Benjamin Redding
HI203 – The European World
Armies, Navies and Statebuilding
The Military Revolution Debate
-Michael Roberts, ‘The Military Revolution, 1560-1660’, January 1955.
- Focus largely on Sweden and the Dutch Republic. Changes in military size, tactics and strategy.Roberts suggests a relationship between these developments and state formation.
-Geoffrey Parker, ‘The “Military Revolution”, 1560-1660-a Myth?’, 1976.
- First scholar to truly question Roberts’s thesis; begins large academic debate on what the military revolution was as well as when and where it took place. Although agreeing to the principle of Roberts’s idea.
-David Parrott, The Business of War, 2012.
- States were over-reliant upon mercenaries until at least 1650, if any military revolution occurred thenit was led by hired forces, not standing national armies.
Infantry revolution?
-Beginning as early as the Hundred Years War? Mass increase in size of armies during early modern period, causes new ideas of military thinking that consider both tactics and strategy. The demand of these forces triggers advances to political infrastructure in order to accommodate them.
The trace italienne?
-Developments in artillery forced transformations in defensive fortifications. These fortifications became so superior, that it became almost futile to lead an offensive against them.
Gunpowder revolution?
-Increasing use of gunpowder-based weapons in fifteenth and sixteenth centuries alters how European warfare is operated. New industries based around gunfounding, new professions, and increased importance in royal arms’ houses. Importance to the development of armed navies.
Bureaucratic/financial revolution?
-Military developments result in creation of reformed or completely new state infrastructure to accommodate upscaled militaries. Some allegedly even ‘bureaucratic’.These bodies would influence future political frameworks to adopt similar structures. Cost of warfare causes considerable national debts in the sixteenth century. Does the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witness the birth of fiscal institutions within the state designed to cater for the demand of warfare? See Bank of England, 1694.
Clifford J. Rogers, instead of a revolution, an evolution of “punctuated equilibrium” = ‘Evolution consisted of short bursts of rapid change interspersed with long periods of near stasis.’
Life of the Mary Rose
1510 – Constructionbegan in Portsmouth.
1512– Completed, and in April, Admiral Edward Howard uses as flagship.
1512-14 –Fought in first major campaign against France.
1522-4 –Fought in 2nd French War.
1536 – Ship undergoes a major rebuild.
1543 – Henry VIII declared war on Francis I.
19 July 1545 – The Mary Rose sinks during the French invasion attempt known as the Battle of the Solent.
1546 [?] – Creation of the Council of Marine Causes.A ‘bureaucratic’ strand of government.
1982 – Wreck is salvaged.
Short Bibliography
-Jeremy Black, A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society 1550-1800 (Basingstoke, 1991).
-Michael J. Braddick, ‘An English Military Revolution?’,The Historical Journal, 36 (1993), p. 965-75.
-Clifford S. L. Davies, ‘The Administration of the Royal Navy under Henry VIII: The Origins of the Navy Board’, The English Historical Review, 80:315 (1965), pp. 268-288.
-Jan Glete, Navies and Nations: Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America, 1500-1860, 2 Volumes (Stockholm, 1993).
-Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500-1660 (London, 2002).
-Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1996).
-Geoffrey Parker, ‘The “Military Revolution,” 1560-1660 – a Myth?’,The Journal of Modern History, 48:2 (1976), pp. 195-214.
-David Parrott, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2012).
-Clifford J. Rodgers (ed.), The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1995).