In his Plagues and Peoples (1976) University of Chicago historian
McNeill surveyed world history from the perspective of the
influence of microparasites in human life and social organization;
this much longer overview is based on "macroparasites" - i.e.,
other human beings. Plato called those who were entrusted with the
physical defense of the community, and nothing else, Guardians.
McNeill calls those who, specializing in violence, are able to
secure a living without producing, macroparasites. But if McNeill's
characterization suggests that he doesn't share Plato's view of the
warrior as an organic part of society, he nonetheless winds up
showing that warfare is never independent of other factors. The
technical means of movement and supply, for example, posed physical
limits to the scale of ancient empires: Xerxes' invasion of ancient
Greece stretched those limits too far, and resulted in catastrophe.
For a long time, Chinese leaders were able to maintain restrictive
control over growing commercial practices within their realm; but
commercial practices did proliferate, and contributed to the
material provisioning of nomads who were eventually able to break
through Chinese defenses. In Europe during the same period
(10001600), the development of commercial practices - together with
the establishment of well-organized, tax-supported military units
(a "self-sustaining feedback loop," as McNeill puts it) -
represented a new fusion that resulted in European military
predominance. From then on, McNeill concentrates on Europe and
America, chronicling such transformations in war-making as those
resulting from the development of staff officers who prepared
written battle plans, or from blast-furnace innovations that made
possible new and more accurate cannons. Napoleon's vast French army
is attributed by McNeill to population pressure (which he considers
a main cause of the French Revolution); the Crimean War's sudden,
overwhelming demand for weapons is seen as ushering in the era of
mass-produced weapons made possible by new industrial production
techniques. Thereafter, manufacturing and war went together, from
the new technologies of transportation to modern notions of
integrated weapons systems. But while McNeill is able to chronicle
all of this, he is unable to show that war was the critical factor
in historical developments; instead, war properly comes across as,
at most, supplying new demand for goods the social and economic
system was already capable of producing. As a survey of military
history, though, it's a work of exceptional breadth. (Kirkus
Reviews)
In this magnificent synthesis of military, technological, and
social history, William H. McNeill explores a whole millennium of
human upheaval and traces the path by which we have arrived at the
frightening dilemmas that now confront us. McNeill moves with equal
mastery from the crossbow--banned by the Church in 1139 as too
lethal for Christians to use against one another--to the nuclear
missile, from the sociological consequences of drill in the
seventeenth century to the emergence of the military-industrial
complex in the twentieth. His central argument is that a commercial
transformation of world society in the eleventh century caused
military activity to respond increasingly to market forces as well
as to the commands of rulers. Only in our own time, suggests
McNeill, are command economies replacing the market control of
large-scale human effort. The Pursuit of Power does not solve the
problems of the present, but its discoveries, hypotheses, and sheer
breadth of learning do offer a perspective on our current fears
and, as McNeill hopes, "a ground for wiser action."
"No summary can do justice to McNeill's intricate, encyclopedic
treatment. . . . McNeill's erudition is stunning, as he moves
easily from European to Chinese and Islamic cultures and from
military and technological to socio-economic and political
developments. The result is a grand synthesis of sweeping
proportions and interdisciplinary character that tells us almost as
much about the history of butter as the history of guns. . . .
McNeill's larger accomplishment is to remind us that all humankind
has a shared past and, particularly with regard to its choice of
weapons and warfare, a shared stake in thefuture."--Stuart
Rochester, "Washington Post Book World"
"Mr. McNeill's comprehensiveness and sensitivity do for the reader
what Henry James said that Turgenev's conversation did for him:
they suggest 'all sorts of valuable things.' This narrative of
rationality applied to irrational purposes and of ingenuity
cannibalizing itself is a work of clarity, which delineates
mysteries. The greatest of them, to my mind, is why human beings
have never learned to cherish their own species."--Naomi Bliven,
"The New Yorker
"
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