The Cambridge History of Warfare

Abstract

First published over a decade ago as the Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare: The Triumph of the West , this revised text has unfortunately lost the elegant illustrations and the informative box inserts on specific topics but not its comprehensive and insightful survey of the history of warfare from the third millennium to the present day. The book’s four-part structure and the substantive material of the seventeen essays by seven contributors remain the same as before. In Part One, Victor Davis Hanson’s three essays chart the emergence and evolution of the infantry as a foundational instrument of warfare from the hoplite troop phalanxes of the Greek polis to Philip II of Macedon’s reinvigorated mixed phalanxes of foot and accompanying horse, which his son Alexander adeptly commanded to conquer Persia in the fourth century BC, and then to the smaller and more adaptable Roman legions. Essays by Bernard Bachrach, Christopher Allmand and the editor comprise Part Two: the continuities of warfare from the late third century to the later medieval period are first explored, with the once pre-eminent chivalric notion of the superior mounted knight in the latter period being dismissed, whereas, through to the sixteenth century, the considerable changes wrought in tactics and army composition by the development in weapons technology—initially pikes and bows and then, significantly, firearms—are explored. In Part Three, two essays each by the editor and John Lynn along with one by Patricia Seed consider warfare in the early modern age. Not only do these pieces emphasize the emerging importance of naval warfare from the fifteenth century—either defensively in home waters or offensively in the conquest of an overseas empire and the protection of trade—they also vouchsafe the significant influence on warfare of its political and geo-strategic contexts as dynastic conflicts, including their often strong confessional complexion, gave way to global wars between states and their armies and then whole nations in arms. Finally, in Part Four, five essays by Williamson Murray, and one written jointly by Murray and the editor, narrate the history of warfare through the industrial and imperial age of the nineteenth century to the two world wars of the twentieth century and then the post-1945 world. Of all the chapters, this last one has undergone substantive revision because of the occurrence of wars in Chechnya, the Balkans, Afghanistan and, most recently, Iraq since the book’s original publication.