Abstract
Military history is the history of wars, and of armed forces in peace as well as in war. Its separation from history more broadly defined arises from its didactic purpose. Its origins therefore lie with the development of professional armies. The growth of history as a university subject from the late nineteenth century did mean that academics as well as soldiers studied the history of war, but its institutional foundations were shallow. Moreover, soldiers rather than academics wrote the official histories of World War I. The situation only changed with the adoption of broader definitions for the official histories of World War II. The world wars themselves showed the absurdity of approaching the study of modern history without taking military history into account. Since the 1960s academic military history has thrived on the back of two influences. The first, ‘the new military history,’ is largely American in origin and stresses the subject as a component of ‘total history.’ The second, strategic studies, relates past to present.
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