The Industrial Revolution led directly to a military revolution, and this book does a fine job of explaining how that came to be. The cost in human lives because old-school military men were unable to understand the forces of mechanization and their affect on the battlefield are beyond staggering. Author John Ellis writes colorfully, movingly, and effectively not only about man's inhumanity to man, but about man's stupidity and self-righteousness. This is a fascinating book. ( )

From the machine gun reading program; compare with Bullets and Bureaucrats, Machine Gun, and Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel. In The Social History of the Machine Gun, author John Ellis has a couple of basic arguments:

1) The machine gun was a tool of imperialists to use against less “civilized” people and of capitalists to use against the proletariat; and
2) European militaries, while accepting the efficiency of the machine gun when used to shoot down African natives never realized it would be equally efficient against European troops, leading to the ghastly carnage of World War One.

Interestingly enough, Ellis points out that once indigenous people, in Africa or elsewhere, got their own machine guns – usually the ubiquitous AK-47 – the colonial powers were defeated. I’ve read an interesting argument (forgive me for not being able to remember where) that bears on that; as long as African natives had an item to trade for European weapons – slaves – imperialists were unable to make any headway against native armies; it was only when the slave trade ended and the natives were left with increasing obsolete and worn-out firearms that colonization took place. I don’t know if I fully buy that but it’s worth investigation.

As far as European military bureaucracy goes, Ellis seems on pretty solid ground. The English and French armies were committed to the infantry charge, with the belief that elan and fighting spirit would overwhelm the enemy and allow the cavalry to break through. It didn’t. The dominance of cavalry on military thinking is emphasized; European observers of the American Civil War and the Russo-Japanese war should have noted that cavalry charges just weren’t effective in the face of rifle fire, but like their horses they had their blinders on.

There seem to be a couple of errors of fact here and there; Ellis gives the impression that the mining town of Ludlow in in West Virginia (it’s in Colorado) and claims that the German army had equipped troops with an automatic rifle in the First World War (I can’t think of anything meeting that description; the closest is some Imperial German Flying Corps observers were briefly equipped with Mexican Mondragón semiautomatic rifles).

Well referenced with endnotes for each chapter, good bibliography, illustrations of machine guns in action. ( )

If you mention "ultimate weapons" in this day in age you will most likely find yourself in a discussion about nuclear tipped missiles. It is easy to forget that almost every age has had an "ultimate weapon" of some kind - the horse mounted armored knight, the longbow, the fortified castle, the cannon, etc. There was a time between the U.S. Civil War and World War I when the ultimate weapon was the machine gun. How the machine gun affected the ways in which the countries of that time behaved towards one another is the focus of The Social History of the Machine Gun.

That nineteenth century world was largely defined by the imperialist movement in Europe and whenever those imperialist aims were threatened (the Zulu's at Rorke's Drift and later at Ulundi, Rhodesia, Omdurman, Tibet, etc.) a group of soldiers, backed up with machine guns were often sent in to settle the issue. Ellis notes that this mechanization of war was downplayed and almost ignored by those sending the troops into settle a "dispute" but he also notes that contemporary observers of the period recognized this new form of industrialized war for what it was and what it might portend (Belloc's poem The Modern Traveler captures this understanding in a two line couplet - Thank God that we have got, the Maxim gun and they have not).

The book is an excellent overview of the impact of a given technology on world affairs. It provides a concise summary of the rise and fall of the status of the machine gun as an ultimate weapon, it highlights the use of the weapon in numerous 19th and early 20th century confrontations that are almost all but forgotten today, and it illustrates how the failure to acknowledge the mechanization of war in the higher levels of European government contributed to the slaughter in the trenches on the Western Front during World War I. ( )