GoKawiilThis week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems tend to map on to societies, both because such general historical frameworks are handy for thinking about the past, but also because they make useful rules of thumb for imagining fantastical societies. So essentially here we are asking: how do societies end up with the sort of armies they have?
This is going to take a few posts to get through because there are actually quite a few key components to cover: the why and how of recruitment (both ‘why do these people feel obligated to serve’ and ‘how do you get them into the army’), how a society pay for that (or doesn’t), who leads it and how, and how once formed any army coheres in the field. Finally, we’ll wrap up with some historical ‘archetypes’ to show how these different facets link together with the underlying civilian society and also how that shapes what they look like on the battlefield (including weapons and tactics).
This series is also going to be a bit unusual because in some ways its purpose is to link up and summarize a bunch of other posts. We’ve had a lot of posts and series over the years which examined this or that historical or fictional military and discussed the ways in which their militaries reflected civilian society and I wanted to pull a lot of that together in one place. As a result in this series – more than most – the links are going to be ‘load bearing.’ Likewise a lot of the heavy bibliography here is going to live in the links, although I think for someone looking to get a handle on how pre-modern societies and pre-modern militaries come together, the two key readings I would suggest are P. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (1989) and then J. Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003). Also well worth reading as an overview is Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2006).
Now we’re going to restrict ourselves a bit here in that we are going to stick to pre-modern or more correctly pre-industrial armies. The rules change a lot for industrial and post-industrial armies, though by the same token we really don’t have nearly the same range of examples for industrial armies either: we really have a single dominant model for industrial armies that emerged in Europe from 1914 to 1945 and then a bunch of reactions to that model (along with what we might term an industrial ‘transitional’ period from ~1800 to 1914). It is thus hard to build a complete typology, because the industrial sample size is so small.
By contrast, the sample for pre-industrial agrarian armies is really big, so it becomes a bit easier to spot recurring patterns of organization and structure as different societies stumble on to the same solutions for generating force. So that’s what we’re going to do this week: look at some of the patterns, keeping in mind that these are general rules with many complications and exceptions. In the process, we’re going to pull together a lot of the individual discussions of specific systems – historical and fantastical – as examples.
Fans of fictional worlds will have often run into the most egregious examples of the failure to think in these terms. Professional or seemingly professional armies employed by societies that lack the administrative structure to manage them, armies that are too large or too small for their parent societies, ‘guards’ that seem to spring out of holes in the ground rather than organically fit into society anywhere and so on.
But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to recruits readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
Armies and Societies
I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield.
When analyzing a historical army or creating a fictional one, everything must begin with that idea, that military systems grow out of and reflect their ‘civilian’ societies or – for societies that lack civilians as such – reflect the civilian side of the lives of their members. That means that armies tend to recreate civilian hierarchies, with similar – often identical – lines of status between the two.
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