David Eltis

This ground-breaking study represents a new twist in the already complicated debate on military change in the early modern period. Previous writers have for the most part defined a 'military revolution' focused on the seventeenth or even early eighteenth centuries. Eltis suggests that key developments in training, organization, tactics and siege warfare occurred in the sixteenth century and, taken together, these innovations constitute a military revolution, changing the face of war. In England, these changes came later than in the rest of Europe, and in Ireland later still. English writers, in their anxiety to spur their countrymen to adopt the new methods, produced some of the most useful manuals of sixteenth-century Europe. These, together with Italian, Spanish, French and German texts, form the main basis of David Eltis's study, allowing the ideas of contemporaries to be set alongside accounts of actual military conditions in explaining one of the turning points of world military development.

"The essays in this book provide statistical analysis of the transatlantic slave trade, focusing especially on Brazil and Portugal, from the 17th through the 19th century. It contains the most up-to-date and comprehensive research on slave ship voyages, origins, destinations, numbers of slaves per port, country, year, and period. In 1999 the same authors published The Transatlantic Slave Trade Dataset (Cambridge, book and CD), but it did not include data on Brazil and Central America, which this book fills in"--Provided by the publisher.