Is The Military Revolution dead yet?

Abstract

The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800 is now approaching its 35th  anniversary, and its author intends to update and restate in a new edition the original assertions of the 1988 edition (with one exception: we need to discard the fallacious term ‘trace italienne’), while applying the theoretical framework of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ to military affairs. The new edition of The Military Revolution will situate a series of episodes of intense change within a prolonged process of evolution and adaptation. This essay offers the opening arguments of the new edition of The Military Revolution, and includes (by way of example) the analysis of one revolutionary episode – the battle of Lützen (1632) – which combines the results of recent ‘battlefield archaeology’ with the numerous surviving eye-witness accounts.