Jan Gotlib Bloch

Jan Gotlib Bloch was a Polish banker and railway financier who devoted his private life to the study of modern industrial warfare. Born Jewish and a convert to Calvinism, he spent considerable effort to opposing the prevalent antisemitic policies of the Tsarist government, and was sympathetic to the fledgling Zionist movement. Bloch had studied at the University of Berlin, worked at a Warsaw bank and then moved to St. Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire (which governed much of the Polish lands at the time). There, he took part in the development of the Russian Railways, both in financing the construction of new railways and in writing research papers on the subject. He founded several banking, credit and insurance companies. In 1877 he was appointed a member of the Russian Finance Ministry's Scientific Committee. Bloch was married to Emilia Julia Kronenberg, the granddaughter of Polish banker Samuel Eleazar Kronenberg, daughter of medical doctor Henryk Andrzej Kronenberg and niece of industrialist and Polish nationalist Leopold Stanislaw Kronenberg; the Kronenberg and Bloch families had often been in competition with each other in several 19th century Polish businesses. Bloch became intrigued by the victory of the North German Confederation over France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, which suggested to him that the solution of diplomatic problems by warfare had become obsolete in Europe. He published his six-volume master work, The Future of War and its Economic Consequences, in Paris in 1898. His detailed analysis of modern warfare, its tactical, strategic and political implications, was widely read in Europe. Bloch argued that the new technologies of smokeless powder, magazine rifles, machine guns and quick-firing artillery had rendered manoeuvres over open ground, such as bayonet and cavalry charges, obsolete. Bloch concluded that a war between the great powers would be a war of entrenchment and that rapid attacks and decisive victories were a thing of the past. He calculated that entrenched men would enjoy a fourfold advantage over infantry in the open. Industrial societies would have to settle a stalemate by committing million-man armies. An enormous battlefront would develop. A war of this type could not be resolved quickly. Such a war would become a duel of industrial might, a matter of total economic attrition. Severe economic and social dislocations would result in the imminent risk of famine, disease, the "break-up of the whole social organization" and revolutions from below. Bloch warned of the dangers of a total, destructive war and urged countries to strive for the peaceful settlement of international disputes. He participated in the First Hague Peace Conference and founded the Museum of War and Peace in Lucerne. Bloch died of heart failure in Warsaw on January 7, 1902.