ABSOLUTISM AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

Armies, Navies, and State Building

Jonathan Davies(Powerpoint will be on the website)

‘War, its conduct, cost, consequences and preparations for conflict, were all central to history in the early modern period. As European exploration and trade linked hitherto separated regions, so force played a crucial role in these new relationships and in their consequences. Conflict was also crucial to the history of relations between Euopean states, as well as to their internal histories’.

Jeremy Black, European Warfare, 1494-1660 (London, 2002), p. 1.

‘Since the 1970s attempts by historians to provide generalised explanations about the connections between the development of armed forces and the transformation of early modern Europe have been centred on the Anglo-Saxon Military Revolution debate’.

Jan Glete, Warfare at Sea, 1500-1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformation of Europe (London, 2000), p. 9.

What is the Military Revolution thesis? How has the Military Revolution thesis been criticised?• What is the Naval Revolution debate?

Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560-1660 (Belfast, 1956)

Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800

(1988; 2nd ed. Cambridge, 1996)

A musketeer

Battle of Breitenfeld, 1631

Battle of Lützen, 1632

Critics of the Military Revolution Thesis

• Jeremy Black, A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550-1800 (London, 1991)

• J.R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450-1620 (Leicester, 1985)

• M.S. Anderson, War and Society in Europe of the Old Regime, 1618-1789 (Leicester, 1988)

• Frank Tallett, War and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1495-1715 (London, 1992)

F.C. Lane, Profits from Power: Readings in Protection Rent and

Violence-Controlling Enterprise (Albany, NY, 1979)

• Charles Tilly, ‘War-Making and State-Making as Organized Crime’, in Peter B. Evans et al. (eds), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 169-91.

• Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 (Oxford, 1990)