Strains on Europe’s Bureaucratization of Violence 157their superiors’ instructions by adhering to familiar methods of work,
and to increase production, if that was what was wanted, either by
driving the labor force harder or by securing more workers. The
alternative of trying some newfangled device that was sure to detract
from short-run results and might not work in the long run either, was
seldom even considered. Only when a technique had proved success
ful abroad was it worthwhile for Russian administrators to disrupt
existing arrangements by importing the novelty—often along with
foreign technicians to instruct the local work force in the use of the
new methods.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century Russian armaments and
Russian armies had been built up in this fashion by Peter the Great.
The stability of European military organization and technique in the
following decades meant that catching up and outstripping smaller
powers became comparatively easy for Russian administrators and
army officers to achieve. The success of Russian arms, especially in the
second half of the eighteenth century, attests their ability to do so.^12
The superior flexibility of market behavior in making room for
technical innovation eventually allowed Great Britain, and western
Europe generally, to steal a march on the Russians by raising economic
and military efficiency to a level that eclipsed Russian and east Euro
pean achievements. This did not become clear until after 1850, how
ever. Before then, from 1736 to 1853, Russia’s ambitions were only
precariously contained by balance-of-power diplomacy and by the re
markable military explosion that the French Revolution generated.
The balance of power also worked to minimize the overseas pre
ponderance that Great Britain seemed to have won in 1763. In par
ticular, the disappearance of the French threat from Canada made
British relations with the North American colonists more difficult
than before; and when King George Ill’s government sought to com
pel the colonists to help pay for the war, discontent turned into open
rebellion. Soon France came to the aid of the American rebels (1778)
and other European powers either joined the French or expressed
their dislike of a British overseas trade monopoly by an “armed neu-
- Naval technique was harder to master, and the Russian navy that sailed into the
Mediterranean in 1770 to attack the Turks was not really up to French or British
standards, though it overwhelmed the Turkish navy easily enough. By 1790, moreover,
the Russian navy had won secure mastery among Baltic powers by outclassing the
Swedes permanently. Cf. Nestor Monasterev and Serge Terestchenko, Histoire de la
marine russe (Paris, 1932), pp. 75–80; Donald W. Mitchell, A History of Russian and
Soviet Sea Power (New York, 1974), pp. 16–102.