The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000

Preface ix

over, since we must still make decisions every day, it probably helps to
know a little more about how we got into our present awesome
dilemma.
The Pursuit of Power attests to a modest faith in the utility of such
knowledge, which may, conceivably, provide a ground for wiser ac­
tion. Even if that turns out to be false, there remains the pale, cerebral,
but nonetheless real delight of knowing something about how things
were different once and then swiftly got to be the way they are.

This book, almost two decades in the making, was stimulated, ini­
tially, by a reviewer of The Rise of the West who remarked that I had
unaccountably lost track of the interaction between military technol­
ogy and political patterns when dealing with modern times after high­
lighting this relationship in earlier ages. The Pursuit of Power is thus a
belated footnote to The Rise of the West.
Across the years, my thinking about technology, armed force, and
society profited enormously from the patience of successive genera­
tions of students at the University of Chicago who let me test my ideas
in class, and responded with a tonic mix of interest, enthusiasm, skep­
ticism, and incomprehension. I also owe a great deal to Ph.D. dis­
sertations written at the University of Chicago by Barton C. Hacker,
Walter McDougall, Stephen Roberts, Howard Rosen, and Jon
Sumida, each of whom taught me things I would not otherwise know
and, by looking over what I wrote here, helped me avoid mistakes.
The manuscript has also been read, in whole or in part, by col­
leagues at Chicago, John Boyer, Ping-ti Ho, Halil Inalcik, and Emmet
Larkin. In addition, Michael Howard and Hartmut Poggo von
Strandmann of Oxford, Paul Kennedy of East Anglia, John Guilmartin
of the United States Air Force, and Dennis Showalter of Colorado
College have generously given me the benefit of their expertise. I owe
a further special debt to three graduate students of Chinese history,
Hugh Scogin and James Lee of Chicago and Steven Sagi of Hawaii, each
of whom took an interest in my researches for chapter 2 and helped to
pilot me through the intricacies of Chinese historiography. Robin
Yates of Cambridge also generously gave time to improving that
chapter.
Finally, the nurturing matrix of the University of Chicago was sup­
plemented both by the University of Hawaii, which invited me to
discourse on the subject matter of this book by appointing me Burns
Visiting Professor in the winter of 1979, and by Oxford University