Kindling for Mass War

A histomap of European armed force, 1720–1871 — adapted from John B. Sparks's flowing-band form (Rand McNally, 1931) to show absolute combined land and naval strength across seven great powers. Unlike Sparks's proportional original, the rising ember crest is itself data: 931,000 men in 1720 to 4.2 million by 1870, a 4.5× growth driven by 26 interactive sparks tracing the institutional, technological, ideological, and competitive causes behind one of history's largest expansions in state military capacity.