Chapter 4 The Nineteenth Century, 1: A Strategic view

Introduction: the reach of strategic history

*Concert of Europe (1814-15) response to the wars of French revolution and
Empire
*In the mid-century (1854-1871) the succession of wars between great powers
entirely restructured the balance of power in Europe.
*Fallacy of benign transformation in international politics- Paul Schroeder
-change in the assumptions and practices in international relations
-identify what they see as evidence of progress away from humankinds
seemingly eternal war- prone condition

A violent century
*19th century violent century
-registered profound political, social, technological, economic and cultural change
*Inter alia polities and their societies express themselves in the way they prepare
for and wage war
*The question of how globalization and innovation will affect strategic history arises

Four Phases of nineteenth century in strategic context:

1) Phase One: 1815-54: These 39 years saw the decline, fall but continuing residual
half-life of the so-called Concert of Europe that emerged from the Vienna
Settlement of 1814.
2) Phase Two: 1854-71: intermittent warfare between isolated pairs of great powers
in which Russia was opposed by France and UK. This led to the creation of
unified Italy and greater significance to united Germany.
-victory of the North in the American civil war (1861-5) had strategic
implications
3) Phase Three: 1871-1890: new Imperial Germany poses lethal threat to the
ideas and practices of international order associated with Concert Europe
-Machiavelli and Otto von Bismarck
4) Phase Four: 1890-1914: German Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II does not have
team players that can and has an intention in a variant Concert diplomacy.
-characterized by the creation and extension of fixed rival alliance
systems and by the conduct of competitions in both land and naval
armaments.

*Strategic history of Europe must be the focus during this period, since Europe
politics were world politics. This is not to say forget warfare in Asia and Africa.
*1861-1865 bloodiest war in America
*U.S. was actively strategically engaged in hostilities with a range of tribes of
native Americans on its internal frontiers.
*Relative to the 20th century, there is no general war in the 19 th century
*Chinese contribution to strategic history: Rebellion against the Manchu
Dynasty in favour of Han dynasty
- bloodiest war in 19th cen. (1850-1864)
-most uncivil civil war in China
-attempted to fuse Confucianism and Christianity
*Taiping Rebellion protracted strategic happening
*Industrial Revolution is considered primarily with a view to the unwrapping 19 th
centurys strategic consequences and implication

Implications of the Industrial Revolution: the strategic tale

*Routinization of invention Clausewitz argued that it had happen in the second
quarter of the 19th cen.
1830s and 1840s material progress in form of technological invention and
industrial process resting upon scientific discovery
1850s strategic history was impacted noticeably by the challenge of coping
with novel technological context
*Revolution as a process of diverse cumulative discovery and manufacture which
continues to this day

3 revolutions
Introduction of Steam power by James Watt in 1764 a revolution fuelled
by coal and capable of producing steel
Invention of internal combustion engine by Gottlieb Daimler in 1885-6
the use of oil as source of power, together with the taming and
exploitation of electricity.
Nuclear energy, plastics and electronics in 1930s
*According to John Terraine, a military historian, a process of emergence,
dominance decline and fall is apparent. There are no fixed dates; elements of all
three Revolutions operate today.

Grand theory of Military Revolution (MR) argues that since 17th revolution
there have been just six truly profound revolutions either in warfare itself or in the
most critical context of warfare.

1. The invention and the rise of the modern state in the seventeenth
century consequence of the first modern MR.
- Historians disagree over the issue of whether the emergence of the state as
we know it is the product mainly of military necessity, or whether a monopoly of
effective military power is more the consequence than the cause of the rise of
the state.

2. The French Revolution invented the modern concept of nation

state.
- postulated the radical notion that people were citizens, not subjects, and
that they had an obligation, a duty as the price of their rights, to defend their
nation.

3. The Industrial Revolution The material character of this revolution has

shifted several times since the age of steam and coal and steel, but it
initiated a process of scientic, technological and industrial
manufacturing, advance that has never halted or even noticeably slowed.
- military revolution sparked and sustained by industrialization

4. The Military Revolution of World War I modern warfare

 - This military revolution was mandated by the strategic context
created by the previous, but still authoritative, MRs.
- In World War I the belligerents were centralized and fairly efficient states,
which ruled over societies of variably patriotic citizen-subjects, with the products
of unevenly mature industrial infrastructures.

5. The Nuclear Revolution of the 1940s and 1950s this revolution

could not be repealed. It could only be accepted and, if possible, tamed and
exploited for national and international security.

6. The Information Revolution of the 1980s to the present. a process

rather than an event or episode.
- 1980s are chosen for convenience and strategic plausibility, as well
as because they marked some dramatic changes.
-This latest promoter of military revolution has in common with all the
rest the defining feature that it is unavoidable.

*7. The Cultural Revolution under way in the Islamic world (this may
be added as the seventh to the original 6 MRs.)
-This revolution in the strategic implications of faith exploits industrial
and information technology, and may find employment for the products of the
nuclear revolution, but it is occurring independent of technology.
-The dominant character of contemporary warfare is highly irregular,
and therefore asymmetrical.
*Industrial Revolution was one in a short series of mighty upheavals that shaped
and reshaped modern strategic history.
- began in Britain in late 18th cen.
- It changed almost everything about war and warfare, except for the nature
of those phenomena and possibly the principles
- in its contemporary guise as the Information Revolution
* General war that erupted in 1914 took the form that it did because of the political,
social and material conditions that were products of the rise of national sentiment
and the process of industrialization.

*Industrialization led to increasing urbanization. The latter was a great matter of

concern to the soldiers and the politicians.
Population as determinative to the outcome of war
* The revolution in the use of coal to produce the steam which enabled the mass
production of iron and then steel delivered, pre-eminently, the railway and the
steamship.
- Both had enormous strategic implications.
-Troops could be moved rapidly for the first time.
-They could be moved in large numbers, and then sustained logistically.
* Study of the strategic inuence of the rise of rail power, written by Edwin A.
Pratt in 1916, had this to say about the extraordinary meaning of the railway for the
American Civil War.
*Industrial revolution allowed for the standardized mass production by machine
tools of the equipment and weapons with interchangeable parts in quantities that
large armies must have.
* The invention in 1812 of a safe and reliable means of preserving food by the
process of heat sterilization and canning had profound implications for military
logistics. More campaigns in history have been undone by hunger and its
consequences than by the combat skills of cunning and determined foes.
* Industrial Revolution was its success in exploiting electrical impulses for
communications.
Samuel Morse electric telegraph (1837)

Conclusions
*A great war is a great railway war.
*The totality of the great wars of the twentieth century was feasible only
because of the marriage of mass manufacture and surplus food to a rise in
national sentiment almost everywhere.

Key points (p. 60)

1. The period 18151914 was not a century of peace; rather, it was only a century
that did not register a general European war.
2. The Industrial Revolution introduced a routinization of the process of invention.
Strategists were challenged to understand the implications of the new technologies
that appeared at a near-frenetic pace.
3. The Industrial Revolution was one of the six (or seven) great military revolutions
in modern strategic history.
4. The signature innovations of the Industrial Revolution were the railway and the
steamship. Both posed novel risks and opportunities for strategists.
5. The invention of the electric telegraph revolutionized civilian and military
communication.
6. The character of World War I was directly attributable to the consequences of the
French and Industrial revolutions. Those revolutions were the vital enablers of
totalwar.