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CHAPTER 1
Iberian Conquistadors and Supplicants
DID SUPERIOR WEAPONS, tactics, organization, administrative and fiscal support, or some combination of these factors, allow Europeans to dominate the Americas, Africa, and Asia? This chapter and the one following assess the global aspects of the military revolution thesis by studying European expeditionary warfare. The military revolution thesis holds that Europeans sallied forth and won thanks to the application of the same style of warfare they had honed in fierce military competition at home. In contrast, I suggest a new perspective on Europeans' overseas wars from the end of the fifteenth century to the end of the 1700s.
The way Westerners fought in the wider world in the early modern period was almost entirely different from the way they fought wars in Europe with respect to nearly every one of the criteria that define the military revolution thesis. Instead of the tactics of the armies of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V or of the Thirty Years War, Europeans abroad improvised and adapted new methods of fighting in line with local circumstances and conditions. Rather than armies of tens of thousands, the forces of European expansion more commonly numbered only in the hundreds. While cannon-armed sailing ships were superior to anything other powers could put on the open ocean, they did not fundamentally change the balance of power. While Western military technology was far in advance of their American opponents, elsewhere there was a general parity. When there were gaps, these were usually closed quickly.
Remembering that the military revolution thesis is as much about states and taxes as muskets and cannon, the forces that fought, traded, and schemed their way into foreign regions were rarely those of European states, but much more commonly ad hoc bands of adventures and chartered private companies. This was largely out of necessity rather than choice: European rulers were rarely able to transport large armies across the oceans until the nineteenth century. Thus on almost every count, the military revolution thesis that Europeans won by overpowering opponents to the West and East fails to hold. Yet if so, what does explain the first wave of expansion?
Here it is necessary to delve a little deeper into the ambiguous idea of "expansion," which played out very differently in different regions. In the Caribbean, Central and some parts of South America this involved conquistadors destroying major native polities already ravaged by disease and taking over their lands and peoples, though for centuries the degree of actual control exercised by the Iberians was often slight. In Africa and Asia, however, European expansion was very different. The Portuguese, Dutch, and English inserted themselves as relatively minor, marginal players within existing systems of political and commercial relations. Coercion was certainly very important, but European domains in the East were maritime networks that did not challenge the interests of the major powers in the region. In a sentiment that was widely replicated elsewhere, African rulers referred to themselves as "lords of the land," while the European interlopers were the "masters of water." Sometimes this relationship operated on a basis of rough equality, but often Europeans had to implicitly or explicitly subordinate themselves in showing deference to local rulers.
Though it does not get much coverage in this book, disease was a crucial factor in explaining the different patterns of European expansion, as popularized in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. The spectacular destruction wreaked by Europeans in the Americas, particularly the Spanish, owed a great deal to the cataclysmic effects of disease in precipitating the collapse of the largest and most structured polities in the region, and gravely weakening the rest. In contrast, in Africa the advantage was reversed, with locals having a greater tolerance to ambient diseases, while Europeans, and their horses and pack animals, suffered daunting mortality rates. In Asia, disease did not consistently advantage one side over the other to anything like the same degree. It bears noting that those in the early modern period had very little understanding of what diseases were, how they worked, or how they were cured. As with the beliefs of bulletproofing discussed earlier, Europeans responded to sicknesses with superstition: blood-letting, spices, and prayer being the main remedies.
Unless they enjoyed a major epidemiological advantage, Europeans were unable to defeat even middling non-Western powers in the period 1500–1750, and generally maintained their predominantly naval-mercantile empires in the East under the sufferance of the Asian and African rulers of the day. In the rare instances when Westerners sought to challenge this arrangement, they generally lost. This precarious presence is hardly surprising given the tiny, essentially freelance European expeditionary forces involved. As discussed in Chapter 3, in the only instance where large, state-supported Western armies repeatedly faced a major non-Western enemy in this period, the Ottomans were able to win, conquer, and then hold most of their gains in Europe and North Africa. The only evidence of a major shift in the military balance comes right after the end of the period Parker sees as crucial (1500–1750). From this point, the Ottomans began to consistently lose to European opponents, especially Russia, while further East the English East India Company began the long process of uniting South Asia under its rule. Even in the case of Western victories, however, the military revolution thesis is often a poor fit with the way events unfolded.
In the rest of this chapter I evaluate the military revolution thesis in relation to technology, tactics, army size, and the fiscal-administrative supports of warfare. I begin with the Spanish conquistadors and other Europeans in the Americas, before moving on to examine the Portuguese in Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Asia. The following chapter does the same in comparing the tenets of the military revolution thesis in relation to the Dutch and English East India Companies in South, Southeast, and East Asia. Having examined the military revolution thesis and found it a poor guide to the historical experience, the explanation of the essentially modest European early modern successes rests on the importance of local allies, deference to non-Western great powers, and the fit between what Europeans wanted, and what locals were prepared to give. European fortified trading posts ashore posed little danger to Asian and African rulers, and were often incorporated within mutually beneficial networks of exchange. European expansion in this era is thus in no way equivalent to conquest, being in many ways more a matter of European submission than dominance.
What of the more abstract argument of the book about war, learning, and organizational change, and what Black refers to as a paradigm-diffusion model? Here it is important to note the contradiction whereby social scientists and historians find it very hard to tell what caused what in very complex situations like battles and wars, leading to fundamental disagreements about why history turned out as it did. At the same time, there is an assumption that those in the thick of these episodes could accurately diagnose the intricate causal relationships between technology, tactics, logistics, morale, and broader societal factors, on the one hand, and military effectiveness, on the other. Perhaps even more optimistically, the assumption is that, having discerned the causes of effectiveness, these actors were then able to implement efficiency-enhancing reforms. As Europeans rarely enjoyed military superiority over their local foes, there was no process of elimination leading to a convergence on one, superior, Western way of war. In Asia, great power armies that dwarfed their European counterparts had either already anticipated key elements of the military revolution centuries before Europe, or had come up with alternatives.
The Model: Armies of the Military Revolution in Europe
Before getting down to the analysis of European military actions on other continents, it is useful to consider what an army of the kind described by the classic military revolution thesis would look like. The first battle of Breitenfeld during the Thirty Years War in 1631 saw Protestant Swedes, led by King Gustavus Adolphus, and their Saxon allies defeat an army of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor. Though he emphasizes sieges as being more typical than battles, Parker refers to Breitenfeld as a paradigmatic demonstration of the superiority of the new, modern form of warfare. Roberts (who wrote a biography of the Swedish king) also saw the Swedish armies of this time as pioneers of the new style of war. The Protestant forces were made up of 28,000 infantry and 13,000 cavalry, with 51 heavy iron cannons and further light pieces distributed among individual regiments. As the Swedish infantry were deployed in thinner lines than the squares of their imperial opponents, were intensively drilled in volley fire, and had superior field artillery, so they produced a greater rate and weight of fire that proved decisive. The battle was a great tactical and strategic victory, almost 80 percent of the imperial army was killed or captured. Though weapons like swords and pikes were still important, gunpowder weapons had come to dominate. Other historians share the view that Breitenfeld was "the first great test and trial of the new tactics against the old, and therefore the first great land battle of the modern age." The discipline required for the Swedes and others to successfully fire in volleys and perform other maneuvers in battle required training in smaller units with more officers as part of a standing force. Given this and other Swedish victories, "their methods were soon copied by other major armies in Europe." For example, according to Parker, by the very next year after the battle, Imperial forces had learned to adapt and emulate the techniques of their victorious opponents by thinning their lines of infantry and improving their volley fire, as well as deploying more field artillery.
From the beginning of the 1500s to the Treaty of Westphalia that concluded the Thirty Years War in 1648, major European powers typically came to battle with 30,000–60,000, troops and maintained up to 150,000 men under arms in total. Raising, equipping, and provisioning forces of this size required the near-total support of the state, commonly taking 80 percent or more of rulers' revenues, not counting the requirements of servicing debt accrued from previous wars. Hence the link to the broader sociopolitical changes such as state-building: "the costs of war and preparing for war are what lead to societal impacts." For armies of the time, bills were paid (if they were paid) through a combination of official taxation, borrowing, and plunder.
The point here is to provide a rough baseline or benchmark against which to judge the way Europeans fought outside their na tive region. To be competitive in the new style of warfare in Europe was held to require large gun-armed, standing infantry armies, plentiful cannons, new warships, and new-style artillery fortresses with angled bastions, which together absorbed nearly all the money and manpower that the rulers of the time could muster. Many went through successive bankruptcies under the fiscal strain. The armies themselves, functioning as instruments of states and sometimes under direct royal command, were professional permanent forces extensively drilled in volley fire and combined arms fighting to draw on the complementary strengths of musketeers, pikemen, cavalry, and artillery. It is important to keep in mind that these individual technological, tactical, and fiscal-administrative features are seen as a package deal in constituting the military revolution, not just a check-list of coincidental developments. In considering the way Westerners fought overseas, almost none of these characteristics applied, and hence the tenets of the military revolution are almost completely irrelevant to European expansion in the early modern period.
The Conquistadors
At first glance, the Spanish conquest of huge swathes of the Americas in the early 1500s would seem to be incontrovertible proof of Western military superiority fuelling spectacularly successful empire-building in the face of incredible odds. Tiny forces of conquistadors, far from home in a strange land, repeatedly overcame American armies of tens of thousands, bringing down two empires, and gaining fantastic wealth in the process. The Spanish secured huge new holdings of land, population, and revenue, based on slavery and genocidal violence. Surely if the military revolution thesis works anywhere, it would be here. Aside from being epochally important in their own right, these feats have often shaped perspectives of European expansion in general: "the Columbian experience has escaped geographical boundaries to emerge as the dominant symbol of European expansion in the early modern period." Even a casual familiarity with Western relations with non-Western powers in the Mediterranean, Africa, and Asia shows how wrong this perspective is. But before skipping ahead to other regions, it is important to take a closer look at the Americas. The aim here is not to summarize the historical record, but to evaluate the relevance of military revolution thesis, and to present an alternative view.
The first point of note is the incredibly small number of conquistadors: for Cortes in Mexico only 900 at the climactic Battle of Tenochtitlan in 1521, and for Pizaro only 170 in Peru in 1532. Often presented as proof of Western technological and/or organizational superiority, this fact immediately disqualifies the military revolution thesis, which is fundamentally about mass armies numbering in the tens of thousands, as an adequate explanation of the Spanish conquest. As already noted, the size of the army is the crucial link in connecting the strictly military aspects of the argument with those relevant to the creation of the modern sovereign state. One objection might be that the forces that finally defeated the Aztecs in the battle for their capital Tenochtitlan did number in the tens of thousands (around 70,000), thanks to the Spaniards' local allies. But these allied forces were a world away from the carefully drilled, permanent, professional soldiers of the thesis.
The small size of the Spanish forces was a direct result of the fact that they were essentially private efforts, like Columbus's original voyage of discovery. The Spanish Crown authorized these private expeditions, striking a deal whereby land was claimed in the name of the Crown, and souls for the church, while the right to exploit the new territories for a set period was set down in an arrangement (encomienda) with those risking their money and lives in the venture. As was the case with the earlier conquest and colonization of the Canary Islands, "Funds for expeditions were made available through contracts between adventurers and bankers, because expansion was always a question of business, with attendant risks." Kamen continues:
Not a single Spanish army was expended on "conquest." When Spaniards established their control, they did so through the sporadic efforts of small groups of adventurers whom the crown later attempted to bring under its control. … Thanks to the encomienda, the crown was able to mount a military operation in the New World without the necessity, which it would in any case not have been able to fulfill, of sending an army there. [There was an] almost total dependence of the "conquest" period on private enterprise.
The essentially private nature of the enterprise refutes the idea that triumphs in the New World were achieved by state forces financed by public revenues and controlled by the royal bureaucracy. In the main, the early conquistadors were not even soldiers, often being recruited via kinship groups. The majority had none of the military training and instruction in drill that were essential features of new-style armies. There were no officers, and hence no formal chain of command.
Yet if there is a single factor that the proponents of the military superiority thesis might seize on, it is the fact that the conquistadors had guns and their opponents did not. Often authors are careful to stress that when they talk about technology, they mean not just the physical artifacts, but also the organizational skills and perhaps even cultural attributes necessary to employ technology to full effect. However, this caveat notwithstanding, there is a tendency for much of the rest of the discussion to nevertheless default to the physical technology, especially guns. The opposite problem is that if the definition of technology becomes all-encompassing, subsuming organizational, social, and cultural features also, then the word becomes stretched beyond recognition from its commonsense meaning, and such explanations become unfalsifiable. Hence the danger of Hoffman's definition that "technology here encompasses a lot, and intentionally so, because it has to embrace everything that made victory more likely." Explaining victory by superior technology, and then defining superior technology as anything that improves the chances of victory, is circular logic.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Empires of the Weak"
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