Dr%20Nicholas%20Rodger: List of publications

The concept of the ‘military revolution’ has had a long and fruitful historical career.1 In its original form it is usually attributed to the inaugural lecture of Professor Michael Roberts in 1956, though a key element of it had been anticipated by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1918.2 The thesis of Roberts and the numerous scholars who followed him – particularly Geoffrey Parker who significantly modified both the chronology and the outline of the original concept3 – was that raising the larger and better disciplined armies of the Renaissance era, with their costly artillery trains, and the bastioned fortifications which were evolved to resist them, presented contemporary princes with a severe test, differing in quality as well as scale from any which had faced their medieval predecessors. Those early modern states which succeeded in transforming themselves into autocratic, centralised monarchies, capable of raising these armies and the revenues to pay for them, passed the test and became the great powers of modern Europe: Sweden (Roberts’s special subject), France, Prussia, Russia, Austria-Hungary, possibly Spain. Those which failed to shake off their archaic medieval representative institutions, those which failed to strengthen the powers of the crown – like the Dutch Republic, Savoy, Poland-Lithuania, the Papal States, Venice, the Two Sicilies or Portugal – were condemned to extinction, or at best marginal irrelevance. A great army was the admission ticket to the great powers’ club, and only a powerful monarchy could hope to be able to pay for it.

Kein Abschnitt der modernen Geschichte war so schrecklich und so folgenreich wie der Erste Weltkrieg. Und es ist kaum überraschend, dass Historiker dazu neigten, die Ereignisse der etwa 30 Jahre vorher hauptsächlich aus einem einzigen ...