The Great Eurasian Military Divergence, According To Kaushik Roy

A book review

Roy, Kaushik. A Global History of Pre-Modern Warfare: Before the Rise of the West, 10,000 BCE–1500 CE. Routledge, 2022. 256 pp.

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“Geography is the mother of military history,” Kaushik Roy writes. Environment and economy shape the military choices that polities make. “Politics is the crucial driver in shaping the trajectory of warfare,” he says, echoing Clausewitz. War elephants eat 272 kg of green fodder every day, making them unsuitable for most of the world’s land terrain. Ecology dictated light infantry supported by camel-borne-units in Sub-Saharan Africa, and so on.

Whereas the Eurasian continent saw a “convergence” of military technologies from 400-1500 AD, the other four continents did not have potential cavalry animals, so no “era of horses” took place. At the end of his book, Roy poses a thought experiment: suppose that the aboriginal settlers of Australia had been able to domesticate the giant lizards they found there, rather than wiping the animals out. Would the “lizard armies of Australasia” have then overrun the rest of the world?