Cliometric approaches to war

Abstract

This article is a review of the many perspectives from history, political science, sociology, and economics that economic historians have applied to the study of war. Here I first review some of the scholarship on the premodern period, especially the formation of European nation states and conflicts. It is fairly clear that Europeans emerged out of this period with a comparative advantage in violence, through technological innovations and repeated warfare. Fiscal innovation and expansion was a key part of this. The period of the revolutions and Napoleonic conflicts represented a change in the nature of warfare and the arrival of total war, as well as the industrial age. The period of the world wars represents perhaps the best represented area of study for economic historians as of late. New data and scholarship has shown the mechanics of mobilization and highlighted the importance of resources in deciding these conflicts. Conversely, the Cold War period has been relatively sparsely studied, at least from the perspective of conflicts or military spending. Given the availability of new data and the opening of many archives, it is highly likely that this state of affairs will change in the near future. Economic historians have clearly made an impact in the study of long-run phenomena such as state formation, empires, and democracy. Cliometrics is well suited to the study of such topics, given the new panel and time series techniques, the rapid development of computing power, and the many new online databases.