The Influence of Firearms on European Society

An expert on early modern Italy, Catherine Fletcher’s The Firearm Revolution is an ambitious but flawed book that links a problematic account of the impact of the handgun with a discussion of the role of firearms in European social relations and culture. The core problem with the book is the author’s lack of awareness of scholarship arguing that the effect of firearms has been exaggerated: guns were only one example of weapons’ increasing capabilities and other tactical innovations of the early modern period. Moreover, although guns were much deadlier than past weapons, they were still less accurate, slower, and limited by a shorter range than the composite recurved bow. Firearms eventually replaced bow weapons as their potential was grasped, but this learning curve also entailed a growing appreciation of the limitations of guns, both on and outside of the battlefield. To provide a high volume of fire, musketeers were grouped together, creating, due to their slow rate of fire, serious problems of vulnerability that required pikemen to be deployed nearby for protection. Firearms were most effective when employed in concert with field fortifications, as at Cerignola (1503), the first European battle won by firearms, where the French cavalry was shattered by Spanish arquebusiers.

Fletcher is unsound when it comes to military history. Still, there is much of value in the book, and that would be especially true if the emphasis were to be, as it should, not on firearms as revolutionizing warfare but rather on their impact on existing social and political practices. From this perspective it is instructive to consider Fletcher’s lengthy and ably illustrated discussion of the iconography of battle. It is, separately, valuable to read her analysis of the use of firearms in assassinations and assassination attempts. She argues that “thanks to the firearms revolution, handguns had become normal, routine objects” and she suggests that the increased effectiveness of guns was linked to debates about the danger of the loosening of gun-control laws. But Fletcher sees the contrary needs to arm militias and to permit the use of firearms for self-defense as more significant. There is an instructive discussion of the role of gun laws and their enforcement in negotiations “between regimes and citizens.” Social status played an important role, affecting the process of the domestication of guns that Fletcher discusses.

There are, however, several problematic comments, such as that “monarchs were less and less involved directly in warfare.” Thus, an interesting work on the development of gun usage in sixteenth-century Italy carries too much unsupported and, at times, dubious baggage. Praise for the book is also surprising, as with Susan Brigden’s claim that “this book tells the unknown story of the beginnings of the unstoppable spread of firearms.” Can Princeton University Press not do better?

Our Reviewer: Jeremy Black, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Exeter, is a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of an impressive number of works in history and international affairs, frequently demonstrating unique interactions and trends among events, including The Great War and the Making of the Modern World, Combined Operations: A Global History of Amphibious and Airborne Warfare, and The War of 1812 in the Age of Napoleon. Among others, he has previously reviewed here The Pacific’s New Navies, No More Napoleons, Republic and Empire. Crisis, Revolution, America’s Early Independence, The Fate of the Day, The Maginot Line: A New History, The Nuclear Age. An Epic Race for Arms, Power and Survival, Daring to Be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World, Mexico: A 500-Year History, A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China, On Strategists and Strategy, Japan’s Grand Strategy: Liminal Power in an Uncertain World, The War that Made the Middle East, and The Cambridge History of War, Volume III, War and the Early Modern World.

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Note: The Firearm Revolution is also available in e-editions.

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