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"I cant in all conscience impose my morals onto them."

Yes, you can. And plenty of them had actual moral sense at the time and were acting upon it. You get to live in a world where their morality is accepted by all as a matter of course, because they built that world for you with their blood. Not because of any virtue you possess just by being born later. And certainly not by any imaginary virtue you hand yourself for lacking their moral courage.

No I actually can't. First off I wasn't around then and secondly, my country didn't have slavery then either. Britain led the way in the anti slavery movement in the 1800's. You could argue that if it wasn't for this then slavery might not have ended I the US when it did. After all if Britain was still heavily into slavery in 1860 then it may have actually supported the south? In this case the north would have lost the war I suppose.

I do however stand by my original statement, I wasn't there and can't moralise for them. If you apply your analogy then the US should really hand back a significant portion of your country to native Americans.

I haven't seen much moralising on the colonisation of the west of the US which happened after a civil war, didn't these Indians have the same rights?

Then I'm heading way off topic.

I'm like the OP here, I think I can have a high degree of interest in the civil War and the characters in it without getting caught up in the whys and what fors. After all I play CM as the Germans and don't constantly dwell on the fact that they were essentially a murdering bunch if Nazi swine.

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JC77- a true non apology apology that it is five times as offensive as direct argument. If you actually want to drop it, then just drop it, don't get up on a soapbox and proclaim that no one else should say anything on the subject you brought up, and oh by the way here is my last bucket of snide. On the substance, trying to separate the US civil war from the morality of slavery is like trying separate white and rice. It doesn't work, it doesn't matter how often the attempt is made. The war happened because men wanted to imprison and beat their workers instead of paying them a market wage - it was more profitable than justice, for them personally - and for no other reason. When they tried to force that moral monstrosity onto other men in their own backyards, those other men said no, and when the offenders pressed the point, we handed them their heads.

About the possibility that I may have offended you personally, I very much meant it. An apology like that does not mean I surrender my beliefs to you. Sorry.

Since you will only back a legalistic argument into a moralist corner, I wonder how you do feel about the Native Americans treatment both before 1861 and during the Reconstructionist Republican (Union) period after 1865?

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"the US should really hand back a significant portion of your country to native Americans."

Why, were they a high school glee club? Did they construct the land with their hands?

Or did they consider publicly torturing captured enemies to death in the village square a rollicking form of entertainment? They were all at war with each other endlessly and held only what they could with the tomahawk, long before any settlers arrived. Their tenure was successful murder, nothing else.

The native Americans are still here, by the way, as many as when the country was formed. They drive pick up trucks instead of riding horses, and live in houses not tents, and they don't torture people. They live better lives and are better people. The only thing they "lost" was the right to kill people with impunity when they felt like it - they were pushed west when they attacked settlers and lost wars against them.

Long before all that, disease certainly hurt them. Modern medicine doubled their life expectancy. Both mattered more to life and health than political anything. But hey, if anyone (native or not) wants to go back to riding horses and living in tents, living off deer hunting, they are perfectly welcome. They just don't get to murder anybody for sport.

Your moral equivalence nonsense is just that.

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While the Indians were living their own way of life, the attitude of Americans to them varied with distance. People who had to actually deal with them, like Kit Carson and the young Theodore Roosevelt, disliked them, describing them as larcenous, treacherous, and cruel. In the East Coast cities far from where the Indians actually were, sentimentality about the Noble Savage was normal, and they were thought of as fierce warriors chocked full with dignity and pride, living a healthy outdoor life and worshiping the spirits of Nature.

Once the Indians had been subjugated and were no longer a threat to anyone, the Noble Savage view became universal. Now we're all supposed to feel terrible about having dispossessed them of their land and their happy, healthy, nature-respecting way of life.

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"the US should really hand back a significant portion of your country to native Americans."

Why, were they a high school glee club? Did they construct the land with their hands?

Or did they consider publicly torturing captured enemies to death in the village square a rollicking form of entertainment? They were all at war with each other endlessly and held only what they could with the tomahawk, long before any settlers arrived. Their tenure was successful murder, nothing else.

The native Americans are still here, by the way, as many as when the country was formed. They drive pick up trucks instead of riding horses, and live in houses not tents, and they don't torture people. They live better lives and are better people. The only thing they "lost" was the right to kill people with impunity when they felt like it - they were pushed west when they attacked settlers and lost wars against them.

Long before all that, disease certainly hurt them. Modern medicine doubled their life expectancy. Both mattered more to life and health than political anything. But hey, if anyone (native or not) wants to go back to riding horses and living in tents, living off deer hunting, they are perfectly welcome. They just don't get to murder anybody for sport.

Your moral equivalence nonsense is just that.

And here you have proved that you use morals to suit your needs and remove them when they don't. You have okayed the evil of one side because it is the side you side with. Never once have I morally okayed slavery to justify the Confederacy. You pinned yourself against the debate wall with your own moral argument.

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You have okayed the evil of one side because it is the side you side with.

The lesson is, that if great numbers of foreigners come to settle in your land, and you can't or won't do anything to stop them, then soon it's not your land any more. It's their land.

As an American with Indian ancestry (Algonquin) on my father's side I feel zero guilt. JasonC has a point, it's rather a lose-win situation for the natives. Better living a humdrum middle-class life than inhabiting some wretched reservation passed out in a pool of your own vomit. And what country in history hasn't displaced the original inhabitants? Usually it's for the general good. Like Britain.

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Childress, I have no argument with you point above as I have never made my argument with the morals of good and bad. With Jason it has been morals this and morals that. He can't have it both ways. You cannot sweep under the rug the immorality of one to suit the other. If he feels no guilt for the Native American "plight" it is irrelevant to his original moral argument. There is doubtless those who would say that thanks to slavery the African American is far better off here. You won't hear them argue that, however, true or not and it still would not change what they were forced to endure to get to this point.

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"the US should really hand back a significant portion of your country to native Americans."

Why, were they a high school glee club? Did they construct the land with their hands?

Or did they consider publicly torturing captured enemies to death in the village square a rollicking form of entertainment? They were all at war with each other endlessly and held only what they could with the tomahawk, long before any settlers arrived. Their tenure was successful murder, nothing else.

The native Americans are still here, by the way, as many as when the country was formed. They drive pick up trucks instead of riding horses, and live in houses not tents, and they don't torture people. They live better lives and are better people. The only thing they "lost" was the right to kill people with impunity when they felt like it - they were pushed west when they attacked settlers and lost wars against them.

Long before all that, disease certainly hurt them. Modern medicine doubled their life expectancy. Both mattered more to life and health than political anything. But hey, if anyone (native or not) wants to go back to riding horses and living in tents, living off deer hunting, they are perfectly welcome. They just don't get to murder anybody for sport.

Your moral equivalence nonsense is just that.

So you dismiss a whole culture because you believe that it was based on murder and torture. I find that very naive. Although I don't presume for a minute to be an expert on the way the west was won, it seems that the US pushed back the natives, offered them many treaties which were broken at a whim, forces the natives into reservations and basically destroyed a whole culture with little or no regard to their human rights. All this carried out by men who just a few years earlier proffesed that slavery was so wrong and all men were created equal.

So the same men who fought to rid the US of slavery, then went on to practically exterminate and enslave a third race.

I think it comes back to my original point that we can't really moralise on the past as they had an entirely different set of morals to us, we can however learn from the past and move forward, trying not to repeat their mistakes, but that's not something were good at either.

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Seems to me that Europeans (including white Americans and their descendants) have always be outstanding in the murder and theft department. Britons carved out a great empire between 1600 and 1900 because they were better at it than anybody else on the planet. How they lost that position is the subject for another discussion.

Michael

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Seems to me that Europeans (including white Americans and their descendants) have always be outstanding in the murder and theft department.

You're flirting with racism there, Michael. Human nature is universal. Indians*, mired in their Stone Age culture, hadn't got around to inventing the wheel. Do you wish that the United States. never happened? Or Australia? That Europeans hunkered down in their over-populated continent? And sent a regiments of lawyers, diplomats and bankers to bargain with the natives? Please, Noble Savages, let us settle in this tiny corner of Massachusetts! We'll pay rent! With beads! At lest we British colonists behaved better that the Spaniards. ;)

And how do you feel about penicillin, the polio vaccine and living past the age of forty?

*And they were environmentalist slobs.

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You're flirting with racism there, Michael.

Where do you get that? I was quoting simple history. Europeans came to dominate the planet for centuries because they were better at organized violence than anybody else. They were also better at some other things, like science and technology, which is sometimes good and sometimes not. Ditto finance.

Michael

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Well you did single out 'Europeans and white Americans (and their descendants!)' as excelling in the murder business. Not a slur? Or it could be my- race based- hair trigger sensitivity acting up. You know how stroppy us white folks can be. ;)

You need to read my post in the context of the ongoing discussion at that point. Jason had described the Indians as murderous savages (to put it mildly) and a couple people had more or less agreed with him. My point was that Europeans could definitely hold up their end in the murdering and thievery sweepstakes. The Aztecs and Incas may not have been nice guys to our modern way of thinking, but neither were the Conquistadors.

And here I would prefer to let the matter rest. Are you okay with that?

Michael

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Why did the West prevail beside their advantages in technology and numbers? When Europeans came to the New World, they brought with them a silent ally, infectious disease, to which the indigenes, in both Americas, had no immunity. Additionally the tribes were divided and generally hostile to each other. Now and then a charismatic leader like Tecumseh (a great man) arose and was able to assemble a coalition that challenged White encroachments. But this was the exception not the rule. The natives also suffered- and suffer to this day- a susceptiblity to alcoholism, an unknown toxin to them, which caused ravages among their populations.

The subject of alcohol and its effects on primitive cultures is a fascinating one. One theory posits that wine, already common in the Middle East, followed the expansion of the Roman Empire north. Over the centuries the occupied territories gradually developed a kind of immunity to the disease. This explains the higher rates of alcoholism in lands never subjugated by the Romans, e.g., Scandinavia, Russia and Ireland.

Edit:

And here I would prefer to let the matter rest. Are you okay with that?

Michael

Yes, indeed. ;)

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Since the topic is veering into the question of why Europe went on to dominate large portions of the planet, I highly recommend reading Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs, and Steel". He is a thoughtful scholar and the book is really well written.

I read that not long after it came out and generally accept his thesis, although his list of essential foods strikes me as a trifle eccentric and almost completely ignores a whole host of food vegetables originally cultivated in the New World.

Michael

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A sinopsis of Parker's book. I read the first 1988-edition rather than the revised 1996 one while I was a student at the University of Barcelona in the early 90's, but found Parker's assertions really valid:

Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, Second Edition (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

************_______________

Central Proposition/Thesis:

[4] "...it is the argument of this book that the key to the Westerners' success in creating the first truly global empires between 1500 and 1750 depended upon precisely those improvements in the ability to wage war which have been termed 'the military revolution'."

[5] Daniel R. Headrick explained in The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century "how the Western states increased their global empires from about 35 percent of the world's land surface in 1800 to 84 percent in 1914. ... My objective, therefore, is rather different: I seek to illuminate the principal means by which the West acquired that first 35 percent between 1500 and 1800."

___________

Conclusion:

Three key innovations in Europe during the sixteenth century set the stage for a military revolution in Europe and eventually led to European dominance of the world: gunpowder weapons, the "artillery fortress", and the capital ship.

__________

Argument/Logic:

Parker traces developments in European military history from 1500-1800. He specifically considers the implications on both armies and societies of what he considers the three most important innovations of the sixteenth century: gunpowder weapons, "artillery fortresses", and the capital ship. These three innovations, together, constitute a "military revolution" that forever changed Europe and the world.

Introduction:

The Military Revolution: [1] According to Michael Roberts, four changes in the art of war occurred between 1560 and 1660. Together, these four elements constitute a "military revolution" and provide a framework that Parker considers throughout his book.

1. Revolution in Tactics. [1] "First came a 'revolution in tactics': the replacement of the lance and pike by the arrow and muskey, as the feudal knights fell before the firepower of massed archers or gunners."

2. Growth in Army Size. [1] "Associated with this development were a marked growth in army size right across Europe (with armed forces of several states increasing tenfold between 1500 and 1700)...."

3. Adoption of More Complex Strategies. [1] "...and the adoption of more ambitious and complex strategies designed to bring these larger armies into action."

4. Dramatic Societal Impact of War. [2] "Fourth, and finally, Roberts's military revolution dramatically accentuated the impact of war on society: the greater costs incurred, the greater damage inflicted, and the greater administrative challenges posed by the augmented armies made waging war far more of a burden and far more of a problem than ever previously, both for the civilian population and for their rulers."

Chapter One: The Military Revolution Revisited. [4] "My story begins with a survey of the various ways in which the Europeans fought their wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the rapid spread of firearms transformed the conduct of both offensive and defensive operations, with due regard for those areas that seemed largely unaffected by the military revolution as well as for those that lay at its heart (Chapter 1)."

[7] The armies of the Middle Ages were subject to just the same tension between offensive and defensive techniques from which strategy, and military innovation, spring."

[7] By the twelfth century, vertical fortifications favored the defense.

[7] In the fifteenth century, the advent of powerful siege guns capable of destroying the walls of medieval cities tipped the balance to the offense. [8] "It seemed as if the age of 'vertical defence' was now over."

[10-12] By the sixteenth century the trace italienne--fortifications with short, thick, earthen walls that could withstand cannon-fire; gun-towers with inter-locking fields of fire; wide, deep exterior ditches that mitigated sapping--shifted the balance back toward the defense.

[12] "The cost [of building trace italienne], however, was stunning." Therefore, trace italienne spread slowly through Europe.

[12] In 1553, the Republic of Sienna, which faced threats of attack, embarked on a program of refortification that bankrupted it and led to its annexation by neighboring Florence. Thus, in this case, a single-minded pursuit of security led to extinction.

[16] Heavily defended fortresses or towns could not be circumvented and ignored because their resident forces threatened the supply lines of invading armies. Sieges remained necessary, and required an increasing number of men to isolate the besieged and fend off relief forces. Consequently, the size of armies grew.

[16] Additionally, the rise of firepower (arrows, then muskets) increased the relative lethality (thus utility) of infantry over cavalry. Since infantry cost less than cavalry, this development also encouraged a growth in the size of armies.

[43] "And so to conclude: warfare in early modern Europe was certainly transformed by three important, related developments -- a new use of firepower, a new type of fortifications, and an increase in army size. But the timing of the transformation was far slower, and the impact less total, than was once thought. Most of the wars fought in Europe before the French Revolution were not brought to an end by a strategy of extermination, but ... through a strategy of attrition, via the patient accumulation of minor victoriesand the slow erosion of the enemy's economic base. There were, to be sure, a few exceptions.... [Nevertheless, the] classic conflicts of the age of military revolution were all 'long wars' made up of numerous separate campaigns and 'actions'...."

[43-44] Increases in the size and cost of armies explains partly the longevity of war. [44] "trategic thinking had become crushed between the sustained growth in army size and the relative scarcity of money, equipment and food. In the age of the military revolution, the skill of individual governments and generals in supplyinig war often became the pivot about which the outcome of armed conflict turned."

Chapter Two: Supplying War. [4] "Chapter 2, by contrast, does focus on these more 'advanced' areas, most of them in the west of Europe, in order to examine the logistical problems which better fortifications and bigger armies created, and how they were overcome."

Strategies of attrition that employ large armies require a substantial amount of resources. [59] Ancient incentives of plunder gradually became insufficient for large, professional armies. [61] Paying large armies over the course of long wars also became problematic. [62-63] Sovereigns were forced to finance military operations through loans. [64] Private contractors and entrepreneurs began supplying fielded armies. [76] Campaigns often remained nearby the sea or along navigable rivers on which supplies could be transported at less cost.

[80] "Even with increased manpower, the political objectives of governments at war were still unattainable with the limited military strategies available. As before, most decisive wars were not big and most big wars were not decisive. The states of early modern Europe had discovered how to supply large armies but not how to lead them to victory."

[80] "The more land warfare became a stalemate, the more the leading states sought a decision through naval power."

Chapter Three: Victory at Sea. [4] "However, the arms-race between the various Western powers took place by sea as well as by land; and the 'military revolution' here offered the European states an opportunity to extend their conflicts far beyond their own shores. At first this escalation remained confined to encounters at sea, with attacks by one European flotilla upon another in the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Carribean and, eventually, the Indian Ocean (Chapter 3)."

The introduction of the capital ship -- swift vessels with cannons -- permitted European powers to contest access to the seas and control strategically important waters. While fleets were no guarantor of strategic victory, they extended the reach of European powers who could afford them.

Chapter Four: The 'Military Revolution' Abroad. [4] But, before long, the Europeans abroad searched for native allies, and thereby spread their enmities to the other continents. With them they took their new military methods and, as these steadily improved, they gradually gained superiority over all their opponents: over the Americans in the sixteenth century, over most Indonesians in the seventeenth, and over many Indians and Africans in the eighteenth. In the end, only Korea, China and Japan held out against the West until the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America forged some new tools of empire -- such as the armoured steam-ship and the rapid-fire gun -- to which even East Asia at first possessed no effective reply (Chapter 4)"

Chapter Five: Beyond the Revolution. [5] "This volume concludes with a brief examination of the process by which the armies and navies of the early modern states metamorphosed into those of the industrial age, capable of imposing -- and, for nearly a century, of maintaining -- Western influence and Western ways on almost the entire world."

[146-147] "...the various changes in the scale and nature of war described in the preceding chapters were accompanied by changes in the structure and nature of the states which fought them. This should not surprise us for, as noted in chapter 2 above, the growth of an effective bureaucracy was an essential prerequisite for the creation, control and supply of larger and better-equipped armies. Thus the great leap in army size in the 1530s and 40s was accompanied by a major reorganization of government in most Western states in which the inherited administrative system (based on the household) gave way to a more complex bureaucratic edifice; while the further period of rapid increase in manpower between 1672 and 1710 was associated with the rise of absolutism -- especially in the states that had been prominent in the Thirty Years War and had experienced a collapse in the pyramid of command during it (France, Sweden, Austria and Prussia)."

[148] In the eighteenth century, "tactics of rapid fire at close range, with the consequent heavy losses of men, called for a far better supply of war materials than previous armies had enjoyed." ... "But the cost of all this was crippling. In human terms, the wars consumed too many men. ... In financial terms, too, the cost was unacceptably high...."

[151] By the end of the eighteenth century, the military system in Europe was again changing. "These three transformations -- the use of light troops and skirmishers; the introduction of divisions and a more mobile strategy; and the creation of a swift and powerful field artillery -- were associated after 1793 with a further revolution in military manpower. ... The [French] royal army in 1788-9, on the eve of the Revolution, stood at some 150,000 men. By August 1793 its paper strength had reached 645,000 and the celebrated levee en masse probably doubled this figure. By September 1794, the army of the Republic numbered, at least in theory, 1,169,000 men."

[153] Enormous mobile armies capable of devastating firepower became an "almost irresistible concentration of force." While bastioned fortifications could still withstand sieges, such large armies could afford to encircle them and proceed on to other objectives.

[153] "The evolution of naval warfare was roughly similar. The near-equilibrium of the three navies of north-west Europe in the later seventeenth century ... was shattered in the later eighteenth century because Britain forged ahead while others did not. In 1789, there were perhaps 440 ships-of-the-line in Europe's navies, of which almost one-third (153) were British, all of them equipped with standard, mass-produced steel cannon. But, by 1810, after almost twenty years of continuous war at sea, the Royal Navy comprised over 1,000 purpose-built warships (243 of them ships-of-the-line) with a total displacement of 861,000 tons and a complement of 142,000 men. These, too, represented an almost irresistible concentration of force which could be applied anywhere in the world. It was from this position of overwhleming strength that Britannia could, and did, rule the waves."

[154] The concentration of such large armies and fleets strained to the limit the expanded economic, political and technological resources which had permitted their creation." Not until technology caught up -- with telegraphs, railways, and breech-loading rifles -- could extremely large armies be employed and sustained effectively. These means, along with the advent of the iron-clad steamship, gave Europeans the forceful power needed to subjugate those remaining uncolonized peoples of the world.

[154] "The West had now indeed risen. In a way that few could have foreseen, the sustained preoccupation of the European states with fighting each other by land and sea had at length paid handsome dividends. Thanks above all to their military superiority, founded upon the military revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Western nations had managed to create the first global hegemony in History."

Afterword: In Defence of The Military Revolution. Parker's The Military Revolution was originally published in 1988. The Afterword chapter is a defense of his original work that applauds several subsequent works and addresses a few critiques put forward between 1988 and the release of the book's second edition in 1996.

[176] Parker concludes with the following reaffirmation of his original work: "Only military resilience and technological innovation -- especially the capital ship, infantry firepower and the artillery fortress: the three vital components of the military revolution in the sixteenth century -- allowed the West to make the most of its smaller resources in order to resist and, eventually, to expand to global dominance."

[158] Among the works referenced in the Afterword is Clifford Rogers's The Military Revolution Debate in which the "punctuated equilibrium" model is heralded. The model is an alternative to the notion of military revolutions and was first presented in 1972 by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge. According to Rogers, Gould and Eldredge argued "that evolution proceeded by short bursts of rapid change interspersed with long periods of stasis rather than constant, slow alteration." However, the model's initial version effectively dismissed incremental change. The revised model of "punctuated equilibrium" that is presented in Rogers's book combines incremental change with spurts of rapid advancement. Said differently, military revolutions don't happen; rather, military innovation is a long and lurching process.

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I find the following book very interesting:

...

Another suggestion:

Ian Morris, "Why The West Rules - For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future", 2011

A bit broader in scope and IMHO a good read. Explains why we (westerners) don't speak Chinese (yet :))

Amazon blurb:

"Why does the West rule? Eminent Stanford polymath Ian Morris answers this provocative question, drawing uniquely on 15,000 years of history and archaeology, and the methods of social science. In the middle of the eighteenth century, British entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal and the world changed forever. Factories, railways and gunboats then propelled the West's rise to power, and computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Today, however, many worry that the emergence of China and India spell the end of the West as a superpower. How long will the power of the West last? And in order to find out we need to know: why has the West been so dominant for the past two hundred years? With flair and authority, historian and achaeologist Ian Morris draws uniquely on 15,000 years of history to offer fresh insights on what the future will bring. Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, "Why The West Rules - For Now" is a gripping and truly original history of the world."

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Like Britain.

It's astonishing that no enterprising lawyer (solicitor?) across the pond hasn't yet initiated a class action suit citing invaders from previous periods; namely the Romans, the Vikings and the Normans. There's surely a pot of gold in there somewhere. The case of the latter may, however, prove arduous; William the Conqueror did actually have a feeble family connection to the recently expired and childless King Edward.

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Three key innovations in Europe during the sixteenth century set the stage for a military revolution in Europe and eventually led to European dominance of the world: gunpowder weapons, the "artillery fortress", and the capital ship.

I believe I would add a fourth. Europe seems to have been better at organizing societies and their militaries to conduct large enterprises such as warmaking and colonization. He mentions the growth of armies, but the armies weren't just bigger, they were also usually better organized, disciplined, and led. I think China might have been able to do the same thing but for two factors. China did not industrialize during the critical period of the 18th. and 19th. centuries. And during the 15th. century when Europe was embarking on the Age of Exploration, China turned inward instead.

Michael

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That battle could have ended differently, but whether that would have led to a Confederate victory in the war is another matter. The South was being dismembered, first by the conquest of the Mississippi River, then by Sherman's March to the Sea. Winning at Gettysburg might have prolonged the war, but the South was being beaten slowly but surely. Both sides suffered heavy losses, but where the Union could replace theirs both human and material—however painfully—the Confederacy could not. The North was being constantly replenished by a flood of immigrants from Europe to man the armies and the mills. But the fact that a very large proportion of Southern males were in service meant that the economy was slowly being bled white. After the aforementioned dismemberments, the economy more or less collapsed. If the South cannot win decisively in the first year or two, it is left with just delaying the inevitable.

Michael

Umm, sorry a little late getting back to you on this one! But regarding the pure physical nature of the war you're entirely correct Michael. Speaking of Shelby Foote, he mentioned in the Civil War PBS Miniseries (which was truly brilliant if anyone missed it) that the North had essentially fought that war with one arm behind it's back and just would have brought out the other if needed. My point was more the psychological aspect. The Army of the Potomac was losing battle after battle (in the west this wasn't the case but anyway...). War fatigue was running high and without the clear victory at Gettysburg, well, who knows? Remember in the election of 1864 McClellan lost to Lincoln, but not by much. And McClellan's main platform was ending the war and allowing the South to secede.

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War fatigue was running high and without the clear victory at Gettysburg, well, who knows? Remember in the election of 1864 McClellan lost to Lincoln, but not by much. And McClellan's main platform was ending the war and allowing the South to secede.

You may have a point. This aspect of the war I have not so far devoted much study to, I regret to admit, and so cannot comment on. It does seem that Lincoln's hold on power was sometimes worn a bit thin.

Michael

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