Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865

Abstract

This insightful book focuses on the principal paradox of civilized man’s approach to war: how and why he sought to tame institutionalized violence by curbing its ferocity. By examining five pivotal conflicts with the common thread of either English colonization projects in Ireland and North America or fundamental civil disputes during the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and (as a coda) the American Civil War, Wayne E. Lee has produced a sound study bolstered by solid statistical and colorful anecdotal evidence, a skillful blend of old-fashioned narrative with nuanced analysis. As indicated by the book’s title, war was (and is) a different affair depending on the enemy. The excesses committed when suppressing Irishmen or Indians derived from categorizing them as barbarians, a status that made them outlaws unworthy of the protections of controlled violence, and a circumstance that not only made atrocities indispensable but also gave men license to commit them. In the English Civil War just decades later, the enemy had changed—he was no longer a distant “barbarian” but a nearby neighbor, a “brother”—and the methods of fighting him changed as well. Spurred in part by that sobering difference, armies began to develop codes of appropriate conduct. Lee sees the process through the lens of four interconnected concepts: the capacity to wage war; the ability to control its course; the calculations necessary for that control; and the way changing and clashing cultures affected the whole.