Customer Reviews

The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

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Professor McNeill describes this 1982 book as a "footnote" to his famous 1963 The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, and as a companion to his even more famous 1976 Plagues and Peoples. The subject of "The Pursuit of Power" is warfare rather than disease, as in "Plagues and People", but Prof. McNeill's conceptual approach is the same. In fact, in the introduction to this book he describes armed force as "micro-parasitism" of the human race.

This is a densely-written and tremendously erudite book. It has 540 footnotes, all pertinent, in 387 pages. There are 21 very interesting illustrations, including a beautiful etching by Violet le Duc showing the use of the 16th century "trace italienne" in defensive siege warfare, Maurice of Orange's 1607 manual of arms for musketeers, and tank photographs from Heinz Guderian's "Panzer Leader". Every page is filled with interest for the general historian as well as the specialist in military affairs, but it is not light reading.

He elaborates on a few broad themes as drivers of historical change, echoing his previous work: Population growth, the development of markets, and the evolution of military technology. He states: "Indeed all humankind is still reeling from the impact of the democratic and industrial revolutions, triggered so unexpectedly in the last decade of the eighteenth century." He elaborates on these changes as they play out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The last chapter, "The Arms Race and Command Economies since 1945" is by far the weakest. He is rather naive in his assessment of Stalin, and curiously equated the Soviet and Western systems under the rubric "command economy". He was myopic about the power of free market behavior in his own time and society, while being quite enthusiastic about it in medieval China.

This leads to a discordant "Conclusion", in which he describes the default political and economic state of the human race as being a despotic command economy. He believed that a "global sovereign power" was the only solution to the threat of nuclear war, the alternative being the "sudden and total annihilation of the human species." I think of the ideal state described by Socrates in Plato's "Republic" as he writes, "Political management, having monopolized the overt organization of armed force, resumed its primacy over human behavior. Self-interest and the pursuit of private profit through buying and selling sank towards the margins of daily life, operating within limits and according to rules laid down by the holders of political-military power. Human society, in short, returned to normal."

Like most who have envisioned a world government, he doesn't describe how such a power could possibly evolve, other than through brute force.

"Even Homer nods", and Prof. McNeill makes a couple of bloopers. He uses the term "hand gun" where most people would use the term "small arms". He attributes the bellicosity of Northern Europeans to their carnivorous eating habits, which required the shedding of much animal blood, and cites the Viking sagas for support, which I think is ridiculous. Plenty of non-Northern Europeans are carnivorous as well as bellicose, and there are plenty of bellicose peoples who eat little or no meat. But these are minor quibbles.

This book is important to everyone with an interest in history, especially the history of warfare. The future may hold some unpleasant surprises for the human species, perhaps including extinction through epidemic disease, nuclear war, or catastrophic climate change. The future is also, however, unknowable and may hold some surprises for us on the upside, despite Prof. McNeill's pessimistic vision.

Highly recommended.

If you only read one book describing the influence of military developments on general history, read this one. --Prof. Clifford J. Rogers

This is a sweeping history of the interplay between technology, society and war by one of the preeminent historians of our generation. Moreover, it is, in this reviewer's opinion, even more relevant today than it was when first published in 1982.

McNeill, quite naturally, observed the events of the past millennium through the lens of the Cold War and came to the conclusion that the current epoch was wholly unprecedented - weapons so powerful that they made their possessors weak because of their inability to flex any power - and that the global ideological confrontation would continue on as the defining feature of the twenty-first century. To the author's credit, he concludes the volume with these sage words: "But the study of [the] past may reduce the discrepancy between expectation and reality, if only by encouraging us to expect surprises - among them, a breakdown of the pattern of the future suggested in this conclusion."

The near future of 2007 does indeed look a lot different than anyone could have imagined in 1982 - but McNeill's themes are no less germane to the radically altered international environment that we currently find ourselves in. Two bear specific mention and consideration.

First, McNeill emphasizes the power of market forces and the incredibly stimulating effect the early markets of Western Europe had on technological development. By the time he wrote "Pursuit of Power," McNeill had come to see the return of command innovation where technological change is driven by the direction and investment of sprawling state bureaucracies, much as the feudal lords of Medieval Europe controlled military technology. But, if anything, the last quarter-century has witnessed the resurgence of market-driven innovation, mostly spurred on by the Internet and global communication networks, while the Cold War era military industrial complex has shriveled to a shell of its former self in the US and all but evaporated in the states of the former communist bloc. As huge chunks of humanity join the global market for goods and services - most notably China and India, but Brazil and other rapidly developing economies as well - one can and should expect robust growth and innovation around the world to flourish. The hallmark of such a system, as McNeill explains, is the rapid adoption and improvement of anything that works better than the existing model. Only now, rather than having the growth and innovation confined to Western Europe, it will become a much more (but not entirely) global phenomenon.

Second, McNeill sees improvements in transportation as the critical enabler to economic growth in Western Europe. At one point, he anticipates the rise of globalization and outsourcing in commenting on how the sudden growth of steam power threatened the wholesale destruction of British agriculture. Over the course of just a few years in the late 19th century, steam-powered ships became so fast and efficient that it was cheaper to import grain to London from the US, Argentina and even Australia than to raise it on local British farms. Thus, over the course of just a decade, a great number of English farmers were effectively "outsourced." We see the same phenomenon at work today, only it is the rapid efficiency in shipping information owing to cheap and reliable high-bandwidth Internet connections to India and other countries that make a number of American jobs suddenly cost ineffective and thus insecure.

In closing, this is a fantastic book and not just for military history buffs. It says as much about society, organizational methods, international economics, the process of innovation, and how technology shapes worldviews as it does about the impact of new weapons on war.

A quick warning to anyone who takes up the chore of reading this book. It is quite difficult to get through without serious reflection and time. It is definitely an enlightening book on the course of the world (not just military history) and the last chapter is truly one for discussion.

In essence, the history of the evolution of the military-industrial complex. Intended as a complementary work to the author's previous "Rise of the West" and "Plagues and Peoples."

To grossly oversimplify: technological advances improve military killing power; since new technologies are more expensive to produce and implement, and since governments have vested interest in a more deadly military, an ineluctable trend develops as states exert more and more socio-economic power in order to develop more and more killing power in order to exert more and more socio-economic power. Compare and contrast command economies v. market economies. One part I found especially new and interesting was how and why, over the course of the 19th century, first land forces were much more open to technological innovation than naval forces, then with the advent of steam power those roles reversed. If the whole subject sounds awfully reminiscent of Kennedy's "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" and Ferguson's "War of the World," well, McNeill was one of Kennedy's major inspirations, as Kennedy was one of Ferguson's.

An important and seminal work, as I just implied, but it still has its drawbacks. There's a lot of the "blind forces of history" style writing: for this book, the Napoleonic wars were "the French revolutionary solution to an excess of manpower and a deficiency of economically productive jobs." And there's the occasional truly weird stumble: he suggests that Northern European cultures are inherently more bloodthirsty than Southern European, because Northern Europeans need to slaughter large numbers of large mammals every year to get through the winter, "cf. the Saga of Olav Trygveson." Huh?!? Even if his thesis were true (and you take Olaf Tryggvason's saga and I'll take the Iliad, and you just try to convince me that proves northerners are inherently more bloodthirsty than southerners), why that one saga in particular?

Tremendously important at the time, but now dated and with real flaws.

A friend of mine once suggested the United States have a 'Historian Laureate,' and recommended William McNeill for the position. I could not agree more. On the first page alone I marked 3 passages to make sure I could find them in the future, and tracked down my son to point out how important they were for an understanding of mankind (he tolerated the interruption but didn't seem to catch the fever).

OK, every page thereafter does not live up to this standard, but as is usual McNeill synthesizes history into comprehensible themes that withstand the test of time. He never panders to the reader, but leaves one wondering why the book is not required reading for everyone seeking public office. If, that is, any of them have actually read a book?

If you are just looking for a list of cool military toys this book isn't for you, by the way. But if you want to understand human history, it is one of the basics.

McNeill shows how military conflict and the advances in technology have stimulated mankind to better itself within the flux of a constantly changing balance of power. "Of War and Men" by Robt O'Connell also addresses this time honored conflict with a focus on culture, weapons technology and warfare.

A good read and an important book for those interested in a longer look at history and how we got here.

Mr. McNeill has put together a comprehensive analysis of the development of military power over the past thousand years, and it just happens to also be tremendously fun to read.

There are already some good reviews, so I will only suggest reading the following books on war in addition to McNeill's: a) "War in human civilization" by Azar Gat; b) "War before Civilization. The Myth of the Peaceful Savage", by Lawrence Keeley; c) "How War Began" by Keith F. Otterbein; d) "War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires" by Peter Turchin; and e) "War and the Law of Nations: A General History" by Stephen Neff.

I ordered this book directly from Amazon 19 days ago and it still hasn't shipped. They are still claiming in the ad that it "usually ships within 7 to 13 days." This is probably an excellent book. If you want it, order it from somewhere else more reliable than Amazon.