War: What is it good for? (36 page)

Horrified, Europe's great powers rallied in a grand coalition to restore the status quo, and in 1793 the French revolutionaries, suddenly scared, unleashed a people's war, the force that beggared Clausewitz's imagination. “The full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance,” said Clausewitz. “The resources and efforts now available for use surpassed all conventional limits; nothing now impeded the vigor with which war could be waged.” A million Frenchmen joined up.

Kant may have been right that the citizens of republics would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game as war, but once they did commence it, they went about it with a violent rage that paid professionals largely lacked. America's Revolutionary War had seen relatively few massacres outside the campaigns in the Carolinas, but the French Revolutionary Wars were fought in frenzies of self-righteousness, directed particularly against enemies within. “We are bearing fire and death,” a French officer wrote to his sister in 1794. “One volunteer killed three women with his own hands. It is atrocious, but the safety of the Republic demands it imperatively.”

The revolutionary army slaughtered a quarter of a million countryfolk (considered counterrevolutionaries) that year. Finding guns and guillotines too slow, they took to tying civilians up and throwing them into rivers. “What a revolutionary torrent the Loire has become,” the commander joked, before adding, apparently sincerely, that “it is out of a principle of humanity that I am purging the land of liberty of these monsters.”

Against the trained troops of their Prussian, Austrian, and Russian enemies, however, the revolutionaries had a harder time, just as the American revolutionaries had initially had against the British and their Hessian mercenaries. The French people's army was huge, undisciplined, and—having beheaded or chased into exile most of its reactionary officers—usually poorly led. Only its excellent artillery, which had retained a backbone of nonaristocratic, prerevolutionary officers, saved it from disaster. By 1796, one of these officers—a short, quarrelsome provincial named Napoleone Buonaparte—had even worked out how to turn a people's army into a war-winning weapon.

“No more maneuvers, no more military art, just fire, steel, and patriotism,” revolutionaries had proclaimed, but Napoleon's genius lay in turning this rhetoric into reality. Abandoning the clumsy supply trains that slowed down professional armies, Napoleon's men lived off the land, buying or stealing what they needed. No one had tried this since the seventeenth century, because forces had grown too big to be fed from farms along their line of march. Napoleon, however, broke his army down into corps and smaller divisions, each marching on a separate line. Each could fight a stand-alone battle if it had to, but the key to victory was that the columns could converge rapidly when the enemy was spotted, allowing Napoleon to concentrate overwhelming force.

Once on the battlefield, Napoleon followed the same principles. His men could rarely perform elaborate linear tactics as well as old-school professionals, so he did not ask them to. Instead, swarms of skirmishers sniped at the enemy's neat lines while the mass of French infantry ran forward in ragged columns, covered by barrages of shot and shell. When the columns got close to the opposition, they could quickly spread out into rough lines and fire off good enough volleys, substituting numbers for precision, or they could keep going, barreling into the enemy line with fixed bayonets. Even professionals regularly threw down their muskets and ran rather than receive the revolutionaries' charge.

Right around the time Kant was writing
Perpetual Peace,
France drifted—without too much deliberation—from waging people's wars in defense of the revolution to waging them to extend it. In 1796, Napoleon swept through northern Italy. In 1798 he invaded Egypt, and in December 1800, French armies stopped just fifty miles short of Vienna. In 1807, three years after Kant died, Napoleon occupied his hometown of Königsberg.

People's war in Europe had taken a very different path from the American version. After the British surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, the Americans had beaten their bayonets into plowshares. The Revolutionary generals had gone back to their farms, and Jefferson and like-minded Republicans had stubbornly resisted centralized power, taxes, a national debt, standing armies, and all the other tools of Leviathan.

To some Americans, this showed that they were cut from a different, more virtuous cloth than the corrupt Europeans. However, the fact that the United States lurched back toward Leviathan whenever it did perceive danger—as in the late 1790s, when fears of a French invasion flared up—suggests that the real difference was one of political geography. The United States faced few existential threats after 1781. In their absence, it could get
away with being a military midget and even with engaging in arguments about whether it needed a Leviathan at all. European governments, on the other hand, faced predatory neighbors on every side. The slightest weakness could prove fatal, and republics had to fight just as hard as monarchies if they were to survive.

On both continents, the rise of patriotic passions was part of the larger rise of open-access orders, but European people's war diverged even further from the American brand when Napoleon discovered that it could be decoupled from republicanism. A quiet coup in 1799 effectively made him France's monarch, and in 1804 he very publicly crowned himself emperor. From now on, France's mass armies fought for the very old-fashioned cause of imperial expansion. George Washington had believed that commerce was making war redundant, but Napoleon never felt that way. In fact, after 1806 he tried to prove just the opposite, using war to overwhelm commerce by requiring defeated foes to join the “Continental System”—basically, a trade embargo intended to bankrupt Britain by shutting it out of Europe's markets.

It took almost ten more years of war, involving some of the biggest battles in European history (600,000 men fought at Leipzig in 1813), to show that Napoleon was wrong. The only way for war to defeat commerce was for French fleets to seize control of the seas and terminate Britain's trade, but because this trade was so profitable, Britain could always build more and better ships and train more and better sailors than France. Napoleon's naval efforts came to nothing, and because Britain's global commerce survived, Europeans quickly found that they needed British trade more than Britain needed them. One nation after another found ways to get around the Continental System and keep dealing in England's markets.

Napoleon's fights to enforce the system soon took him beyond the culminating point of people's war. Since 1799, he had shown that he could co-opt people's war to make himself an emperor, but Europe's more established monarchs now learned how to do the same to bring him down. When Napoleon occupied Spain in 1808 to keep it inside the Continental System, he was sucked into a quagmire of popular revolt (
Figure 4.11
), and Spanish insurgents, stiffened by British regulars, tied down hundreds of thousands of French troops for the next six years.

Worse followed when Napoleon, still trying to enforce the system, invaded Russia. (As mentioned in
Chapter 3
, it was this blunder that inspired Clausewitz to come up with his theory of culminating points: enraged
when his native Prussia submitted to France, he joined the Russian army in 1812 as a volunteer and realized that his own anti-French anger was just part of a vast reaction that Napoleon had himself created by going too far.) The tide turned rapidly: just two years after Napoleon took Moscow, the Russians had taken Paris and Napoleon was in exile. But the tide then turned again, and in a hundred dramatic days in 1815, Napoleon stormed back into France, raised another army, and almost—but not quite—broke the British at Waterloo before being bundled back into a much more remote exile.

So it was that Britain's newfangled, open-access empire of trade survived the great challenge posed by Napoleon's marriage of old-school militarism and up-to-date people's war. By the time Bonaparte died, in 1821 (helped along, some said, by British poison), Britain bestrode much of the world like a colossus. Acting as a globocop was paying off: policing the waterways with British warships cost money, but it was worth it, because between 1781 and 1821 Britain's exports tripled and its workers became the most productive on the planet.

Britain was becoming a nation unlike any seen before—and also solving a problem that had never been seen before.

The Sun Never Sets

Bigger markets, Smith had argued, made for a finer division of labor, which lifted productivity, profits, and wages in a virtuous spiral. But what would happen when tasks had been subdivided as finely as possible and no further efficiency gains could be squeezed out?

Smith had not worried unduly about this, because the problem had never arisen. But by the time Napoleon died, his successors were worrying very much indeed. The high wages that British workers earned were already pricing some of their goods out of European markets. The only way for British firms to stay in business, it seemed, was to pay their workers less, and the average Londoner of the early nineteenth century was earning 15 percent less than his grandparents had. Having won the war, Britain seemed to be losing the peace.

Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and a string of other political economists speculated that there was an iron law of wages. The division of labor, imperial expansion, and becoming a globocop might all push wages up for a while, but in the end income would always be driven back down to the edge of starvation. The nineteenth century, some predicted, would be an age of misery. But this did not happen, because an odd concatenation of forces compelled the invisible hand and invisible fist to work together in new ways.

The story starts with clothes. Because everyone needs them, textiles are a major sector in all premodern economies, and because sheep do well in wet, grassy countries, Britons had for centuries worn wool. But as it made inroads into Asia, Britain's East India Company saw an opportunity and started shipping rolls of brightly colored, inexpensive cotton cloth back to the home isles. It was a huge hit.

Wool merchants, unhappy about this competition, struck back by doing the kind of thing that Smith hated most: distorting the market by lobbying Parliament to ban Indian cotton. Cotton cannot grow in Britain, so clothiers responded by importing raw cotton (which was still legal) from the Caribbean colonies and spinning and weaving it in Britain, but British workers could not do the job as cheaply (or, frankly, as well) as Indians. In the 1760s, thirty pieces of woolen clothing were being sold for every one of cotton.

The bottleneck in cotton production was spinning, the labor-intensive, repetitive job of twisting cotton fibers together to make strong, even thread, and it was opened (according to legend) in 1764, when a spinning wheel belonging to one James Hargreaves fell over. As he watched it continue
turning for several seconds as it lay on its side, Hargreaves said, he had an epiphany: he could make a machine that flipped a spindle from vertical to horizontal and then back again, over and over, replacing the human fingers that laboriously twisted the fibers. In fact, a single machine could have dozens of spindles, doing the job faster than a human.

Hargreaves had hit on a solution to the downside of high wages: he would augment human labor with machine power, raising productivity. Hargreaves's spinning jenny was a hit (perhaps too much so; Hargreaves was unable to enforce his patent), and in 1779 a vastly superior device (Crompton's mule) also came onto the market, spinning cotton that was not only cheaper but also finer than anything made in India.

All this seems very far from the history of war, but before its relevance becomes clear, we must stray still farther from the battlefield, into the world of underground streams. In the eighteenth century, coal-mine owners were also facing the problem of high (by the standards of the day) wages. As wages rose, Britons had more babies; as population grew, people cut down forests to clear farmland; and as wood grew scarce, coal replaced it for heating and cooking. All this was good news for colliers, who dug their mines deeper to bring up ever more coal, but by 1700 mine after mine was flooding. Paying high-priced laborers to bail out the diggings was ruinously expensive, as was using high-priced land to grow oats to feed dozens of horses pulling bucket chains. The answer, first installed at a coal mine in 1712, was an engineering marvel—a machine that substituted cheap coal for expensive muscles. It burned coal to boil water, making steam that drove a piston that pumped water out of the mine shaft, allowing more coal to be dug up and burned.

Coal and clothes came together in 1785, when the first cotton mill owner hooked up his mules, jennies, and throstles to steam engines. Productivity exploded. The price of spun cotton fell from 38 shillings per pound in 1786 to under 7 shillings in 1807, but sales grew even faster. In 1760, Britain had imported 2.5 million pounds of raw cotton; by 1787 that jumped to 22 million pounds (in 1837 it reached 366 million pounds). Steam power then leaped from industry to industry as engineers figured out new applications. British wages, which had been sliding since the 1740s as Smithian improvements ran into diminishing returns, stabilized, and after 1830 surged upward. The Industrial Revolution had arrived.