Military technology

How far were the weapons of war transformed in the course of these 400 years, and did changing technologies have a decisive effect on the shape, duration, and character of warfare? Running through this entire period is the assumption that ‘early modernity’ in warfare was, above all, defined by the evolving and systematic use of gunpowder as a missile propellant. Whether linked to the so-called Islamic ‘gunpowder empires’ of the Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids, the struggles for political hegemony in China, Japan, and South-East Asia, or the shifting patterns of European warfare, the development and proliferation of artillery and infantry firearms has been treated as the decisive factor in successful warfare. Much material in the chapters underpins the importance of the evolution of artillery and handguns, and does so on a global scale. But the global dimension is no less problematic and challenging when it comes to making broad assumptions about the central significance of gunpowder weaponry. The adoption of firearms and artillery was far from universal, even in Europe; almost to the end of our period there were military contexts in which firearms remained of marginal importance. The chapters offer plenty of evidence of the limitations, as well as the strengths, of gunpowder weaponry – both in terms of technology and in terms of the environments in which warfare was waged. Moreover, the difficulties of assimilating firepower into existing military structures and organisations emerge in many contexts: artillery, or infantry weighed down with muskets and their accoutrements, sacrificed speed and flexibility; the advantages of shooting arrows from horseback, rather than firing a powder weapon, were accepted up to the end of the eighteenth century. Where heavy armour had never been adopted by rival military elites the advantage of the musket – its impressive penetrative power – was largely irrelevant.Footnote ¹⁰

The Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453 is frequently cited as a decisive moment in the rise of gunpowder warfare. Yet Gábor Ágoston cautions against the well-worn assumption that Ottoman success was owed to giant bombards operated by renegade Christian gunners, stressing that ‘there were a number of other factors that explain Ottoman success. Of these, overwhelming numerical superiority (70,000 besiegers versus 10,000 defenders), abundant supplies of food, weapons, shot, and powder in the Ottoman army all demonstrated the Ottomans’ organizational and logistical capabilities.’Footnote ¹¹ Over a much longer timespan, Simon Pepper’s chapter also cautions against fixating on artillery as the single determinant of success and failure in siege warfare. Undermining walls, with or without gunpowder, was often seen as a more effective way of bringing besieged garrisons to terms. The science of siege warfare, reaching its apogee in the careful placing of gun batteries and the methodical advance of lines of trenches associated with the French marshal Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, was often sidelined in favour of less time-consuming assaults or surprise attacks, aiming to take enough of the fortifications to force the besieged to terms.Footnote ¹² In some cases success in siege warfare was indeed a question of who could muster the most artillery in attack or defence, but outcomes could depend on many other factors.

The adoption of firearms and cannon did not proceed in a universal and uncritical global fashion. Gunpowder has been used in Asia for centuries in catapult, throwing, or incendiary weapons – grenades, primitive flamethrowers, and firebombs – rather than for its ability to propel stone or metal shot.Footnote ¹³ By the sixteenth century, as Morris Rossabi points out, the Ming armies were copying Western cannons and firearms, but subjected them to critical evaluation and selective deployment. The Ming and their Qing successors recognised that for much of the warfare in which they found themselves engaged, particularly struggles against nomadic peoples to the west and north, firearms were of limited utility. In a struggle against mobile, cavalry-based forces, the best military response remained horsemen with composite bows – arguably the most widespread and enduring piece of military technology in human history. Against nomads, artillery and handguns might be more usefully deployed in protected defensive positions and by established garrisons – along the Great Wall, for example. As Pamela Crossley shows in her chapter, all these issues were the subject of lively discussion, theorising, and practical experiments with different types of gunpowder weaponry throughout the late Ming and early Qing period.

In contrast, Kaushik Roy is positive about the developing role of firearms in India both before and after the establishment of the Mughal Empire. By the mid-sixteenth century he argues that warfare in the Deccan was being shaped by large infantry forces making disciplined use of muskets and supported by iron cannon. Yet the subsequent military success of the Mughal rulers rested on the combination of musketeer infantry supported by mass forces of cavalry bowmen utilising the traditional nomadic tactics of rapid-fire archery, outflanking, and envelopment. The later Maratha struggle against the Mughals was another war dominated by light cavalry, once again resorting to the durable tactics of nomad warfare. Similarly, Eugene Park notes the initial enthusiasm with which both Japanese and Korean armies adopted and improved imported European muskets and developed distinctive tactics attuned to their cumbersome deployment. This was especially evident in Odo Nobunaga’s division of his musketeer infantry into loaders and shooters at the battle of Nagashino (1575), with three times the number of loaders feeding primed muskets to the shooters. The deployment of musketeers was repeated with equal success at Sekigahara (1600) and by Japanese forces in their invasions of Korea in the 1590s. Yet in the ensuing centuries neither power sought to integrate evolving gunpowder arms into military forces that were secluded from most forms of warfare – in Japan as a result of the deliberate imposition of sakoku or the near-total exclusion of outsiders. Weaponry reflected a blend of social signifiers, established tradition, and vested interests. In Korea, the ‘Three Skills Army’ (Samsubyŏng) in the late sixteenth century comprised musketeers, archers, and close-combat ‘killers’ (salsu, comprising swordsmen, pikemen, and spearmen). But, as in Japan, the development of musketry and associated tactics atrophied after the defeat of Korea by the Qing in 1637, and the long subsequent period of peace as a tributary of Qing China.

As Richard Reid’s chapter demonstrates, Africa offers an immense variety of military systems shaped by politics, environment, and available resources. However, the relative slowness and reluctance of so many states and military regimes to adopt firearms was notable. The Ethiopian army had adopted handguns to some extent by the end of the sixteenth century, yet they remained secondary to infantry armed with spears and swords. Likewise, even following the collapse of the great cavalry empires of the western savannah by the late sixteenth century, there was no immediate adoption of firearms as an alternative. It was not until the nineteenth century that guns had a significant impact on savannah warfare.Footnote ¹⁴ David Schimmelpenninck’s account of Muscovite warfare also marginalises firearms: the army was preponderantly composed of light cavalry, and its tactics and weapons imitated those of the Tatar khanates on the eastern and southern frontier. ‘The descriptions of Muscovite warfare by the sixteenth-century Habsburg diplomat Baron Sigismund von Herberstein resemble accounts of the Scythians by Herodotus two millennia earlier.’ This was not a reflection of military backwardness, but rather a recognition that environment and enemy military organisation dictated a style of warfare in which cumbersome firearms and slow-moving artillery had little place. Artillery, as Rudolph Matthee observes in his chapter on the Safavid empires, is the best example of ‘the dictum that the adoption of new technology is of limited value unless accompanied by cultural changes’.Footnote ¹⁵ Cannon, hard to cast and difficult to move over land, remained even more marginal to an army that remained cavalry-focused and less intent on conquering land and urban hubs than on intimidating enemies for tribute.

Practical and cultural factors could therefore constrain the use of firearms and encourage reliance on traditional weaponry. It is also important to recognise the limitations of the technology itself. At no point from the advent of early firearms through to the end of the period covered by this volume was there a single development in guns and gunpowder technology so significant as to count as ‘revolutionary’: that is to say, an improvement in speed of fire, range, accuracy, facility of use, so dramatic that it immediately rendered previous weaponry or tactics obsolete. Such revolutions in military technology have occurred: the cavalry stirrup, the breech-loading rifle, and the machine gun are transformative in exactly this way. But no such revolution took place between 1450 and 1850. Advancing such an unsustainable claim for the matchlock infantry musket of the late sixteenth century, combined with a few supposed innovations to enhance its effectiveness like the counter-march and volley fire, was the original fault of Michael Roberts’s 1955 thesis, from which many misconceptions about military revolution continue to flow.Footnote ¹⁶ Instead, these centuries witnessed small and incremental change: the shift after the 1680s from matchlock to flintlock firing mechanism for standard infantry muskets improved their speed of fire and allowed units of infantry to mass in close order, impossible when each man needed to hold a length of burning match in conjunction with musket and fork-rest.Footnote ¹⁷ Rifling of barrels and greater uniformity of production finally gave the standard musket a degree of accuracy that it had entirely lacked before. In the South-East Asian context, Michael Charney comments of infantry firearms that: ‘they became sufficiently accurate and powerful by the early eighteenth century – as South-East Asian armies shifted from the matchlock to the flintlock – to end the role of the elephant as a tactical combat animal’.Footnote ¹⁸ And insofar as effectiveness was more a matter of production quality than innovative technology, it is worth noting Kaushik Roy’s comment that: ‘Qualitatively, the muskets manufactured in Punjab were on a par with, if not better than, the Brown Bess used by the EIC personnel.’Footnote ¹⁹ The point is echoed by other contributors, who argue that in terms of sophisticated metallurgy and craftsmanship Middle Eastern or Asian gun-founders were capable of equalling or surpassing muskets and cannons produced in Europe.Footnote ²⁰

The same incremental picture holds for artillery: the basic technology of the smooth-bore, muzzle-loaded cannon, firing solid shot or a variety of anti-personnel projectiles, hardly changed across the period. Developments in metallurgy, reductions in weight, and improvements in the design of gun carriages were progressively and widely adopted.Footnote ²¹ By the mid-eighteenth century European field and siege artillery was lighter and more manoeuvrable, and in general fired shot of lesser weight but with more velocity and range. As Alan Forrest notes: ‘If the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars were notable for the deployment of larger massed armies in the field, it is more difficult to point to any technical or strategic innovations … Artillery pieces were lighter and more manoeuvrable than in previous wars, but they owed the innovation to Gribeauval and the Bourbons.’Footnote ²² By far the most significant change was quantitative: a lot more artillery was deployed on battlefields and sieges during the major European wars of the eighteenth century, and this was largely responsible for the steady increase in battlefield casualties.

Insofar as gunpowder weaponry was the catalyst of fundamental military change it was in conjunction with other technologies. As we have seen, the response to armies equipped with siege artillery was the adoption of a completely new style of fortification both for city defences and in the form of free-standing ‘star-forts’. These thick-walled, multi-bastioned structures, provisioned with plentiful artillery, became the key to defensive strategies along contested frontiers, notably, as James Tracy shows in his chapter, in the Hungarian and Balkan borderlands between the Austrian Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ²³ The most familiar role of such artillery forts was as a means of defence and power-projection by European states and trading companies as they established their coastal toeholds in Africa and the Far East. Louis Sicking’s chapter points to the progressive elaboration and expense of these fortification projects as one factor in the gradual decline of the Dutch East India company in the eighteenth century. New-style fortifications were hugely expensive to build and equip, and when constructed for urban defence, extremely disruptive to existing buildings and town layouts. As such, the decision whether or not to fortify could be hotly debated by states and communities in Europe; projects for the reworking or supplementing of existing ‘medieval’ walls and towers as an alternative to complete rebuilding, as Simon Pepper shows, were widely adopted.Footnote ²⁴ Pepper’s chapter also points to the massive proliferation of improvised fortifications in military campaigning, mostly earthworks.Footnote ²⁵ This was a logical extension of the ever-more elaborate siege-works constructed by besieging armies from the sixteenth century to protect against the artillery fire and sorties of the besieged and from relief forces. In 1810 the lines of Torres Vedras protected Wellington’s retreating army so effectively that the French declined to attack the 29-mile-long double chain of forts, redoubts, artillery batteries, and obstacles. Such elaborate but temporary military defences could serve their purpose as effectively as monumental stone fortification projects such as Vauban’s Pre carré, the double line of fortresses that guarded France’s eastern and north-eastern frontier.

Artillery and fortification came together in a gradual transformation of the military landscape of Europe and those parts of the world that were part of European colonial or trading networks. The slowness of Asian powers to adopt European fortification techniques was certainly in part a consequence of their own lengthy tradition of building massive, stone and packed-earth city walls both for defence and for prestige: Chinese cities already possessed what were effectively artillery-resistant fortifications.Footnote ²⁶ The eclectic adoption of European frontier-fort design and field fortifications nonetheless became a much more widespread phenomenon as the period continued. Schimmelpenninck details the two Chinese sieges of Albazin, an outpost of the Russian expansion into Siberia. The Chinese took Albazin in 1685 after a short siege, but the Russians returned later that year, rebuilt the citadel under the direction of a Prussian military expert, and the next year held out during a months-long siege until the Chinese finally withdrew.Footnote ²⁷

The other major application of gunpowder and its technologies, in the reshaping of naval warfare, was more clearly decisive, and perhaps the nearest thing to a genuine military revolution, or at least a ‘revolution in military affairs’, seen in this period. Decisive changes in the technology of warfare at sea took place in three distinct stages, sequentially examined through the chapters on navies by Niccolò Capponi, Robin Briggs, and Andrew Lambert. These technological shifts are marked first by the emergence of the stand-off naval engagement, deploying firepower rather than the ‘ram and board’ tactics dominant hitherto; the next phase, in the mid-seventeenth century, saw the development of the line-astern tactic and led to the rapid predominance of the purpose-build warship; the final phase in the first half of the nineteenth century saw the utilisation of steam power and the shift from wood to iron as the basis of warship construction.

Capponi’s chapter traces the shift in naval technology through armed galleys and the experiments with the heavy-armed galleass, towards the broadside-mounted gun battery deployed on galleons and other square-rigged ocean-going sailing vessels. All of them marked a decisive shift away from naval tactics based on close-quarter engagement, boarding, and capture. The galleass, used with impressive effect against the Ottoman galleys at Lepanto (1571), was, Capponi argues, a striking example of a hybrid ‘wonder weapon’ that rapidly lost any decisive impact and was soon abandoned by its Venetian inventors. Instead, an evolution in sailing-warship design culminated, as both Capponi and Briggs agree, in the mid-seventeenth century.Footnote ²⁸ The shift towards firepower, concentrated on two or three decks of broadside-mounted cannon, led to the adoption of tactics that moved away from individual fire-fights between combatant vessels in favour of squadrons arranged in line astern and raking each other with the full weight of their gun batteries.Footnote ²⁹ During the couple of decades surrounding the Anglo-Dutch Wars (1650s–60s), the century-old deployment of fleets composed largely of co-opted merchant vessels temporarily fitted out with extra cannon became obsolete. Instead, vessels specifically designed to engage in this new type of artillery combat were built to new and massively stronger specifications, designed to carry batteries of heavy cannon on the lower decks, to accommodate the very large crews require to service anything up to 80 or 100 guns, and to survive both the impact of enemy shot and the stresses of cannon battery discharges within the hull. Massive investment in a purpose-built weapon system was now the rule, and states not prepared, or able, to invest in both fleets and the supporting infrastructure of dockyards, construction, and maintenance were at a clear and permanent military-technological disadvantage.Footnote ³⁰

Yet after this initial and irrevocable leap from hybrid merchant/warship to the expensively purpose-built vessel rated by its number of decks and guns, there was a long period of relative stasis. As Briggs’s chapter shows, most subsequent developments in the sailing warship were not the product of any radical technological transformation but the incremental effect of numerous smaller, and in many cases experience-related, innovations and modifications. To an uninformed observer the warships that fought at Trafalgar do not appear significantly different from those being built 150 years earlier. Not so the transformative leap forward described by Lambert over the next three or four decades, as the screw-propeller-driven steamship emerged from the confusing mass of rapid experiments, trials, and dead-ends following on from the development of steam power and the industrialised potential of iron and steel. As in the mid-seventeenth century, this was irrevocably to transform naval warfare and maritime power-projection across the globe. Initially steam-powered wooden battleships with familiar broadside-mounted gun batteries were developed in parallel with iron-hulled prototype warships, but by 1850 the supplanting of wood by iron was gaining momentum and pointed the way to another major technological transformation.

Military organisation and military culture

Revolutionary or not, technological innovation, if it is to be effective, must be integrated into larger systems of military organisation: command and control, the management of logistical systems to ensure supply of food and munitions, and the overall strategic vision – the sense of what can realistically be achieved by the resources at the commander’s disposal.

In all these areas comparisons and contrasts emerge amongst the chapters in this volume. An essential tenet of the original European ‘military revolution’ thesis was that changes in weaponry and tactics were managed by a far more professionalised officer corps. If the social background of officers remained largely that of the titled and landed elites, it is widely assumed that their standards of military knowledge and institutionalised self-discipline and respect for military hierarchy were transformed over these centuries. Much has been made of the revival of classical military texts and their use by a generation of European military writers and staff officers in the late sixteenth century in theorising a new ‘art of war’ which consciously rejected what was assumed to be the individualist anarchy of feudal and knightly warfare.Footnote ³¹ Hitherto, it is argued, elite warriors had been more concerned to seek single combat and individual glory than to participate in the collective exercise of disciplined combat; their preparation for war was based on the cultivation of personal martial skills and an early apprenticeship in the military entourage of rulers or grandee commanders.Footnote ³² This ‘before and after’ story is exaggerated even in a European context: treatises on the art of war which drew on models of Roman and Greek military organisation and discipline and sought to accommodate these to contemporary weapon-systems had proliferated, above all in Italy, Spain, and France, for well over a century before the supposed ‘rediscovery’ of military antiquity by those indefatigable self-publicists, the Orange-Nassau clan.Footnote ³³ And what is presented as the decisive rise of a literate and educated officer class, ready to subordinate instinct and impulsive leadership to a reasoned grasp of ‘military science’, looks altogether less distinctive from a global perspective. One section of Morris Rossabi’s chapter focuses on the extraordinary quantity and detail of printed texts in Ming China concerning every aspect of the art of war, reflecting developments in weaponry, military deployment, and strategic thinking. Ming officers could draw upon massive resources of accumulated written knowledge, ideas about discipline, tactics, and military organisation.Footnote ³⁴ Examinations for entry into, or promotion within, the officer corps took place in China, but also in Korea – admittedly a satellite state of the Qing after 1637, but where a Directorate General for military training had existed since the later sixteenth century. Indeed, in matters of acquiring regular skills of disciplining, controlling, feeding, and supplying armies effectively, European officer corps only caught up with the more precocious examples of Middle Eastern and Asian military organisation in the later seventeenth century.Footnote ³⁵

The scale of military forces raised and maintained by powers from the Ottoman Empire eastwards as far as Japan required early engagement with the issues of command and control and logistical support systems. All the lastingly successful powers which emerged from the nomadic tradition of warfare had managed to find means to subordinate the localist, tribal-dominated recruitment of troops into some form of overarching command structure. Manz’s chapter points to the original achievement of Chinggis Khan in creating an organisational and disciplinary structure that could counter the friability and clan rivalries of a force drawn from numerous extended tribes with their conflicting loyalties and antagonisms:

This model of internal restructuring to define command structures was a common legacy of the Mongols’ heirs. The Manchu armies that were ultimately to conquer Ming China had grasped this nettle with the creation of the Eight Banners by the khan/military leader Hung Taiji – incorporating the tribal recruits from across Manchuria into a military structure under the overall command of members of the ruling family.Footnote ³⁷ In some cases this aim to break down tribal substructures in the armies required more drastic measures. The initial achievements of the Safavid rulers had depended on the military skills and commitment of the Qizilbash, tribal contingents of horsemen serving for booty rather than pay, whose subordination to Safavid authority and military discipline was unreliable. As the shahs grew more successful and wealthier, the response to this conditional obedience was to create a parallel force of gholams – slave soldiers drawn from neighbouring territories such as Georgia and Armenia and paid directly from the ruler’s revenues. These troops and their officers were the object of sustained training, promotion through merit, and tactical experimentation. The model was partly owed to the far better-known system of highly trained slave soldiers developed by the Ottoman sultans – the corps of Janissaries, recruited through the devshirme – levies of boys taken from Christian families in the Balkans. As Ágoston points out, the trajectory of Ottoman armies throughout this period was towards a larger and larger proportion of permanently salaried and directly appointed troops within the army, principally the Janissary corps. The Mughal Empire faced the same challenge of how to mould an army composed of huge tribal contingents of cavalry archers into a disciplined, cohesive force able to combine effectively with infantry and artillery units. As initial military success allowed the Mughals to consolidate their conquests on the subcontinent, and to recruit heavily from indigenous populations, the mansabdari system was introduced. Establishing a highly structured system of thirty-three military ranks through which career officers could be promoted and demoted, loyalty could be focused on the Mughal sultans, and a military structure created that overrode tribal groupings: officers raised troops from land grants conditionally made to them by the sultan, and were moved around the empire in fulfilment of military duties.

In all these cases we see what were at the outset steps to escape the fractious loyalties of armies composed of constituent tribal or clan groupings; these subsequently developed into a more systematic attempt to create a professionalised, formally trained officer corps, whether this was for the whole, or just an elite cutting edge for the army. Equally apparent from the discussions in the volume is the difficulty that most regimes encountered in maintaining military professionalism over any length of time. Both political expediency and social pressures weighed on professionalised officer corps, cankering promotional structures and encouraging sinecures and token appointments. Bernhard Kroener’s study of the officer corps in eighteenth-century France and Prussia is an excellent example of this process in action. Of France, Kroener writes: ‘Admission into the highest military ranks remained first and foremost a process based on social exclusion and social connections. This defeated all those initiatives and efforts since the reign of Louis XIV that had aimed to establish the counter-principle of military professionalism based on seniority and performance.’Footnote ³⁸ A similar picture of mid-eighteenth-century military decline is offered by Michael Charney in his chapter on South-East Asia, where again court and factional groupings increasingly penetrated the officer corps, and elite status dominated promotion. ‘Consequently, lethargy, indifference, and even resistance to change, as well as incompetence, slowed and confused the trajectory of martial developments in the region.’Footnote ³⁹ Other cases of stagnation and regression are numerous: a burgeoning, innovative literature concerned with military theory and practice in Ming China could not prevent a military collapse that reflected economic weakness, political division, and demoralisation amongst an officer corps that had become in practice hereditary. Similar problems afflicted Safavid and Ottoman command and control as initially robust and professional structures started to lose out to placemanship, favour, and the lapsing of hitherto tight hierarchical control over the officer corps.

No less important in determining military success throughout this period was a grip on the logistical requirements of armies and navies. Forces of nomadic cavalry could support themselves through requisitioning and plunder in many operational circumstances, at least in the short term, but even these armies needed to be deployed with a strategic eye on the availability of forage for the horses.Footnote ⁴⁰ Agriculture may have served as a more reliable and functional basis for military organisation in the long haul, but the problems of raising and deploying armies on the basis of primitive methods of cultivation and low productivity should not be underestimated. Commanders who assumed that they could maintain their armies on campaign through ad hoc requisitioning and pillage of supplies regularly discovered that an army of even 20,000–30,000 troops – the population of a medium-to-large city – imposed demands for food far beyond the capacity of local communities to produce or provide. The movement of immense armies dominated by infantry, probably with an artillery train and extensive supporting resources, allowed no such flexibility. The Ottoman armies that were brought together from military fiefs (timar) and standing troops, and assembled around Istanbul at the beginning of the campaign season, presented a massive logistical challenge. The ability to supply Ottoman armies on campaign, drawing heavily on the disposition of maritime and riverine transport to maintain supplies of food and munitions, was universally admired and respected.Footnote ⁴¹ Yet even the Ottoman troops greatly preferred campaigning in the Balkans, where supply mechanisms were more assured, to the harsh and frugal frontier wars with the Safavid Empire.

Effective logistical support was, first of all, a question of adequate financial support for operations; but it also invariably drew on managerial skill sets that could link the projected needs of military operations with private contractors and suppliers who could most effectively tap both local and far-flung markets in foodstuffs and munitions, and organise the transport, storage, and distribution of goods. The most effective examples of this sort of cooperation between military officials and the private sphere are seen in navies, where the negotiation of supply contracts ran parallel to a mass of carefully managed contracts for shipbuilding, maintenance, and the stockpiling of naval stores. Robin Briggs’s chapter emphasises the central importance of this managerial culture to the outstanding success of the Royal Navy during the eighteenth century, increasing operational effectiveness by allowing ships to remain at sea for longer, and reducing losses of sailors to disease and poor diet.Footnote ⁴²

Reliable provisioning of armies remained the greatest single challenge to military operations, and the crucial question for much land warfare was how far commanders were prepared to allow their military operations to be dominated – or constrained – by the needs of amassing, transporting, stockpiling, and distributing supplies to maintain their forces with food and munitions. These chapters provide many examples of the devastating impact on the survival of armies of neglecting logistical needs. The price of avoiding this might be the adoption of a style of positional warfare constrained by magazines and supply convoys, focused on sieges of cities chosen more for their accessibility than their strategic significance.Footnote ⁴³ But though this ancien régime military culture of slow-moving armies, with set-piece sieges and battles, undoubtedly existed, and not only in Europe, it was by no means the only line of development.

The latter half of the Thirty Years’ War was fought by commanders who understood that military success was not necessarily about pitched battles, still less large-scale sieges, but an understanding of campaigning in which mobility, surprise, and flexibility would allow small, cavalry-heavy armies to notch up cumulative advantages against an enemy and his territory.Footnote ⁴⁴ The legacy of this could be seen, as Carol Stevens points out, in the army composition and strategic approach of the Swedes: ‘[Charles XII’s] army was … by comparison with other armies of the era, particularly mobile and aggressive in attack. It boasted effective heavy cavalry, which built upon the model of the Polish hussars … [Charles XII] famously distrusted firepower; he may also have minimised his use of artillery during the Great Northern War because of lengthy supply lines.’Footnote ⁴⁵

One enduring manifestation of this military culture, primarily adapted to the limitations of logistical support, was the style of irregular ‘small war’ (kleiner Krieg) which gained a lot of theoretical attention in the following century as well as some distinguished practitioners.Footnote ⁴⁶ Small war became almost synonymous with European colonial warfare wherever large-scale local soldier-markets could not easily be tapped – as they could, for example, in India. Colonial warfare in the Americas, as waged by the Spanish, Dutch, English, and French was a constant struggle to make effective use of small – and often, thanks to disease, rapidly diminishing – forces in the face of what were often near-insuperable logistical challenges. As Kevin McCranie shows in his chapter on warfare in America, the British held a major advantage over their colonial opponents in the Revolutionary War so long as they could supply and move their armies by sea. As soon as warfare moved further inland, conventional forces became acutely vulnerable to supply failure, shown, for example, in General John Burgoyne’s fatal advance down from Canada towards Saratoga. When the Royal Navy lost control of the Atlantic to the European fleets allied with the American colonists, the whole logistical base on which Britain could sustain its military operations in America began to crumble. This was nothing new: back in the 1590s the huge Japanese invasion of Korea collapsed when the Japanese could no longer supply their troops by sea, having lost naval command of the straits to the Koreans. Felipe Fernández-Armesto stresses another response to logistical and costing constraints for European forces waging war outside Europe: a massive reliance on co-opting indigenous peoples as fighting forces. The Spanish conquests and the maintenance of their empire in the New World rested heavily on the integration of native elites and their military resources. Extremely small forces of hardened Spanish troops, habituated to local diets and diseases, coordinated the military activity of indigenous warriors whose local survival skills and tolerance of inadequate support systems were far greater.

The military-fiscal state

The ‘military revolution’ has provided one lens through which warfare over these centuries has repeatedly been viewed, but as we have seen it is one that always threatens to view global military developments through a narrow focus on a European model of military evolution which does not even fit all European contexts. Gábor Ágoston encapsulates the issue in relation to the Ottoman Empire: ‘For too long, Ottoman military and naval developments have been discussed in contrast to developments in a handful of paradigmatic West European polities, against whose armies and navies the Ottomans waged no war in the early modern era.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet the fully fledged ‘military revolution’ thesis extends beyond changes in military technology, tactics, organisation, and strategy. In the usual iteration, these changes force an even more extensive transformation of state capacity through the expansion of centralised and bureaucratic governments, able to meet the challenges of maintaining larger, more sophisticated, and more expensive military systems. And this transformation in government has traditionally been linked to the rise of autocratic regimes, and in particular the establishment of ‘absolute’ monarchies.Footnote ⁴⁸

This direct link between military change and state formation has aroused its fair share of scepticism and criticism even within a Europe-focused historiography. Jeremy Black, in a prescient study from 1991, questioned the military significance of developments in the period from 1560–1660, and argued that military changes in the period from 1660–1760 had a better claim to be considered transformative, not least citing the exponential increase in the size of European armies after 1660. Linked to these assertions was the larger case that this expansion of military capacity and resources should be seen not as the cause of subsequent developments in administration and government, but as the consequence of such changes. It was the greater capacity of governments to raise taxes, quell opposition, and manage their resources that made possible the transformation of warfare, whether in the form of armies running to hundreds of thousands of troops or navies composed of purpose-built rated warships.Footnote ⁴⁹

This challenge to an assumed relationship between war and state building was taken in another direction by what has been an extended debate about whether, in Peter Wilson’s words, ‘European states either adopted an authoritarian “coercion-intensive” solution to the pressures of war, or followed a constitutional “capital-intensive” route’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Against the model of the absolutist states of France, Spain, or those of East-Central Europe, with their ability to coerce the payment of taxes and impose service obligations, could be set the constitutional regimes of the Dutch Republic and Britain. The traditional assumption that powerful, centralised monarchies were the model for the effective mobilisation of resources and waging of war could be challenged by the evidence that constitutional regimes were more efficient in collecting taxes – largely because they had more ability to extract resources from the wealthier classes within their societies.Footnote ⁵¹ Still more important, these states had the capacity to finance war by borrowing money, if not in greater quantities than absolute monarchies, then certainly at lower rates of interest and on more sustainable terms.Footnote ⁵²

This debate has been further nuanced by several decades of research and reconsideration of ‘absolutism’ and the basis on which state authority was exercised. Starting with that traditional paradigm of absolute monarchy, the France of Louis XIV, historians have argued that a rhetoric of absolutist assertion and representation, combined with such monarchs’ undisputed legal authority, has concealed the reality of a state in which effective power depended on compromise and collaboration with the socio-political elites.Footnote ⁵³ An alternative pattern has been depicted in which monarchical authority is sustained through policies which shared the priorities and interests of provincial or institutional elites, or which respected the privileges and resources of these groups. This had clear implications for military organisation. In Russia, Stevens shows how the creation of a vast, permanent army from the late seventeenth century, based on military conscription, high taxation on the unprivileged, and enforced noble military service in the officer corps, was bought through the permanent concession of peasant enserfment to the landowning class, the granting of massive power and influence to the court aristocracy, and tacit acceptance of an officer corps dominated by noble privilege and interests.

One of the most characteristic features of states in which authority rested on collaboration between ruler and elites was purchase and proprietorship of military office. This is the central theme of Bernhard Kroener’s chapter on France and Prussia, and in both cases he demonstrates how military venality was a concession to the social aspirations and established influence of the nobilities. Of course the ‘public–private partnership’ implied by purchased military office brought financial benefits to the ruler, as wealthy proprietors invested in their regiments for reasons of personal prestige or against the office’s resale value.Footnote ⁵⁴ But at the same time proprietorship embedded networks of patronage and influence, limited direct administrative control, created conflicting interests through the proprietors’ wish to recoup money through regimental management, and led to the tightening of social and financial exclusivity in awards of commissions and promotion.Footnote ⁵⁵

All of this has an impact on the way that European state-formation and the impact of war is viewed, and challenges ‘preconceptions about functioning hierarchies and chains of command, an increasingly effective military administration, rigid discipline, and corresponding efficiency in the waging of warfare’.Footnote ⁵⁶

One way of approaching the relationship is to abandon assumptions that war-waging should be tied to a broad notion of state development. Recent focus on what have been termed ‘military-fiscal states’ has been less interested in categorising states in terms of the general types of government they possess: authoritarian versus constitutional, centralised or decentralised, coercive or collaborative. Consideration has started instead from the premise that the early modern state is fundamentally geared to the waging of war, whether in pursuit of the dynastic objectives and reputation of its rulers, the commercial and economic ambitions of a ruling oligarchy, the interests of a militarised ruling elite, or simply the defence of territorial or confessional integrity.Footnote ⁵⁷ This requires jettisoning the assumption that such states are driven by a wide range of policy objectives and ambitions: economic planning and development, social and confessional regulation, the development of central authority at the expense of localities and institutions. If these are pursued at all, they will be of secondary and negotiable importance to the waging of war. So rather than thinking holistically about the state and its purposes, military-fiscal capacity focuses on its central priority, and ultimately its raison d’être, to which both ideology and practice were subordinated.

Given this priority, with its consequent imperative to generate resources to wage war, the comparative questions to be asked about different states relate directly to the means and the efficiency with which they gather resources – especially finance – and the ways in which such resources are used to wage war. In raising money to meet military expenditure we should not seek political consistency in policy-making and practice: a state like Louis XIV’s France was readily prepared to surrender direct royal authority or to confirm privileges in return for injections of cash, or even rely upon financial intermediation by the crown’s privileged subjects to allow it to raise more money at lower rates of interest.Footnote ⁵⁸ Military-fiscal states should also be examined in terms of how they waged war, measured in terms of sustainable military capacity, the overall size of armies and navies relative to population, and the ways in which these forces were managed and controlled. As Carol Stevens points out, Russia possessed a huge resource superiority over the Scandinavian states, and from the early eighteenth century developed a centralised, coercive mechanism to raise and maintain its army, but one which accepted high levels of corruption and inefficiency in military management, was inherently expensive to run, and was reliant on draconian policing. It was not, Stevens adds, a model that would be widely imitated.

Does the concept of the military-fiscal state, especially given its very particular origins in debates about European state formation, have relevance to the wider global world? A major attraction of the concept to historians of Europe has been its potential to explain the dramatic increases in the size and permanence of European armies and navies, whether the first round of sustained increases in the period from roughly 1500 to 1560, or the much more significant and permanent growth from the later seventeenth century onwards. The global challenge here is that almost all European accounts of army size and troop mobilisation before the 1680s look puny in comparison with the resources raised by the great empires of the Far East and the Islamic empires, especially the Ottomans and the Mughals. Roy suggests that at the height of its strength, and drawing on a population of about 150 million, the Mughal army had on its payroll about 600,000 cavalry and 500,000 infantry. Meanwhile, Ming campaign armies raised against the Mongols under the Yongle Emperor in the first half of the fifteenth century are reported – in not entirely reliable sources – to have been of between 250,000 and 500,000 troops. At the same time the first of the great Treasure Fleets despatched into the Indian Ocean in 1406 consisted of 317 vessels and around 27,000 men. The initial Japanese invasion of Korea involved an army of 160,000 men, and was opposed by an alliance of up to 60,000 Chinese and 84,500 Korean troops.Footnote ⁵⁹ Ágoston draws attention to impressive levels of military mobilisation by the Ottomans, pointing in particular to the military effort during Istanbul’s ‘Thirty Years’ War’ (1578–1611), when Ottoman troops fought, often simultaneously, against the Safavids in the east (1578–90, 1603–11), the Habsburgs in the north (1593–1606), and the Celali rebels in eastern Anatolia and northern Syria (c. 1595–1610). Even the Safavid Empire, based on a much more limited total population, could still draw on large-scale cavalry forces drawn from tribal communities to raise up to 100,000 troops.Footnote ⁶⁰

In contrast, it was not until the later seventeenth century that the military establishments of major European states permanently crossed a threshold of 100,000 troops, though from the 1680s the upward push was dramatic. During the War of the League of Augsburg (1688–97) the French crown achieved the remarkable feat of maintaining a military establishment of up to 340,000 troops on land, and 50,000–70,000 men in its navy. This was an entirely new development; despite figures regularly cited to suggest that armies of 100,000 were a feature of the Thirty Years’ War, these were never more than the shortest-term ‘spikes’. Overall military establishments were maintained at a typical strength of 50,000–60,000, with France and Spain as outliers whose total military strength might edge closer to 70,000–80,000.Footnote ⁶¹ European army size essentially flatlined between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth century, and fell considerably short of the levels of military mobilisation that had been achieved elsewhere in the world centuries earlier.

How should this divergence be understood in terms of military-fiscal systems? For some it is an obvious means to challenge a European perspective which, as we have seen, is deeply rooted in interpretations of the history of early modern war. ‘To a historian specializing in the non-European world there is something puzzling about the excitement with which European historians hail the arrival of … standing armies, legal codes, bureaucracies, absolutist rulers … as if they were unique to Europe and self-evident stepping stones to modernity.’Footnote ⁶² Certainly the logistical and organisational challenges of mustering, feeding, equipping, and controlling armies of over 100,000 men were daunting: the seventeenth-century Italian commander and theorist Raimondo Montecuccoli wrote that no commander could realistically manage a campaign army of more than 30,000 men.Footnote ⁶³ In contrast, Ottoman, Chinese, Japanese, and other non-European governments had achieved impressive levels of effectiveness in managing supply systems, communication networks, garrisoning, and weapons procurement early in their respective histories. In many of these the acquired management skills for these enterprises were passed on thanks to the records and writings of specialised administrators working in structured bureaucracies.

One global distinction seems essentially cultural. A shared characteristic of European military-fiscal states was that, by whatever means – coercive, consensual, or concessionary – the ruler and government sought to maximise the financial resources made available for the support of their military. Even if this weakened the ruler’s direct authority, undermined the principle of a ‘monopoly of violence’, or embedded medium- and long-term weaknesses into the fiscal system, the priority of maximising revenue extraction prevailed. This priority, as Roy indicates, could also be seen in the Delhi Sultanate and the policies of successor Mughal rulers. The Mughal state at the height of its power was extracting up to 50 per cent of the gross agricultural product of the territories over which it ruled, while about 80 per cent of the Mughal budget went to meet military expenditure. Similar initiatives can be seen in the increased demands for revenues and in new fiscal expedients adopted to support the growing proportion of permanent troops in the Ottoman armies. No less typical was the considerable provincial resistance evident by the late sixteenth century to this tightening of the Ottoman fiscal vice.

Yet in contrast, in both Ming and Qing China there was considerable, deep-seated opposition to the assumption that the purpose of government was to maximise resources that could be devoted to the waging of war. Historically China, and various of the political and cultural ‘satellite states’ in South-East Asia, had imposed comparatively low levels of taxes. Political virtue was strongly associated with fiscal restraint and concern for the welfare of subjects. This could certainly clash with military demands: even in peacetime, expenditure on the two types of Qing troops (Eight Banners and Green Standard) ran at around 55 per cent of the imperial budget during the mid-eighteenth century. Rossabi shows how, during the reign of the Yongle Emperor in the early fifteenth century, extended and large-scale military campaigns in Annam and Mongolia, combined with the great naval expeditions of Zheng He, involved levels of expenditure which horrified the court officials, and led to the abandonment of all these military policies within three years of the emperor’s death.

For less strongly ideological reasons, both Japan, from the mid-seventeenth century and the beginning of its period of sakoku (isolation), and Korea, effectively a Manchu protectorate, enjoyed a lengthy period of low-intensity military activity; both had military establishments, but these were embedded within government, court, and wider society. The huge costs of earlier military operations – the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s, for example – were not to be incurred subsequently. The frantic fiscal extraction and innovation seen elsewhere as states grappled to fund upward spiralling military budgets could be sidelined: the fiscal regimes were by no means economically enlightened, but financing war was not the dominant fact of the state’s existence.

The contractor state

Awareness of how states created mechanisms to raise and borrow money and to expand their capacity to meet the costs of warfare has been matched in recent years by attention devoted to how the money was spent. Are there common patterns to the ways in which states set about funding and administering warfare? One important observation in an overview of the ‘spending of states’, especially in the period of this volume, is that a large, and often growing, part of the management of war was outsourced into the hands of private agents. How far in military terms was this the age of the ‘contractor state’?Footnote ⁶⁴ Rather than meeting the challenges of waging large-scale and protracted warfare through an expansion of centralisation and bureaucracy, the response of states was to make use of a huge variety of private agents to manage and support most aspects of their war effort. These contractors – merchants, financiers, manufacturers, transport operatives – provided specialist expertise, interconnecting networks of contacts and agents, more efficient and reliable access to credit, and an extended reach when it came to procurement of goods and skills. Recognition that private networks of merchants or financiers had an international, sometimes even a global, reach, which extended well beyond anything that could be established by state agencies, was a major factor in determining heavy reliance on the private sector. No less important was the awareness that more capital could be raised more quickly and at better rates of interest through the agency of private contractors than via the state and its direct representatives. Adopting James Tracy’s memorable phrase: ‘In fiscal terms, the putative age of centralization is better called an age of intermediation.’Footnote ⁶⁵

How far did this willingness to depend on military contracting extend? Amongst European states, the most extensive period of military outsourcing occurs, with some irony, in exactly the century – 1560–1660 – that is traditionally identified with the chronology for ‘military revolution’. For it was in these decades, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), that most European states did not just outsource the provisioning, equipping, and transportation of their armed forces, but contracted out the direct recruitment, maintenance, and control of their armies and navies as well. The rise of the ‘military contractor’ is described in Peter Wilson’s chapter and is a distinct phenomenon standing between the almost universal use of hired mercenaries, and the more ‘managed’ systems of military proprietorship – regimental and company ownership – which emerged after 1660, and whose benefits and problems are described in Bernhard Kroener’s chapter. The state’s primary concern in making a contract with a military enterpriser, who would take charge of the recruitment, appointments, ongoing costs, and discipline of one or more military units, was financial. Rulers grasped the opportunity to intermediate, to offload the heavy costs of raising and operating all, or large parts, of their armies and navies onto the shoulders of their senior officers, most of whom raised the money for this through their personal connections or their access to bankers and other credit sources. Reimbursement for the financial commitment of the enterprisers was most often provided through further outsourcing, this time to delegate the right to collect taxes. Military commanders sought to make their profits from this fiscal decentralisation, through which they could collect military taxes or ‘contributions’ over designated areas, imposing greatly increased financial burdens on communities under the direct threat of military coercion.

The most notorious military enterprisers were the so-called ‘general contractors’, principally associated with the Thirty Years’ War, who were prepared to raise entire armies under their own authority and credit. Sometimes, as with the best known of these, Albrecht von Wallenstein, duke of Friedland (1583–1634), this was in response to an invitation from the contractor’s sovereign, in this case the Holy Roman Emperor. In other cases, like those of Bernhard von Sachsen-Weimar (1604–39), or Duke Charles IV of Lorraine (1604–75), the armies were essentially freebooting forces hired out to the highest bidder.Footnote ⁶⁶ In all these cases money raised or borrowed by the commander was combined with resources advanced by regimental officers, acting as subcontractors to raise and maintain the army, extending the network of credit and spreading the risk.Footnote ⁶⁷

Given that it so directly challenges the assumption that ‘modernising’ governments and states were working towards a monopoly of violence, it is unsurprising that private enterprise at the immediate level of raising, maintaining, and directly controlling sizable portions of the state’s armed forces has attracted scrutiny. Too often, though, it has been marginalised as a failed experiment, associated principally with the Thirty Years’ War, and abandoned by rulers and their states once circumstances permitted. In fact, military outsourcing was a logical development in the context of military-fiscal states whose raison d’être was the raising and maintenance of internationally competitive armies and navies as cost-efficiently as possible. As Wilson stresses when examining the military policies of early modern rulers: ‘Centralisation and consolidation were rarely desired and certainly not goals in themselves.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Moreover, in the haste to write off military contracting as a failed and rejected experiment, insufficient attention has been given to the ways in which outright military enterprise evolved into much longer-term systems of military venality and proprietorship.Footnote ⁶⁹ These systems retained many of the features of a public–private partnership: the individual, family, and corporate interests of the office-holders remained, as Kroener shows, embedded in the military systems of ancien régime states. They also provided a substantial source of informal financial support for the levy and maintenance of cavalry and infantry units, and cemented the political ties between rulers and social elites.Footnote ⁷⁰

Less controversial, but no less noteworthy in challenging assumptions that the ‘rationalising’ pressure of managing and administering warfare always tended towards greater direct administration and centralised control, is the massive and continuous presence of private contracting in every aspect of military supply, maintenance, and support. From the individual sutlers, who were very frequently women – vivandières – who sold supplementary food, drink, and other goods to soldiers in encampments or on the march, up to the private owners of shipyards where warships were built and repaired under contract, the entire military support system remained dependent on the functions, skills, and access to resources of private contractors. Far from diminishing in importance, this private component of military and naval infrastructure expanded in the eighteenth century. The main development in this century came in the closer and more effective supervision of the ‘contractor state’ by government agents both at the centre and on the ground, whether in shipyards, magazines, supply depots, or abattoirs.Footnote ⁷¹

Better oversight was also a factor in another area of continuity, the direct hiring of mercenary regiments, naval squadrons, or other military units by European states. Military enterprise should be seen as an activity that temporarily overshadowed, but never replaced, the time-honoured practice of hiring foreign mercenaries to serve alongside and supplement forces that were raised, by whatever means, within the state. Whether because of their specialist skills – the Swiss and Landsknecht pike-squares; German pistol-armed cavalry or Reiters; East European or Balkan light cavalry often known as Cossacks or Croats – or the flexibility of ‘hiring and firing’ such units, the attraction of recruiting mercenary contingents was a constant through to the end of the eighteenth century, and in some cases beyond. The obvious distinction lay in the relative balance of control between mercenary and contracting state. Swiss mercenaries or German Reiters in the sixteenth century occupied a sellers’ market in which the heavy expense of hiring their services was combined with de facto autonomy of disciplinary and judicial status, and a great deal of unpredictable small print about what services their contract might or might not bind them to offer. In contrast, by the eighteenth century the balance had decisively shifted: Hessians hired for the British army, Swiss regiments in French service, and Germans in Danish or Russian service were all expected to conform to the disciplinary authority and military commands of the host army, and often served under lengthy contracts which assimilated them more effectively into the command structure and military culture of the national force.Footnote ⁷²

Military contracting has been discussed so far in a European context, but how far is that to provincialise a wider, global phenomenon? Gábor Ágoston tersely notes the double standard at work when discussing the outsourcing of military functions. ‘For too long, historians have viewed fiscal decentralization and military devolution as signs of “Ottoman decline”, responsible for Ottoman military defeats in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, military devolution and governments’ reliance on local elites and military entrepreneurs in war-making had been the norm in most European states until about the mid-eighteenth century.’Footnote ⁷³ In reality, it was precisely their increasing reliance on the outsourcing of military functions that provided the Ottomans with the means to sustain their ever-growing armies and gave them vital flexibility in financing and supplying these forces. The Ottomans had drawn on the services of martoloses and voynuks, Christian military forces hired from the Balkans and Greece, and they had consistently used the support of the Barbary corsairs as contractors raising auxiliary naval forces to serve with or in place of the Ottoman fleets.Footnote ⁷⁴ The same is true of India, where armies, from the Rajput rulers through the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals, could be built on a vast pool of potential military labour: peasant-soldiers, trained in weapons use, and easily drawn into military service. Faced with Mughal invasion, the Lodhi Sultan, for example, successfully competed in what were traditional Mughal recruiting grounds, notably Afghanistan, to raise the army that was defeated at Panipat in 1526. Kaushik Roy’s chapter raises many important points about how the predecessor regimes to the British East India Company (EIC) managed the hiring, maintenance, and control of their armies. He has little time for the argument that the EIC had the administrative and cultural mindset to take control of contracted soldiers in a way that had not previously been achieved in India, and makes a strong case for the ability of the Mughal emperors to tap and control the military labour market via the mansabdari system, closing off large sections of the market from their potential opponents.

The hiring of foreign mercenaries was a global phenomenon, and the volume provides numerous examples. Felipe Fernández-Armesto points to the heavy use of hired soldiers in the Spanish Empire, no less than in the armies which asserted Spanish power in Europe. Native auxiliaries, serving with a strong sense of their local identities – and local rivalries – were a mainstay of conquest and colonisation in the New World; they formed the great bulk of the forces whose leadership and ‘cutting edge’ were the small private forces of self-financing European adventurers. Charney points to Christians, driven out of Japan to escape persecution in the seventeenth century, who joined the courts of Ayudhya, Arakan, and even the Spanish Philippines to serve as mercenary bands. Even the general contractor raising entire private armies was by no means unique to Europe. Richard Reid discusses territories in the African interior where the trend was towards private armies raised and maintained by entrepreneur warlords. Powerful leaders across East Africa built and retained – usually through payments in cattle – networks of military clients that could be mobilised for military service. In West Africa, fortified city-states, the most powerful of which was Ibadan, were dominated by armed entrepreneurs who commanded professional armies of young men. Drilled, disciplined, and trained in battlefield manoeuvre and in the use of firearms, these forces hired themselves out to the highest bidder.

Sea power was often placed into the hands of private contractors, especially when the size and design of vessels made them more accessible to individual financial initiatives. One consequence was that the line between a state’s naval policy and self-interested privateering might well be blurred. Endemic Japanese piracy in the China Sea did not serve any discernible military interest of the Tokugawa Shogunate. But the successful Maratha navy, which was privately financed and run by local chiefs, was as much an agent of state power as any privately funded galley squadron in the Mediterranean. This fleet, which emerged in the later seventeenth century, was composed of small, lightly armed ships able to operate in shallow waters out of reach of European warships, and buttressed state opposition to the encroachment of the EIC by inflicting heavy losses on British merchant vessels.Footnote ⁷⁵

Only in the Far East, and in those areas where the nomadic warrior tradition of universal military skills and service prevailed, was the use of mercenaries and contracted expertise less evident. Though even in Qing China, where military activity was undertaken by a semi-hereditary soldier-population under – theoretically – tight bureaucratic control, the supply of foodstuffs to armies was regularly outsourced to merchant contractors.Footnote ⁷⁶ The imperial government devised the so-called kaizhong system, by which it commissioned merchants to transport supplies, and provided traders with licences to purchase salt and tea from the state monopolies of those products. Russia presents two distinctive extremes. Carol Stevens describes a Russian army operating on the Baltic and in Eastern Europe that increasingly rejected reliance on foreign mercenary units (though not foreign military expertise) and developed into a state-run institution under the autocratic initiatives and centralising tendencies of Peter I and his successors. In contrast, David Schimmelpenninck’s account of the push into Siberia from the later sixteenth century provides an account of private war being waged, on behalf of the tsar, by the hired Cossacks of the Stroganov family against the Tatar khanates.