes you noticed in America when you got back from Europe after working there for several years for the Wall Street Journal. You’ve written elsewhere about the differences between Europeans and Americans. These are differences you’ve experienced first-hand. 

Brooks: I left America a big Europhile, and came back still admiring Europebut feeling much more estranged from it than before I lived there. My two turtles when I was a boy were named Disraeli and Gladstone. My family was Anglophilic, very much in the “think Yiddish act British” style of New York Jewry. When I lived in Brussels for four and a half years I came to see that the mentality really is very different. I felt more like a stranger there than I expected to. 

Lucas: In “Among the Bourgeoisophobes: Why the Europeans and Arabs, Each in Their Own Way, HateAmerica and Israel ,” Weekly Standard (April 15, 2002), you argue that an anti-bourgeois ethos shapes elite Europeans’ ideas about America . Is this a vestige of the aristocratic disdain for ordinary people? 

Brooks: There is definitely a different attitude toward democracy. I would get invited to these conferences at a place called Ditchley Park, which is in Oxfordshire where Churchill spent part of World War II. In attendance were elite diplomats from across Europe, academics and foreign policy people from the States, and a few journalists. You would hear from the European diplomats—and there were also former prime ministers and cabinet ministers—anti-democratic attitudes that you just wouldn’t hear in America , uttered publicly at least. The idea that we can never let the people know about this, we can’t let them vote on this because they’ll get it all wrong. Those are attitudes that I think are prevalent in Europe and just not found in the United States. 

Europeans have more sophisticated public discussions. And frankly a lot of Europeans, particularly the French, write the sort of books I like. Scholars there are less professionalized and what they write is read by the general public. 

But I came away thinking—and maybe this was just Belgium—that  Francis Fukuyama’s “last man” really was to be found in northern Europe; complacent, flat, comfort-oriented lives—not enough work. 

Lucas:  Since Bobos in Paradise [which argues that the American elite of the 1990s successfully merged two sets of values that have historically been at odds: bourgeois and bohemian—hence, “bobo”] you’ve continued to write about the American bourgeoisie, and also its enemies.  I’m thinking of “Among the Bourgeoisophobes,” and also “Patio Man and the Sprawl People:America’s Newest Suburbs,” Weekly Standard (August 12-19, 2002) and “One Nation, Slightly Divisible,”Atlantic Monthly (December 2001). Why is it that Bobos don’t figure very largely in these essays? 

Brooks: I’m sick of them. While promoting the book, actually, I found myself in places like Scottsdale, Arizona, where golf is far more important as a cultural influence than universities. I remember being in Piffin, Ohio, a rural town where a lot of the things I was writing about didn’t touch these people at all. I sort of knew this already, but I came to see more vividly that the slice of America I wrote about in Bobos, the coastal, upper-middle class suburb, is an influential but small part of America. And so since then I’ve tried to do more reporting from rural America, exurban America, and in Nashville, where I just came back from, pretty well-preserved Protestant establishment America, with white-tie balls and country clubs, and rich people who’ve been rich for four generations.

I’ve become incredibly impatient with people who don’t know about these parts of America (which was me only five years ago)—people who don’t know what Pentecostalism is, or don’t know who Tim LaHaye is (whose books have sold 42 million copies). It seems to me you have a responsibility to know your own country. 

Lucas: Do you think that these neglected parts of America have closer ties to the country’s cultural roots?  

Brooks: All the country’s regions have ties to America ’s many different traditions. But if you use the phrase “middle America,” you’re talking about the people who live in rural areas and exurbs. And exurban America is interesting because it’s growing. One of the things that intrigues me is that in the 1990s 90% of the offices that were built in this country were built in exurbs. Whereas in 1979 the vast majority—I think 80%—of the office space in America was in cities. Now it’s almost 50/50. So you have a whole new crowd of people who don’t commute to cities, don’t go to dinner in cities, don’t have any contact with urban life. They live in these fast-growing exurbs, and it’s interesting to know what they’re all about. 

Lucas: Do you think these people are more capable than Bobos of articulating and defending American values? 

Brooks: No, they’re much less capable. They don’t read as much; they don’t listen to NPR; they don’t even watch PBS. The paradox of their lives is that they seek out the pleasures of private life, but because they work so hard and create so many companies and jobs and products, they account for the U.S. economy being so dominant in the world, and therefore arousing hatred, envy, resentment—all sorts of feelings—from people around the world. So while they seek out just private satisfaction, America ’s position in the world means that they’re inescapably drawn to foreign conflicts, as we learned on September 11, 2001. So they get woken up and dragged into politics, which they desperately want to avoid. They’re not inclined or trained or interested in—I’m speaking generally, of course—the wars of ideas and debates about the future of the country. 

Lucas: You mentioned Francis Fukuyama. Since September 11, 2001, intellectuals have waged a modern battle of the books, pitting Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man against Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. What do you make of this? 

Brooks: I used to be a firm Fukuyaman. I was the only person in America, aside from him maybe, who would go around saying his book was absolutely right. The second part of the book is about “the last man,” which as I said is who I found in Brussels. Fukuyama’s intellectual guru, AlexandreKojève, moved to Brusselswhen he decided history was over, which was an act of integrity, if boringness. 

Now I’m a little less convinced that Fukuyama is right. One of things you see across the United States and especially across the world is religious revival being so strong. Philip Jenkins, a historian at PennState, notes in his book The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity that the most successful social idea of the 20th century was Pentecostalism, which started at nothing and now has 400-500 million adherents. According to projections there will be about one billion Pentecostals in the world in 2050. 

Jenkins writes about the rise of Christianity in Latin America and Africa, especially the rise of Protestantism, which is displacing Catholicism in many places. What this shows is that, as Peter Berger argues, the secularization thesis is not true. You have to be a lot more religiously minded when you think about grand politics. You have to be aware of religion when you think about this Fukuyama/Huntington debate. To me it’s not so much a clash of religions but a clash of eschatologies. Saddam Hussein has one vision of how history ends, Osama bin Laden has another, and many Americans share a vision of how history ends—with the United States as the last, best hope on earth leading the whole world to democracy. 

Lucas: In much of your work you suggest that big changes have recently happened or are happening right now. How do you think future historians will describe our era? 

Brooks: One of the things I think future scholars will emphasize is the tremendous wave of democratization throughout the world. I think there were 10 multi-party democracies in the world at the turn of the 20th century, and now there are 120 real democracies and 170 multi-party nations, 33 new democracies in the last 20 years. 

I think that our look at the world does not take into account our victory in the Cold War. When historians look back on this era that will be a tremendous victory, and I think we’re either too close to it or don’t really understand what it means. We’re shaped more by World War II and Vietnam than our victory in the Cold War. 

Historians will also focus on the unprecedented mass affluence of the country. When you go to places like DouglasCounty or LoudounCounty or Henderson, Nevada, they’re carving golf courses out of the desert, and these places are huge. Mesa, Arizona, has more people living in it than live in St. Louis, Minneapolis, or Cincinnati. That’s the emergence of a new sort of person. And we really haven’t caught up with that.  END 

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Computers, Visualization, and the Representation of History
by David J. Staley 

I have yet to discover any philosopher of history who directly explains why serious history must be written history. Instead, many philosophers of history—if they discuss the issue at all—equate serious history with written history as an axiom, a first principle upon which the rest of the edifice of our discipline is built. The philosopher and historian Michael Stanford has been perhaps the most eloquent about this assumption. In The Nature of Historical Knowledge Stanford writes that “history, like poetry and song, is a way of using language.” In an otherwise insightful analysis of historical methods, Stanford provides no other explanation for why this is so. “Whether spoken or written,” he argues, a historical work “is a construction in words.”[2] Stanford does not explain why history is a construction in words; he just asserts that it is. 

Our reasons for preferring writing over visual representation are rooted in the same cultural assumptions that have undergirded much of modern Western thought, assumptions that historians have had little occasion to question: We believe that words and writing represent the highest form of thought. The arrival of the printing press hastened the creation of the “Gutenberg Galaxy,” a cultural environment wherein the ability to write and read the printed word became the hallmark of scholarship and the educated person. The modern discipline of history was forged during this “Gutenberg” period. Long before Ranke established our current practices, history was viewed as a branch of literature. As Francis Haskell has chronicled, while visual images such as paintings, sculpture, and monuments were at one time a common method for representing the past, modern historians after the Renaissance dismissed these, confining them to the ranks of antiquarians.[3] In establishing the professional discipline of history, Ranke emphasized immersion in the sources, meaning the written documents found in the state archives. That writing was associated with science, scholarship, and the highest level of thought would probably have been self-evident to any 19th-century historian. 

This attitude persists among historians at the beginning of the 21st century. While ours is a culture awash in images—from television, magazines, cinema, billboards, newspapers, video games, and now the Internet—historians continue to remain committed to the written word. Our educational institutions enshrine these beliefs. One need only note that reading and writing are considered core cognitive competencies, whereas facility with images is deemed an enrichment experience, something that can be easily cut when budgets get too tight. If “Johnny can’t read,” politicians, business leaders, and concerned parents lament the state of our schools and fret about Johnny’s competitiveness in the marketplace. If “Johnny can’t draw,” no one bats an eye. Perhaps it is the very ubiquity of images that explains this attitude: that images are associated with mass culture and a “dumbed down” society. Images are something little kids look at before they learn to read the words. Wayward teenagers avoid reading the novel by seeking out “the movie version.” In emphasizing graphics over prose, newspapers such as USA Today appeal to the lowest common denominator. These largely unexamined cultural assumptions might explain why historians insist history must be written. While it is true that some historians study images—such as art historians and historians of popular culture—and while it is true that visual primary sources are becoming increasingly common in historical scholarship, we write about images. Historians do not choose to communicate through images. 

Historians uncritically adhere to the written word despite the limitations of that medium of communication. Where I have found no definitive statement from a philosopher of history concerning the necessity of writing, I have found more direct evidence for the problems of writing as a medium for representing the past. In an early 19th-century essay, Thomas Carlyle wrote about how difficult it was to write about causation in history:

The most gifted man can observe, still more can record, only the series of his own impressions; his observation, therefore . . . must be successive, while the things done were often simultaneous; the things done were not in a series, but in a group. It is not in acted, as it is in written History: actual events are nowise so simply related to each other as parent and offspring are; every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events, prior or contemporaneous, and will in its turn combine with all others to give birth to new: it is an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements. And this Chaos . . . is what the historian will depict, and scientifically gauge, we may say, by threading it with single lines of a few els in length! For as all Action is, by nature, to be figured as extended in breadth and in depth, as well as in length . . . so all Narrative is, by its very nature, of only one dimension; only travels forward towards one, or towards successive points; Narrative is linear, Action is solid.[4]

More recently, John D. Hicks expressed his frustration with writing as a medium for conveying historical narrative. “All historical writing,” he observes,

is a kind of compromise between topical and chronological treatment; how far should he go with one subject before he takes up another? And what sequence can he follow that will least confuse the students  who so regularly assume that whatever comes earlier in the book happened before whatever comes later? And how can he guard against introducing a subject, following it halfway through, then dropping it for chronological reasons and forgetting to return to it? Many times I have pointed out to my students how much simpler it would be if historical synthesis could follow the example of a symphony orchestra, with the various instruments, each representing some significant developments, all blended together to produce a harmonious whole. Instead, the historian has to do the best he can to convey his enormously complicated message on a single instrument that can produce only one tone at a time.[5]

Although both Carlyle and Hicks expressed frustration with the written word as a medium for representing the past, neither sought an alternative medium. As Hicks says, historians must “do the best we can” with the written word. 

When we write, we line up words in sequential order, even when the reality we are representing does not line up so sequentially. The effect is something like trying to translate all the information contained in a map into written prose. Even as they tend to dismiss other forms of visual information, most historians would agree that maps are useful to our work, and would probably admit a map as a “serious” form of history. Maps are useful because they efficiently arrange information in a two-dimensional space. Now, imagine trying to write out all that information as a sequence of words: “Paris is west of Berlinand north of Madrid and south of London, located on the Seine which winds from . . . .” There are any number of cases where a map-like display of the past would convey historical knowledge better than a written account, because the historical reality historians wish to represent is often made up of events occurring at once simultaneously, chronologically, and topically. Instead of “doing the best we can” with writing, perhaps historians might seek out a more appropriate medium of communication. 

Many of the events of the past, as Carlyle observed, might be better understood as a three-dimensional structure extending in breadth and depth as well as length. Think of complex historical phenomena like the genesis of revolutions, the causes of the First World War, or the rise of consumer culture. The events that made up these historical phenomena did not occur one at a time, like a line of words, but more like the acoustic space of a symphony, with events occurring simultaneously, located in a variety of places, moving at different rhythms of time. The medium of writing forces us to reduce this three-dimensional (or even four-dimensional) structure into a one-dimensional sequential line of words. 

Instead, why not employ a medium of representation that retains more of this multidimensionality? Maps would seem a natural medium for historians, but there are many other visual forms that would retain multi-dimensional structure. In his Outline of World History, H.G. Wells commissioned the artist J.F. Horrabin to design illustrations and charts. One chart in particular highlights the elegance and efficiency of a visualization to convey historical information: 

In this diagram, time is represented along the x-axis, and geographic space is placed along the y-axis. Within the resulting space, Horrabin has placed notable events. Note how we can watch the rise and fall of the Roman Empire in this image, which is represented as a steadily increasing area. Note how this area expands in size as the empire grows both westward and eastward. Now, look to the upper right portion of the image and notice the advance of the Huns who, in the year 220 A.D. are “deflected” by the Great Wall of China. The movement of the Huns is depicted as a line, which moves inexorably westward, eventually “piercing” the Roman Empire and taking a “chunk” out of it. Horrabin, reflecting the historiography of the early 20th century, did not choose to represent the Han Empire in a similar fashion, but he easily could have done so. Moreover, he might have depicted interactions between Rome and China through, say, a depiction of the Silk Road. Questions of interpretation aside, this relational graph conveys multiple dimensions of historical information, in a manner similar to a geographic map. Note how your eye moves around the image, at once grasping the whole while zooming in on specific parts. This visualization retains more of the simultaneity and whole/part structures that are linearized in a written account. 

Imagine this image updated in a digital environment. We could add a third dimension along a z-axis, representing some other thematic dimension, as Hicks would have wanted. The resulting three-dimensional space would feature a “volume” that represents the rise and fall of Rome, with another volume reflecting its spatial/temporal/thematic relationship with Han China. In such a three-dimensional digital space, we could rotate the image, viewing in from many angles and perspectives. A viewer could also “fly around” inside the space, “zooming in” on some portion of the space, alighting somewhere within the volume, thereby revealing new levels of information. The volume itself could be filled with representations of events, people, and other historical phenomenon, such as a Hadrian’s Wall to mirror the Great Wall. After zooming into the details, we could then zoom back out to reveal the macro-level structure of the whole once again. Instead of a linear, one-dimensional written narrative, this visual image would be an efficient way to visualize the multidimensionality of the past. 

Like geographic information systems (GIS) maps, the digital information space I have described above could be easily produced right now; it is not the stuff of science fiction. In fact, there are historians and social scientists who are currently experimenting with such representations.  The China Historical GIS Project at Harvard (http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/) is an extensive collection of databases for much of Chinese history, which are then geo-referenced. The resulting GIS maps reveal patterns in the data that would not have been apparent had the data remained in database form. The historian John Bonnett has recreated 19th-century Ottawa using digital modeling techniques.  Most of the buildings have long since been razed, but by using fire insurance records, contemporary photographs, written documents, and other primary sources, Bonnett has been able to “rebuild” many of the buildings in silico. It may be possible in the near future to allow a viewer to “walk through” the city using virtual reality, providing a multidimensional experience that would be difficult to capture in a written account.[6] Digital visualizations need not make reference to physical spaces. The sociologist Lothar Krempel “maps” social networks and relationships as abstract structural patterns (http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/~lk/netvis.html). Spheres of differing size and color represent social actors, whose relationships to and influence upon each other are depicted as lines of varying width and color. The resulting digital “tinker toys” depict complex social relations; Krempel has so far depicted gift exchange patterns among the !Khung, the patterns of influence flowing among German research institutes, universities, and corporations, and the structure of world trade. These visualizations capture more of the Chaos of Being than what can be represented in writing.

A historical work is a representation, not the thing represented. Why, then, do historians choose one form of representation (the written word) over the many other forms of representation? Digital visualizations provide historians useful and evocative possibilities for representing the simultaneity, multidimensionality, and holistic structures of the past. I envision a day when dissertation committees—and journal editors and academic publishers—accept a visualization in lieu of a written document. 
David J. Staley is an assistant professor of history and the director of grants at Heidelberg College in Tiffin,Ohio. He is the author of Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technologies Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past (M.E. Sharpe, 2003) and is the executive director (elect) of the American Association for History and Computing (AAHC). He is a series editor for the AAHC/M.E. Sharpe book series “History, the Humanities, and New Technology,” and is currently at work designing a visualization comparing imperialism and globalization and is preparing a manuscript analyzing the visualizations in William McNeill’s The Rise of the West. 

In January 1955 Michael Roberts delivered his inaugural lecture, “The Military Revolution, 1560-1660,” at the University of Belfast. Roberts argued that the changes wrought by firearms and the tactical reforms of Maurice of Nassau and GustavusAdolphus led to larger, more disciplined, and more expensive standing armies. Supporting these armies necessitated bureaucratic mechanisms that led to more centralized and complex governments. Put simply, late 16th-century tactical reforms helped to bring about the modern nation-state. Almost as soon as it was published in 1956, Roberts’s thesis was incorporated into accounts of early modern military and political history. In 1976, however, Geoffrey Parker modified the original formulation of the Military Revolution by calling attention to the importance of siege warfare in the 16th century. The fortifications developed to resist artillery assault first in Italy and then all over Europe were the real keys to the Military Revolution and were ultimately responsible for the increased size of European armies. In 1988 Parker expanded the concept of the Military Revolution to include naval warfare and the experience of European militaries in colonial settings with the publication of The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500 – 1800, 3rd ed. (CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000). The overseas expansion of Europe, Parker argued, was primarily a function of its superior armies and fleets. The Military Revolution debate continued through the 1990s with Jeremy Black and Clifford J. Rogers, among others, contributing major critiques. 

While historians debated the nature and extent of the Military Revolution in early modern Europe, advances in weapons systems such as those showcased in the 1991 Gulf War were prompting military experts to proclaim the emergence of a “revolution in military affairs” (RMA). In the following forum, several prominent military historians weigh in on both the historiographical and policy debates involved with these military revolutions of yesteryear and today. Geoffrey Parker brings the Military Revolution debate up to date by addressing Jeremy Black’s more recent concerns as well as discussing the relevance of historical understanding to contemporary policy matters. Black, along with Dennis Showalter and Jeffrey Clarke, respond, followed by Parker’s concluding reply. 

Military Revolutions, Past and Present[1]
by Geoffrey Parker

A couple of years ago, a friend and I were cruising the shelves of London University’s magnificent bookstore, Dillons (now merged into Waterstones), in which “History” occupied an entire floor. After passing “World History,” “European History,” and “Women’s History,” we lingered over “Military History” (reassuringly large), and then found ourselves in front of some shelves labeled “Black History.” “Oh no!” my friend exclaimed. “Not an entire section filled with Jeremy’s books!” 

Jeremy Black has certainly been prolific. He has 213 entries to his credit in the current bibliography of the Royal Historical Society. Last summer one of his students hosted a party for him, entitled “Convergence,” to mark the fact that the number of books he has written equals his age. Several of them deal with military history in general and a few with military revolutions in particular. Most recently, in War: Past, Present & Future, Black argues that military revolutions are not driven by research and technology, as some of us had supposed, but rather stem primarily from “military organization”:

“Organization” can be understood in a double sense: first, the explicit organization of the military—unit and command structures—and second, organization as an aspect of, and intersection and interaction with, wider social patterns and practices, leading to the social systematization of organized force.[2]

Black criticizes historians like me who have argued that an important military revolution, based on technology and research, occurred in early modern Europe. On the one hand, he claims, we fail to offer empirical research, instead “employing individual cases as illustrations more than evidence”;on the other, he dismisses early modern Europe’s Military Revolution as a chimera. While acknowledging that “Europeans created the first global empires” in the 16th and 17th centuries, Black denies that these empires were the fruits of a “technologically driven Military Revolution.” Furthermore, he even denies that these empires exercised military dominance over the rest of the world’s peoples.[3]

These denials overlook three important developments that took place between 1500 and 1650. First, superior military technology and combat effectiveness enabled relatively small groups of Spaniards to dominate thousands of square miles of Central and South America; second, those same assets enabled equally small groups of Russians to create the largest state on earth; finally, several groups of Western Europeans achieved mastery over the world’s oceans thanks to a lethal combination of “guns and sails” devised by shipwrights along Europe’s Atlantic coast.[4]

I contend that a military revolution did occur in early modern Europe; that it reflected advances in research and technology, not “military organization”; and that it played a crucial role in the rise of the West . . . .

Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History at Ohio State University. He is author or editor of thirty-one books, including the award-winning The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988; rev. ed., 1996), which has been tranlsated into Chinese, French, German, Indian, Japanese, and Spanish. 

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On Diversity and Military History
by Jeremy Black

Geoffrey Parker correctly draws attention to our different views on early-modern warfare, ones I have discussed in European Warfare, 1494-1660 (2002), but I suspect there are more fundamental differences that repay consideration. I am wary about meta-narratives and cautious about paradigms, mono-causal explanations, and much of the explanatory culture of long-term military history. My emphasis is on diversity and on being cautious in adducing characteristics and explanations. Thus, in the series of books that accompany War: Past, Present and Future—European Warfare, 1494-1660 (2002), European Warfare, 1660-1815 (1994), Western Warfare, 1775-1882 (2001), Warfare in the Western World, 1882-1975 (2002), and War in the New Century (2001)—there is a stress on diversity within both the West and the Rest . . . .

Jeremy Black is professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is the author of America as a Military Power, 1775-1865 (Praeger, 2002). 

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