Castles Battles and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History by Jurgen Brauer and Huburt van Tuyll
A guest review by Dave Birch
If fancy a trip to the cinema this summer, you might enjoy the action movie Ironclad. Starring Paul Giamatti, it is all about King John’s siege of Rochester castle in 1215. (As a complete aside, the defender of Rochester castle, who John let live, was one William d’Aubigny, not only one of the 25 guarantors of the Magna Carta but a direct ancestor of George Washington.) If you’re an economist and you fancy a trip to the cinema this summer, I’m sure you’ll still enjoy Ironclad but you might want to read this book first. In 1140, William of Malmesbury had written that England had many castles, each defending a neighbourhood but 'more properly speaking laying it waste' because of the high taxes needed to pay for it. Castles were the medieval equivalent of a nuclear weapons programme. Edward I’s castle-building programme in Wales was a bit like Trident, consuming approximately one year's Crown revenues over a quarter of century. And these weren’t even the expensive kind: the Chateau Galliard in Normany was built by Richard I and cost more than all of his other castles put together!
Was it worth it? Well, Caernarfon castle in Wales was once successfully defended by a garrison of 28 that killed 300 attackers and when Stephen besieged Exeter castle in 1136 it cost him £10,000, five time his annual revenue. Now I understand a little more about the economics, I will never be able to watch movies about the Middle Ages in the same way, which I suspect is just what the authors of this lovely book wanted. The book takes some basic economic issues —including the principal-agent problem, opportunity costs, subsitution, diminishing marginal returns, incentive alignments and a few more — and tries show how they have influenced military thinking. Now, on the one hand you would, I’m sure, regard it as obvious that economics have an influence on military thinking. But this book, which goes much deeper than a Freakonomics-style take on pop history, helps you to understand just how the sometimes subtle application of these economic principles has affected military strategy through the ages.
It is filled with the kind of facts that I adore, such as that in 1342 Florence employed 20 times as many mercenaries as citizen soldiers, and while the narrative around them might have been a little sharper for the general reader, they are assembled in such a way as to make you think hard about the topics. An example: studies have shown that the massive bombing campaign against Germany in World War II reduced overall Nazi war production by about 2% and exhibited sharply diminishing marginal returns in terms of the morale of the target population. You cannot think about this without wondering about the strategy. Another example: a UN Security Council supranational peacekeeping force of 17,500 in Sierra Lone was unable to stop the war, whereas the Executive Options (the authors call them a “private military company”, or PMC) did so with 150-200 people. So why not do what Florence did and simply outsource? You’ll need to read to the end to find out.
I found the book most fascinating where it filled in a big gap in my knowledge, and that was the section of concerning the French independent nuclear deterrent. The Fourth Republic had started a nuclear weapons programme because of defence but de Gaulle developed it for “grandeur” (and I wonder if a similar dynamic applied to the UK, even under the US nuclear umbrella). I had always assumed this to be the entire dynamic, but in fact the bigger picture of capital substituting for labour following a series of defeats for French forces is both more interesting and illuminating, especially as it better explains subsequent military action. French spending on its nuclear programme left conventional forces weak (as revealed in 1991 Gulf war) because de Gaulle’s strategy was to defend French independence, not French territory. The force de frappe was never intended to be a new Maginot line.
The role of technology is addressed, but not in as much detail as I would have liked. When the authors note that asymmetric information played a vital role in the determining the outcome of the American Civil War despite the telegraph, railroad, newspapers and even balloons being used to in the war effort because they proved too novel, experimental, unreliable or easily disrupted. Yet as new technologies come along, they must sometimes lead to disruptive innovation that change the economic landscape, and I would have been very interested to understand the authors' take on this.
Was England’s ascendancy through the “Age of Battles” all down to brilliant generals and the playing fields of Eton? Of course not: the English defeated the ostensibly more powerful French because they had better credit and could raise supplies. Some may see this as a reductionist destruction of noble military tradition, but personally it makes me even more proud of our lead role in the industrial and financial revolution that changed our lives immeasurably for the better. As Voltaire wrote, in 1723, “Commerce has made the English people rich, and being rich has made them free.”
Castles Battles and Bombs by Jurgen Brauer and Huburt van Tuyll
University of Chicago Press (2009)
978-0-226-07164-0