Brauer and Van Tuyll, _Castles, Battles and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History_

[Book Reviews in Economic and Business History]

Published by EH.NET (February 2009)

Jurgen Brauer and Hubert Van Tuyll, _Castles, Battles and Bombs: How 
Economics Explains Military History_. Chicago: University of Chicago 
Press, 2008. xix + 385 pp. $29 (cloth), ISBN: 0-226-07163-4.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Peter Howlett, Department of Economic History, 
London School of Economics.


This book is a collaboration between a professor of economics and a 
professor of history, both based at Augusta State University, whose aim 
is to show how economic theory can enrich our understanding of military 
history. At first glance, therefore, this should be a book that should 
appeal to economic historians -- applying or utilizing economic 
principles, theories and ideas to history is our bread and butter. 
However, its target audience is “the general-interest reader” (p. xvii), 
it is a trade book, and despite the authors’ claim that “each of the 
substantive chapters nonetheless makes a genuine contribution to the 
development of scholarly knowledge” (pp. xvii-xviii) it is not a 
research monograph. It is therefore more likely to appeal to students 
than to professors.

The strategy of the book is to take six case studies spanning a thousand 
years of history and apply economic principles to them to improve our 
depth of understanding. The historical cases are: the medieval castle, 
mercenaries during the Renaissance, the decision to offer battle in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the role of information in the 
American Civil War, the strategic bombing of Germany in the Second World 
War, and France’s acquisition of a nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. 
The cases are studied through, or used to illustrate, six “economic 
principles”: opportunity cost, expected marginal costs and benefits, 
substitution, diminishing marginal returns, asymmetric information and 
hidden characteristics, and hidden actions and incentive alignments. The 
economic principles, along with a broad introduction to economics 
itself, are introduced in chapter one and this is then followed by the 
case studies. While each case does touch on several of the economic 
principles, all are focused on one aspect -- for example, the medieval 
castle is used to illustrate the opportunity cost of warfare while the 
bombing of Germany focuses on diminishing marginal returns. Each of the 
case study chapters also comes with an appendix that provides a matrix 
whose rows are the six economic principles chosen by the authors and 
whose columns are five elements of the military sphere (manpower, 
logistics, technology, planning and operations) -- the effectiveness of 
this as a summary or learning tool is debatable and often the individual 
elements of the matrix seem forced. The final chapter, which was written 
in response to “prepublication readers” (p. xix) offers some thought on 
war in the twenty-first century -- including the economics of terrorism 
and the economics of private military companies. It offers some 
interesting insights for the general reader, illustrating how economists 
are thinking about such issues, but sits outside the analytical 
framework employed in the rest of the book.

At least some aspects of the book could have been improved. For example, 
the cases could have had a more global spread -- five of the cases are 
European and one is American. Perhaps more acknowledgments could have 
been given to military historians and military strategy. For example, it 
is disappointing that neither _The Art Of War_ (written several hundred 
years before the birth of Christ by Sun Tzu) or _On War_ (by Carl von 
Clausewitz and published in 1832) appear in the book’s list of 
references, although the authors, in discussing the significance of 
information do acknowledge Sun Tzu (p. 159) and Clausweitz gets a nod in 
discussing Napoleon’s strategy (p. 154). These two of the classic texts 
on military strategy, while obviously not written using a modern 
economist’s vocabulary, do utilize economic concepts -- for example the 
second chapter of _The Art of War_ explains how to understand the 
economic nature of competition and conflict and how success requires 
limiting their cost. This raises a broader issue of how successful the 
book will be in opening a dialogue with military historians. In a 
similar, but more self-interested vein, the book does not fully 
appreciate the existing large economic history literature that relates 
to the topic of military strategy (in the broadly defined manner used in 
the book), not least in terms of technology or state policy or 
institutions. To cite just one example -- Daniel Benjamin and 
Christopher Thornberg (“Organization and Incentives in the Age of Sail,” 
_Explorations in Economic History_, 2007, pp. 317-341) recently argued 
that the pay incentive system employed by British navy from the late 
seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century was one factor 
underlying its military success.

Overall, while the overall contribution to knowledge of this book is 
limited, it does serve its target audience of “the general-interest” 
reader well -- it is written in an engaging manner, provides much 
interesting information about its disparate cases, and does illustrate 
that economics (as this readership knows) has much to offer history. As 
such it may well find its way onto many student reading lists.


Peter Howlett (w.p.howlett at lse.ac.uk) is a Senior Lecturer in the 
Economic History Department of the LSE. His most recent publication was 
“Trade, Convergence and Globalisation: The Dynamics of the International 
Income Distribution, 1950-1998,” (with P. Epstein and M-S. Schulze), 
_Explorations in Economic History_, vol. 44, no. 1 (January 2007), 
pp.100-13.

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