Mini Rant on Jared Diamond
Dr. Strangemonkey said:
2.) Armies are indeed primarilly hired. But hiring and training musketeers is something you can do pretty much anywhere, archers come from cultures not training camps.
This was not the effect of gunpowder. Armies were primarily hired in the early Renaissance period because of the City states in Italy and the lack of a centralized state in the rest of Europe. In fact, it was
because of gunpowder that these sorts of forces ultimately became extinct.
You are referring to the Renaissance mercenary armies as your example (the mercenaries of the De Medicis et al..) But Venetian and Florentine mercenary armies were primarily crossbow users - not gunpowder forces. Firearms were still very expensive to deploy in numbers at this time and they were still unreliable and had a poor rate of fire.
It took central governments to exploit gunpowder to its fullest. Gunpowder and a strong central state fed on one another and reinforced one another. Jared Diamond might believe that gunpowder had little to do with it - but I am not buying into that view.
It leads to the early modern period, nationalism and plentiful black powder weaponry on the fields of Europe. It lead to revolution and the guillotine. It leads to a change in the way in which states were governed. It's not incidental; it's not a throw away development in history with no lasting change.
The historiography of Diamond that people are quoting in this thread is extremely fatalistic and determinative. It has a philosophy of historical interpretation which intrinsically never admits that things could really have gone any other way than they did; that all change is social and military matters effect little in the way of typical life and societal change. That the military is only effected by and does not cause economic change. It's all geography and biology.
(Paul Kennedy will show you a very different explanation if you read him - but he's currently out of favour in a country where major war and tax cuts are uttered in the same breath)
There are a lot of historians who agree with this sort of broad brushed analysis - and while it is often true - it ignore pivotal events where it is demonstrably NOT true.
Consequently, it can be naive and dangerous. It suggests that wars are always won before they are begun and that generational patterns of migration, disease and geography are ultimately determinative.
It's a psychohistory approach which ignores The Mule. A study of the Pacific War that ignores Midway; that Austerlitz - or Waterloo - were won by plows and shopkeepers and that neither victory had long term consequences. It's not quite revisionism a la Charles and Mary Beard saying the American Civil War was economics and not slavery - but it often comes close. It focuses to the macro scale that finds its theory convenient - by steadfastly refusing to look deeper and measure individual cause and effect.
I accordingly approach such historiography with suspicion. I did my thesis on the topic of the Grand Theorists (which at the time were Paul Kennedy and William McNeill). Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs and Steel) has ripped off just enough of McNeill's Plagues and Peoples and tried to bend it away from Kennedy's more militaristic view. He may be selling - but on the whole - I'm not buying.
So: while Diamond may chalk it all up to germs and bubonic plague and geography - I think history, technology, the military and the individual go deeper than that. They matter.
And when you have a weapon that renders a decade of hacking at the pells to be more or less wasted time - you have a serious and profound effect on your society measurable over as long a period of time as it takes to perfect the weapon and deploy them in numbers. In our history - that took centuries. That does not mean that it needed to take that long - only that it did take that long.
