Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History was undoubtedly a quintessential by-product of an age that believed in universally applicable rules, in this case that a navy’s function was the same in the seventeenth as in the nineteenth century, the command of the sea its ultimate goal. Naturally enough, over the years Mahan’s sweeping theoretical framework has received its share of criticism. In his 1911 book Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, Sir Julian Corbett argued that it was more important to deny to one’s opponent the command of the sea, rather than seize it for oneself, so that ‘the enemy can no longer attack our lines of passage and communication effectively, and that he cannot use or defend his own’. Taking a leaf from Corbett, John F. Guilmartin underscored how Mahan’s principles cannot be applied to the early modern Mediterranean, the physical conditions of the area defying the paradigms applied by Anglo-American naval historians to the oceanic world. Besides, even if Mahan did acknowledge the importance of weaponry, Geoffrey Parker has pointed out that The Influence of Sea Power upon History ‘contained no discussion of guns, sails or ship design, because the author did not believe that changes in these things could affect the application of strategic principles’.

The chapter sets out the story of the era of agrarian/pastoralist empires (CAPE) in terms of its material conditions and social structures. New materials were hard metals and gunpowder. New sources of energy were wind and animal power. New technologies were the sailing ship, wheeled vehicles, writing, money and paper. Society became much more complex and larger in scale, and developed many new institutions, notable amongst which were human inequality (slavery, patriarchy, economic, monarchy, dynasticism), universal religions, empire, territoriality, sovereignty, trade and diplomacy. This package of material and social conditions proved remarkably stable up to the end of the eighteenth century AD. The core military dynamic of this era was between militarily superior nomadic steppe peoples, and more numerous and wealthier sedentary civilisations.