estimated (and one must emphasize estimated) to have totalled no fewer than 20 million.
By any standard of awfulness, the Taiping Rebellion was a protracted strategic happening
that would blacken the record of any century.
As was claimed in the introduction to this chapter, those in search of a grand narrative
for the nineteenth century are virtually obliged to settle upon the Industrial Revolution
as the multifunctional engine of their story arc. That near-compulsory choice is not
contested here, but the Industrial Revolution is considered primarily with a view to
unwrapping its strategic consequences and implications.
Implications of the Industrial Revolution: the strategic tale
The strategic history of 1 8 00 to the present is the history of the conflicts, and peace-
making efforts, of an ever more industrial, technological and at root scientific
civilization. When Clausewitz was writing and rewriting On Warin the 1 8 20s, he felt
under no compulsion to discuss the implications of technology and industry for his
theory. Had he been writing twenty, perhaps only ten, years later, he could hardly have
avoided the subject. What happened in the second quarter of the nineteenth century
was the acceleration, maybe the true beginning, of what has been called the routinization
of invention. From the 1 8 30s and 1 8 40s until today, material progress in the form of
technological invention and industrial processes resting upon scientific discovery has
been continuous. The rate of advance has varied, and some societies have lagged behind,
but as early as the 1 8 50s, strategic history was impacted noticeably by the challenge of
coping with a novel technological context. It is fair to claim that in sharp contrast to the
wars of the French Revolution and Empire, every war between great powers in the later
nineteenth century and after posed new problems and opportunities that were, in good
part at least, technological. The Industrial Revolution was not carried through in order to
benefit strategists, but its progress was expedited at times by the needs of strategists, just
as its products, by no means always welcomed wholeheartedly by soldiers, presented
challenges that only experience, which is to say trial and error, could resolve.
While it is sensible to identify an Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, it
is no less valid to think of that revolution as a process of diverse cumulative discovery
and manufacture which continues to this day. It is useful to appreciate that there have
been three such revolutions. The first was the introduction of steam power, following
James Watt’s invention of a practicable steam engine in 1764, which was a revolution
fuelled by coal and capable of producing steel. The second revolution occurred slightly
more than a century later with the invention of the internal combustion engine in 1 88 5–6
by Gottlieb Daimler, the use of oil as a source of power, together with the taming and
exploitation of electricity. The third revolution, dating from the 1930s, yielded nuclear
energy, plastics and electronics. In the words of military historian John Terraine, ‘A
process of emergence, dominance, decline and fall is apparent. There are no fixed dates;
elements of all three Revolutions operate today’ (Terraine, 1996: 3). This chapter asks
the same question that statesmen and strategists have been obliged to ask since the 1 8 40s:
what do these technological changes mean for the character and structure of international
relations and for the conduct of war? The wars of the 1 8 50s, 1 8 60s and 1 8 70s posed novel
dilemmas. That condition of some bewilderment was not to improve in the twentieth
century.
54 War, peace and international relations