Military-Technological Models and World Order

The history of Europe, Mr. Burns, is the history of the horse of the horse and its harnessing. Twenty-two years ago, Margaret Deanesley's pleasantly comical epitome started a train of thought about a twofold source, amongst technological innovations, of historic change in the world order. The first source: with a heavy saddle and stirrups, the Eastern empire and later the Dark Ages feudalities mounted their armoured lancers and swordsmen, who then held sway on the field until flights of clothyard arrows from English longbows toppled them. While they were dominant, powers of a kind unfavoured before by the legionary weapon system, or later by firepower, could flourish, and fell into a kind of external relationship with each other distinguished from that of the former imperium, or those of the later hegemonical order of late Christendom, or of the still later European state system. What the second source of change tended to alter was the productive process: horsepower made available by harnessing the heavy draught animal with a collar advanced both communications and farming in the early Middle Ages, shifting to transalpine Europe the economic, and later the power-political, centre of gravity. So technological innovations, transforming the modes of both production and destruction, shape the dimensions, relationships, and order of powers on a time scale far longer than that on which may be plotted the actions of men making their own brief histories. True or false, those twin explanatory hypotheses suggested eight years afterwards a long-range forecast of changes in the nature of the powers' political relations that would follow upon the making of thermonuclear warheads and the ballistic missiles

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