Advances in Europe’s Art of War, 1600–1750 143ministrators had relied on to govern military professionals un
necessary in transalpine Europe.
Stability at home meant formidability abroad. Within the cockpit of
western Europe, one improved modern-style army shouldered hard
against its rivals. This led to only local and temporary disturbances of
the balance of power, which diplomacy proved able to contain. To
wards the margins of the European radius of action, however, the
result was systematic expansion—whether in India, Siberia, or the
Americas. Frontier expansion in turn sustained an expanding trade
network, enhanced taxable wealth in Europe, and made support of the
armed establishments less onerous than would otherwise have been
the case. Europe, in short, launched itself on a self-reinforcing cycle in
which its military organization sustained, and was sustained by, eco
nomic and political expansion at the expense of other peoples and
polities of the earth.
The modern history of the globe registered that fact, and turned in
large measure on the further fact that technical and organizational
improvements in European management of organized violence did not
come permanently to a halt in the seventeenth century, despite the
new precision and rigidity that European armies achieved by that time.
Instead, technological and organizational innovation continued,
allowing Europeans to outstrip other peoples of the earth more and
more emphatically until the globe-girdling imperialism of the nine
teenth century became as cheap and easy for Europeans as it was
catastrophic to Asians, Africans, and the peoples of Oceania.
The succeeding chapters of the book will address themselves to
these changes.