Isn’t a big reason for the demise of slavery the increase of technology which is illustrated in the technology of transport on the high seas? That is, galley slaves were economically viable before sail technology improved such that it wasn’t possible to sail a ship by nailing/tying someone to a sheet, stay or painter? As soon as it became cheaper to sail rather than to row and since the mobility of sail operators (sailors) was necessary to sail; slavery – in the form of galley slaves – disappeared.

I’d be interested to read if anyone (preferrably an economic historian) has done any work in this area or similar – such as the change from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy. Or perhaps the increase of agricultural yields with the use of fertilisers (guano rather than ammonium nitrate).

Er, yes. I sort of mentioned that in note 2, above.

The RN was very meritocratic for its day, it was one of the places in British society a relatively lower class sort could do well, even if he had a disadvantage. The two European military institutions generally lauded for their administrative excellence are the Prussian/German General staff and the British Admiralty.

As the old joke goes, “I don’t have to outrun the bear.” Neither did the British Navy have to operate optimally. It simply needed to be incentivized in such a way as to operate more efficiently than the French Navy when they clashed.

“Annie Hall”: Marshall MacLuhan

Sure. I suspect that purchase was a blunt instrument, but purchase and patronage combined strikes me as a pretty solid way of keeping things in the hands of acceptable folks.

(Of course, that ignores the lessons of the 14th and 15th centuries, which is that “acceptable” people tend to be the ones to put the knife in. cf. War of the Roses, and so on).

I’d say rather that the units of the Napoleonic era* arose from earlier units that had elements of both the mercenary and the feudal. The practice of purchasing promotions arose during that earlier period and continued for a variety of reasons during the Napoleonic Wars.

• This is more true in some armies than others. The explicitly anti-aristocratic French army of the Republican period broke many of the links between the earlier and later practices in a way that the Austrian, Russian, and British armies, in particular did not. The Prussian army was a bit of an outlier, in that it was more directly supported and controlled by the Prussian government than were the others mentioned. The Prussian army was also created out of whole cloth in a way very different from the more organic way that the other major European armies arose.

Seriously, so Napoleonic era armies were composed of and/or augmented by mercenary units raised by the nobility? You learn something new every day…

In re irrationality and incompetence, they admittedly have defects as explanatory devices, not least because incompetence is not always clear, and I regret having deployed them so carelessly. For one thing, I am not sure that 18th Brit Army officers were incompetent at war-fighting, and there is obvious evidence that they were as good as or better than the competition (Britain lost relatively few land battles in the 18th C.) Stable, property-owning gents made pretty good field officers in many pre-Napoleonic 18th C. armies; it was industrial war and, above all, maneuver warfare and combined arms operations, which made the Brit gentleman officer look somewhat inept—and even them, very ept indeed at securing unit cohesion, morale, discipline, etc. If memories of the 17th C. remain disturbing, you do not necessarily need to secure aristocratic control, since the perceived threat is neither Jacobin nor Bolshevik, it is at least as likely Catholic or Dissenting or Jacobite: you may simply want Whiggish Anglicans, it depends on how the people who allowed purchase interpreted the New Model Army and the Civil War. There were religious qualifications, and permissable exceptions, I do not remember quite how they worked. But does purchase necessarily let you keep out Jacobites? I agree that fear of the Executive was certainly a serious motive for maintaining Parilamentary controls on the army, it is just that I am not sure that purchase does this too plausibly.

I’m not sure labelling things as ‘irrational’ or ‘incompetent’ is the best way to analyze them. There’s an assumption in that that the primary goal for a military service should be excellence in fighting. But if the British were more concerned with the possibility of an Army coup (which they might well be, given the 17th century), then fighting effectiveness could come second to ensuring control of the Army by giving it an aristocratic officer corps.

Conversely, with the Navy, if the main threat is that of foreign invasion, then fighting effectiveness would become the primary goal, and an exclusionary officer corps not useful. The point about the RN doing it more after 1815 rather than before simply echoes that. Without the mortal threat that was Bonaparte, the British could afford to reduce the effectiveness of the Navy in service of elite domination of the officer corps.