The Pursuit of Power

Historian William H. McNeill examines the reciprocal relationship between society, technology and armed forces, offering broad coverage and specific treatment of historiographical and historical debates. His survey includes early Chinese commercialization, the rise of the West, the managerial revolution sparked by World War I and elaborated by World War II, and the post-1945 nuclear arms race, among other subjects.
Ten chapters proceed chronologically from antiquity to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks of the 1970s. While the opening chapters are global in approach and cover several centuries, McNeill’s focus eventually narrows temporally and geographically to Western Europe and specifically Great Britain, France, Prussia, Germany and Russia. These focused chapters analyze historical processes between 1600 and 1945, such as the “bureaucratization of violence” and the “industrialization of war.”
In the two opening chapters, McNeill describes the “command societies” of antiquity and explains why China did not become a world imperial power before 1500. Command-societies conditioned citizens to obey orders from social superiors. Its rulers collected taxes, prosecuted wars, and limited commercial relations by command. Command-societies limited commerce, McNeill suggests, because the sovereign subordinated the merchant classes and limited technical and military innovation. In “free” societies, by comparison, the logic of supply and demand and profit allowed flourishing commercial relations. The principle difference between China and Europe was that China remained a command society that ultimately squashed commercial development while European polities facilitated a commercial explosion. For example, the Chinese commercial boom circa 1000 A.D. had no analogue in the West. Although China possessed nascent coal and metalworking industries and an ocean-going fleet capable of reaching East Africa, its governing Confucian bureaucrats were suspicious of private capital accumulation and military aggrandizement. Hence, the Ming Dynasty suspended naval construction, banned foreign expeditions, and constrained vital industries beginning in the 1420s.
The Chinese commercial boom constitutes the heart of McNeill’s thesis that commercialization started in China, diffused among other polities, and those recipients organized their societies around the pursuit of private self-interest and profit seeking first in the Mediterranean and later throughout the European continent. By modeling their societies around the market, Italian city-states inaugurated a new art of war. Italian entrepôts pioneered the practice of replacing traditional civilian militias with hired professional soldiers. Hired professionals allowed city-states to reserve their domestic population for commercial labor. Taxes then paid for armed companies who, in turn, pumped money back into the system and rejuvenated the tax base. McNeill argues that commerce gradually freed European powers from the ancient constraints of scarce manpower and supply. Force and wealth became coterminous and self-reinforcing.
McNeill contends that the reciprocal relationship between technology, commerce, and armed forces produced increasingly sophisticated modern armaments and armies in Europe after 1600. This process was mitigated by cultural factors that produced varying levels of inventiveness among European powers. Wars constituted the primary vehicle for technical innovation. The Thirty Years War brought into fruition a modern army: drilled, disciplined, outfitted with standardized equipment, and controlled by a military bureaucracy devoted to the sovereign. McNeill also persuasively argues that the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars catalyzed the British industrial revolution because British wartime demands for armaments and goods encouraged profound growth in metalworking and related core industries.
McNeill’s final chapters illustrate how the industrialization of war provoked a continual security dilemma in Europe as nations sought new technologies to maintain parity between armed forces. Private firms made effective suppliers of military accouterment. European industries adopted the “American System” of interchangeable parts that could, within a few years, mass-produce and outfit an entire European army with the latest firearm. McNeill dates the modern “military-industrial complex” to the 1884 British Naval Scare. The British approved large naval appropriations to both modernize the Royal Navy and stimulate employment during an economic depression. Interest groups emerged that lobbied Parliament for enlarged naval appropriations bills that, in turn, sparked further technological change that made older ships obsolete. Outdated ships needed still larger appropriations for the next round of renovation. This became self-reinforcing when technologies sparked foreign inventiveness. A “Red Queen” effect emerged as nations spent more to maintain political equilibrium—it continues today.
McNeill concludes with a fitting survey of the post-1945 nuclear arms race that predicts either future global annihilation or the rise of a utopian global imperial order that stifles nuclear proliferation and ends the current security dilemma. Overall, McNeill’s superb military history persuasively demonstrates why historians cannot divorce the military from its social and cultural background, and suggests the Cold War has long historical precedents in European history.