Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution

Abstract

What have been the causes and consequences of technological evolution in world history? In particular, what propels innovation and diffusion of military technologies, details of which are comparatively well preserved and which are often seen as drivers of broad socio-cultural processes? Here we analyze the evolution of key military technologies in a sample of pre-industrial societies world-wide covering almost 10,000 years of history using Seshat: Global History Databank. We empirically test previously speculative theories that proposed world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding, as central drivers of military technological evolution. We find that all of these factors are strong predictors of change in military technology, whereas state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication play no major role. We discuss how our approach can be extended to explore technological change more generally, and how our results carry important ramifications for understanding major drivers of evolution of social complexity.

Retrodicting the rise, spread, and fall of large-scale states in the Old World

“…Thus the asymmetric and substantial military shock that emanates from the steppe early in the simulation appears required by the model to match historical events, as Turchin conjectured. This result is consistent with a recent statistical analysis [ 35 ] of comprehensive world-wide data on the evolution of military technology that identified several significant factors beyond world population and existing technology levels, notably the adoption of iron and horse cavalry and connectivity between states, which are required to causally account for the regional increase of historical military technologies.…”

“…Historically both nomadic confederations and agrarian states continued to improve their military technologies in this period, including adopting heavier armor, improved bows and stirrup systems, and eventually siege engines [ 31 , 35 ]. The model assumes that the impact of these innovations and any other military changes are reflected as changes in s .…”

Disentangling the evolutionary drivers of social complexity: A comprehensive test of hypotheses

“…However, we should also note that there is a feedback loop from advances in military technologies and the intensity of warfare. In particular, our analysis of the evolution of MilTech in the Seshat sample indicated that these new technologies as horse riding and iron metallurgy result in strong advances of other aspects of military technologies ( 46 ). Thus, we add a supplementary hypothesis, Cavalry/Iron Revolution, as a check for the CMLS hypothesis (see below).…”

“…External conflict theories propose that competition between societies, usually taking the form of warfare, imposes a selection regime that weeds out relatively dysfunctional, poorly organized, and internally uncooperative polities, favoring those with larger populations and effective, centralized, and internally specialized institutions (6,(43)(44)(45). The main proxy for the conflict hypothesis is the Seshat measure of the realized sophistication and variety of military technologies used by polities, MilTech (46). A large variety of sophisticated means of attack and defense serves as a quantitative proxy for the intensity of warfare in the environment of the polity, because people tend to invest in expensive armor and defenses when their societies are threatened by their neighbors.…”

Governance Strategies in Precolonial Central Mexico

“…This differs significantly from various core regions of early states in Eurasia, where political elites had greater opportunities to monopolize or disproportionately control raw material sources and larger tracts of land, or to take advantage of production bottlenecks in certain industries of craft manufacturing (Carballo 2020a: 9-12, 107-125;Kohler et al, 2017;Morris 1989). Other related pivots in Eurasian political evolution include changes in the relative advantages offered by offensive or defensive military capacities that came with mounted cavalry, chariots, naval technologies, and increasingly elaborate fortifications (Morris 2010;Boix 2015;Turchin et al, 2021), all of which either do not apply at all to Mesoamerica or do but to a much lesser degree. In some cases, Eurasian political elites were able to significantly control military and transportation technologies, fostering more absolutist polities, whereas in others these technologies were distributed widely and provided balances to absolutist power, instead fostering more pluralistic or heterarchical political arrangements.…”