This book offers a new approach to the pre-industrial past in Europe and the Mediterranean basin from the Roman Republic to the fall of Napoleon. It takes as its starting point E. A. Wrigley’s concept of ‘organic economies’ and their reliance on the land for energy and raw materials. It first considers the constraints on productivity, transportation, and the spatial organization of the economy. The second section analyses the constraints imposed by military technology and by the organic economy on the tactical, operational, and strategic use of armed force, and the consequences of the spread o ... More

This book offers a new approach to the pre-industrial past in Europe and the Mediterranean basin from the Roman Republic to the fall of Napoleon. It takes as its starting point E. A. Wrigley’s concept of ‘organic economies’ and their reliance on the land for energy and raw materials. It first considers the constraints on productivity, transportation, and the spatial organization of the economy. The second section analyses the constraints imposed by military technology and by the organic economy on the tactical, operational, and strategic use of armed force, and the consequences of the spread of firearms in recorded history’s first energy revolution. This is followed by an analysis of the military and economic constraints on the political integration of space through the formation of geographically extensive political units. The volume concludes with the demographic and economic consequences of the investment of manpower and resources in war. This volume also considers why so much potential or organic economies to support economic and political development remained unrealized. Endemic mass poverty curtailed demand, limiting incentives for investment and innovation, and keeping output growth below what was technologically possible. Resource shortages prevented rulers from establishing a fiscal apparatus capable of appropriating such resources as were physically available. But economic inefficiency also created under-utilized resources that could potentially be mobilized in pursuit of political power. The volume gives an innovative account of this potential — and why it was realized in the ancient world rather than the medieval west — together with a new analysis of the gunpowder revolution and the inability of rulers to meet the consequential costs within the confines of an organic economy.