Modern Military History

Abstract

As the editors say in the introduction, military history has often been looked down upon by academia, which sees it partly as antiquarianism and partly as suited only for boys who refuse to grow up. Too often, too, the cardinal role that war plays in history is ignored; if only for that reason, any effort to correct this situation, such as the present one, is welcome. Most of the authors who have written the various essays in this volume are relatively young and little known, though the most senior among them, Professor Joanna Bourke of Birkbeck College London, is the author of no fewer than seven books. Nevertheless, the quality of their work is almost uniformly excellent, a fact which promises well for the future. One characteristic of the work in question is that as much, or more, attention is paid to historiography as to history proper; as a result, the volume as a whole also constitutes a very good introduction to some of the most important issues that have preoccupied military historians during the last three decades or so. This includes that much-discussed concept, military revolutions, their origins, their nature, and their impact; the link between warfare and the rise of the state; war and society (a vast subject which Michael Neiberg manages to cover in just nineteen pages, including a bibliographical essay and footnotes); the evolution of military thought from Machiavelli to Liddell Hart; the evolution of land warfare from Machiavelli to Desert Storm; the various forms of low-intensity conflict, guerrilla, terrorism, insurgency and the like; total war; the rise and impact of air power; naval warfare; war as waged in the non-European world; imperial military history; technology, science and war; and, last but not least, the ‘new’ military history. As this list shows, by ‘modern’ the authors mean anything that has happened in the field over the last five centuries or so, a fact that enables them to provide perspective while casting their net far and wide.