Engineering a New Order: Military Institutions, Technical Education, and the Rise of the Industrial State

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Gunpowder began the military revolution that molded the modern world. Relatively narrow technical changes in weapons and tactics on early modern European battlefields set in train the transformation of almost every aspect of Western civilization, argued Michael Roberts in 1956.' Widely discussed and critically challenged, his version of the precise nature and timing of change on the equation's military side now commands only qualified respect.2 But the other side of the equation, Roberts's claim of great social consequences flowing from changing military technique, remains substantially intact. It retains enough plausibility, in fact, to suggest thinking about similar processes in other eras.