flâneur

Bryce Hunt

1 followers · 2 following · 259 views

on the atlas — 4

highlights — 16

  • Fourth, this late medieval/early modern military revolution was only one of several that continue into the present (see Chickering 2010). Knox and Murray (2001: 6–13) propose there were four following revolutions. A second revolution in the mid-eighteenth century came in the form of light infantry and cavalry, of self-contained divisions, standardized mobile artillery, and, during the French Revolution, the advent of mass ideologically driven armies combined with new strategies of battlefield elimination of enemy forces—which David Bell (2007) viewed, perhaps with some exaggeration, as the fir…
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • They were able to field large standing armies from their peasantries, as well as accessing the wealth of urban merchants. Both Tilly and Mann argue it was this model that proved triumphant, more capable than its agrarian-bureaucratic rivals of tapping the wealth of a monetized economy and its attendant banking systems, and able to raise large forces that could overwhelm city states. It was strengthened by global imperial and commercial expansion to the Americas and Asia, giving incipient states access to bullion, luxury goods, agricultural products, and colonial revenues.
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • Both Mann and Tilly emphasize that (with variations) the political mobilization from below resulted in the increasing civilianization of the state. As this occurred, the state switched from coercion to policing and surveillance of its populations. These analyses show that military and civilian institutions were intertwined. Industrialization united populations through faster communications (e.g. railways, postal services), resulted in further military revolutions, and intensified this interdependence
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • During the nineteenth century many intellectuals, Clausewitz, Michelet, and Mazzini, drew connections between national conscription armies and civic participation. This association had popular resonance, summarized in the slogan of Swedes agitating for political rights: ‘One soldier, one rifle, one vote’
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • In Tilly’s analysis war plays the major role in state centralization, whose impress nationalizes populations. Mann claims the passions of nationalism derive from the tighter links between state institutions and the intensive emotional power of family, kinship networks, and neighbourhood
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • The almost continuous wars between England and France in this period (described by historians as a Second Hundred Years War ending in 1815) led to an intensification of national characteristics and stereotypes. During the Seven Years War middle-class nationalists in England, critical of the alleged Francophilia of the aristocracy, evoked the ‘ancient constitution’ of Anglo-Saxon times in support of parliamentary reforms. They extolled an English national character based on honesty, good beef, and bourgeois virtues
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • Sixth, war diffused the national model through the imperial expansion of the European states or through its selective imitation by non-Western state elites who could see the capacities released by nationalism. An outstanding example is that of Meiji Japan, which adopted German military models, and whose success against the Russian Empire in 1905 made it in turn an exemplar for Asian nationalists seeking to modernize their states
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • Third, military pressures stimulated a drive by rulers for organizational development and monetary resources. As armed forces grew larger, so there was a shift from a desmesne to a taxation and finally to a fiscal state, combined with broad networks of credit, and with this a ‘rationalization’ of the political order in the form of centralized territorial units (Gunn 2010: 51–2). Permanent and professional armed forces under the direct control of rulers could permit the conquest of new territories, the expansion of state revenues, the pacification of existing territories, and the enforcement of…
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • Second, war-making took on a new character as a result of military innovations that were diffused through a competitive multi-polity system. There is still debate among historians about this military revolution: about its origins, whether medieval (Tallett and Trim 2010b) or early modern (Roberts 1956), and about its character as a discrete phenomenon, a continuous evolution, or a cyclical process (Gat 2010). What is clear is that the capacity of political units to mobilize armies between 1300 and 1750 expanded dramatically, although the population of Europe increased only within narrow limits…
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • First, war-making or preparation was an incessant activity of polities in much of the late medieval and early modern period. Until the French Revolution, the classic conflicts were long and attritional, made up of multiple campaigns. These included the ‘Hundred Years War’ between England and France, the ‘Eighty Years War’ in the Netherlands; the ‘Thirty Years War’ in German territories, ‘the Great Northern War’, to name but some. War or its preparations in these periods swallowed the bulk of public expenditures.
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • However, while the period 1850–1914 was one of relative peace, 40 per cent of state revenues were devoted to war or its preparations, and military virtues and masculinity were strongly associated (Mann 1995: 54). As the link between industrialization and military power became evident, geopolitical pressures produced a state-led drive for heavy industrialization, railway construction, and welfare provision, first in late-developing polities such as Germany and then more generally. By the 1880s a military-industrial complex formed even in Britain and the USA
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • Similarly, Mann argues that a nation-state consciousness arose as a reactive movement for political representation in the name of the people against the demands of the state. The impress of the state resulted in emerging classes flexing their growing muscles in politics rather than fighting other classes in civil society (Mann 1993: 20). In the process they were ‘caged’ within a nation state. Demands for representation in the state were first voiced by bourgeois and petit bourgeois males, but they were followed by workers, peasants, and women. In an early militarist phase this took two forms, …
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • Both offer a similar interactive mechanism to explain the rise of the nation state. The power of the national military model forced ancien régime states to seek to co-opt it. During the nineteenth century European states, faced with intensified military competition from their neighbours, used nationalist appeals to extract ever greater resources (including military sacrifice) from reluctant populations through policies of centralization and circumscription (Tilly 1995)
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • Mann (1993: 215–18; 1995: 45–7) also charts the emergence of ‘proto-national’ identities, in two phases, religious and commercial/statist. During the former, literacy networks linked to the moral world of family and local community expanded to make possible the later formation of broader cultural communities. In particular, Protestantism inspired the spread of vernacular written cultures and popular uprisings against religious and state elites. The wars of the Counter-Reformation crystallized national consciousness among the popular classes, where the boundaries of warring states and linguisti…
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • During the eighteenth century periods of peace alternated with intense war-making on an expanding scale, conducted by ever larger standing armies. Both scholars depict this time as one of increasing nationalization, though in Tilly’s analysis this appears to refer to a state-territorial consciousness, arising from the interaction of state and population. Tilly (1992: 80–4) states that rulers increasingly resorted to direct recruitment of their ‘national’ population from a concern about the rising costs of war and the loyalty of large armies of foreign mercenaries. Such exactions had previously…
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic
  • We can consider Tilly and Mann together, though there are subtle differences. Tilly considers states as ‘coercive-wielding apparatuses’ (1992: 2), indeed as giant protection rackets. Baldly stated, Tilly argues the modern nation state is a by-product of rulers’ efforts to acquire the means of war, and war is an organizational phenomenon from which the state derived its administrative machinery. The two are mutually reinforcing, as summarized in Tilly’s dictum ‘war made states and states made war’. The most effective state form, the national state, is that which is able to combine coercive powe…
    European War-Making and the Rise of Nation States | Nationalism and War | Oxford Academic