This entry is a subentry of Disciplinary Views Of War.
The history of science had its roots in intellectual history; it studied the ideas of great men. George Sarton launched the field on its modern, independent trajectory with the creation of the journal Isis in 1912 and the History of Science Society in 1924. The history of technology had its roots both in the history of science and in economic history. Its autonomy as a field began with the founding of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) and the journal Technology and Culture in 1958.
Until World War II, historians of science paid little attention to war and the military, in spite of the fact that both loomed large in the lives and work of scientists as disparate and renowned as Archimedes, Galileo, and Lavoisier. The few exceptions, such as Robert Merton's classic Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth‐Century England (1938), prove the rule; Merton, in fact, was a sociologist. In contrast, historians of technology appreciated the importance of military topics before the creation of SHOT. For example, the standard multivolume reference works all have extensive coverage of military topics:
Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization (1932) established a benchmark among pre–World War II studies. In this synthetic, richly interpretive overview of Western experience, Mumford identified four loci of what he saw as the deterioration of civilization from its natural, organic state to a perverse, mechanistic, artificial corruption that had set in during the modern era. These loci were the soldier, the miner, the cleric, and the accountant. The solder was responsible, in Mumford's view, for the regimentation of life and work and the subordination of the individual to the group.
In 1932, Mumford had hoped that the twentieth century, a period he called the neotechnic era, would witness a return to natural, organic values. Instead, civilization continued to disappoint him, prompting his two‐volume study, The Myth of the Machine (1967–70). In the second volume, The Pentagon of Power, Mumford portrayed the military‐industrial complex as the sad culmination of the mechanistic, authoritarian tendencies he had first identified in Technics and Civilization. The greening of civilization had failed to materialize.
Other works appearing in Mumford's prime were less judgmental. For example, Carlo Cipolla, an economic historian, argued in Guns, Sails, and Empire (1965) that the West had established hegemony over the world's littoral in the early modern period by exploiting the superior military technology of the heavy cannon and the side‐gunned sailing ship. Lynn White, Jr., argued in Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) that the introduction of the stirrup in eighth‐century Europe empowered the mounted warrior and thus catalyzed the feudal system. Both books have been interpreted as indulging in technological determinism. This claim places them in the same category as Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society (1964), an alarmist tract lamenting the loss of human agency in the face of increasingly autonomous technological imperatives.
Against this interpretation has emerged a school of thought generally described as social constructivist. Adherents of this school, whose roots are in European sociology, argue that all technologies are socially constructed, that is, they take their form and their role in society from human decisions. An excellent example of this kind of analysis is Donald MacKenzie's Inventing Accuracy: An Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missiles and Guidance (1990). That the debate between these two schools remains unsettled is manifest in
Many important works have escaped this controversy. For example, Merritt Roe Smith's Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change (1977) explored the revolution in small arms manufacture that lay behind the so‐called American System. In the process he called into question America's purported love affair with technology.
A related issue, military conservatism, received its most influential treatment in Elting Morison's Men, Machines, and Modern Times (1966), especially in his seminal essay Gunfire at Sea. Morison eschewed the temptation to stereotype the military, arguing instead that “military organizations are really societies, more rigidly structured, more highly integrated, than most communities, but still societies.” Their response to technological change, he believed, differed in degree but not in kind from that of other societies. Military officers in general and naval officers in particular had good reasons to cherish proven technologies and to resist innovation; after all, they risked their lives and the lives of their subordinates on that technology. Arms and equipment that had been proven in battle were bound to appear more secure and trustworthy than new technology yet to win its spurs. Morison went so far as to argue in another article that we would do well to recognize “the destructive energy in machinery.” His examination of the navy's skepticism about the revolutionary warship Wampanoag after the Civil War presents naval conservatism in a new light, almost as an early aversion to the dangers of autonomous technology.
The great irony about traditional military conservatism toward technological change is that it reversed itself completely after World War II. This was the first war in which the weapons deployed at the end were significantly different from those with which it was launched; the most familiar examples are jet aircraft, ballistic missiles, proximity fuses, and, of course, the atomic bomb. These developments convinced the services that the desideratum of modern war was shifting from industrial production to technological development. The next war would be won in the research laboratory fully as much as the factory. Thus began the hothouse environment of military research and development that produced a new arms race, military‐industrial complexes in the United States and abroad, and the expansion of military interest and funds into new realms, such as computers, communications, space flight, microelectronics, astrophysics, and a host of other fields.
Many scholars writing in this environment found their views and conclusions shaped by the Cold War and the military‐industrial complex. Perhaps the most influential was William H. McNeill, whose The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000 (1982) explored the relationship between technology and war through the second millennium. McNeill believed that free enterprise had driven the explosion of military technology in the late Middle Ages and early modern periods, only to be replaced by command economies in the twentieth century. Under state direction, these economies drove the nuclear arms race, which threatened human survival. Implicit in McNeill's work was a belief that historians should understand, expose, and perhaps deflect a military‐technical trajectory that seemed headed to Armageddon.
The topic has attracted historians of science as well. Following the lead of scientists themselves, historians of science turned increasingly after World War II to military topics in general, and the moral and political implications of nuclear weapons in particular. The ethical concerns about developing weapons that some scientists have had throughout history were magnified in the twentieth century as scientific knowledge and expertise were bent on producing weapons of mass destruction—gas in World War I and most especially the atomic bomb in World War II.
Between 1950 and 1990, a significant body of scholarship explored the military‐industrial complex, the making of science policy, the ethical position of the scientist, and the militarization of universities and other centers of scientific and technical research.
Meanwhile, the best scholarship in the history of science and technology combines solid grounding in the technical material with rich contextualization. For example, Hugh G. J. Aitken's Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal: Scientific Management in Action (1960) explores the military roots of American technological and industrial practice. Daniel Kevles's The Physicists (1964) reveals the ways in which physics and war shaped each other in the United States. Richard Rhodes examines the Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) with unprecedented insight and precision, virtues also present in his sequel, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995). As the Cold War recedes into history, it may be expected that historians of science and technology will be less influenced by the passions of that conflict and even more inclined to see war and the military as important contextual issues.
[See also: Society and War.]
