STEPHEN MORILLO
One premise of this book is that world history’s dynamism and complexity as a research field need to be demonstrated more broadly to mainstream historians, who are not as aware as they might be of the field’s recent developments. The same could be said – indeed, has recently been said (Morillo 2006; Black 2004) – of military history. Both fields suffer from negative stereotypes among academic historians: world history from the perception that it is a teaching field and thus the preserve of textbook writers, military history that it is practiced far too much by retired generals or popularizers (never mind war being politically suspect). In other words, both are caricatured as somehow not really professional, “serious” history.
The intersection of world history and military history therefore suffers from a double burden of negative images. What’s worse, those negative stereotypes arise from within the two subfields themselves. Many military historians are accustomed to working within a Euro-American historical framework, and are thus both suspicious of the breadth of world history and unsure of its relevance. Many world historians, informed by approaches in social and cultural history (Pomeranz 2007), are equally suspicious of the methodologies and supposed ideology of military history.
The result is that world military history is not just the intersection of two somewhat marginalized subfields, it is a fairly tiny intersection. But it is an intersection that is not only growing with the expansion of world history generally: it is, contrary to the stereotypes imposed upon it from within and without, yet another dynamic and sophisticated field of research filled with potential for conceptual breakthroughs and new discoveries.
Audiences
World military history faces a number of issues as it moves forward. The first is, if not unique to military history (whether global or not), at least more acute than it is for other fields of historical writing. This is that publishing in military history aims at three distinct audiences with different demands and expectations. This diversity, while presenting opportunities for researchers, contributes to the complicated image and status of world military history within the larger historical profession.
The first audience, and the primary one at which this book is aimed, is the community of academic historians. Some of the issues outlined below, of effectively globalizing approaches to military history and working out reasonable terms of comparison and conceptualization, arise from the demands of this audience for a world military history that fits with the methods and understandings of the broader fields of world history and of academic history generally.
Two other audiences, however, make publishing in military history, especially world military history, more complicated than in some other specialties. First, military history appeals to a large popular audience, as any stroll through the history shelves of mass-market bookstores demonstrates immediately. The American Civil War and World War II each constitute substantial franchises in military history; at least the latter has an inherently global orientation, even as the European theater of conflict tends to dominate the lists. What publishers want for this audience and what scholars produce do not overlap perfectly. (See Witz, this volume.) This is not to say that all the books produced for popular consumption have no academic value: Williamson Murray and Allan Millett’s A War To Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (2001), for example, presents a truly global and nuanced interpretation of the war. But more common are books that, while academically sound, present condensed summaries of broad (sometimes even global) topics, copiously illustrated in a glossy format (e.g., Dawson 2002; Bouchard 2009), or that apply sound scholarship to the “big event, famous person” genre of military history that thereby excludes much in the way of a world history approach (e.g., Strauss 2005; 2009). And of course the potential profits of the popular market do spawn some books that contribute to the dubious academic reputation of military history.
The final audience for military history is military professionals, working in the armed services of many different countries, who are engaged as students or teachers in Professional Military Education (PME). While the goals of academic historians and PME are somewhat different, there is much more potential for synergy and understanding between the two groups than the cultural differences between them make evident. And while PME is in many ways nationalistically oriented – national military academies are at the foundation of PME – there is nothing in that teaching structure that precludes a global perspective. Indeed, the global nature of contemporary military problems encourages both global approaches and the globalization of audiences for military history. The publisher of a major military world history textbook (Morillo et al. 2009), for example, has contracted to publish translations in Chinese, Arabic, and Dari, the latter specifically for use at the Afghanistan National Military Academy.
Issues: Globalization
The continuing globalization of military history, however, faces two challenges in terms of established patterns of analysis in the field: military Eurocentrism, and a disparity in the sources available for doing military history in different regions – itself partly a cause of military Eurocentrism, and partly a result of the very cultural differences that gave rise to that Eurocentrism.
The most common form of military Eurocentrism in popular military history, although probably the least creditable in professional academic circles, is the “Western way of war” argument first put forward by Victor Davis Hanson (1989). Hanson argues for a uniquely effective “Western” culture of war based in a combination of what he calls “civic militarism” and a willingness to kill face-to-face in decisive battles, a combination that originated, he says, with the city-state warfare of the classical Greeks. Numerous scholars have questioned various aspects of this argument, starting with whether the paradigm even describes classical Greek warfare very well (Van Wees 2004). There are a number of other deep problems with the thesis. Whether there was a continuous military culture as described by Hanson is seriously in doubt: “civic militarism,” in particular, describes neither late imperial Rome nor most of medieval Europe very well; and there is little evidence for the unique effectiveness of European arms before the industrialization of warfare in the nineteenth century. At the deeper, more philosophical levels that most interest world historians, Hanson’s definition of “Western” is vague to the point of evanescence (Rome, geographically east of Carthage, is the “Western” power in the Punic Wars, and Rome’s lineal descendant, Byzantium, is apparently not Western because it was not, in the end, victorious). Indeed, events since 2001 also call into question the unique effectiveness of any “Western way of war,” even if that idea is defined simply as the way of war practiced by current “Western” powers. At the level of defining cultures of war and their impact, John Lynn’s Battle (2003) also makes important points about the malleability of cultures generally and military cultures in particular that tell against Hanson’s thesis.
For in fundamental ways Hanson’s argument depends upon a caricature of “Eastern” ways of war as not only averse to decisive battles and face-to-face combat, and grounded in despotism rather than civic participation, but as essentially unchanging. Here the steady expansion of recent work in military history into non-Western regions provides the most effective disproof of Hanson’s picture of world history. Histories of steppe nomadic peoples highlight the terribly effective military forces they raised – usually more effective, man for man, than almost any army raised by any sedentary state, never mind European ones, from their origins perhaps 4,000 years ago down into the sixteenth century – while nomadic social and political patterns seem a perfect instantiation of “civic militarism,” although not a version that a modern democratic society would wish to embrace. The burgeoning field of Chinese military history, meanwhile, shows clearly the dynamism and creativity of military forces and leaders throughout Chinese history, simultaneously lifting the veil of Confucian-bureaucratic idealizations in Chinese historiography and debunking any Orientalist notions of an “unchanging East” at its heart (e.g., Lorge 2005; Graff 2002).
Ancient Chinese history, as well as recent work in Japanese military history, also undermines another conceptual manifestation of military Eurocentrism, the “Military Revolution” paradigm. This idea is not as inherently Eurocentric as Hanson’s thesis. The landmark book that brought the Military Revolution debate to mainstream history by implicating military change in broad processes of state formation and regional dominance is Geoffrey Parker’s The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West (1988). It advertises its focus on the rise of Europe in a subtitle, but in the text acknowledges that China underwent a similar revolution, in witnessing a shift away from small, elite-based and largely cavalry forces towards massed infantry armies, fortifications, wars of territorial conquest, and centralized states supported by absolutist ideologies, during the Warring States era (475–221 BCE) (see also Lewis 1992). Still, despite this case and others, such as the military transformation of sixteenth-century Japan (Morillo 1995) and Bronze Age changes (Drews 1993) that have been called “military revolutions,” the emphasis remains on “Western” military innovation. This is especially true of work on the early modern military revolution and its modern analogue about a “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA). All of this, it should be said, is laid over deeper questions of whether “military revolutions” really exist, an interesting philosophical-historiographical problem that has, potentially at least, truly global possibilities for analyzing military change.
Overcoming military Eurocentrism is not simply a matter of recognizing the philosophical problem and placing global comparative perspectives at the center of military world history, however. European military history benefits from a long historiographical tradition that dates back to the classical historians of Greece and Rome. This has made the writing of accounts of military actions a commonplace since Herodotus, Thucydides, and Caesar. When this practice is combined with a record-keeping culture, the result is that European military historians have had readier access to a larger store of relevant primary source materials than military historians elsewhere. Furthermore, the recent dominance of Western academics has made the linguistic barrier to studying or disseminating non-European military history higher as well. But recognition of the philosophical problem, as well as the globalization of modern military affairs and conceptions of military effectiveness, have begun to prompt efforts to redress the balance. The already noted explosion of Chinese military historiography builds on much work by Chinese historians, which in turn builds on the copious sources provided by another record-keeping culture. The cultural orientation of Chinese literati and record-keepers means that less detail on matters of tactics and leadership has survived in the sources, but the connection between military action and political policy is, by contrast, often clearer than in European accounts of glorious battles. Japanese military history can also draw on a tradition and sources quite comparable in amount and cultural orientation to those of Europe. On the other hand, world military historians will simply never be able to know as much about the history of societies whose cultural orientation made writing about military affairs unimportant, or whose literate and historical traditions focused on warfare but were aborted (as, for example, with the Mayas and Aztecs). Nonliterate societies, meanwhile, will be as underrepresented in military history as in any other subfield.
Issues: Problems of Analysis
World historians generally face problems of methodology in constructing transregional or transcultural analyses and comparisons, including issues of appropriate units of analysis, comparing like phenomena, and distinguishing terminology from underlying reality (to the extent that we can get at that slippery target). (See Adas, this volume.) Military world history faces its own versions of each of these issues.
To begin, the globalization of military history highlights the fact that much military history has been uncritically state-centric, without “the state” necessarily having been clearly defined or delineated as an analytical concept. It is too often simply assumed, partly as a consequence of the long shadow Clausewitz casts over modern military analysis: his dictum that “war is the continuation of policy with an admixture of other means” assumes state-directed warfare. As a result, the varieties of forms taken by states globally, including most monarchies in which “policy” was essentially a synonym for “the whims of the ruler,” and the many regions and time periods in which state-level societies did not exist or in which formal state mechanisms of governance were secondary to informal social and cultural means of exercising power, have often led to their patterns of warfare being ignored or their rationales being rendered opaque by traditional state-centered military analysis. Even for Eurocentric military history, state-centrism is problematic for analyzing much medieval warfare. For world military history, then, the concept of the state must become part of the problem, not an assumed part of the answer.
This is not to say that warfare is unconnected to issues of state formation (and state collapse). It is simply to recognize that wars between fully state-level complex societies probably constitute a minority of the war that fills the pages of world history. Even attention to intrastate wars, including civil wars and other internecine power struggles, does not capture the rich complexity of the topic. Violence and armed force may be at the heart of many complex societies in one way or another, but histories of state-raised and state-directed armies, even those acting as the tax-collecting arms of the state, must sit beside analyses of the place of warrior elites in social structures and the existence of warfare as a lifestyle – at times, as on the Eurasian steppes, of whole peoples, not just warrior elites – rather than as a tool of state policy. Much of the warfare in global history may indeed be a tool of policy, but the policy was informal, unstated, and social: to keep warrior (and other) elites themselves in power, not to defend “the state.”
This issue has become more visible since 2001 as the armed forces of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization face nontraditional enemies, and more generally as the World War/Cold War paradigm of major state wars increasingly gives way to substate conflict, nonstate actors, and the rising importance, in perception and reality, of guerrilla, irregular, and what is termed “asymmetric” warfare. This has already prompted new interest in colonial wars of the nineteenth century, wars largely ignored even at the time by military analysts for whom confrontations between major European powers were all that really mattered militarily, and in the sorts of warfare conducted by, for example, the Romans around their borders in the imperial period, when threats from other states outside the Parthian or Persian Empire were rare. But the very use of the terms “irregular” and “asymmetric” betray the state-centric bias ingrained in much modern military analysis.
And in fact, modernity may be the larger issue here. State-centrism is simply part of a wider present-centrism in much military analysis and therefore in a good deal of history. Certainly in terms of weight of research and publication, the last two centuries predominate in military history. While this may be justified in terms of popular book-market demand, it pushes the terms of analysis toward modern concepts and issues. This includes not just the centrality of the state, but also a fascination with and focus on technology, and some deep assumptions about military rationality that reflect a difficulty for modern military history in escaping its own cultural framework.
The rapid technological changes of the last two centuries, including significant changes not just in weaponry but in nonmilitary technologies with militarily significant applications, such as railroads and steamships, have brought technology to the fore in popular perceptions of warfare. The history of the twentieth century, in particular, with its naval arms races, tanks, airplanes, missiles and atomic and nuclear bombs, can make war seem like a battle for the best weapons, from the introduction of bronze and iron to the spread of early gunpowder weapons. Put in more philosophical terms, technological determinism becomes a real danger in explaining the course of warfare in world history – many forms of the early modern military revolution thesis view it as the direct consequence of the introduction of cannon and effective gunpowder small arms. But careful analysis of the longer history of the preindustrial world, and even of the last two centuries globally, shows that technology is almost always a dependent variable, not an independent one, whose effects are shaped by the contexts into which it is introduced.
That the “obvious” advantages of new military technologies were not always obvious to those exposed to them reminds us that people’s cultural frames of reference are one of the contexts not just for the reception of technology but for the evaluation of past military action. Here again, the modern tendency for military analysis to see the world through a cultural frame that emphasizes, at least in the major industrial powers, materialist if not outright economic factors, and that sees politics and power in “rational” (again, largely material) terms, can lead to serious misunderstanding of warfare waged not just by past peoples with very different frames of reference but by modern enemies for whom materialism may be a central threat rather than a “natural” assumption about how people operate in the world. Rationality, in other words, is culturally constructed: some medieval battle-seeking strategies that seem to make no sense from a modern materialist perspective (battle avoidance looks safer and more likely to achieve positive material results) were, in a cultural framework based on divinely judged trial by battle, the only “rational” choice of action. Abandoning the modern materialist myth of a universal military rationality complicates the project dear to some aspects of military analysis, especially those aimed at a PME audience interested in learning timeless lessons about the “art of war.” But the corresponding gain comes in understanding past military cultures and actions more accurately on their own terms, a goal more in harmony with academic approaches to the study of history. In general, one of the challenges posed by the globalization of military history is how to incorporate a more careful and nuanced approach to culture broadly, and to varying cultures of war specifically, into the field.
What these problems of present-centrism demonstrate, finally, is that the globalization of military history demands a sophisticated approach to the problem of cross-cultural comparison. Strategic and operational “art of war” principles are not the only place where comparison based in unexamined modern concepts and terminology threatens to “shoehorn” past evidence into misleading containers. The problem of translating terms for types of soldiers provides a good example of these potential pitfalls. Even terms as apparently straightforward as “infantry” and “cavalry” are loaded, in modern English, with assumptions that may not be appropriate for different times and places. Each is built from different vectors of meaning that point in different directions: functional (whether a soldier fights on foot or horseback at any particular moment); organizational (how the unit a soldier belongs to “normally” fights or is designed to fight); and social (with soldiers on horseback usually, though not always, having higher social status). Thus, Roman legionnaires and modern US foot soldiers may actually be “infantry” in about the same mixture of functional, organizational and social ways, but for Anglo-Norman writers pedites would describe any soldier fighting on foot, regardless of class and with no organizational component possible (there being no permanent units in Anglo-Norman armies), while the Japanese term ashigaru, often translated as “infantry,” is really a social term denoting low status. Similarly, the term “mercenary” contains all sorts of assumptions about nationalistic identity and the operation of market economies that do not fit the realities of most past societies, calling for a more nuanced definition of soldier types that combines mode of payment with measures of social embeddedness to more usefully distinguish soldier types from one another (Morillo 2001; 2007). Again, the expectations of professional military audiences and the demands of popular audiences complicate the challenges posed by globalizing academic military history.
Themes: Global Patterns of War
Taking the optimistic view that the challenges outlined above are not an obstacle to advances in world military history but considerations that will produce better histories when they are accounted for, what topics, themes, or questions currently generate the most controversy or hold the most promise for future investigations?
Not surprisingly, much of the extant work at the still small intersection of world and military history has focused on surveys and on outlining long-term global patterns in the history of war. Among surveys, the dated but still surprisingly useful Encyclopedia of Military History (Dupuy and Dupuy 1970), although Eurocentric, is truly global in coverage and narrative-chronological in organization. World History of Warfare (Archer et al. 2002) is similarly dated and Eurocentric, though it attempts a more coherent analysis. By contrast, various encyclopedias organized alphabetically by topic (e.g. Cowley and Parker 1996; Martel 2012) are useful as references but offer an overview only in mosaic form. War in World History (Morillo et al. 2009), a military world history textbook, offers the most up-to-date interpretive survey that is as globally balanced and comparative as the available sources allow; it focuses on setting warfare in its socioeconomic, political and cultural contexts. Less detailed as surveys but attempting a grander sort of synthetic overview are John Keegan’s A History of Warfare (1993) and Azar Gat’s more successful War in Human Civilization(2006). All such surveys address, to one extent or another, basic questions about the origins of war, the causes of wars, the relationship of war to state formation, culture, and society. What this body of work shows is that much more work remains to be done on these questions in the global and comparative perspectives provided by world-historical approaches.
The question of the origins of war is one of the most contentious. The sparseness of the archaeological record makes reaching definitive conclusions difficult, and arguments from evidence of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups are fraught with methodological issues. Essentially, two opposing positions have emerged. On the one hand, some argue for a very early emergence of warfare – at least with the emergence of the modern human species around 190,000 years ago, if not before. Indeed, disputed evidence about warfare between chimpanzee groups, our closest surviving relatives, is cited in support of a “war instinct” in humans, in addition to abundant archaeological evidence for war around the globe (see e.g. Keeley 1996). On the other hand, supporters of a late date for the invention of warfare point out that none of the definitive archaeological evidence actually dates to earlier than about 8000 BCE, and that when it does appear, it is in conjunction with the whole set of conditions associated with the origins of agriculture: sedentary communities, emergent social complexity, and possibly climate change as a trigger. (See Yoffee, this volume.) Thus, in this view, warfare is a product of (and then spur to greater) hierarchical social organization – a cultural invention with no antecedents in the long history of the species or its ancestors or close relatives (see e.g. Ferguson 2005). These two positions tend to align roughly with political positions on the possibilities for preventing or mitigating conflict in the modern world, but the cases ultimately stand on their own merits, with the cultural construction position having for now somewhat the better of the argument.
In any case, once war appeared in the historical record, it rapidly became a pervasive phenomenon, indicating that however destructive it is, it also proved both highly successful as a communal survival strategy, and one that usually demanded a response in kind even from those disinclined to follow the path of organized violence. Broad global histories of warfare since its emergence (whatever the earlier antecedents) tend to focus on what might be called “technological-tactical” landmarks to provide some periodization. Thus, from the earliest clear signs of (relatively) large-scale communal violence in the Neolithic, several subsequent turning points are commonly cited. The introduction of metallurgy into warfare, first bronze and then iron, made for more effective weapons and body armor. At least as important and occurring at roughly the same period, the domestication of the horse made for the tactical and strategic advantages of mobility, and when combined with powerful composite bows invented on the Eurasian steppes (where horse riding also originated) made for a powerful and lasting weapons system that put the pastoralists of the steppes at the center of Eurasian warfare, at least, for two and a half millennia (Anthony 2007; also Liu, this volume).
The decline of steppe cavalry is then associated with the invention and spread of increasingly effective gunpowder weapons, which came to affect patterns of warfare not only on land but perhaps more significantly at sea after 1500. Finally, the entire suite not just of rapidly developing technologies but of socioeconomic organization and political revolution stemming from the Industrial Revolution sets the last two centuries off from its preindustrial history as much in the global history of warfare as in any other aspect of world history.
There is certainly value in this broad periodization, and there is no denying that the great division between sedentary agrarian societies and their infantry-dominated armies against the nomadic pastoralist societies of horsemen was a central one in large-scale patterns of war, and one determined by a combination of technology (taking the domestication of the horse as a technological achievement) and geography. But this periodization’s emphasis on technological and tactical factors holds the danger of overemphasizing material factors and particularly weaponry over deeper political, social, and cultural patterns in the history of war. Arguably, the most significant development in those terms was the “invention” of what might be called the “modern” combination of strong, centralizing political authority and effective administration that could support mass armies of various complementary troop types, armies which in turn backed up the central authority’s claims to dominance. The Assyrians and the Qin were the first to independently invent this powerful combination with all its implications for state-building, though one could also argue that it was only with the addition of an ideological framework that made the workings of such a machine acceptable to those whom it came to rule – achieved by the immediate successors to both inventors, the Persians and the Han – that this sort of socio-political-military establishment reached its full potential. The advantage of an analytical scheme that subordinates technology to broader social developments is that it brings more of the world’s societies into the discussion. Whereas a technologically based outline relegates regions that did not have metal weapons, horses, or later gunpowder to a sort of teleological backwater, emphasis on organization sheds light, for example, on the achievement of the Incas, who arrived, much later but completely independently, at something resembling the Persian-Han synthesis of political-military organization with effective ideology. It also connects pre-gunpowder and preindustrial state-level societies more clearly to their industrial successors, as from this perspective the Persian-Han formula differs from the nationalist-inspired mass conscript armies of the last two centuries only by degree, not by type. An emphasis on social and cultural factors also casts the decline of the steppe nomads in a different, less gunpowder-dominated light, as it was the slow accumulation of demographic and organizational advantages by the successors of the Persians and the Han that eventually contained and then swallowed the steppe nomadic threat.
Emphasis on political, social, and cultural factors brings other patterns obscured by a technological focus to light as well. The steppe–sedentary divide, for example, was not just a technological and geographic divide, and an economic one based on technology and geography, but a social and cultural one as well. But instead of the opposition set up by viewing the two worlds through the lens of technology, a cultural perspective highlights the interactions across frontier zones, processes of mutual or at least semi-mutual acculturation, and dynamics of synthesis and political interrelationship. Thus, the gradual closing of the steppes between 1500 and 1700 may have been powered by the slow advance of the demographic and technological advantages that centralized sedentary states following the Persian-Han model could deploy. But the actual polities that accomplished the closing – the Qing Dynasty in China, the Ottomans, and even Muscovy and the Mughals – represented in another way the last assertion of steppe power, as each combined cavalry forces whose origins and cultures of war arose on the steppes with the administration and mass infantry armies of a major sedentary state, in every case except Muscovy under leadership that was from the steppes or identified itself culturally as nomadic. More broadly, the “divide” itself was hardly a simple dichotomy. “Horse zones” spread out from the epicenter of the steppes. An inner circuit of Eurasian societies facing the steppes directly depended far more on cavalry as part of their mix of troops than an outer circuit of regions, especially western Europe and Japan, that were somewhat insulated from the steppes. In that outer circuit, cavalry tended more to be the preserve of small mounted warrior elites working alongside infantry forces that could assume a larger role in warfare. This may have had consequences for the spread of gunpowder technology (Chase 2003); it was certainly a development with clear consequences for social structure and status as much as for tactics and weaponry. Beyond that lay numerous different “no-horse zones” where horses were either absent (the Americas)1 or did not thrive for climatic and disease reasons (the tropics generally) and so had no influence on war and the social dynamics connected to waging war.
Similarly, and in fact connected to the decline of the steppes, a social-cultural perspective on patterns of war places more prominence on naval warfare, especially the globalization of naval power after 1500, because of its deep connections to trade and the early modern history of cultural contact and exchange (see chapters by Fernández-Armesto and by Levi, this volume). It also highlights in that history the contexts in which new technologies of naval power, above all the cannon-bearing full-rigged ship, were generated by and worked as part of socioeconomic dynamics and cultural outlooks in western Europe, and that it was these contexts, not the technologies themselves, that distinguished the European maritime world. Put another way, European naval forces came to prominence as much through lack of opposition as through their own efforts.
In a broader but more diverse way, social and cultural factors also constantly influenced the practices of war, creating patterns subject to comparative analysis that are not necessarily subject to chronological periodization. Strategic patterns of battle-seeking and battle-avoidance in the preindustrial world can be explained in terms of the intersection between practical matters of logistics on one hand and culturally determined goals on the other, for example (Morillo 2002). These topics, potentially fruitful areas for cross-cultural analysis, may be divided for convenience into “war and society” and “war and culture” questions.
Themes: War and Society
Studies of “war and society” are a well-established genre in military history. It was largely through examination of the impact of war on society that military history built a larger presence in the mainstream of academic history starting in the 1960s. While this work is still mostly Euro-American in orientation, its quality provides models for extending such investigations to other areas of the world, a project already underway. Routledge’s War and History series provides a number of fine examples of such work (e.g., Haldon 1999; Friday 2004). Since the 1970s, “war and society” has come to mean not just the impact of war on society but also the converse: the impact of society, including class and gender, on armies and warfare. Though initially open to the criticism that the institutional and social orientation of such studies made for “military history without warfare,” by now the integration of context and events is more typical, even routine.
One of the first major themes of war and society studies was the importance of logistics to patterns of campaigning. This involved for starters the recognition that available sources of water and stores of food, founded in local agricultural productivity and transportation, were perhaps the major constraint on the movement of armies that often constituted, in the magnitude of their demands, something like cities on the march. Donald Engels’s pioneering study of the logistics of Alexander the Great (1978) and Martin van Creveld’s broader study of more modern logistics (1977) opened up a rich field for comparative studies that could take account of different agricultural systems, including different crops and seasonal patterns – the logistical constraints on Aztec warfare, for example, created their own patterns of campaigning (Hassig 1988). How armies actually gathered supplies on campaign probably constituted, for much of history, the key moment of interaction between states and local populations outside of tax collection. Whether armies plundered, requisitioned, paid in markets, or brought along their own supplies clearly had significantly different implications for the relationship of peasants to armies. Thus, the different methods employed are one of the most useful windows into different military administrations and the broader topic of state–society relationships.
A crucial question about the state–society relationship in the context of logistics is whether military establishments and campaigning damaged a society’s economy or stimulated production and led to improvements in infrastructure. Clearly, both happened in different times and places, but comparative studies of which effect predominated in particular cases, and what factors were involved, could reveal interesting patterns about economic development and state formation (or deformation). Taken beyond individual societies, there is fruitful work to be done on the connections between war, trade, and network flows (including not just material goods but cultural encounters and exchanges more generally). Avner Offer’s innovative work on the role of global food production and imperial trade in the success of the British war effort in World War I provides an instructive exemplar here (1991).
Finally, war and society studies have explored the impact of armed violence on societies broadly. Here, too, the transregional network connections highlighted by world history can contribute to such analyses. War was long associated, especially in the premodern world but in evolving ways even after industrialization, with slavery and the slave trade. Thus, established patterns of sub-Saharan African warfare, in which slave-taking was one common result, formed part of the link between African societies and the Islamic world’s demand for domestic slaves; later and more infamously African warfare also supplied the Atlantic slave trade. Questions of war and slavery inevitably also raise issues of the division between combatants and noncombatants and how that division has been constructed through time in different places, as well as of the impact of armed violence on women and children – with child warriors in recent African warfare highlighting the complexities of such topics. (See Ward, this volume.)
While the impact of war on society is a well-established field, less work has been done on the impact of society on war. One issue open to further investigation in cross-cultural context is how the interactions of social structure, ideology, and state power produce different types of troops, from warrior elites and militia to stipendiaries, volunteer armies, and mercenaries, in various combinations. Two central factors are prominent in this analysis. First, there are variations in terms of service, extending from purely political or coercive sorts such as conscription to purely economic incentives that draw volunteers, with a whole range of combinations in between. Second, there is the question of whether the soldiers who make up an army are more or less socially embedded in the society of the state that employs them, a sometimes clear reflection of the relationship of state to society and the legitimacy of state power. Analyzed in this way, it turns out that true mercenary service – soldiers drawn by pay in a free market for military manpower and with no social connection to the society of their employing state – is quite rare in history (Morillo 2007). But the distribution of other sorts of military service over time and place could be revealing about deeper patterns of social and political development. Under what political and economic conditions does paid service appear? Is there a global trend in terms of common soldier types? These are unanswered questions that would repay comparative investigation. And are terms of service and social embeddedness adequate as factors of analysis? Might social status provide another vector of fruitful analysis? The complex interaction of social class, economic development, and political participation with mass conscription is relatively well studied in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, for example, and the problems of creating a modern mass army have been studied for some non-European societies (Ralston 1990). Even broader comparative work is possible, however.
In addition to class, the subject of war and gender has attracted recent important research (Goldstein 2001; Lynn 2008), with John Lynn’s study of women, “campaign communities,” and the life of early modern European armies establishing especially questions for investigation in other societies. The relationship of warfare and the construction of gender roles, especially notions of masculinity, is one of the central themes of Goldstein’s work. (See Burton, this volume.) Questions of gender and warfare have been addressed through examinations of gendered violence, especially rape, in wartime, but one of the lessons of Lynn’s work is that women were not just passive victims of military violence. Women in combat may have particular relevance to modern armed forces (Krylova 2010), but studies of women in command roles in medieval warfare, particularly but not exclusively in siege warfare, indicates that more remains to be explored.
Themes: War and Culture
Construction of gender roles creates a segue from questions of war and society to those about war and culture. Cultural analysis has not been one of the strengths of traditional military history, as Lynn notes in his study of women and warfare. It holds great promise, however. Given the social and political importance in many traditional, preindustrial cultures of warrior elites, surprisingly little critical work has been done on the impact of warrior cultures on broader cultural developments, or even in a comparative way of the similarities and differences among the world’s various traditional warrior cultures. A critical question here concerns the transition from preindustrial to industrial era patterns. Warrior elites as such arguably disappeared with the spread of industrial mass society and the new forms of mass politics industrialization created. But in many ways the values of traditional warrior cultures have transitioned neatly into the bureaucratic, institutional settings of modern military forces, as one look at television recruiting advertisements for, say, the United States Marine Corps demonstrates instantly. How well cultural values with roots in the coercive, hierarchical structures of preindustrial complex societies fit into the more egalitarian, democratic and market-based socioeconomic and political structures of modern societies is an open question seriously in need of careful historical scholarship with a global perspective (see, e.g., Enloe 2007).
More broadly, variations in cultures of war offer a tantalizing field for further investigation. Warrior elites were not the only social group with input into the construction of such cultures. In the preindustrial world, the interaction of warrior values with religion produced among other things theories about Just War, most famously in the formulations of Augustine that Aquinas refined and systematized in the Christian tradition that have strong parallels in Islamic just war theory, but also in different ways in other traditions (Brekke 2005). Crusading theory is exhaustively studied in medieval European scholarship, but the topic of holy war more generally would benefit from a broader, more global and comparative approach. The modern parallel with such topics is the intersection between war and nationalism over the last two centuries, nationalistic ideology having largely displaced (or in some cases reoriented) religion as the most important ideological framework for conflict both between and within states.
Finally, consideration of war and culture brings us back to some of the methodological issues explored early in this chapter from a different perspective. In his brilliant examination of epistemologies of military experience, reporting, and historiography, The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (2008), Yuval Harari analyzes how, at least in Western culture, there was a shift in such epistemologies that has vital implications for the writing of military history today, implications that gain even greater force when set in a complex, multicultural context. Briefly, Harari shows that in medieval and early modern Europe, war, like most other human experiences outside mystical revelation, was subject to an “eye-witness” epistemology: information was gained through seeing events; that information could then be narrated. Narration passed on the eye-witness’s information to others, including experts – those with moral (or academic/professional) authority to interpret information and create knowledge. But the rise during the later eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century of Romanticism, with its at least partial rejection of the dominance of Reason in favor of direct emotional experience and sensation, gave rise to what Harari calls an epistemology of “flesh-witnessing.” The crucial claim of flesh-witnessing is that the experiences of a flesh-witness (to combat, especially, the “ultimate experience” of Harari’s title) cannot be transferred by narration. As the saying goes, “you had to be there”: a listener may come to know the events the flesh-witness experienced, but it is the experiential aspect itself that is crucial, so the claim goes, so the hearer’s new information is worthless. As a consequence, only flesh-witnesses can claim the authority to interpret what the combat experience means. Flesh-witnessing, as Harari shows, has underlain the claims of both militarists (Hitler, the former corporal, being a prime example) and pacifists (Erich-Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, from the same war).
In either form, however, acceptance of flesh-witnessing as the epistemological foundation of military analysis removes debate about war – and by extension about the history of war – not just from academic analysis but from the public sphere altogether, with serious implications for the democratic debate about policy of which the writing of history is arguably an important part. Thus, what Harari’s analysis reveals is the danger of flesh-witnessing as an epistemology. By implication, it therefore shows the importance of world history, and especially, in this context, of world military history, to the globalizing public sphere of a connected world in which there is no shortage in the capacity and the will for global conflict.
Note
1 Ironically, horses evolved in the Americas, but after spreading across the Bering land bridge to Asia went extinct in their place of origin before humans arrived there from Asia. They did not reappear until imported by the Spanish in the 1500s.
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