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

Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Seventh Printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Very good. x, 405, [1] pages. Illustrations. Footnotes. Index. Minor cover wear and edge soiling. William Hardy McNeill (October 31, 1917 - July 8, 2016) was a historian and author, noted for his argument that contact and exchange among civilizations is what drives human history forward, first postulated in The Rise of the West (1963). He was the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1947 until his retirement in 1987. In 1947, McNeill began teaching at the University of Chicago, where he remained throughout his teaching career. He chaired the University's Department of History from 1961 to 1967, establishing its international reputation. During his tenure as chair, he recruited Henry Moore to cast a bronze statue called Nuclear Energy commemorating the University of Chicago as the place where the world's first manmade nuclear chain reaction took place in 1942. In 1988 he was a visiting professor at Williams College, where he taught a seminar on The Rise of the West. According to John W. Boyer, the University of Chicago's Dean and a former student of McNeill's, McNeill was "one of the most important historians to teach at the University of Chicago in the twentieth century". From 1971 to 1980, he served as the editor of The Journal of Modern History. His Plagues and Peoples (1976), was an important early contribution to the impact of disease on human history. In 1982, he published The Pursuit of Power, which examined the role of military forces, military technology, and war in human history. Derived from a Kirkus review: Plato called those who were entrusted with the physical defense of the community, and nothing else, Guardians. McNeill calls those who, specializing in violence, are able to secure a living without producing, macroparasites. But if McNeill's characterization suggests that he doesn't share Plato's view of the warrior as an organic part of society, he nonetheless winds up showing that warfare is never independent of other factors. The technical means of movement and supply, for example, posed physical limits to the scale of ancient empires: Xerxes' invasion of ancient Greece stretched those limits too far, and resulted in catastrophe. For a long time, Chinese leaders were able to maintain restrictive control over growing commercial practices within their realm; but commercial practices did proliferate, and contributed to the material provisioning of nomads who were eventually able to break through Chinese defenses. In Europe during the same period (1000-1600), the development of commercial practices-together with the establishment of well-organized, tax-supported military units-represented a new fusion that resulted in European military predominance. From then on, McNeill concentrates on Europe and America, chronicling such transformations in war-making as those resulting from the development of staff officers who prepared written battle plans, or from blast-furnace innovations that made possible new and more accurate cannons. Napoleon's vast French army is attributed by McNeill to population pressure; the Crimean War's sudden, overwhelming demand for weapons is seen as ushering in the era of mass-produced weapons made possible by new industrial production techniques. Thereafter, manufacturing and war went together, from the new technologies of transportation to modern notions of integrated weapons systems. But while McNeill is able to chronicle all of this, he does not show that war was the critical factor in historical developments; instead, war properly comes across as supplying new demand for goods the social and economic system was already capable of producing. As a survey of military history, this is a work of exceptional breadth.