The revolution of industrial capitalism and of science and technology is the greatest transformation in human existence since the coming of agriculture. It began in the late eighteenth century and its end is not in sight. It has given such immense power to the societies that pioneered it or adopted it that it has obscured a fundamental truth: military revolutions are changes in the nature and purposes of war itself. They are normally the military outcome of underlying processes – ideological, political, social, economic, and demographic – far deeper and broader than the advent of a particular technology or cluster of technologies.

While the Industrial Revolution was achieving – for the first time in human history – self-sustaining and seemingly limitless growth in Britain's textile mills, mines, and foundries, a political revolution with consequences almost as great erupted across the Channel. The upheaval of 1788–94 was not merely a revolution in France. It marked the beginning of the exceedingly violent end, first in France and then throughout Europe, of an entire social, political, and international order.