Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology through History (review)

In Throwing Fire, Alfred W. Crosby takes a new look at the old idea that weapons have influenced human evolution and history, singling out specific human traits to explain why a specific class of weapons has exerted unique effects. He argues the thesis that among the many distinctive abilities of the human species, two have decisively shaped humanity's place in nature and the course of human history: to throw accurately and to tame fire. Projectiles and fire, alone or in combination, could and did, with proper tactics, produce results far out of proportion to the physical means applied.

Crosby is professor emeritus of American Studies, Geography, and History, University of Texas at Austin. Historians of science and technology know him best for two very influential books in environmental history, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (1972) and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (1986), and for another important and more recent work, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (1997). Throwing Fire is very much the same kind of book as The Measure of Reality: wide-ranging, readable, and sometimes thought-provoking (if at other times annoying).

Crosby opens with a general discussion of humanity's distinctive traits, stressing bipedalism as the prerequisite both for throwing projectiles and for manipulating fire. He divides the bulk of the book among four "accelerations," each the product of a particular set of technologies. In "The First Acceleration" (chapters 2 through 5, pp. 15-92), he examines the use of projectiles, from stones through javelins and atlatls to bows; fire and its uses in shaping the environment; the human role, abetted by fire and weapons, in late Pleistocene extinctions; and the elaboration of projectile and fire weapons from the rise of civilization in the ancient Near East until the advent of gunpowder. Gunpowder underlies "The Second Acceleration" (chapters 6-8, pp. 93-145). Here Crosby discusses the Chinese invention of gunpowder and its spread; the role of gunpowder in expanding states and empires; and the development of firearms, rocketry, and explosives from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth. Long-range missiles, nuclear weapons, and the space race propel "The Third Acceleration" (chapters 9-10, pp. 147-90), of the twentieth century. In "The Fourth Acceleration" (pp. 191-99), Crosby speculates on the Gaia Hypothesis—that the earth itself is "alive"—and on the human settlement of other worlds.

As in his other works, in Throwing Fire Crosby synthesizes a large historical theme from thoughtful readings of a wide range of well-chosen secondary works. He then skillfully orders the material in an episodic, though basically chronological, narrative. His clear and unaffected prose, interspersed with well-considered insights and conclusions, is just as accessible to the lay reader as to the specialist. Indeed, lay readers may be his main audience. Specialists will find questionable statements and even outright errors, as is only to be expected in so wide-ranging a book. These hardly matter in context and I will not bother to list those I noticed. Although I found Crosby's thesis most persuasive for prehistory, the book as a whole is well worth the few hours it takes to read. Even if experts are likely to find little that is new, they may well benefit by looking at familiar material from the fresh angles that Crosby suggests.