158 Chapter Fivetrality” that was inimical to British interests. By 1783, Great Britain
was compelled to admit defeat and recognized the independence of
the United States of America.
In this way, then, the European state system partially counteracted
the rise of British and of Russian power, and adjusted itself to the
upheavals that resulted from the expansion of European economic-
military organization to extensive new regions of the earth between
1700 and 1793.Challenges Arising from Deliberate ReorganizationEuropean adjustment to territorial expansion was, in a sense, quite
normal—a semiautomatic consequence of balance-of-power calcula
tions on the part of political leaders. It was a pattern that could be
matched by similar behavior in other times and places—e.g., among
Greek city-states responding to Athens’ rise in the fifth century, or
among the principalities of Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen
turies in response to the rise of Milanese and Venetian power. On the
other hand, the reorganization of political, economic, and military
management that began to manifest itself as the eighteenth century
neared its close was unique, not because other states in other ages had
not also sought to increase their military power by internal re
organization, but because the scope and complexity of the techniques
accessible to European administrators and soldiers had become enor
mously greater than in any earlier age. Rational calculation so enlarged
the scope of deliberate action that, before the end of the century,
managerial decisions began to change the lives of millions of persons.
Military manpower and materiel were clearly in the forefront of this
managerial transformation. In the seventeenth century armies and
navies had become, so to speak, works of art in which human lives as
well as ships and guns were shaped according to preconceived plans
for quite specialized uses. Results were spectacular, as we saw in the
last chapter. In the early part of the eighteenth century further
changes were minimal. After 1750, however, as population growth
began to alter social reality everywhere, experts started to tinker with
existing ways of managing and deploying armed force in the hope of
escaping limits inherent in the older system. Nothing dramatic was
achieved before 1792; but long before then military reformers fore
shadowed the mass mobilization brought about by the French
Revolution.
By the mid-eighteenth century, four limits in existing patterns of