My upcoming course on the “History of Everything” starts with the Big Bang, about 13.8 billion years ago. We’re still living off the energy that was explosively deposited in our universe at that time. Being more interested in social phenomena, however, I was curious about how much “bang” we humans have produced. I utilized a (somewhat) trusty AI research assistant (in this case, Google’s Gemini) for some of the statistics used here, with all the caveats associated therewith.
This course is looking at long-term trends and significant developments and I’ve long thought that the technology of gunpowder was one of the most influential. It emerged out of China and made its way to Europe late in the medieval era. The interaction of this technology—both in terms of artillery and individual firearms—with other forces of change led to a multi-stage “military revolution” in the way wars were fought and states were organized well into the 20C when atomic weaponry took things to an entirely new level. Fortunately, only two such bombs have ever been used, so this technology really hasn’t affected the total very much.
Democratization and technology are well recognized as important aspects of modernity, but I suspect that the spread of gunpowder/firearm-aided coercive power to the masses has not been seen as a central part of that story. Our demo-triumphant history much prefers Madison to muzzle-loaders; even if that revered political thinker Mao Zedong deftly captured the concept when he noted that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” As a practical matter, however, the European revolutionary tradition is unthinkable without the ability of popular forces for political change being able to access and deploy firearms. Revolutions elsewhere, especially across the 20C, seem even more reliant on shifting the balance of military power away from the incumbent regime. Similarly, due in no small part to its unique gun culture, the role of firearms in the US, particularly in the last 75 or so years, has been profound.
We can see this by going back to the global historical view, which shows, as with most technologies, guns spread as technical advances made them easier to use and cheaper to produce.
Rough estimates of gun availability per thousand people are:
1500 – less than one gun
1800 –about 10 guns
1900—about 50 guns
2000—about 125 guns
Today—about 140 guns
(Btw, a significant part of the recent growth has been concentrated in the US, which currently has over 1200 guns/ thousand people (that’s right, over ten times the average for the rest of the world!!).)
Of course, the cause/effect relationship between the distribution of firepower and that of political power will have run both ways and in a wide range of distinct national circumstances, but the basic connection seems important.
From a geopolitical perspective, I was curious about the dominance of European/Western countries over the centuries. Europe was the principal manufacturing center until the 20C and Western countries controlled over 75% of firearms in both 1800 and 1900. This dropped radically in the later 20C to just under 50%, reflecting the growth of militaries in former European colonies, the Communist Bloc, and, especially lately, the rise of China. Of course, most of that firepower was used outside of Europe, by both European armies/police and local purchasers of European arms.
In parallel, the military use of explosives shows a slightly different pattern, reflecting the configurations of major geopolitical conflicts. The estimated quantity of ordnance used in the 18C was in the low millions of SHELLS, growing to the tens of millions of shells across the 19C. WWI and WWII drove the usage in the first half of the 20C to about 250 million TONS, which dropped back over 90% to about 8 million tons for 1950-2000 (mostly the US in Vietnam) and “only” 1-2 million tons so far in the 21C.
I’m sorry to throw a lot of rough data of uncertain reliability at you, but the important take-away is qualitative, not the specific numbers. Even discounting the early 20C spike for WWI/WWII, we would seem to live in much more violence-feasible world. How can we square this with the spread of democratic values (at least the “power to the people” part, if not the rights and due process part)? How much is cause and how much is effect?
From another perspective, however, this apparent tsunami of firepower at multiple levels stands in sharp contrast to the analysis done by Steve Pinker in his “Better Angels of Our Nature” (2011). Pinker shows, with a fair amount of support and rationale, that our sense of living in a highly violent world has been largely a product of media sensationalism and the growth of overall populations, even though our chance of dying a violent death is substantially less than in centuries past.
Pinker argues that the relative stability of everyday life brought about by socialization and much stronger government-driven public order has vastly reduced domestic homicides, and that even the massive death-tolls of WWI and WWII leave the bloody 20C with a lower per-capita military death rate than earlier eras (and especially since the end of WWII).
It’s a conundrum. There’s a lot more bang out there and most people—whether in Santa Monica or Johannesburg—feel less secure. Yet the numbers are pretty strong that there’s less violence (again: per capita) than before. We seem to have forgotten the ordinariness of the casual “civil” violence that marked almost all human societies until pretty recently. We also put the impact of modern wars into some easily excludible categories of “far away” or “world wars don’t count.” Down deep, it’s more likely that our psychic sense of security is being measured against some “Ozzie-and-Harriet” suburban standard than the cumulative data.
Pinker notwithstanding, therefore, even if the total volume of violence is down, the spread of the sources of that violence away from elites and the governments they control may correlate with the spread of democratic political power. We will have to see how this plays out with the global crisis of democracy in the 21C.
This course is looking at long-term trends and significant developments and I’ve long thought that the technology of gunpowder was one of the most influential. It emerged out of China and made its way to Europe late in the medieval era. The interaction of this technology—both in terms of artillery and individual firearms—with other forces of change led to a multi-stage “military revolution” in the way wars were fought and states were organized well into the 20C when atomic weaponry took things to an entirely new level. Fortunately, only two such bombs have ever been used, so this technology really hasn’t affected the total very much.
Democratization and technology are well recognized as important aspects of modernity, but I suspect that the spread of gunpowder/firearm-aided coercive power to the masses has not been seen as a central part of that story. Our demo-triumphant history much prefers Madison to muzzle-loaders; even if that revered political thinker Mao Zedong deftly captured the concept when he noted that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” As a practical matter, however, the European revolutionary tradition is unthinkable without the ability of popular forces for political change being able to access and deploy firearms. Revolutions elsewhere, especially across the 20C, seem even more reliant on shifting the balance of military power away from the incumbent regime. Similarly, due in no small part to its unique gun culture, the role of firearms in the US, particularly in the last 75 or so years, has been profound.
We can see this by going back to the global historical view, which shows, as with most technologies, guns spread as technical advances made them easier to use and cheaper to produce.
Rough estimates of gun availability per thousand people are:
1500 – less than one gun
1800 –about 10 guns
1900—about 50 guns
2000—about 125 guns
Today—about 140 guns
(Btw, a significant part of the recent growth has been concentrated in the US, which currently has over 1200 guns/ thousand people (that’s right, over ten times the average for the rest of the world!!).)
Of course, the cause/effect relationship between the distribution of firepower and that of political power will have run both ways and in a wide range of distinct national circumstances, but the basic connection seems important.
From a geopolitical perspective, I was curious about the dominance of European/Western countries over the centuries. Europe was the principal manufacturing center until the 20C and Western countries controlled over 75% of firearms in both 1800 and 1900. This dropped radically in the later 20C to just under 50%, reflecting the growth of militaries in former European colonies, the Communist Bloc, and, especially lately, the rise of China. Of course, most of that firepower was used outside of Europe, by both European armies/police and local purchasers of European arms.
In parallel, the military use of explosives shows a slightly different pattern, reflecting the configurations of major geopolitical conflicts. The estimated quantity of ordnance used in the 18C was in the low millions of SHELLS, growing to the tens of millions of shells across the 19C. WWI and WWII drove the usage in the first half of the 20C to about 250 million TONS, which dropped back over 90% to about 8 million tons for 1950-2000 (mostly the US in Vietnam) and “only” 1-2 million tons so far in the 21C.
I’m sorry to throw a lot of rough data of uncertain reliability at you, but the important take-away is qualitative, not the specific numbers. Even discounting the early 20C spike for WWI/WWII, we would seem to live in much more violence-feasible world. How can we square this with the spread of democratic values (at least the “power to the people” part, if not the rights and due process part)? How much is cause and how much is effect?
From another perspective, however, this apparent tsunami of firepower at multiple levels stands in sharp contrast to the analysis done by Steve Pinker in his “Better Angels of Our Nature” (2011). Pinker shows, with a fair amount of support and rationale, that our sense of living in a highly violent world has been largely a product of media sensationalism and the growth of overall populations, even though our chance of dying a violent death is substantially less than in centuries past.
Pinker argues that the relative stability of everyday life brought about by socialization and much stronger government-driven public order has vastly reduced domestic homicides, and that even the massive death-tolls of WWI and WWII leave the bloody 20C with a lower per-capita military death rate than earlier eras (and especially since the end of WWII).
It’s a conundrum. There’s a lot more bang out there and most people—whether in Santa Monica or Johannesburg—feel less secure. Yet the numbers are pretty strong that there’s less violence (again: per capita) than before. We seem to have forgotten the ordinariness of the casual “civil” violence that marked almost all human societies until pretty recently. We also put the impact of modern wars into some easily excludible categories of “far away” or “world wars don’t count.” Down deep, it’s more likely that our psychic sense of security is being measured against some “Ozzie-and-Harriet” suburban standard than the cumulative data.
Pinker notwithstanding, therefore, even if the total volume of violence is down, the spread of the sources of that violence away from elites and the governments they control may correlate with the spread of democratic political power. We will have to see how this plays out with the global crisis of democracy in the 21C.
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