THE PURSUIT OF POWER

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.