One cannot discuss international conflicts, wars, and struggles throughout pre-20th-century history without giving enormous precedence to the might of military and naval elites that were fundamentally the core catalyst in determining the outcomes of some of the most ferocious violence history has witnessed. Violence has always been engrained in the human psyche, and those who have forged the strongest alliances, the mightiest of military forces, and developed the shrewdest of tactics prevail, victors, most of the time. With regards to political relations, a countries military might will always coincide with factors such as economy, differing governing systems, land mass etc. as the foremost justifications as to why a superpower is a superpower, …show more content…
This resulted in imperialist and colonial rivalries for the influence and control of the developing and underdeveloped world. The consequences of these interferences have had an especially long-lasting effect which still heavily lingers today. Come the end of the long-standing feud between the United Kingdom and France culminating in the Napoleonic wars , these wars effectively altered major European military systems for the better some would argue, heavy artillery such as cannons became lighter and more efficient, militias developed into much larger, more well-organised armies due to retaining much more supplies, food and drink and possible obligatory conscription . While France gathered territory, momentum, and victories rapidly, they were crushed just as rapidly with France’s calamitous defeats at the hands of the Russians and the British as the battle of Waterloo. Early showcases of Britain’s naval superiority were encapsulated here as France dared not to even tempt their luck invading by sea. Because of the war, all major European powers excluding France enacted a proposal for post-war Europe, it became known as the ‘concert of Europe’. This was a systematic structure developed resolving any quarrels adopted by the chief conservative authorities of Europe to help sustain their …show more content…
Ever-increasing tensions and hostilities arising from ideological differences, military envy, and economic pressures culminated in some of the most ferocious violence history has ever witnessed. From the Napoleonic, Balkan, and Boer wars right up to the Franco-Russian, and Russo-Japanese conflicts, the boastful displays of power by the world’s most powerful states only emphasised just how much importance was placed upon the military elites of the world’s greater powers. It is widely believed that this accumulation of conflicts, hostilities, and political strife were significant factors in the emergence of the first world war, yet these are only a handful of the causes of the ‘great war’. Eugenia Nomikos and Robert C. North argue in their book on the outbreak of World War 1 “A major difficulty in trying to understand the escalation of July and early August 1914, is the consideration that the crisis and the events that immediately produced it were in part the culmination of a long chain of occurrences and relationships dating back for years and even decades,” also they state “the events of the crisis are likely to constitute only the peaking of a vast structure of past interactions, conflicts, and outbreaks of violence which set the stage or define the parameters of the