Exploring the “Military Time”: Historical Timing, Civil–Military Relations, and the Military Revolution in Russia and Japan

Abstract

Abstract What is the relationship between civil–military relations and the emergence as well as diffusion of military innovations? More precisely, how do civil–military relations affect a state's capacity for adopting military innovations? While both topics, military innovations and civil–military relations, have individually attracted considerable scholarly attention, very few studies deal with them in tandem. This study builds on the existing research on the relationship between “historical timing,” civil–military relations, and the diffusion of military reforms and advances an analytical framework that treats “time” as an explanatory dynamic, using the reception of the “military revolution” on Russia and Japan as exploratory cases. In both cases, historical timing played crucial roles in defining the “balance of [political] power” between the rulers and the existing military establishment, which then led to diverging paths in terms of adopting and internalizing the military reforms associated with the aforementioned revolution.