European Warfare, 1660-1815

Warfare and History

by Jeremy Black

In this incisive study, Jeremy Black presents a wide-ranging analysis of European land and naval warfare from the time of the military revolution of the mid-seventeenth century to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Focusing not only on warfare in Europe but also on the complex conflicts that involved European states outside Europe (such as the British victories over the French in North America and India), Black assesses the conduct, cost, and consequences of European wars for major and minor powers.

Genres: History, Military History, Military Fiction, Nonfiction, 18th Century, Research

288 pages, Hardcover

First published June 30, 1994

About the author

Jeremy Black is an English historian, who was formerly a professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.
Black is the author of over 180 books, principally but not exclusively on 18th-century British politics and international relations, and has been described by one commentator as "the most prolific historical scholar of our age". He has published on military and political history, including Warfare in the Western World, 1882–1975 (2001) and The World in the Twentieth Century (2002).

Reviews

[August · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good introduction to European military history, and as an introduction it serves its purpose well. More experienced readers however will note that certain description of military trends would be familiar, if not slightly cliche: a strange yet apt description of my experience reading this book.

While clearly grounded in an extensive reading of the available literature, certain tropes emerge from the reading that will be very familiar to military history buffs: Mahanite grand strategy and the tactics of the carronade allowed the British to rule of the waves versus the anemic and comparatively unsuccessful French guerre de course; the Russian Army of Peter the Great and his successors were notable not so much for their discipline and material advances as for their size and fearsome reputation; advances in rifling technology demonstrated their most developed use in the American wars, etc.

What does stand out is Professor Black’s emphasis on the role of communities and national institutions over and above the purely technological-deterministic perspectives of the writers he positions this book as a response to, particularly, that school of military history which emphasizes the role of the 1550 -1630 and the development of the ‘infantry revolution’ as the main source of historical ‘pressure’ that created the early-modern (European) state.

Much of the book was concerned with tracing the historical development of military trends, technologies and concepts such as the state of military research in the 19th century, the development of tactics, strategy and grand strategy, and the interconnectedness of these trends. Ultimately, however, what results from the treatment is a vindication of the thesis — that technological pressure molded the response of the belligerents impacting both their fighting and their thinking — with some modification as ultimately these changes emerged /as a consequence of technology/—that, in fact, tactics and the institutions of war emerged as a way to cope with the development of novel technologies and institutions (such as Prussian drill) imposed on the innovator by the victorious enemy.

One interesting theme that emerged out of the author’s premise was the extension of the discussion of the ‘infantry revolution,’ to include the role of the ‘East’ in the development of European Military Science. An important insight emerges: that although they did possess the technologies available to the West (flintlock technology in the case of Mughal India, for example), the armies of the East did not possess important cultural and institutional attributes that lent themselves to the dominance of the ‘West’ — see the development of the early modern European tax economies and the juxtaposition of Mamluk cavalry who placed emphasis on personal bravery over the defending French who valued discipline and firepower. Although primarily fueled by the technological advantage in many stark cases, in others a distinction emerges about a particularly ‘Western’ way of fighting, cementing the role of national institutions in the performance of military action and the later development of military thinking through introspection on the part of participants. While this may sound Orientalist to some degree, the author also attempts a similar analysis from /within/ the ambit of the West as a historical unit, comparing the early Enlightenment, late Enlightenment and Napoleonic European military establishments in his analysis of the emergence of the concept of ‘Decisiveness’.

While I admit that the book does not succeed in escaping the thesis it meant to critique (nor does it rise above some familiar tropes in military history—to no fault of the historian, I am sure) it manages to illustrate its premise successfully so that what emerges is not so much a rebuttal as a reassessment of the foundation on which that premise is based.

3.5/5

[Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

If historians could accrue appropriate adjectives the way some jazz performers used to do (the Divine Sarah Vaughan, the Amazing Jimmy Smith), then I've often opined that the unbelievably prolific Prof. Black should be the Ubiquitous Jeremy Black, not least because his scholarship has lifted its leg on a ridiculously broad array of issues in the long 18th century, but also because I have never been to an archive to look at a manuscript where they keep records of previous consultants of whatever material I've examined and NOT seen Black's name somewhere on the list of prior readers. His breadth of interest and engagement in the relative archival material of whatever his current topic of research is (apparently) unsurpassed. The present volume is rather more dependent on extant secondary material than most Black works in part because he is engaged in revising pre-existing theses about European warfare. So naturally the notes are chock a block with Additional manuscript numbers in the British Library, Bodleian papers of one kind or another, India Office records, PRO records and much more, but they are also replete with a sustained engagement with the scholarly literature on this topic. The reason for this is that Black's brief in this book is to revise Michael Roberts' 1955 thesis about the nature of change in European warfare in this period. To some extent, Black's effort is continuing the work of Geoffrey Parker in redating some of Roberts' conclusions. Roberts' thesis, in short, is that the development of new military strategies and technologies from about 1550 through say 1630 merited the term 'revolutionary'—that they form an historical break with what came before and after. Black argues this is misleading on several counts. He suggests the evidence for stasis in these matters prior to 1550 is overblown. More importantly, he wants to date the era of real changes, following and building on Parker, to the beginning of the long eighteenth century (1660-1720). This argument underwrites his meticulous survey of military strategy and technology in the period. The writing itself is a little dry—Black is never a popularizer and writes for scholars. This isn't to suggest the book is loaded with jargon however; it is not. There's just no catering to those who need biographical or geographical lessons. If you can't tell Marlborough from Massena or Bavaria from Bohemia, Black certainly isn't going to do it. Even those for whom this is old hat may find themselves popping over to Wikipedia for a refresher course on the Maratha Confederacy or the Asiento. Though there's not much to dislike here there are plenty of details to daunt. Would be nice if Black occasionally made more reference back to his overarching thesis in the later chapters, so as to tie together the details a bit more. Even the conclusion seems less interested in reiterating his main claim and linking it to the discussions in the middle of the book than to looking forward to later military (post-Napoleonic) developments that more obviously merit that fraught term 'revolutionary'. In short, if you want to know things like the value of socket versus plug bayonets and their use by, say, Wellington, or the gradual evolution of light infantry to harass defensive positions prior to a charge, or the sheer tonnage displaced by the various navies throughout the period in question, this is your book.

[Steven]

Good info and well written. Enjoyed it.