evidence of progress away from humankind’s seemingly eternal war-prone condition. But
what those optimists have done is ignore the main plot in international relations in favour
of a sub-plot. Time after time in the past two centuries, progressive folk have found the
very idea of major war, which is to say war between or among the great powers, to be
incredible and obsolescent or even obsolete. This was so in the early 1 8 50s, the late
18 60s, the 1920s, the 1990s and the 2000s.
A violent century
The nineteenth was a very violent century. It just does not seem so to Eurocentric people
who compare and contrast the ninety-nine years that separated Waterloo from Sarajevo
with the periods that immediately preceded and followed them. It is not controversial to
note that this was a long period that registered profound political, social, technological,
economic and cultural change. And one must not forget that even though some changes,
especially those of a material kind, occurred near-simultaneously in many countries,
there were national differences in the ways that, and in the pace at which, modernity was
welcomed. Unlike those theorists of international relations who disdain to take account
of the domestic diversity of states, this text on strategic history is ever mindful of the rule
that polities and their societies express themselves, indeed reveal their characteristics, in
the way they prepare for and wage war, inter alia.
It is commonplace today to comment upon such phenomena as globalization and a
supposedly frenetic rate of technological change. However, the nineteenth century
suffered, or at least had to cope with, processes of globalization and rapid innovation
which, if anything, were even more dramatic and potentially more significant than their
successors of today. Then, as now, the real challenge was not to know what was happen-
ing, but rather to understand its significance. In strategic context, absent great power
warfare for long periods, the overall meaning of technical innovations has to be eminently
contestable. Forward-looking soldiers from the 1 8 40s right until 1914 were confronted
with desperately difficult questions. What would future major war be like? What did new
weapons mean for the balance among warfare’s trinity of fire, shock and movement?
What should history, even recent experience of war, be allowed to teach? When tech-
nology changes rapidly from decade to decade, or even more rapidly than that, just how
useful can historical experience be? Can one look to Napoleon, Jomini and Clausewitz
for guidance in a strategic context that they neither knew nor anticipated?
It is convenient, but inevitably over-tidy, to divide a long period into phases. Risking
the charge of undue simplification, this text finds it strategically meaningful to divide the
nineteenth century into four phases. Each corresponds to a distinctive strategic context.
If nothing else, such phasing should be effective in combating any temptation to offer
unduly airy strategic generalizations about the nineteenth century.
- Phase One: 1815–54:These thirty-nine years saw the decline, fall but continuing
residual half-life of the so-called Concert of Europe that emerged from the Vienna
Settlement of 1 8 14. - Phase Two: 1854–71:Nearly two decades of intermittent warfare between iso-
lated pairs of great powers, except for the Crimea, in which Russia was opposed by
France and Britain. The overall consequence of the warfare of this phase was the
52 War, peace and international relations