Mobilizing for Modern War: The Political Economy of American Warfare, 1865-1919.

• Author: Gamble, Richard M.

By Paul A. C. Koistinen

Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. Pp. xiii, 391. $45.00.

Total war has been the costliest pastime of the total state in the twentieth century. Recognizing war as "the health of the state," modern nation-states have enhanced their power by waging war, and they have achieved total power in part by successfully waging total war. The modern state's ability to wage sustained total war depends directly on its ability to mobilize its physical resources over extended periods, demanding of its people as much of their labor and wealth as they will tolerate surrendering without rebellion. As Bertrand de Jouvenel observed at the end of the Second World War, under these conditions "the whole nation becomes a weapon of war wielded by the state; and the proportion engaged on warlike tasks is limited only by the need to keep it alive" (On Power [Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1993], 165). Total war in the twentieth century has entailed the mobilization of industry, finances, and manpower, and even of the media, the arts, the academy, and the church. Every tangible and intangible resource has become a potential resource for warfare among governments unwilling to recognize the difference between soldier and civilian, public and private, war and peace.

In Mobilizing for Modern War, Paul Koistinen analyzes how the United States mobilized its industrial resources for defense and war from the Gilded Age through the First World War. This richly detailed volume is the second in a projected five-part series on the history of the political economy of American warfare. The goal of this ambitious series is, in the author's words, to provide "a comprehensive, schematic, and interdisciplinary study of the economics of America's wars from the colonial period to today" (p. x). So far, Koistinen has traced the pattern of mobilization through three stages of the American economy: the preindustrial colonial era; the early industrial nineteenth century (culminating in the Civil War); and now the more complex industrial age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A forthcoming volume will cover the post-World War I era, including what should prove to be an important analysis of the Nye Committee.

Mobilizing for Modern War examines the impact of industrialization and technological innovation on American mobilization for defense and war. Koistinen traces how mobilization for war necessarily changed as post-Civil War America...