7

The Initial Industrialization of War,

1840–84

In the 1840s the Prussian army

and the French and British navies broke away from the weapons pat­
tern that had served European governments of the Old Regime so
well. These changes prefigured the industrialization of war, but the
transformation of weapons manufacture did not get into high gear
until the next decade, when the Crimean War (1854–56) highlighted
the deficiencies of traditional methods of supply and presented
British and French inventors with an opportunity to apply civil en­
gineering to military problems of every sort. The pace of change in
weaponry and in methods of management of armed force continued to
accelerate thereafter, so that by the 1880s, military engineering had
begun to forge ahead of civil engineering, reversing the relationship of
thirty years before.
New weapons changed warfare, of course, but they were less im­
portant during the first phase of the industrialization of war than
changes in transport resulting from the application of fossil fuels to the
age-old problem of supplying and deploying armed forces. Steamships
and railroads proved capable of moving men, weapons, and supplies
on an entirely unprecedented scale. This in turn meant that most of
the male population of European countries could be trained for war
and actually delivered to the battlefield. The ideal of every man a
soldier, characteristic only of barbarian societies in time past, became
almost capable of realization in the technologically most sophisticated
countries of the earth. Accordingly, armies began to count their sol­
diers by the million.
Simultaneously, cheaper transport and accelerated communications
allowed Europeans to unify the surface of the globe, bringing weaker
Asian and African polities into a European-centered and managed

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