Strains on Europe’s Bureaucratization of Violence^147
Disequilibrium Arising from Frontier Expansion
Any human skill that achieves admirable results will tend to spread
from its place of origin by taking root among other peoples who
encounter the novelty and find it better than whatever they had previ
ously known or done. This was conspicuously the case with the style
of army organization that came into being in Holland at the close of
the sixteenth century and spread, as we saw in the last chapter, to
Sweden and the Germanies, to France and England, and even to Spain
before the seventeenth century had come to a close. During the
eighteenth century, the contagion attained far greater range: trans
forming Russia under Peter the Great (r. 1689–1725) with near revo
lutionary force; infiltrating the New World and India as a by-product
of a global struggle for overseas empire in which France and Great
Britain were the protagonists; and infecting even such a culturally
alien polity as that of the Ottoman empire.^2
The range of market-regulated activity which undergirded and sus
tained the European pattern of bureaucratized armed force expanded
even more widely during the same decades, weaving the everyday
activities of countless millions of Asians, Africans, Americans, and
Europeans into a more and more coherent system of exchange and
production. Even Australia began to enter into the European-centered
and managed economy before the century closed. Only the Far East
remained apart, owing to Chinese and Japanese governmental policy
which deliberately restricted European trade to marginal and indeed,
in the case of Japan, to economically trivial proportions.
Expansion on such a scale wrought drastic alterations in the internal
- In 1730, Sultan Mahmud I initiated an effort to improve Ottoman defenses by
imitating Christian methods. A French renegade, Claude-Alexandre, comte de Bonne
val (1675–1747), played the leading role in this effort. He took the name of Achmet
Pasha and was appointed commander-in-chief of Rumelia, the highest post in the Otto
man service. Ironically, real military successes against both the Austrians and Russians,
1736–39, did not prevent a sharp reversal of policy after the war. De Bonneval’s
ungovernable temper led to his disgrace and imprisonment in 1738 and his removal
allowed pious Moslems, who preferred to rely on the will of Allah rather than on
newfangled hardware, to return to power. A second abortive effort at modernization
was set off by the unexpected appearance of the Russian fleet in the Aegean in 1770. A
Frenchified Hungarian, Baron François de Tott (1733–93), was entrusted with emer
gency powers to block the Dardanelles; then he undertook a more general effort to
improve the fortification of the capital and modernize the Ottoman artillery and fleet.
When war ended in 1774, however, the energy behind these efforts evaporated. De
Tott, who had not been required to accept Islam, as de Bonneval had done, was doubly
suspect as a foreigner and an infidel; and the reforms he had introduced withered away
to triviality after he returned to France in 1776. On de Bonneval see Albert Vandal, Le
pacha Bonneval (Paris, 1885); on de Tott, see his own Mémoires sur les Turcs et les Tartares
(Amsterdam, 1784).
