In the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual, William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson make a convincing case that again and again throughout history, the dominant power of the day was disrupted by new technologies. Advances in agriculture meant that people and their property were often geographically stationary, making them sitting ducks for “specialists in violence”, the predecessors to modern governments, who back then, were both the plunderers and protectors against plunder. The stirrup, contoured saddle, spur, and curb bit had a combined similar disrupting effect, shifting power away from heavy cavalry to a single armed knight. The Gunpowder Revolution disrupted the feudal order…

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