The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-industrial West (review)

In his latest book, demographer John Landers turns his attention to the intersection of technology and economics, production, and people over the longue durée of the pre-industrial West. Taking as his focus the "organic economies" before the Industrial Revolution (those based principally on muscle power and wooden raw materials rather than the "minerals" of iron and coal—a concept linked to economist E. A. Wrigley), Landers seeks to understand how these societies organized materials, production processes, and human energy, and how that organization affected policy. That alone would pique interest in the book by historians of technology, but its major subtheme—so integral that I wonder why it did not make it into the title—is the connection of all of these to military technology and military power. The Field and the Forge is a new take on the continuing "military revolution" debate, for, as Landers quite rightly notes in his opening pages, the shift from sword and pike to firearms was one of the first transitions from organic (muscle) technology to mineral (and chemical) technology.

The Field and the Forge is impressively wide-ranging: the author analyzes Romans and Carthaginians in one paragraph, then jumps to military victories at Austerlitz and Sebastapol in the next. On the one hand, although compressing these vastly different eras into a single macro-analysis poses obvious difficulties, Landers's comparisons come together cogently and provide useful insights into the relationships between the larger societal and technological variables; on the other hand, it seems to me the problem is that his analysis is often a rather simplistic rehashing of the general story of the development of the technologies and the production methods under consideration. This "banalysis" is not incorrect; it is usually quite well written and relies on the standard summary works in relevant fields, but it seems that one would not be reading this book if one did not already know these general outlines. It also seems that the book's main argument is overly extended to 440 pages, when two hundred would have sufficed.

That said, it is quite easy to parse the sections in which one is interested, for Landers's organization is exceedingly detailed. Although the sixteen chapters initially seem to be a minute division of the material, each of these is further reduced into subsections and even sub-subsections (six levels in some cases) that offer specifics that may only be one or a few paragraphs long. This detailed outline renders the material at once easy to scan and locate, but also contributes to a feeling that the author's argument is burdened with detail.

Landers's best sections are found towards the end, especially in chapters 13 and 15, in which he brings economic theories of costs, production, and population (and mortality) to bear on military technology and military-force projection and stability. He shows how certain populations and levels of technological investment correlate to maximal output and/or efficiency, and then illustrates these ideas by vignettes of various societies that exemplify various levels of production/population/technology. These last chapters would serve as a fine basis for a pedagogical discussion of military history and technology by moving the discussion away from personalities and hardware and toward more satisfying macro-analyses.

The concept I find most compelling in The Field and the Forge is that of "military devolution," wherein the state of a polity's armed forces is both enabled by technological utilization and also determined by the polity's ability to allocate manpower from productive industries to serve in wars; then, when the organizational and financial structures cannot sustain those levels, the military structure must devolve to equilibrate the two. Of course, rarely will a polity give up its "advanced" technology without total collapse, so the military reorganization coupled to financial collapse (e.g., Spain in the seventeenth century, France in the eighteenth) becomes almost predictable...