Description of what happened is not the central problem – the real challenge is to explain why these changes took place. But historians generally agree on the core set of changes, especially as they occurred within Europe. The term covers such a broad range of developments, in fact, that its boundaries are sometimes fuzzy. This, in short, was the military revolution.Ī complete description would take account of many more nuances and qualifications than a sketch can show. Inevitably, the greater scale and intensity of warfare led to greater effects of war on society. Larger armies meant larger, more spread-out campaigns and thus greater strategic challenges, including the expansion of European conflict to other areas of the world via related changes in European naval capabilities. These stimulated the next change: steady growth in the size of armies. This battlefield phenomenon was accompanied by rapid changes in fortification and siege tactics that further emphasized infantry over cavalry. A tactical revolution returned massed infantry formations to a battlefield dominance they had not held since the age of Rome, at the expense of heavily armored cavalry. In European history, the term military revolution denotes the developments in warfare from about 1450 to 1800 that steadily created a military advantage for western European powers compared to much of the rest of the world.1 The revolution itself is one of the symptoms of the divergence of European civilization from traditional patterns of civilization.2 The key developments the term describes can be quickly summarized. THE “MILITARY REVOLUTION”: CONFLICTING EXPLANATIONS The act of comparison, though subject to interesting methodological problems, also raises questions about some general processes of historical development and suggests some broader conclusions about the place of technology in traditional civilizations. The Japanese case suggests that stronger government, not the introduction of guns, was the key force behind the revolutions. Gunpowder weapons developed slowly in Europe over the course of several hundred years, but arquebuses and cannon of a developed type were introduced in Japan at a precisely identifiable time: the year 1543. Specifically, I analyze the “military revolution” that emerged from Europe in the sixteenth century and the similar military changes that characterized sixteenth-century Japan.ĭid the introduction of gunpowder weapons cause these military revolutions? This turns out to be a problem for which we may run a virtual historical experiment: a side-by-side comparison of two cases with the critical variable, the introduction of gunpowder, controlled for. What role does technological innovation play in shaping histori–cal change in the premodern world? In general terms, this is the problem I address in this article. Journal of World History, Vol.6 No.1 (1995) Guns and Government: A Comparative Study of Europe and Japan
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