116 Chapter Threeexpansion of market relationships and their gradual penetration into
remoter regions and further down the social scale became assured for
several centuries to come. And during those same centuries their
reluctant readiness to tolerate private pursuit of profit allowed west
ern Europeans to dominate the rest of the earth.
Another way to describe these transactions is to speak of the rise of
capitalism and the emergence of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class
within European society. This has been a central concern among histo
rians of early modern Europe ever since Marxism began to seep into
intellectual and academic circles. But Marxists unfortunately share the
nineteenth-century Eurocentric blinkers that inevitably limited Karl
Marx’s vision of human history. Among Europeans of his age, the
supremacy of the market and of the pecuniary nexus seemed assured
for all time—past, present, and future. From the perspective of the
late twentieth century this no longer seems a self-evident truth, and
historians may therefore soon become sensitive to the military-
technological and political aspects of the rise of European capitalism.
We can gain a juster perspective on the remarkable European ven
ture toward the sovereignty of the market in military as in other forms
of management by recognizing it as an eccentric departure from the
human norm of command behavior—the sort of behavior that domi
nated ancient times and has reasserted itself with remarkable power
since the 1880s. The rest of this book will undertake just such a
readjustment of inherited viewpoints and valuations by attempting to
bridge the gap that separates military from economic history and
historiography.