deterministic way by the burgeoning nationalism that flourished in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. And neither should one assert that the war was the almost
natural consequence of the material transformation of many European and North
American societies effected by the Industrial Revolution. Instead, the claim is simply that
the general war that erupted in 1914 took the form that it did because of the political,
social and material conditions that were products of the rise of national sentiment and
the process of industrialization.
The Industrial Revolution affected all aspects of strategic history. Indeed, in its
contemporary guise as the Information Revolution, keyed to the exploitation of the
computer, technological change continues to impact, though certainly not direct, the
course of strategic history in the twenty-first century. Many historians have accepted
as a master strategic narrative the thesis that there was a distinct era of increasingly total
- for a contested concept (Chickering, 1999) – warfare enabled initially by the revolution
in national sentiment unleashed from Paris, and later by the artefacts and attitudes of an
industrial age. That era is variably dated from the 1790s, the Crimea (1 8 54–6), the
American Civil War (1 8 61–5), the Austro-Prussian War (1 8 66) or the Franco-Prussian
War (1 8 70–1). Generally it is held to have terminated in 1945, when the appearance of
the atomic bomb seemed to carry the promise of functioning as a technological trump to
the military products of industrial mass production. Alternatively, a case can be made for
allowing industrial-age mass warfare a lingering half-life through the Cold War decades
to a final hurrah in the First Gulf War of 1991. That conflict was waged with masses of
armour, fleets of ships and aircraft, mountains of ammunition and other supplies and,
generally, in a style not radically different from 1945.
In tandem with, and really as a beneficiary of, radical changes in agricultural practices - in a few countries, at least – industrialization led to increasing urbanization. There
was a flight of people to towns and cities, away from the countryside. Nevertheless,
this was a slow process and it was distinctly uneven from country to country. Throughout
the nineteenth century, Europe continued to comprise a collection of largely peasant
societies. Urbanization was a matter of great concern to politicians and soldiers. With
good reason, peasants were believed to be healthier than townsfolk, and hence to make
more robust soldiers. Also, even more important, peasants were ill-educated, if formally
educated at all, politically conservative and therefore a reliable source of military
manpower for the support of traditional regimes. Population growth was rapid – if, again,
uneven – among states. When one considers the mass conscript armies fielded in
1914–1 8 , supplied and fed by the products of industrialization and a more scientific
agriculture, it is important to be aware of the dynamic demographic context of the
preceding century. The total population of Europe was 1 8 7 million in 1 8 00, 266 million
in 1 8 50, 401 million in 1900 and 46 8 million in 1913. By 1914 the new united Germany
comprised 67 million people, a total which dwarfed the human pool of the French at
a severely lagging 39 million. In this period, numbers mattered profoundly. Mass armies
had to be extracted from the mainstream of the public, from society broadly, not
only from its marginal groups. Should warfare be protracted, size of population could,
indeed must, be the vital factor determining the depth of the belligerents’ manpower
reserves. Moreover, should attrition play a determinative role in deciding war’s out-
come between competent enemies, relative numbers would be potentially the deciding
difference.
Nineteenth century: strategy 57