The Worth of War (9 page)

Of course, the Europeans were not the only ones to make use of firearms during this period. Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires built or acquired cannons and muskets and established what some historians have called “gunpowder empires.”
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During this period and the ensuing three centuries, however, the Europeans maintained a substantial lead in the technology of warfare. This included the development of ship-borne heavy artillery that allowed European states to project enormous power
across the maritime world. Equally important, the Europeans developed tactics and training designed to maximize the effectiveness of their firepower. Early in the seventeenth century, the Dutch prince, Maurice of Nassau, introduced tactics that made his forces quite maneuverable on the battlefield and drill and discipline that made them willing to maintain their formations while receiving fire from opposing forces. Subsequent military innovators such as Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden honed infantry tactics to perfection.
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Europe's lead in military technology widened sharply with the European industrial revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The early technologies associated with the industrial revolution include the development of reliable and efficient steam engines that soon powered locomotives and ships; enormous improvements in the production of iron; the expanded use of efficient fuels—particularly coal; the development of various machine tools for cutting and shaping metal; the mechanization of production and agriculture; and new communications technologies—particularly the telegraph. These are only a few of the technological advances made in Europe and the United States during this period. As a result of the industrial revolution, rival European states were given the opportunity to harness new technologies to ever more powerful weapons. Cumbersome cannons were converted into breech-loading, rapid-fire artillery. Steam-powered steel warships carrying heavy guns ruled the seas. Infantrymen were equipped with mass-produced, breech-loading rifles to replace their more cumbersome muskets. With their weapons, their ships, and their tactics, European armies conquered the Americas, Africa, portions of Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. The only military forces that could reliably defeat European armies were other European armies employing similar forms of organization and technology.

As it conquered the world, Europe also disseminated its technologies, both military and civilian. In some regions, indigenous people were able to acquire European weapons and attempted to use them to repel the invaders. Native North Americans, as I mentioned earlier, acquired firearms and often became quite proficient in their use. The
North American Plains Indians learned the technique of combining the horse and the repeating rifle and by the late nineteenth century had become quite an effective light cavalry. By this time, however, European settlers had very nearly exterminated the indigenous people of North America, and there were too few survivors for a newfound mastery of European weapons to have any consequence. European technology was obviously disseminated to regions such as North America and Australia, where Europeans obliterated native societies, as well as to those regions such as South and Central America, where Europeans more or less permanently subjugated indigenous groups.

European technologies also spread to other parts of the globe that were controlled or even dominated, but not fully subjugated, by one or another European state. Here, not only the weapons but the technological base from which those weapons derived might be assimilated and ultimately employed to challenge European domination. Take the case of India. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as India came under British control, important elements of British technology were exported to and assimilated by India's own populace, eventually expanding manufacturing, agriculture, and commerce on the subcontinent. The most important British technology exports were in the realms of transport and communication. To cement their control over India and their capacity to move troops quickly wherever they might be needed, the British built thousands of miles of railroads, roads, and telegraph lines that promoted communication and transport throughout India. Like the ancient Roman roads, arteries built to move troops also promoted the flow of commerce.

Beginning in 1780, British engineers began a several-decades-long effort to expand and improve India's road network.
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The original purpose of this effort was to facilitate the movement of troops and supplies in order to strengthen Britain's hold on India. These roads, however, particularly the improvement and expansion of India's ancient Grand Trunk Road, traversing 2,500 miles from India's eastern seaports through Calcutta and Delhi and ending in Kabul in modern-day Afghanistan, opened the way for horse-drawn (later, gasoline-powered)
wheeled transport carrying mail and goods throughout India. Road-building greatly stimulated India's market economy and stimulated the production of local goods, as well as the distribution of imported products.

Similarly, beginning in the 1850s, the British began the construction of India's railway system, laying 120 miles of track between the West Bengal port city of Hooghly to the Raniganj coalfields.
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This line was followed by hundreds of others, and some 24,000 mile of track laid during the nineteenth century alone, carrying millions of tons of freight and speeding both the transport of troops and goods throughout India. By the beginning of the First World War, India boasted the fifth-largest railway system in the world, the most extensive outside Europe and North America.
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Initially, most of the locomotives and other rolling stock of the Indian railway system were manufactured in England. By the early 1900s, though, large workshops for the repair and assembly of railroad equipment had developed in Lahore and Rawalpindi. These workshops employed thousands of Indian workers who had an opportunity to learn the skills associated with building and maintaining locomotives and other railway equipment.
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The British introduced the telegraph to India and, by 1900, had installed tens of thousands of miles of telegraph lines and hundreds of receiving stations throughout the region. The telegraph, of course, had considerable military value, helping the British army to collect up-to-date information and direct troops where they were needed. But, of course, the telegraph also became an important commercial instrument, allowing Indian as well as European businessmen to conduct transactions rapidly across the entire subcontinent.

In addition to these systems of transport and communication, the British built factories, canals, and irrigation systems and brought many other elements of European technology to India. Of course, India already possessed a long tradition of scholarship in science and mathematics, and some existing technologies may have been extinguished under British rule. In general, however, Britain brought advanced technology to the subcontinent it conquered. Ironically, this created
the technological base from which India eventually surpassed Britain as an industrial and scientific center. An important symbol of this shift came in 2008, when India's Tata Motors purchased Britain's venerable Jaguar and Land Rover motor companies and then spent hundreds of millions of dollars to bring these English vehicles up to Indian technological standards.

REVERSE TECHNOLOGY FLOWS: FROM THE CONQUERED TO THEIR CONQUERORS

Conquest leads not only to exports of technology from conquerors to those they subjugate; technology may flow in the other direction as well. This is especially likely to occur if a technologically more advanced society is conquered by a technologically less sophisticated foe. In the early twentieth century, to cite just one example, Germany was the world's leader in what today would be called aerospace engineering. During the closing years of the Second World War, the Germans fired V-1 and V-2 missiles at England. The V-1 was jet-powered, used an autopilot to control the missile's speed and altitude, and carried a 1,900-pound explosive warhead. The V-1 had a range of about 160 miles and flew at about 400 miles per hour, a speed which made it vulnerable to Allied aircraft and anti-aircraft guns. More than 9,000 of the missiles were fired at England and another 2,000 at targets on the European continent after the Allied invasion. The V-2 was an even more advanced weapon. It was the world's first ballistic missile and had a range of about 200 miles at a speed of more than 3,000 miles per hour, which made the weapon impossible to intercept. More than 3,000 V-2s were launched by the Germans. Their relatively small warheads, however, limited the damage they were able to produce. When the Allies defeated and occupied Germany, the Americans and Soviets acquired German aviation and rocket technology, along with German scientists, that became the basis for both nation's space and ballistic missile programs—as well as their development of jet aircraft.

One important example of conquered-to-conqueror technology transfer from the ancient world is the relationship between Greece and Rome, in which Rome's military conquest paved the way for an enormous flow of Greek technology into the Roman Empire. Rome's conquest of Greece over a period of about sixty-five years began with the so-called First Macedonian War (214–205 BCE). After the disastrous Roman defeat by the Carthaginians at Cannae in 216 BCE, Macedonian King Philip believed that the Romans would not be able to oppose his efforts to expand Macedonian power in Greece and the Aegean. Accordingly, he signed a treaty of alliance with the Carthaginian general Hannibal, in which the Macedonians agreed to support Carthage in its war against Rome in exchange for control over a number of Roman-held territories on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. Learning of this alliance, the Romans strengthened their forces in the Adriatic region and fought several small-scale battles designed mainly to prevent Philip from sending reinforcements to Hannibal, Rome's primary foe. The war ended inconclusively in 205 BCE, when the Macedonians concluded that Hannibal would be defeated and the Romans were happy to be able to shift their legions to more important military fronts to the West. During the war, the Romans were able to expand their influence and alliances in Greece and paved the way for the subsequent expansion of their power in the region.

An opportunity for such expansion came quickly. In 201 BCE, the Greek city-states of Rhodes and Pergamon asked the Romans for help against a Macedonian attack. The Romans, who by this time had defeated Carthage, had no particular territorial ambitions in Greece. Rome was, however, concerned about the rise of a rival power so close to its own territory and maritime interests. Thus, Rome wanted to prevent Philip from expanding Macedonian influence over neighboring city-states. This concern was heightened when Philip entered into an alliance with Antiochus III of the Seleucid Empire (the near-eastern portion of the empire that had been built by Alexander the Great.). An alliance between the Macedonians and Seleucids had the potential to conquer all of Greece and pose a threat to Roman
domination of both the Mediterranean and Adriatic regions. In the Second Macedonian War, the Romans, aided by the Athenians and other Greeks who feared Philip—particularly the Aetolians—attacked Macedon and inflicted a decisive defeat on the Macedonians in the Battle of Cynoscephalae in 197 BCE. After this Roman victory, Philip was prohibited from threatening other Greek states, and the Romans acquired a good deal of territory in the modern-day Balkans.

Peace lasted only until 192 BCE. Despite the defeat of their allies the Macedonians, the Seleucids hoped to expand into Greece. Antiochus promised the Aetolians substantial territorial rewards if they would end their alliance with Rome and support his efforts instead. With the support of Aetolian forces and with Rome's most feared opponent, Hannibal, as a military advisor, a large Seleucid army entered Greece. The Romans, however, were determined now to allow the Seleucids to take control of the region and sent a large force to stop them. At the Battles of Thermopylae and Magnesia, the Seleucids were routed by the Roman legions and forced to cede to Rome the territory they had occupied in Greece.

Subsequently, Rome defeated Macedon two more times, first dividing the kingdom of Macedon into four nominally independent states controlled by Rome and then annexing Macedon altogether as the Roman province of Macedonia. Most Greek polities had been happy to see the Romans prevent Macedon and the Seleucid Empire from expanding their influence in the Greek world. Now, however, Rome seemed to pose an even greater threat than either of these Greek realms. Thus, in 146 BCE, a group of Greek city-states declared war on Rome and attempted to drive the Romans from Greece. After a short war, the Greeks were defeated and Rome annexed the entire region, dividing Greece into the new Roman provinces of Achaea and Epirus. Millennia of Greek independence had come to an end.

It is often observed that Rome conquered Greece militarily, but the reverse was true culturally. Greek culture was far older and more sophisticated than that of Rome, and the Romans, aware of this fact, eagerly absorbed—one might say swallowed—the culture of their new
conquest. This was true in the realms of drama, poetry, literature, art, fashion, and, perhaps most important, technology. The Greeks had developed a number of important civilian and military technologies that the Romans appropriated, in many cases improving Greek designs. The Romans recognized their debt to the Greeks and often employed Greek engineers for important projects. The Greek engineer Apollodorus of Damascus, for example, was employed by the Emperor Trajan for the most complex and important imperial engineering projects. In 105 CE, Apollodorus built Trajan's bridge across the Danube, at that time one of the longest spans in Europe, to allow the legions to cross easily for Trajan's campaign in Dacia. Apollodorus also built Trajan's column in the Roman forum.

Beginning in about the sixth century BCE, the Greeks began to develop remarkable technologies that they employed for measurement, construction, transportation, irrigation, plumbing, ship building, and a host of other tasks. Among these “other tasks,” of course, was war. The Greek city-states were almost continually at war with one another and with non-Greek foes. Technology provided the Greeks with a number of powerful weapons to use in battle. One of these weapons was the crossbow, a form of mechanical bow that fires a projectile with far greater penetrating power and accuracy, though a slower fire rate, than other bows. The fact that the bow is drawn mechanically rather than by hand allows it to be held at ready for an indefinite period of time and then fired when the target appears. Crossbows were developed in ancient China as well as ancient Greece, and perhaps also in other parts of the world. The Greek crossbow seems to date from about the fifth century BCE, when a hand-held device called the
gastraphetes
was employed by a Greek force against a Carthaginian army in Sicily. Over the next century or so, crossbows became larger and more diverse, with some large machines, operated by a crew like a modern artillery piece, designed to fire several arrows at a time.