15 - War and state-building

Summary

Traditional accounts of the period with which this volume is concerned assume that state-building and war interacted almost permanently in ways that shaped both the structure of the late-medieval and early-modern state, and the framework and scope of warfare. The pressure warfare exerted on monarchies and republics alike to mobilise new resources has often been seen as one of the driving forces of the process of state-building. However, a number of chapters voice reservations about this, and in fact recent research in Britain, Germany, and elsewhere has called into question the entire process of state-building in its traditional sense. Indeed, any approach that subscribes to some sort of theory of modernisation has become widely unpopular in early-modern studies, and merely talking about state-building implies that in one way or another a process of modernisation did take place. Of course, military history as opposed to cultural history, for example, which tends to see the past more as a system of self-referential symbols and meanings, would probably find it quite difficult to abandon the idea of modernisation entirely, if only in the technical sense of a move towards greater efficiency, greater firepower, greater degrees of ‘Vickers hardness’ and so on. Moreover, it is difficult to tell a coherent story about long-term changes in military history without some sort of teleological approach, as many historians would argue.

What we should bear in mind is that the notion of modernity has become more ambiguous and contradictory than in the past.