Book Reviews 849

The Military Revolution: Military Innovations and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, Geoffrey Parker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), xvii + 234 pp., $15.00; $29.95.

Professor Parker chose as the theme for his 1984 Lees Knowles lectures, an exploration of Michael Roberts’s concept that the period 1550-1650 witnessed a ‘military revolution’. Although Parker considers that Roberts’ concept is not without flaws (it ignored naval warfare, for example) he believes the idea basically sound. The progress of European military methods ‘not only transformed the conduct of war at home but also decisively accelerated the progress of Europe’s expansion overseas’ (pp. 3-5, 154). As Western overseas expansion rested ultimately on military power, Professor Parker extends Roberts’s concept beyond Europe and contends that the ‘military revolution’ provided an important qualitative differential which allowed Western powers to shatter the strength of indigenous empires. Between 1500-1750 the world’s ‘first truly global empires’ sprang up. They covered 35 per cent of the world’s surface (as opposed to 84 per cent in 1914). This book is a lively and authoritative account of how the Europeans conquered that initial 35 per cent. University undergraduates will find Parker’s book invaluable (as will any reader with a serious interest in this subject). One of its most convenient features is a very full set of footnotes indicating areas of historiographical debate, with a separate index of authors cited.

At the heart of this notion of a ‘military revolution’ lies a paradox which Parker does not satisfactorily resolve. He explains that the stalemate of fifteenth century warfare was shattered by the development of siege artillery. High, exposed castle walls could not withstand steady bombardment. Warfare in the field was also transformed by the use of firearms (which unlike the longbow or crossbow required little training). Weapons reliant on shock (the physical impact of the charge, like swords or halberds) lost their efficacy. Yet this did not lead to the supremacy of the offensive but rather to a balance between the defensive and the offensive. Fortifications now assumed the shape of the trace italienne, which was lower and bulkier and more resistant to bombardment. Sieges still remained immensely important in warfare despite the great increase in the size of armies (Charles V commanded some 150,000 men during the siege of Metz in 1552) and their greatly enhanced firepower. A large percentage of this extra manpower was distributed to garrison towns, conquered provinces and subordinate theatres. Warfare, therefore, remained indecisive. The administrative and financial burden required to keep these forces in the field was a grave strain on the organisation of the early modern state. These exertions were rewarded with results that were less than decisive. As Parker observes, ‘The early modern states may have lacked the resources to wage a war of extermination; but they could certainly keep on fighting with ever-larger armies, often on more than one front and sometimes overseas, for years at a time’ (p. 46). The object was attritional-even for commanders with the ardent spirit of a Gustavus Adolphus. Thus, how can a ‘revolution’ in military methods fail to break the deadlock but only confirm it?

Warfare became a test of financial as well as military power. Contractors, like Wallenstein, flourished (though they could not always be relied upon to provide artillery). Veterans, like those of the Spanish Army of Flanders, were the backbone of armies and held them together under the strain of heavy casualties and desertion. In 1576 the strength of the Army of Flanders declined from 60,000 men in June to a mere 11,000 in November. But however ingenious the solutions to these organisational obstacles, they could not overcome the strategic limitations of movement and communications inherent in the technology of the period. ‘Even with increased manpower, the political objectives of governments at war were still unattainable with the limited military strategies available’. Thus, Parker concludes of the ‘military revolution’, ‘ The states of early modern Europe had discovered how to supply large armies but not how to lead them to victory’ (p. 80). But

850 Book Reviews

is this a ‘revolution’? It is significant, too, that in Parker’s very brief reflections on the eighteenth century, he notes that it was improvements in logistics that were the vital ingredients in the victories of Frederick the Great, though his strategy was still one of attrition rather than annihilation (pp. 14749). The later eighteenth century he regards as the ‘culmination’ of the ‘military revolution’.

One wonders whether a certain degree of terminological inexactitude lurks in this categorisation. Warfare in the later eighteenth century witnessed three ‘transformations’, namely, the use of light infantry, light artillery, and divisional organisation which rendered strategy more flexible. Here lies the germ of a true ‘revolution’ in warfare. The developments of the early modern period were not so much revolutionary as evolutionary, and made possible the Napoleonic apogee of a system of warfare which was to break down slowly under the influence of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century.

The earlier developments were nonetheless significant. As the Napoleonic imperium of 1804-14 demonstrated, a true revolutionin warfare led to one state totally dominating the European heartland. Interest in overseas expansion may have taken a quite different direction had this occurred earlier. The qualitative differential secured by Europeans was sufficient to gain bridge-heads on the coastal littorals of indigenous empires. This superiority was manifest in the increase in naval firepower (Turkish copies of European guns were poor quality by comparison); and on land, the superior discipline of European forces compensated for a deficiency in numbers. The armies of the Mogul emperor, for instance, were huge ‘aggregations of individual heroic warriors’ (p. 130). Thus by the end of the eighteenth century the various European powers dominated the Americas, Africa and the Near East; they required the Industrial Revolution to exert their hegemony over the Far East in the nineteenth century. In tracing these developments Professor Parker is a stimulating and knowledgeable guide. He may not persuade us completely but the wealth of his learning is immensely impressive. There can be no better introduction to the scholarly debate over the place of war in the early modern world than his lucidly written and imaginatively illustrated history.

King’s College, London Brian Holden Reid

Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623-1677, Jonathan Scott, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), xii +

258 pp., 527.50, cloth.

In 1985 Blair Worden offered a comprehensive assessment of Algernon Sidney in which he doubted that there were fifty people alive who had an accurate sense of Sidney’s life.’ It is not that Sidney, himself, has been forgotten. His name, a sense of his achievement, and something of his reputation as a Whig martyr have endured, even if the trajectory of that reputation has for a long time been in decline. Sidney, after all, is still remembered for his posthumously published Discourses Concerning Government; for his famous entry in the signature book of the University of Copenhagen: ‘this hand, always an enemy to tyrants, seeks a little peace under liberty’; and for his execution in 1683 on a legally questionable, if not wholly insupportable, charge of treason. The problem is rather that the historical Sidney has been largely obscured. Whig mythology has recruited him to the cause of constitutional preservation and moderate reform, while Sidney, himself, was largely responsible for self-consciously fashioning his own image as an uncompromising protestant patriot. The reality, however, as Jonathan Scott suggests, is otherwise. Sidney ‘was clearly one of the most passionate and bellicose rebels of his age’ (p. 3), not ‘the