The Field & the Forge

The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-Industrial West. By John Landers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-19-924916-4. Figures. Tables. Notes. Appendixes. References. Index. Pp. 440. $80.00.

It took me many hours to work my way through The Field and the Forge, but not because it is boring or badly written. On the contrary, it is consistently intriguing, informative, and thought-provoking, and the author's prose style ranges from very good to outstanding. The reason it took so much time to read was because I had so frequently to pause and reflect on the challenging ideas presented, and their implications.

Landers's book ranges widely, spanning the whole chronology of the European Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern periods (through the French Revolution)—and integrating economic, demographic, macro-political, technological, and military approaches. The general argument is that throughout that timeframe, European civilization was molded by the permanent and inherent characteristics of an "organic economy," i.e., one in which most of society's labor had to be devoted to agriculture, and most of the available energy came from muscle power or wood fires. These preindustrial economies were of necessity plagued by endemic poverty, which limited specialization of labor. The high costs of land transport ensured that the population and productive capacity would be widely distributed across the countryside. These considerations, in turn, put tight limitations on the resources that societies could devote to warfare. Military systems had to work within strict trade-offs between quantity and quality of soldiers, since the surpluses generated by organic production were not sufficient to pay for large investments in the factors of quality (armor, horses, training, and leadership structures) for large numbers of soldiers. Landers further argues that, until the sixteenth century, the balance of quantity vs. quality in military systems was broadly determined by the phases of the demographic cycle. When population was declining—i.e., across most of the period ca. AD 150-1000, from 1347 to around 1400 or possibly 1500, and from around 1600 to 1650 (pp. 23-24)—the labor scarcity in the civilian economy made it more efficient to rely on fewer, better-equipped soldiers. During phases of demographic expansion (most clearly c. 1000 to 1300 and 1500 to 1600), however, the population tended to push past the point where the marginal productivity of labor fell below subsistence costs. This made diversion of manpower into the economically unproductive activity of soldiering cheap, encouraging the use of large armies. However, as already noted, resources were too limited to sustain large armies and high per-man costs, so quality tended to fall in these periods. Army sizes could not grow too much, however, because the necessarily dispersed "areal geography" of organic economies imposed logistical constraints making it very difficult to sustain field armies much in excess of 30,000 men. Furthermore, the technology of command was insufficiently developed to employ larger armies effectively, even if they could be fed.

This general pattern, Landers argues, was broken by "the spread of gunpowder weapons—the first great energy revolution in human affairs" (p. 382). (Landers seems to be speaking here of the sixteenth century, not the fifteenth century, when gunpowder weapons were already ubiquitous and arguably already revolutionizing warfare. He does not note, though it would fit very well with his overall concept, that it was probably around the turn of the sixteenth century that most saltpeter began to be manufactured in large "niter farms," or imported from the East, rather than the older, more dispersed and "organic" method of collection from dung heaps, compost piles, and so forth.) His point is that the nature of hand firearms put a great premium on numbers, in part because they had to be used in mass, and in part because musket battles imposed much heavier casualties on the winners than had been the case in earlier eras. Moreover, only a limited amount of...