The Heirs of Archimedes: Science and the Art of War through the Age of Enlightenment (review)

The result of two conferences in the late 1990s, this volume on early modern military science offers a baker's dozen of first-rate essays from the leaders in the field. Arranged roughly chronologically, from Kelly DeVries's look at fourteenth- and fifteenth-century gunpowder fortification to Brett Steele's work on military "progress" and Enlightenment Newtonians, each offers a focused look at a single topic, or one country, and as a group they touch on military developments from the Atlantic to the Caucasus, from Sweden to Cairo, and on land and sea. Given that eight of the contributions are more or less directly related to gunpowder production or defense against gunpowder weaponry, it seems that the volume is more fully invested in critiquing the mechanics of the Roberts/Parker "military revolution" thesis than it is the scientific one, as the subtitle suggests. Still, the contributors all take up and reinterpret central themes in early modern military history, and some the historiography of the scientific revolution. Some essays merely survey a particular topic, and only a few seem to have delved deeply into primary sources or forged deeply novel arguments.

The first part, on "Global Development of Gunpowder Weaponry," includes four surveys by respected scholars. In addition to DeVries's, Frederic Baumgarner investigates French reluctance to arm with gunpowder weaponry, while Bart Hacker and Gábor A´goston show that the Islamic empires and the Ottomans, respectively, were more progressive in this matter than we typically assume.

Part 2 focuses principally on navigation and exploration and their connection to both the sciences and northern European military impulses. Naval hardware is relatively absent here, although Alex Hildred's long chapter on the Mary Rose gives at least one in-depth look at a warship, albeit from a more archaeological than synthetic viewpoint. The other essays seem only to draw a weak connection between militarism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and navigational science (other than that the former needed the latter to get where it was going). Lesley Cormack and Amir Alexander synergistically consider the English case in their respective essays, Cormack concluding that science in the guise of navigation "assumed new methodologies, epistemologies, and ideologies of utility and progress" (p. 196), Alexander contrasting the geometrical and logical mathematics of John Dee with the exploratory mathematics of Thomas Harriot and suggesting that the actors' frameworks determined their outcomes in some ways. Michael Mahoney then concludes with a pithy essay on Christiaan Huygens and his navigational and chronometric research program of state.

Part 3 offers three closely connected essays by Brenda Buchanan, Thomas Kaiserfeld, and Seymour Mauskopf, who review the process of gunpowder manufacture in England, Sweden, and France, respectively, each country showing more development of bureaucracy than science in the pursuit of national military production.

Coeditors Brett Steele and Tamera Dorland frame the volume as a laudable attempt to fuse military history and the history of science, although how successful it is remains to be seen. The introduction's indebtedness to a RAND-style diagnostic approach is obvious, with terminology of operations research and systems analysis rampant—including a "military organization as a complex system" graphical tetrahedron that disappointingly tries to reduce the messiness of warfare to a ball-and-stick diagram with one-way arrows (p. 6). In addition, the editors' desire to argue for the primacy of something approaching a modern concept of science within and foundational to premodern warfare permeates the introduction. Steele and Dorland allude to the idea that we will find "science" in these heirs of Archimedes; the other authors mostly approach military technological history from the operational or production viewpoints rather than from functional or scientific ones.

The editors are quite right that early...