Industrialization of War, 1840–84 259
conquered Moslem tribes and states with ease. The tsar’s soldiers
found scope for old-fashioned heroism in these campaigns just as
French colonial troops were simultaneously doing in Africa and Indo
china. Successes of this sort helped to disguise from both armies their
failure to keep pace with German organization and planning.
Nevertheless, the Russians could not forget their Crimean humilia
tion. But efforts to overcome the backwardness that had permitted a
French and British expeditionary force to defeat the Russian army on
its own ground merely opened painful rents in the social fabric with
out altering the peasant base upon which the army rested or restoring
Russia to the military primacy it had enjoyed from 1815 to 1853.
Nevertheless, Russian state power remained formidable, and official
policy devoted great effort to the task of equipping the tsar’s army and
navy with the latest and most efficient weapons, even when they had
to be purchased abroad from Krupp or Armstrong. Russia, in fact,
ranked among the very best customers for both these firms from the
1860s onwards.^49
Within Russia, powerful residues of older command structures of
society remained apparent, even after compulsory state service was
legally abolished in the eighteenth century for nobles and for peasants
in 1861. Japan’s society, too, carried forward into the twentieth cen
tury strong traces of older “feudal” forms of human relationships.
These aspects of Russian and Japanese society were profoundly alien
to the liberal, individualistic and market-regulated patterns of behav
ior that achieved such remarkably broad scope in Britain and France in
the nineteenth century. Until after World War II, however, these
heritages from the past seemed handicaps, not strengths, destined to
decay and disappear sooner or later. Indeed, British and French suc
cess and self-confidence were so great that their brands of liberalism
exercised a powerful attraction upon the rest of Europe and the world,
at least until economic depression, setting in after 1873, invited more
active state intervention in economic matters.
Both France and Britain had been able to solve the problems each
had confronted in the late eighteenth century when rapidly growing
populations pressed hard against the limits of an already well-
cultivated countryside. The French had done so by lowering birthrates
and attuning population growth to expanding economic opportunities
- Cf. John Bushnell, “Peasants in Uniform: The Tsarist Army as a Peasant Society,”
Journal of Social History 13 (1980): 565–76; John Bushnell, “The Tsarist Officer Corps
1881–1914: Customs, Duties, Inefficiency,” American Historical Review 86 (1981):
753–80.
