More and more I am curious about how changes in power sources (from muscle, wind, and water to chemical and eventually nuclear) alter the ways we think about history. So far, in my reading, something seems missing. It may be there but there is too little on the interplay between intellectual and cultural history, on the one side, and the history of technology and war on the other.
Since the mid-80s I have been aware of the close interconnections between technology, intellectual history, and culture, but have never tried to frame the effects of it in terms of motive power. In my dissertation, I had noticed how the rise of mechanical, mostly clockwork devices, including both clocks and gunlocks (the early matchlock, wheel-lock, snaphaunce, and flintlock mechanisms) seem to correspond to the period when cause-and-effect came to be more widely understood without resort of divine or demonic intervention. Curiously, they do correspond to the core period of witch hunting, as if in reaction, though that is putting it much too simply. The idea is that the ability to clearly see and handle a clockwork device allows one too visualize cause-and-effect quite clearly. Unlike windmills and watermills, these devices were making their ways into the homes of the upper and middle classes, while the lower classes would have become more familiar with them through the handling of guns in militias and armies. You can see it, at least as early as Machiavelli, but it reaches its peak in the generation of Newton, when the idea of the clock-work universe took firm hold.
One of the real problems with our time is the decreased visibility of the inner workings of the mechanisms that surround us. When I was a child, while you could not see exactly how a phone worked, or even a TV (those being the most hi-tech devices I regularly experienced), but you could see into them just by unscrewing the ends of the receiver on the phone, or watching the TV repairman monkey with the internals of the set. (I miss TV repairmen.) You could still learn a lot and have a fair sense of how things worked.
Try doing that with an iPhone or smart TV. If you can take them apart, you probably will not get them back together. They are not made to be repaired. People today no longer have a sense of how these devices work, except in a general way, and, as the insurrectionists on 1/6 showed, a lot of people lack even a foggy notion of the different ways they may be tracked by their phones. Cars were another way we understood cause-and-effect, but as is often noted, with the advent of multiple computers in engines, the ability to tinker with cars is rapidly diminishing, and so is a common training in causality that many boys and some girls received from that direction until the 1990s.
Computer scripting and programming have been something of the last bastion of that understanding, but even in the 1970s and 1980s, it was being noted that it went along with a magical world view as much as a mechanistic one, programming often being likened more to spell casting. As time has gone on, and programs become more complex, I think the links to causality are becoming more attenuated. Now, with the advent of machine learning and computers that can essentially program themselves, that will vanish as well. There will be some coders for another generation or so, but this will become a boutique skill or one practiced mainly by old hardware enthusiasts.
This is one of the reasons I believe we are truly at the end of an age of world history.
I am starting to realize how much deeper this goes. Most of the preceding I already understood at the time I finished my dissertation thirty years ago. I cannot claim a great deal of originality, but I also cannot say I have seen much along these lines since. The one great exception, a thorough, remarkable work in a different, adjacent vein, is Priya Satia's study of the leading, family of eighteenth-century, English gun manufacturers, the Galtons, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution.
Returning to my own research, there is a side to it that I almost completely missed. Had I focused just on firearms, instead of clocks, printing, and firearms, I might have seen it. Firearms, I now see, are something of a prototype of the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration. There is a small literature on some of the second order effects of firearms on our society and culture. Beyond what I said above about promoting a particular set of notions of causality, they also did things like introduce notions of industrial discipline in workers (derived from the model of military drill, which was a necessity for the effective use of massed firearms until the advent of repeating rifles in the 1860s-1880s), along with a concomitant reinforcement of class divisions that was seen as necessary for maintaining discipline except in some revolutionary armies.
But what gunpowder, along with gradual improvements in its manufacture, including corning (a method of turning into grains of uniform size that would burn at a uniform rate) and better ways of producing saltpeter (that increased the overall supply and drove down costs), did, was literally to fuel the transformation of warfare. There was something of a logistical transformation, though it was more evolutionary than revolutionary, and derived from a steady increase in the use of horses and mules instead of bullocks for haulage, as well as improvements to harnessing, so that the by the eighteenth century, there is a significant, increase in the hauling capacity of armies. The early modern period in Europe saw financial and administrative improvements that also benefitted military and naval logistics. Those helped fuel the increase in the size of armies, but they are of less overall significance than gunpowder.
In the 1970s, J.F. Guilmartin pointed out that one of the advantages of gunpowder weapons over muscle-powered arms, is that it takes much less time to train a soldier to be effective with a gun as opposed to a sword or bow. The difference is a matter of weeks or months, as opposed to years or a lifetime of practice. I do not recall that he also noted that soldiers with arquebuses and muskets needed to be as physically strong as archers. One of Henry VIII's archers aboard the Mary Rose would have had to be able to draw a bow with a draw weights of at least 100 lbs (and some up to 180 lbs) several times a minute. (We know from skeletal evidence that this resulted in the right shoulders being much more developed than the left and eventually resulted in arthritis.) The arquebusers on the same ship would have only had to support a weight of a few kilos while firing and absorbed the recoil of the gun. Soldiers needed to be able to march and be hardy, but guns meant a soldier's physique did require the same level of development.
That, in itself, meant that armies could become larger and potentially fight longer. In many cases that meant war became bloodier (though, as Cannae, which has been described as a knife fight lasting several hours, and where Hannibal's men slew upwards of 48,000 Romans, shows even battles with swords and spears could be horrendous). The capacity to field such armies quickly outgrew the ability of the slowly improving logistical organization to support them, as evidenced both by the experiences of the Thirty Years War and the French Revolutionary & Napoleonic Wars where living off the land (more properly plundering the local population) was the norm.
All of that is indicative of the trends in tactics, logistics, and the like, but this is not properly a disquisition on those fields of endeavor. They play into what follows, but are not the main issues. Let me suggest that the accelerating changes of early modern, modern, and post-modern warfare, the changes that benefitted so greatly from the turn from muscle to chemical power, instilled a number of mental attitudes that became much more significant after 1850, and especially after 1950. The former representing roughly the date when the conversion of chemical energy (in the form first of coal, but gradually of oil) became really significant in replacing muscle power in transportation, and water power in industry, candles in lighting (in the form of coal-gas), as well as marking the first stirrings of synthetic manufacturing based (coal tar or aniline dyes). The latter of course is the era of both nuclear energy (and weapons) and also of the Great Acceleration, the period in which the unsustainable exploitation of oil and other natural resources began to resemble hockey sticks when graphed against time, also marking the vast acceleration in global warming and climate change.
Not only did gunpowder weapons bolster clockwork models of causation, spreading it, I believe, much more widely and quickly than possible with clocks (given their expense), but gunpowder itself also firmly rooted the notion that chemical energy could substitute for natural sources. This was true not just of firearms, but also of mining and engineering, where it was used for blasting, and, by the latter 1600s, was fueling the earliest European experiments with internal combustion engines, creating the concept, if not a practical product. What follows will focus more on Europe, but much of it applies to Asia as well.
The use of coal and charcoal as a substitute for wood was already well established in heating, cooking, and metallurgy. It was also known that heat from wood or those sources could power various sorts of lower power thermal engines to do mechanical work. And, of course, charcoal, somewhat like blackpowder, was a manufactured fuel, and one necessary for composition of the new explosive itself.
Blackpowder is not as simply created as charcoal. The former would have been known to anyone who ever built a wood fire. The more formal process of charcoal burning to create charcoal is ancient, dating to late pre-history. While there is an art to the process, it does not involve mixing different chemical compounds. That had to wait for eighth-century China and an unknown Taoist alchemist (and not a legendary German monk as was long believed in Europe). It took a longer time to simplify the formula (these early on might also contain arsenic or antimony, which were common in Taoist alchemical experiments that were searching for means of prolonging not destroying life) and find its most effective and efficient variants for various purposes. One needs different quantities of the three ingredients (carbon, sulfur and either potassium- or calcium-nitrate) for blasting, bombs, rockets (and flamethrowers), and guns.
From the start, blackpowder was something of intellectual and academic interest sparking numerous treatises in China and a lesser number in Europe and elsewhere. I have no idea when someone thought, "oh, we can substitute chemicals for muscles," but the concept was implicitly there from at least the time of the earliest proto-guns in eleventh or twelfth-century China.
Machiavelli's Art of War of 1521 seems to show the idea was fighting to get out. If one includes his militia papers (among his other offices, he was Secretary to the Ten of War - the committee in charge of the military in the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, making him effectively undersecretary of war in American or British terminology), he had a strangely ambivalent relationship to firearms. He was careful to include hand-gunners or arquebusiers among the Florentine militia fighting Pisa and then the Spanish, and also included them in his theoretical forces in the Art of War. Light cannons also play a part in the book. That said, Machaivelli seems to want the speed, agility, dexterity, strength, and skill with edged weapons to be the deciding factor, not the chemical power of firearms. He seems to be aware of the latter; however, he needs, philosophically, to uphold something closer to the ideals of the Roman Republic and to rely on the virtù of his soldiers and generals, which, for him, had a much larger component of courage (both physical and moral) than we tend to think of when we speak of virtue.
Put another way, Machiavelli was already grappling with the dilemma that faced all military thinkers between the American Civil War and the First World War: could human flesh and spirit hold up against the terrific threat posed by guns. His solution was similar to the infamous French doctrine of the offensive à outrance championed until the horrors of Verdun. Both doctrines focused on speed and willpower to overcome the hail of bullets and shells. While this may have had some basis in reality in the 1520s, it made very little real sense in the era of the First World War. (There were some curious examples where this did work in the Middle East, most notably by the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba on Halloween, 1917, but that was as much a triumph of skillful use of terrain and surprise, as of speed.)
Emerging from this is the sense that there was a competition between muscular and chemical energy. This is a purely modern way of stating it, but it was there from at least 1521 to 1916. I doubt anyone could or would have formulated it that way prior to the 1660s and 1670s when Samuel Moreland, Denis Papin, and Christian Huygens designed and to a limited extent experimented with gunpowder engines for pumping water or other uses. These experiments, most of which may have been thought, rather than real, experiments were important stepping stones along the path to both practical steam engines and the later petroleum driven varieties. They paved the way towards the later ideas that created our industrial civilization with its insatiable appetite for abundant and powerful energy sources.
It took more than that, though, to create the worldview that not only demanded, but accepted and created the Great Acceleration. Not all of it was military or associated with explosives, whether blackpowder or other explosives or military propellents, but much of it was. For those interested in how important firearms, particularly muskets, were to the industrial revolution in Britain, the best starting point may be Priya Satia, Empire of Guns, which is also a good introduction to the complexity and occasional alienness of the intellectual and cultural meaning of guns in history. Her discussion of the ways that the eighteenth-century English-speaking world understood the legal and moral implications of defending one's home with a gun should be enough to give anyone arguing either side of the Second Amendment pause if not a headache. That, alone, is worth the price of the book.
One thing that should be clear is the sheer scale of arms manufacture for the colonial and continental wars, as well as to exchange for slaves in Africa, in the later 1700s and very early 1800s. Because of the nature of arms in that period, muskets typically did not have a long life. Barrels were not yet normally blued or browned, were often polished to a ridiculous degree by soldiers, and were subject to internal corrosion from the acidic residue of gunpowder. Flintlocks were easily disordered, and, prior to the introduction of interchangeable parts after 1800, were not easily replaced. They were also susceptible to corrosion. All of this was worse in southern climates with heat and high humidity, where the wooden stocks rotted quickly while the steel rusted more rapidly. Muskets were not just needed for new units, but were constantly needed to replace worn, damaged, or corroded examples.
Arms and ammunition in this era constituted only portion of the state's expenditure on military supplies, which encompassed everything from hops for beer, to woolen cloth, and even items we might not consider, such as white clay to keep belts and leather bright white. At the heart of it all, though lay guns and gunpowder. Without them, the whole enterprise would have been different. It is conceivable mass European armies might have evolved without guns, perhaps employing something like the Chinese repeating crossbow instead, but this is a purely mental exercise. Everything in their style of warfare, including specifics of their surgical kits, and their needs for cleaning their kit, were geared to the effects of firearms.
It does not seem to much of a stretch to argue that this early form of chemical energy usage drove forward the industrial revolution, and hence the adoption of coal and steam as a replacement for muscles, wind, and water as the more commonly noted spinning and weaving did.
But there is more that we should consider about what this form of chemical energy has contributed to our modern and post-modern mindset. There is the sheer bloody mindedness of warfare and the desire to destroy the enemy that reached its apogee in the A-Bomb and the H-Bomb. There is also the bloody mindedness of contemporary American society. Only a part of this is embedded in the history of the gun, but, let me suggest, it is an important part. There are multiple strands to this, but let me focus on two, both tied to the nexus of race and ethnicity, colonialism, property, and technology.
At least in the West, firearms have long been a marker of cultural and racial superiority. One thinks of Hilaire Belloc's famous couplet, "Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not." The Maxim machine gun was a guarantor of cultural and military superiority at the beginning of the previous century. It is difficult to know when firearms became the mark of an advanced culture, but there are signs that Europeans took them as such before 1500, as some tried to argue that the Greeks and Romans possessed gunpowder artillery, something made easier by the incredible terminological confusion of gunpowder and mechanical siege engines at the time. Petrarch was already doing so in 1366.
What is known is that, while Chinese priority in the invention of gunpowder is long established and has never entirely been forgotten, it was not until the 1980s that Chinese priority in the development of early guns was completely established in the West. This was long contested and became part of the worn-out narrative of Chinese technical and scientific failure. And if the Chinese were seen in this light, the failure of non-European cultures to continue to innovate past the level of the matchlock musket, that is the technological level of European arms about 1550, as late as the 1800s was certainly seen as an indictment on their culture and perhaps even intelligence.
Long before the Maxim gun, the supposed inferiority of Africans, and various others, was confirmed by their dependence on European firearms. These were imported in huge numbers to Africa and functioned as a high-value trade good as part of the slave trade. Here, surely, were peoples so degraded that they traded their fellows for muskets that would have been rejected by any European army.
We seem to have continued in that vein. Belloc lived long enough that one is almost surprised he did not update his comment to "Whatever happens, we have got the Bomb, and they have not." The Manhattan Project remains a crucial touchstone for the American and British sense of superiority. Indeed from the Maxim gun to the Bomb to stealth aircraft, we have taken a perverse pride in our destructive superiority.
Well before the French Revolution, the English-speaking world viewed guns as a guarantor of property. In a sense, it did not matter if that property were a home, a store, a colony, or other humans. While we no longer deal with colonies, but client states, and we have substituted the right to own others with demands too intimidate the other and keep the other under control, we continue to rely on the replacement of muscular energy with chemical energy, at least in this country.
This has been a rough sketch of some ideas I hope to develop further. It is nothing more than a sketch at this point, far too big a topic for a single blog post, and all of it is provisional.
Works Consulted:
Crawford, Matthew B. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015. Provides a general discussion of what we are losing personally and culturally as craftsmanship and working with our hands becomes rarer.
Davis, Erik. TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, 3rd ed. North Atlantic Books, 2015. Discusses the correspondences between programming and magic.
Guilmartin, J.F. Gunpowder and Galleys: Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the 16th Century. Cambridge, 1974. See especially the chapters on Lepanto and its aftermath for explicit examples of the failings of a military system that relied on muscles as gunpowder became central to war.
Henderson, Robert. "From Bright Steel to Brown: The Colour of British Musket Barrels, 1755-1865," Military Heritage.
https://www.militaryheritage.com/browning.htm#:~:text=It%20is%20important%20to%20emphasize,bayonet%20were%20browned%20and%20blued.&text=The%20approach%20of%20browning%20only,of%20the%20pattern%201853%20Enfield (accessed 3/27/2021). Detailed information on how British soldiers mistreated their guns by over polishing and the processes developed to preserve them.
O'Connell, Robert L. The Ghosts of Cannae: Hannibal and the Darkest Hour of the Roman Republic. Random House, 2010. One of the best books on the interplay of between military failure, political failure, and the roots of long-term political decline, but cited here just for its characterization of Cannae.
Satia, Priya. Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution, Penguin, 2018. This is indispensable for anyone trying to understand the how our culture used to think about guns and about their role in the industrial revolution.
Strickland, Matthew and Robert Hardy, The Great Warbow. Sutton Publishing Limited, 2005. For information on the Mary Rose bows.
Simms, D.L. "Archimedes and the Invention of Artillery and Gunpowder," Technology and Culture, 28 (Jan. 1987), 68-69. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3105477. Overview of early literature on the origins of guns and gunpowder in the ancient world.
Wilson, Guy. The Effects of Technology on Military Thought in the Sixteenth Century PhD diss. University of Missouri-Columbia, 1991. This is my takeoff point for this post. I attempted to understand how clocks, printing, and firearms influenced how military authors of the Sixteenth Century thought.
