Weapons

Early History

Weapons are one of the earliest forms of technology, and their development and usage have long affected the nature of societies. For example, some of the typical features of the modern state arose in the city-states of northern Italy as they organized themselves for self-protection by employing a professional militia paid for through taxation, and in part this stemmed from the improved effectiveness in using weapons that came with organizational specialization. Some three centuries later, differential developments in weaponry, and in their modes of application, were a major factor in the rise to dominance of Europe during what is known as the “gunpowder revolution.”

However, such macro-level analyses of the effects of weapons technology on society can slip into technological determinism, as in the well-known claim that the introduction of the stirrup into northern Europe led to the rise of feudal society because it enabled greater effectiveness in the use of weapons by horse-mounted warriors. (Without the use of stirrups, horsemen could not easily swing swords or use other large weapons without risk that their momentum would overbalance them.) The argument that access to this expensive form of weaponry so favored land-owning knights as to lead to feudalism has been criticized as overly simplistic, if not historically dubious.

Other examples show that, although the use of weapons can confer advantages to different groups within a state or between different states, it is too simple to attribute this to technology alone. For example, China had access to key technologies with military potential—notably gunpowder, iron, and steel—before Europe did, but China did not utilize them for foreign conquest. This difference has been explained by the more entrepreneurial nature of some European countries compared to China, where Confucian bureaucratic governance discouraged such activity.

The links between weapons, entrepreneurship, and industry grew stronger during the industrial [Page 1779]revolution, leading to increasingly powerful and complex weapons and to differing forms of warfare. However, the conduct of warfare did not involve just weapons; other technologies and other aspects of social organization also were important. For example, the development of transport technologies (e.g., trains) and communication technologies (e.g., the telegraph) affected the changing nature of European warfare in the late 19th century just as much as the development of the breech-loading rifle.

World War II

This industrialization of warfare reached a peak—or one might say a new low—with World War II. Despite the importance of new weapons technologies such as radar, World War II was, in many areas, a war of attrition, with societies waged against societies, competing as to whose industry could produce the most destructive capability. In this total warfare, civilian populations were targeted, and the idea of “strategic bombing” that had been advocated in the early part of the century now found its fullest expression.

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