In 1956, the British historian Michael Roberts posited that the years 1560–1660 saw a military revolution, with the adoption of firearms leading to enormous changes in the organization and tactics of armies and a massive increase in their size. These changes then created a need for larger, more reliable, and centralized military bureaucracies for supply, support, and especially financing, which in turn had a revolutionary impact on both society and governmental structures. This thesis was taken up and expanded by others over the years, who, although they disagreed with Roberts in some key particulars, generally reinforced his argument that this revolution in military technology, tactics, organization, and administration was closely tied to the creation of the modern centralized bureaucratic state.

In The Business of War, the Oxford historian David Parrott offers another salvo in the ongoing debate over the relationship between military changes and the development of the modern state. In this handsomely written and thoroughly researched study, he focuses not on tactical innovations or technological changes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but on the era’s widespread use of private military enterprisers—captains, colonels, and admirals, but also merchants and financiers—who contracted with rulers to fight battles, to supply and train troops, to manufacture weaponry and build fortresses, and to finance military activities on behalf of the state.

Like Fritz Redlich in his foundational study, The German Military Enterpriser and His Work Force (Wiesbaden, 1964), Parrott treats early modern warfare as a for-profit business. Rather than focusing primarily on the individual contractor-commanders, however, Parrott investigates the development and functioning of the entire military enterprise system. This means that he not only offers fascinating insights into the possible profits and risks faced by the military enterprisers, but also carefully surveys their manner of doing business, including the way the colonels and other commanders levied troops, the relationships between commanders and their military suppliers and financiers, the relationships between enterprisers and rulers, the commanders’ motivations, their social ambitions, and their efforts at cultural self-representation and identity formation. In addition, he provides an in-depth and welcome analysis of the operational priorities and practices of commanders, their efforts at maintaining their troops’ quality and effectiveness, and the logistical problems and supply needs of the armies and men. Interestingly, although he does mention the era’s tactical and technological changes, he downplays their significance. Rather than revolution, he seems to favor a model of evolution—or even continuity.

Although modern scholars tend to lump all military enterprisers into the same category, Parrott argues that the second half of the sixteenth century saw the emergence of diverse forms of public–private partnerships that allowed governments to devolve or outsource varying portions of their military efforts onto outside contractors. He also argues convincingly that these partnerships between states and private military contractors were far more significant and prevalent in the early modern era than previous scholars have recognized. Indeed, he contends, military privatization was fundamental to the practice and business of warfare in this era, such that often “‘state administration’ and ‘private enterprise’ cannot be neatly divided into separate spheres” (p. 150).

Furthermore, despite early-modern and modern assumptions about the poor quality, disloyalty, and inefficiency of mercenaries (a term that he nicely problematizes), Parrott contends that these public–private military initiatives worked surprisingly well. This is an important corrective to exaggeratedly negative views of the worth and quality of mercenary armies, yet even a cursory study of this era shows that such armies were indeed prone to serious problems. These included loss of rulers’ operational control, officers’ corruption, widespread desertion by soldiers, and innumerable incidents of armies mutinying for pay (which was often in serious arrears), or engaging in uncontrolled looting, raping, torturing, and murdering of civilians. Such evils did exist, Parrott admits, but he downplays their importance, arguing that these issues improved over time and that, in general, this system of contracting was flexible, relatively efficient, “combat-effective and resilient under operational stresses” (p. 171), and let governments maintain “more strategic coherence than superficial accounts of the war and typical prejudice would suggest” (p. 151).

Even more significantly, Parrott argues that these public–private partnerships were of enormous benefit to states, as they allowed rulers to tap into the vast financial resources of their nobility (who made up the great majority of the commander-enterprisers) and of the peasantry (because the soldiers lived off the land and off financial “contributions” extracted from enemy or domestic populations), and it “made available a level of resources and robustness of organization that would otherwise have been unattainable by government authorities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (p. 320). Governments using this decentralized, devolved military system were thus able to fight wars with bigger armies for far longer and with more significant results than would otherwise have been possible.

By decoupling the processes of military centralization and state-building, Parrott launches a direct attack on the military revolution thesis and rejects the determinism inherent in many discussions of early modern state formation. The rise of the state, he contends, was not driven by innovations in military technology and did not go hand in hand with the government’s increasing monopoly on violence and warfare. The push for a fully government-controlled military was instead a product of the political and economic developments (especially industrialization) after the mid-eighteenth century. Whether one agrees with this contention or not, there is no denying that this book makes a major contribution to the military revolution debate. Military historians and those interested in early modern Europe will find this a thought-provoking and engaging read.