War by Gwynne Dyer

Author:Gwynne Dyer [Dyer, Gwynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-36901-7
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2005-06-28T16:00:00+00:00

A very big travelling circus, or perhaps an eighteenth-century army on campaign. The Encampment of the Austrian Army, Georg Balthasar Probst.

———

It was the development of ocean-going sailing ships, the biggest and most complex machines men had ever built, that enabled the Europeans to establish their control over the peoples of the Americas during the first period of colonial expansion, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the conquest of the western hemisphere did not require technology and organization of a very high order. The array of epidemic diseases spawned in the crowded towns and cities of Eurasia over ten thousand years devastated the native populations even before a shot was fired, the Europeans’ horses overawed them, and the methodical Eurasian ruthlessness of the invaders shocked them into passivity. But any other civilized domain—the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, the Mogul Empire in India, or the Chinese Empire—would have had as little difficulty in subjugating the people of the Americas if they had possessed the ships and the commercial drive to take them there. As late as 1683, indeed, the military technology and organization of the Muslim world was still roughly comparable to that of Christian Europe, and an Ottoman army was able to besiege Vienna, more than halfway from Istanbul to Paris.

At that point, it was also still true that European power in other parts of Eurasia rarely extended inland beyond the range of a cannon shot: their ships were unbeatable, but their armies were less so. Nor did the technology of weapons change appreciably in the following century and a quarter. The flintlock muskets used at the battle of Blenheim in 1704 differed hardly at all from those employed by European armies of the 1830s, and the same applied to field artillery, warships, and almost every other category of weapon. But the rigid discipline and ruthlessly efficient organization that the Europeans brought to the use of these weapons, backed by their rapidly growing wealth, could not be matched by their opponents elsewhere. By the eighteenth century other parts of the civilized world were beginning to fall under European rule: the British conquered most of India, and the Ottoman borders began to contract under Austrian and Russian pressure.

To a European of the last generation before the French Revolution, therefore, war would have seemed a bearable evil—and perhaps even a beneficial phenomenon, on balance, since Europe’s proficiency in the modern art of war was rapidly giving it the mastery of the whole world at a relatively low cost in money and lives. The incessant wars within Europe itself could not be seen in the same cheerful light, but at least they were well contained. A few areas that had the misfortune to constitute some sort of military crossroads took a severe beating from time to time (the province of Pomerania suffered seventy thousand civilian deaths, one-fifth of the population, during the Seven Years War),20 but usually the suffering caused by war fell mainly on the soldiers, who lived a life apart from civil society.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.