This book is a history of the world as viewed through the lens of war. It is designed for use at the college level as a textbook for military history courses or as a textbook or supplemental reading for world history courses. As a general introduction to and synthesis of this topic, we believe it will also interest general readers, especially those interested in military history. But while military history is undoubtedly a popular topic, popularity alone cannot justify a new textbook in intellectual terms. What can a world history textbook focused on warfare offer to students and teachers, in college or outside the curriculum?
Warfare has been one of humankind’s most prevalent activities throughout history. Military preparations and organization have been central to the internal structures of many human communities. War itself is one of the major ways in which those human communities have interacted with each other, and it has often been intimately connected to other significant forms of contact and influence, whether as a vector for spreading disease, an accompaniment to or form of trade and economic exchange, or a partner of religious expansion.
Because making war has been such a central activity of so many human communities, it makes a good lens through which to view the rest of history, providing a thematic connection among many facets of human experience, as well as being a topic important in its own right. The stresses of war sometimes cast a particularly revealing light on social structures, exposing the strengths and weaknesses of institutions and testing the cultural cohesion of communities in ways that few other activities do.
Despite this, warfare has been largely unexplored up to now as a theme in world history. True world history textbooks are far more common now than they were even ten years ago. Many of the most recent, in attempting to organize the mountain of material world historians face, have begun structuring their narratives around themes such as technology or cultural contact. Some have even taken an almost entirely thematic approach, exploring various cross- cultural topics, such as the family, religion and the state, or frontiers, from a global perspective. War almost never shows up in these lists of themes except perhaps as an aspect of the conflicts of the twentieth century.
This neglect of military history is doubly odd given that the last twenty-five years has seen an explosion of specialist studies in the field, works that have fundamentally redefined military history as an arena of academic investigation. The nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century traditions of military historiography, dominated by ex-military men writing about decisive battles and the “Art of War” for other exmilitary men and amateur war buffs, nearly killed the field for serious historians. But since the mid-1970s, the “new military history” has revitalized military studies. European medieval historians, examining a society organized for war, played a leading role in creating the new military history; more recently, fierce and productive controversies over the early modern period’s Military Revolution and the modern age’s “revolution in military affairs” have extended the new approaches to histories of war to many times and places.
Central to the new military history has been the process of placing warfare in context or, more accurately, in its many contexts—socioeconomic, institutional, and cultural. One of the aims of this book, therefore, is to synthesize and integrate the new military history from a global perspective. As a military history text, then, we attempt always to examine war and warriors as parts of functioning societies. The mutual relationships between war and its contexts—both the effects of war on society and the effects of society on war (including the development of new technologies as part of both)—are fundamental to understanding why wars have been fought in the many ways history has witnessed. Unlike many histories of warfare, we integrate naval warfare and maritime activity (as well as air war in the twentieth century) into this big picture of the development of armed force through the millennia. In general, the aims and methods of the new military history have shaped the focus of our text.
Thus, what we write about is war and its contexts. Students of military operations will find some campaign history here. The vast scope of chronology and geography entailed by a global history necessarily limits the amount of detailed narrative possible. The emphasis is on analysis rather than storytelling. Nevertheless, each chapter highlights battles and campaigns that demonstrate classic and sometimes unchanging aspects of the “Art of War,” as well as illustrating changes in tactics and practices in response to new challenges, weapons, and environments.
But the larger emphasis, as noted above, is on contexts. Three broad areas stand out in this respect.
First, political and institutional contexts: The institutional organization of warfare in all societies has always had important connections to the powers of elites and states and to methods of rulership and government. The structures of power place important constraints on military organization and activity— for example, in influencing who can be recruited and how. The exercise of force has also been a consistent and often paramount factor in the distribution of political power within polities; politics and political institutions in turn affect the use of warfare as a tool of state policy. War not only is affected by but also affects its institutional context.
Second, social and economic contexts: This area includes the effects of class structure (closely related to political contexts) and the issue of economic support for military activity. Economic productivity and the technologies of transportation shape logistics in decisive ways, and logistics—the art of keeping military forces in being—has been perhaps the dominant constraint on methods and patterns of waging war throughout history. The economic sphere also includes technology generally. Changing weaponry springs to mind naturally when technology is mentioned in relation to warfare, but technologies that were either nonmilitary, such as the printing press, or only military tangentially or partially, such as the steam engine, have consistently played a major role in shaping how war has been waged. Finally, armed conflict has always had significant effects on societies and economies (“the effect of war on society” was an early rallying cry of the new military history), most often wreaking havoc and destruction, but in a significant minority of cases stimulating economic growth and inventiveness.
Third, cultural contexts: From the point of view of world history, war is not just an activity, it is a nexus of cultural production. Given the elite status of many warrior classes in world history, warrior values have shaped many cultures. War and religion have frequently been in alliance (holy or unholy depending on one’s perspective). Many cultures have placed various ritual constraints on the practice of war, while reactions to warfare ranging from glorification to condemnation are probably rivaled only by love as a dominant theme in world literature, with war far outdistancing romance in popularity in many cultures.
War literature as a source for military history brings us to another aspect of the focus of this volume. The sources available from the world’s many societies and the amount of secondary historical investigation published for different areas vary tremendously. A work of synthesis such as this one is dependent on the specialist work of many previous scholars and is inevitably shaped by these questions of availability. In our case, the result is an emphasis on the major Eurasian civilizations and, up to 1700, the central Asian nomads with whom those civilizations coexisted. Within that ecumene, the literature tends to place somewhat more emphasis on western Europe than some other areas of historical inquiry. This focus is almost inevitable for the last two centuries of European military dominance (with a few important exceptions). Before that time, the merits of such emphasis are more debatable but were for us less a matter of debate than of necessity. While we have tried always to keep our perspective global, we must await further research for a more even balance of details from across Eurasia.
We have undoubtedly shorted the military histories of sub-Saharan Africa, the pre-Columbian Americas, Australia, and Oceania. Partly, this is again a matter of the available secondary literature. But it is a matter partly of defining war and looking only at what rises over our own arbitrarily chosen “military horizon,” one of two preliminary questions we must examine before proceeding.
These two questions, to which there are no clear answers, are these: What counts as war, and what are the origins of war in human history?
With regard to the first question, there is clearly a vast range of human violence. But the boundaries separating one sort of violence from another—in particular, organized warfare from more individual and perhaps random acts of violence—are fuzzy in the extreme. Limiting a definition of warfare to “organized state activity” not only eliminates many violent tribal conflicts that probably should count as some form of warfare but also is too restrictive even if we don’t consider tribes. Much of the armed conflict in early medieval Europe and most of the aggressive activity of nomadic peoples from the Asian steppes have been unproblematically treated as warfare despite the fact that “states” among some of those peoples existed only tenuously at best and had no monopoly on war making even where they did exist. Mere numbers cannot serve to distinguish true warfare from something less, for the violent application of armed force by states has often been carried out by remarkably small forces. Attempts to distinguish “real” warfare from more ritualized forms of violence in terms of seriousness of intent or casualty rates fail both for vagueness and because almost all forms of warfare have had a significant ritualistic element, which simply removes the question one step without resolving it. In short, there are no clear criteria for the ranking of human violent activity on a continuum from murder to melee to missile strike.
The very attempt to make such divisions, however, points up the near universality of warfare, at least under broader definitions, as a feature of human culture. This brings us to the question of the origins of war.
There is a vast and complex literature on this subject, and one that is changing rapidly. The investigations span the fields of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and brain studies, anthropology, sociology, and history. As yet, however, no clear consensus has emerged. This is in part because any explanation for the origins of war depends on how war is defined: Organized warfare as a cultural invention of complex, hierarchical cultures clearly differs in origin, at least to some extent, from the sorts of conflicts hunter-gatherer tribes may have engaged in. The lack of consensus also derives from the politically charged nature of the topic. Explanations for the origins of war are taken, rightly or wrongly, to have implications for the issue of the inevitability of war versus possibilities for modern peace movements.
The topic is also politically charged, at least potentially, in terms of gender, because war has been and continues to be largely a male activity, even when recent gender integration of armed forces is taken into account. In the past, of course, females have had close connections to warfare as victims of rape, abduction, and killing; as producers in the economies that supported war; as camp followers, wives, and a key part of “home fronts”; as cementers of alliances through marriage; and as pretexts for going to war, even if there were never a Helen who saw a Troy. But females have participated in war only occasionally as leaders and even more rarely as fighters, a fact that complicates both the explanations for and the politics of explaining the origins of war.
In this text, we will answer the first question, of what counts as war, only by implication, and our answer is probably arbitrary at that. We will attempt to answer the second question, about the origins of war, briefly in Chapter 1. This introduction will lead us quickly to the established presence of war in the earliest civilizations of southwest Asia—ancient city walls speak eloquently to the necessities of communal defense even at that early stage of settled cultures— and simply trace its evolution since then. Does the near universal presence of war in history mean that war is an inevitable part of the human condition? Perhaps, but until very recently, slavery was a near universal feature of human societies. It is now much less common. Conditions change, and the organized responses of communities evolve accordingly. Our job as historians is to help understand the past. Predicting the future is far trickier.