Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- List of figures and tables
- 1 Thinking about revolutions in warfare
- 2 “As if a new sun had arisen”: England's fourteenth-century RMA
- 3 Forging the Western army in seventeenth-century France
- 4 Mass politics and nationalism as military revolution: The French Revolution and after
- 5 Surviving military revolution: The U.S. Civil War
- 6 The Prusso-German RMA, 1840–1871
- 7 The battlefleet revolution, 1885–1914
- 8 The First World War and the birth of modern warfare
- 9 May 1940: Contingency and fragility of the German RMA
- 10 Conclusion: The future behind us
- Index
4 - Mass politics and nationalism as military revolution: The French Revolution and after
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2015
- Frontmatter
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- List of figures and tables
- 1 Thinking about revolutions in warfare
- 2 “As if a new sun had arisen”: England's fourteenth-century RMA
- 3 Forging the Western army in seventeenth-century France
- 4 Mass politics and nationalism as military revolution: The French Revolution and after
- 5 Surviving military revolution: The U.S. Civil War
- 6 The Prusso-German RMA, 1840–1871
- 7 The battlefleet revolution, 1885–1914
- 8 The First World War and the birth of modern warfare
- 9 May 1940: Contingency and fragility of the German RMA
- 10 Conclusion: The future behind us
- Index
Summary
[W]ar … again became the affair of the people as a whole, and took on an entirely different character, or rather approached its true character, its absolute perfection.
—Carl von ClausewitzThe revolution of industrial capitalism and of science and technology is the greatest transformation in human existence since the coming of agriculture. It began in the late eighteenth century and its end is not in sight. It has given such immense power to the societies that pioneered it or adopted it that it has obscured a fundamental truth: military revolutions are changes in the nature and purposes of war itself. They are normally the military outcome of underlying processes – ideological, political, social, economic, and demographic – far deeper and broader than the advent of a particular technology or cluster of technologies.
While the Industrial Revolution was achieving – for the first time in human history – self-sustaining and seemingly limitless growth in Britain's textile mills, mines, and foundries, a political revolution with consequences almost as great erupted across the Channel. The upheaval of 1788–94 was not merely a revolution in France. It marked the beginning of the exceedingly violent end, first in France and then throughout Europe, of an entire social, political, and international order.
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- Information
- The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050 , pp. 57 - 73Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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