War

Just as the history of government is seen through the eyes of the rulers, the history of wars has, at least until recent decades, been written largely from the viewpoint of the men of power who brought them about and the commanders who organized them. Their effects on the participants, the civil populations, and the whole economic and political life of the countries involved in fighting and preparing for wars have been less conspicuous. The tedious diplomatic arguments before hostilities and the even more tedious treaties after them that have been made to seem similarly important. Hardly anyone would now doubt that though one of the greatest changes in seventeenth-century Europe was in the character of warfare, it mattered less because of victories or defeats than because of its connections with the life of the community. Wars came, more and more, to be fought only by states; and states became, more and more, institutions for fighting wars. The developments are not easy to define: there were no inventions comparable to gunpowder or aeroplanes, no decisive events like Hiroshima. Innovations in weapons such as the flintlock, the paper cartridge, and the rifle were adopted slowly and erratically. Soldiers were recruited and trained in the old ways long after new ones had become familiar. Attempts to build bigger and better ships were generally unsuccessful. It is safe to say that far more resources were spent on wars; but much of the information we need is very hard to quantify. Where statistics are available the historian can be deceived by figures that were meant to deceive someone else. (Unending controversy about the effects of the Thirty Years War shows how some of the problems of evidence extended to civilian affairs too.) It is difficult also to see the many wars in their true proportions. As with other topics, we still devote too much attention to western Europe. The warfare that had the largest effects was not that about scraps of territory in the Rhineland but about control of the Danube countries, the Balkans, the Mediterranean and of course the huge areas outside Europe whose fate wes decided by comparatively small forces. We shall not entirely escape the distortions here.