Revolution in military power and finance.A primary reason for the rise of European power was the military and fiscal revolution. In the military sphere, Europeans adopted gunpowder weaponry, which had originally been pioneered in China. This soon led to advances in strategy, tactics, fort-building, and discipline. Warfare became the business of professional soldiers and sailors. Europeans fought many wars during this Big Era. These conflicts included the Wars of Religion, the Puritan Revolution in England, the Seven Years’ War, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. Military innovations, however, did not serve all European states equally because some states augmented their power at the expense of others. By 1800, Britain had virtually eliminated France, its principal rival for global domination, from North America, the Caribbean, and South Asia.
The military revolution was also fiscal because it required deep changes in state bureaucracy, taxation, and accounting to pay for increasingly expensive wars. In this race for revenue only the fiscally fit survived. The power of states unable to finance costly artillery and other weapons was gradually reduced by their more successful rivals. Britain’s greater ability to finance warfare largely explains its victories over France. For example, French military and financial support for the American Revolution led to that kingdom’s bankruptcy and thus contributed to the French Revolution, to be discussed in Big Era Seven. In Asia, imperial states like the Ottomans, Mughals, and Ming Chinese adopted gunpowder weapons and expanded their territories. They did not, however, accept the full package of military and fiscal reforms that Europeans did. By the later eighteenth century, the balance of military power in the world was shifting to the European side. Before the nineteenth century, European states did not have a significant military advantage over Asian or African rivals. For example, at the start of the era, the Austrian Hapsburg empire (the largest in Europe) could not defeat the Ottoman |
Turkish empire, its principal rival. The Portuguese, Dutch, and English traded for slaves in West Africa but seized little territory because regional African states, which were increasingly armed with guns, had sufficient power to defend themselves. The tropical disease environment in West Africa was also deadly to Europeans. It was not until the nineteenth century that Europeans began to have adequate military and medical technology to readily defeat Asian or African armies. At the start of Big Era Seven, for example, both Austrian and Russian forces deploying massed field artillery and other lethal weapons were able to defeat the Ottomans more and more often. |