P.11 MacDonald summarizes the dominant state of thinking in the discipline on why Europe conquered much of the rest of the world by exactly replicating the military revolution argument: “European warfare underwent a profound transformation beginning in the 16th century. On land, the spread of gunpowder-based weapons, as well as specialised fortifications designed to resist these arms, transformed the nature of combat. European armies were increasingly compelled to raise large standing armies, which were dominated by highly-trained and well-drilled infantry. Although driven by competition between European states, the unintended consqeuence of this ‘military revolution’ was to widen the gap in military power between Europe and the rest of the world.”
P. 20 “this process of discerning ‘what worked’ is by no means as easy as it sounds. Victory and loss in war are a result of complex and varying combinations of factors, many of the most important of which, like leadership and morale, are intangible. A study of contemporary military effectiveness stresses indirect and hard to change factors like the international environment, political culture and social structure.”
P. 22 “In order for selection mechanisms to create a population of homogenous effective organisations … the ‘death rate’ amongst organisations has to be very high, the differences in effectiveness have to be large and consistent, and the environment has to stay fairly constant,,, these differences are difficult to meet in the context of military competition.”
P. 34 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 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. .. Rather than armies of 10s of thousands, the forces in Europe 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.”
P. 36 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 predominately nabal mercantile empires in the East under the sufferance of the Asian and African rulers o f the day. In the rare instance where Westerners sought to challenge this arrangement, they generally lost.”
P. 37 In Asia, great power armies that dwarfed their European counterparts hsd either already anticipated key elements of the military revolution centuries before Euopre, or had come up with alternatives.
P. 61 One of the few instances of the Portugese trying to conquer territory in Asia was their campaign against the rajah of Kandy in Ceylon. In 1594, 1630, and 1638 this resulted in disaster, as Portugese forces were ambushed and destroyed, their commaners being killed on each occasion… Kandyan forces did not have guns or armour like the Portugese, being armed with bows and spears, and thus they tended to avoid frontal attacks. Instead, they used the mountainous and forested terrain to wear down the Portugese with ambushes and attacks on their supply lines”
P. 74 There is no question that mainland Southeast Asian and perhaps most of the islands too had gubs well before the Europeans arrived. .. the sultan of Malacca was lentifully equipped with cannons by the time of the Portugese attack in 1511… diffusion of gunpowder weapons as beginning in Burma and Vietnam in the 1390s, before advancing to the rest of the region and Northern India through the next century, parallelling the fact that Mamluk and Ottoman guns had reached Western India by 500. Chinese cannons reached Java by 1421.”
P. 86 “the Mighals were not defeated by European,s and that though internal dynamics were the determining factor in their fall, their most dangerous military foes were Persians and Afghans, not the Portugese, Dutch or British.”
P. 87 “Bengal alone had a larger population than Britain in 1750.”
P. As in Africa, none of the Asian great powers had an interest in controlling sea routes or maritime trade in the way that Europeans obsessed about, making compromises and accommodations between the two groups much easier to strike.”
P. 100 “The repeated European disappointments and defeats at the hands of Islamic foes in North Africa right through to the 19th century scotches any notion that Western overseas expansion swept all before it. These reverses are even more significant given that the Spanish and Portugese committed far more resources in their failed expeditions across the Mediterranean than they ever did to those across the Atlantic or to the East. The Ottomans were dominant in Europe right through what is said to be the key century in the military revolution. The fact that their eclipse came only in the second half of the 18th century, and then at the hands of the Russians, is an awkward fit with the tenets of the conventional story. It is a strongly underappreciated fact that the Ottoman Empire enjoyed far more extensive and longer-lasting military and geo-political success than supposed paragons of modernity like the Dutch and the Swedes… Non-Western powers are portrayed as mere failures waiting to happen.”
P. 134 The Industrial Revolution was certainly a vital part of explaining how Europeans were able to build their new empires. But the prior question is why Europeans wanted to build huge empires. Given the at-best uncertain returns in military and economic terms, in many cases later imperial expansion seems to have reflected concerns about prestige and status in an international context where great power standing required colonies. In the decades after WWII, however, being in possession of colonies went from being valorized to being deeply stigmatised as part of a fundamental change in the mores of international society… the rise and fall of European empires were crucially driven and shaped by changes in ideas and cultural contexts, rather than just, or even mostly, material factors and rational means-end calculation.”
P. 134 “the functionalist model, premised on rational learning and Darwinian survival pressures, is implausiable. Against the expectation of convergence on a superior Western style of warfare, it is striking how often non-Western opponents have improved their performance by adopting a very different style of war.”
P. 143 Outside the settler countries of the Americas and Oceania, European dominance fell even more suddenly than it had been established. .. the declining legitimacy of empires reinforces earlier conclusions about the importance of culture and ideas, as distinct from rational pursuit of power and wealth, in the making and remaking of the modern international system. Second, the fact that ‘backward’ non-Western forces have repeatedly bested ‘advanced’ Western forces supports earlier skepticism about the significance of weapons and military technology in isolation from broader concerns.”
P. 144 The wars of decolonisation, and subsequent Western counterinsurgency campaigns, decisively undermines easy assumptions that victory goes to those with the most advanced technology, the largest economies, and the most developed state apparatus. .. Us and Western forces are perhaps even further away from solving these problems than they were 50 years earlier… Claims that these kinds of insurgencies are not ‘real’ major power wars completely fail to deal with the fact that this kind of expeditionary warfare was how Europeans built their empires and created the international system in the first place.”
P. 150 “Moving away from the conventional story of Western hegemony puts our current circumstances in a new light. A more cosmopolitan, less eurocentric perspective, giving due weight to regions beyond Europe, shows Western dominance of the international system as relatively fleeting, and thus makes it much less surprising if this dominance is now being challenged with the rise of powers beyond the West. A multipolar global international order becomes the historical norm rather than the exception. … The questions that we ask, and fail to ask, about history changes our views not only of where we have come from, but also where we are, and where we are going.”
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