War and Peace, 1689–1702

William III immediately took Britain into the Nine Years’ War against the French. This chapter examines how William purged the army of James VII and II’s supporters in order to fight the war. However, William was never certain of his new army’s political loyalties. Nor could he trust its British senior officers, some of whom, such as John Churchill, the future duke of Marlborough, had joined William in 1688 but had become alienated from him. William’s relations with parliament were equally troubled, and never more so than during the biggest political crisis after the end of the war, the standing army debates over the peacetime army.

‘The Days of their Heedless Power Were Over and Done’: Dynamics of Power in the Military Structures of the Precolonial Asante State, 1874–1900

The British surprisingly faced no military resistance when they captured Asante in 1896. Previous works have focused on the agency of actors like Prempe and Frederick Hodgson to explain why. This paper, in contrast, approaches this epoch in Asante history from the context of the sociopolitical power structure within which the precolonial Asante state operated. It asserts that Asante's independence was contingent on having a strong military. But since it had no standing army, the state used Asante's ‘social contract’ to coerce its subjects into ad hoc armies to meet military threats. Starting from the 1874 Sagrenti War, however, the state disregarded the social contract. This unleashed a series of events that undermined the state's power to coerce Asantes into military service. The article posits further that this erosion of the state's coercive power ultimately prevented it from countering the British with armed resistance in 1896 to maintain independence.

Order and Disorder

This chapter spotlights the role of the state (via the army) in enforcing urban security and in creating professional policing for the capital city. It begins by describing the greatest building project in Dublin, the Royal Barracks. The creation within a capital city of such a vast military establishment was a consequence of the agreement by the (all Protestant) Irish Parliament to house and maintain on Irish soil the bulk of the English standing army during peacetime. The chapter then turns to study the logic behind the increased concentration of the military in the cities. It argues that the permanent presence of military manpower, albeit in largely open residential barracks, helped make the case for continuing the gradual process of urban de-fortification. The chapter also looks into the three collective threats to urban order: faction fights, scarcity riots and artisan protests. It focuses more on the severe food shortages across Ulster and the food protests in 1729 in which civic authorities turned to the military for help. Finally, the chapter reviews the implications of industrial protest — a collective action by producers taken against their masters, other traders or workers, or even against consumers.

Theoderic the Great and Ostrogothic Italy

The Ostrogothic king Theoderic is the only non-Roman ruler of Late Antiquity to have acquired the epithet the Great, albeit only in modern times. Born around 453 in Pannonia (Hungary) as the son of a Gothic king named Thiudimir, he grew up in Constantinople, where he was held as a hostage for ten years. He returned to Pannonia in 471, in 474 succeeding his father, who had meanwhile led the “Pannonian Goths” into Macedonia. For several years Theoderic fought a Gothic king and rival claimant to imperial favor likewise named Theoderic whose power base was in Thrace (hence “Thracian Goths”). Only after the latter’s death in 481 did he succeed in uniting the two groups under his leadership. Although he was subsequently appointed magister militum and held the consulship in 484, relations with the emperor Zeno soon became hostile. In 488, Theoderic and Zeno made an agreement that Theoderic should take his people to Italy and eliminate Odovacer. After a devastating war, he slew Odovacer by his own hand in March 493, in breach of an oath sworn shortly before to share rule in Italy. Having secured sole rule in Italy, Theoderic turned his mobile and militarized followers into a standing army by allotting them ownership rights to landed estates (rather than shares in land tax, as some have argued). He defined his position as ruler over two peoples, Goths and Romans, to which he assigned complementary but separate roles (“integration by separation”). While Goths were warriors by definition, the civilian population was labeled Roman. Theoderic won over the senatorial elites by preserving their privileges, wealth, and social power and by giving them a share in his rule. He left the administrative structures of the Late Roman state largely unaltered and filled all positions of a civilian nature with people from the senatorial milieu. Although he belonged to a Christian denomination considered heretical by Catholics (“Arian”) he treated Catholic bishops with respect; they in turn asked him to act as an arbitrator when in 498 Symmachus and Laurentius were simultaneously elected to be bishop of Rome. From 508 to 511 he extended his rule over Provence and the Iberian peninsula. Relations with the senatorial elites and the Roman church became strained at the end of Theoderic’s life. He died in Ravenna on 30 August 526 without having nominated an heir to the throne. His kingdom fell within a generation after his death, but his memory lived on in Italy and in all Germanic-speaking lands where legend transformed him into Dietrich of Berne.

The Sokoto Caliphate

The Sokoto Caliphate, prior to 1964 generally referred to in print as the Fulani Empire, was Africa’s largest pre-colonial state and lasted for a century, coming into being in 1808 through a four-year jihad and finally in 1903 being conquered by Britain. As an Islamic state, it was run as a decentralized confederation of emirates under the supervision of the caliph and his bureaucracy in Sokoto. Though almost all the emirs initially were scholars chosen for their piety, they could be identified ethnically as Fulani/Fulbe (hence the “Fulani Empire”) whereas the majority of the population were Hausa-speakers. There was a very large number of slaves (at times over 50 percent), serving the elite or working as labor on farms, which supplied food to large households and markets in the cities. There was no standing army, but borders were closed by strategically sited ribats or strongholds. Conflicts were resolved by local administrators, with the courts using Shari‘a law; servants of local officials acted as police. The chapter’s argument is that the Sokoto Caliphate is more accurately categorized not as an “imperial” polity but as an Islamic state modeled as a confederation on Abbasid practice.

The Roman Empire

This chapter identifies a comparative context for the Roman Empire in the Muslim imperial experience, from the Caliphate to the Mughals and Ottomans. As Crone once noted, the Caliphate was founded by Arab conquerors, but was quickly taken over by provincial converts to Islam in a process that saw the consolidation of an imperial monarchy, a court society, and garrisoned army. The course of Roman history mirrors this story of provincial takeover. A coalition of Italian conquerors expanded across the Mediterranean. Consolidation of conquests happened in a revolution that saw the institutionalization of a monarchy, the formation of a court, and a standing army. Only a little more slowly than in the Arab case, the history of the monarchy evolved as provincials came increasingly to constitute the personnel of the empire. At the end, power abandoned the city of Rome, only to find a durable seat in Constantinople on the Bosporus.

Are States under a Prospective Duty to Create and Maintain Militaries?

Suppose it is foreseeable that you will soon encounter a drowning child, whom you will only be able to rescue if you learn to swim. In this scenario we might think that you have a “prospective duty” to take swimming lessons given that this will be necessary to perform the future rescue. Cécile Fabre argues that, by parity of reasoning, states have a prospective duty to build and maintain military establishments. My argument in this essay pulls in the opposite direction. First, I emphasize that learning to swim is only a prospective duty under very specific circumstances. Normally there is no such duty; hence, we do not normally think that people deserve moral censure for choosing to forego swimming lessons. I then argue that, similarly, while a prospective duty to build a military can arise under some conceivable circumstances, these are not the circumstances that most states today find themselves in. I then suggest a more fitting domestic analogy to guide our thinking about this issue: Maintaining a standing army is less like learning to swim and more like keeping an assault weapon in the home “just in case.” This analogy supports a defeasible presumption against militarization.

Only as fast as its troop contributors: Incentives, capabilities, and constraints in the UN’s peacekeeping response

International organizations’ ability to respond promptly to crises is essential for their effectiveness and legitimacy. For the UN, which sends peacekeeping missions to some of the world’s most difficult conflicts, responsiveness can save lives and protect peace. Very often, however, the UN fails to deploy peacekeepers rapidly. Lacking a standing army, the UN relies on its member states to provide troops for peacekeeping operations. In the first systematic study of the determinants of deployment speed in UN peacekeeping, we theorize that this speed hinges on the incentives, capabilities, and constraints of the troop-contributing countries. Using duration modeling, we analyze novel data on the deployment speed in 28 peacekeeping operations between 1991 and 2015. Our data reveal three principal findings: All else equal, countries that depend on peacekeeping reimbursements by the UN, are exposed to negative externalities from a particular conflict, or lack parliamentary constraints on sending troops abroad deploy more swiftly than others. By underlining how member state characteristics affect aggregate outcomes, these findings have important implications for research on the effectiveness of UN peacekeeping, troop contribution dynamics, and rapid deployment initiatives.

The Kingdom of Akkad

This chapter discusses the foundations and inner structure of the kingdom of Akkad. Based mainly on royal inscriptions and archival records, it argues that this state constitutes a decisive phase in Mesopotamian history and discusses a series of political, ideological, socioeconomic, and administrative transformations that it brought about: the implementation of the concept of the territorial state, borne by an autocratic and conquering kingship with absolute claim to power; an administrative centralization directed toward the capital; the introduction of Akkadian as an official language of administration; and the spread of private landownership, concentrated in the hands of the king and administered through large agricultural estates established throughout the state through purchase and confiscation. These transformations were implemented by means of the standing army, whose upkeep was supported by the agricultural land in the hands of the king. Allocations of royally owned land to other parties established a far-flung network of patronage, which included not only members of the royal family, court, administration, and army but also members of the local elites, thus strengthening the king’s power base. The chapter also discusses how the transformations brought about by the kingdom of Akkad were ambiguously reflected in later tradition, which also made this state a model to be emulated by later rulers.