Rethinking Military History

Jeremy Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134477012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Rethinking Military History is a bold new 'thought book' that reconsiders military history at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The chapters provide a valuable and concise survey of the main themes in the study of military history from 1500 to the present day as Jeremy Black reveals the main trends in the practice and approach to mili

Chapter 1

---

Introduction

---

[N]o field is more attuned to the present than military history, even though many of the people who are interested in it can seem nostalgic and backward-looking. Fear, especially what the current or next war may bring, concentrates the mind.

Michael Sherry, 2000¹

Military history is arguably the last stronghold of what historiographers call the ‘Whig interpretation’ … [it] sees the development of warfare as progressive.

Dennis Showalter, 2002²

Diversity

Popular work in military history, discussed in the next chapter, tends to concentrate on an established list of topics, rather than ranging further afield; and, for such an account, it is necessary to turn to a far less extensive literature, much, but by no means all, of which is more academic in its tone and origin. With this literature, however, it is important to be wary about meta-narratives (overarching interpretations), and to be cautious about paradigms, mono-causal explanations and much of the explanatory culture of long-term military history. Instead, it is important to emphasize the diversity of military practice, through both time and space, and to be hesitant in adducing characteristics and explanations for military capability and change.

Linked to this, it is also important to be wary of the concept of a single Western way of war, as suggested, explicitly or implicitly, in much of the literature, unless the thesis is accompanied by due notice of the variety of contexts and ‘taskings’ (objectives set for the military) involved. Far from there being such a single Western way of war, there were, and still are, a variety of military cultures and practices within the West, ranging from conflict with other regular forces to counter-insurgency and policing operations. Rather than, as is usually done, treating the latter as in some ways lesser forms of warfare that, at the most, represented adaptations of existing methods, it is necessary to appreciate the pluralistic nature of warfare and then to build this into theoretical discussions about the processes of military development. Such an appreciation undermines clear rankings of capability and prowess, not least because of the range of taskings the militaries are expected to pursue, an issue discussed in Chapter five.

More troubling than the underplaying of diversity within the West, much of which stems from a misleading attempt to discern supposedly inherent characteristics, has been the tendency to simplify the non-West, an issue raised in Chapter three. Instead, in reality, in terms of military cultures and environments, the range of the non-West was immense. This, indeed, played a role in the difficulties that Western militaries experienced in seeking over the last half-millennium to exercise military dominance over much of the world's populations – although other factors, not least the very varied degree of Western commitment, were also very important. Rather than simply repeating the standard account of Western successes, beginning with Vasco da Gama and Hernán Cortes, it is worth also considering, for example, the reasons for European military failures in Africa prior to the nineteenth century, as well as the problems encountered by the Europeans in East and South Asia. While it is true that the major empires in the New World, those of the Aztecs and Incas, were rapidly conquered in the early sixteenth century, the bulk of the world's population did not live there. Furthermore, although, from the late fifteenth century, European warships and merchantmen increasingly sailed the oceans, providing the means of power projection, deep-draught European ships, once on their opposite shores, found it difficult to operate in inshore, estuarine and riverine waters; and here the major changes in force projection did not occur until the nineteenth century, a change in which motivation as well as technology played a major role.

An emphasis on variety, both in the West and in the non-West, has obvious consequences for the relationship between historians' approaches to war and those of other subject specialists. If the historians' emphasis is on diversity, for example on the role of particular military cultures, this challenges generic approaches to the study of war – although the diversity can also be seen as an enabler of relative capability between powers. In addition, it is possible to seek a reconciliation between variety and theoretical models by seeing the former as arising largely from environmental adaptation. This is a question that is ripe for examination from the perspectives of history, anthropology and sociology. For example, it is possible to consider the introduction of gunpowder weaponry, to ask why this was employed differently, and with contrasting results, in particular societies. This question draws attention to issues of process when considering adaptation, an issue addressed in Chapter four: there is a somewhat crude belief that societies adapt in order to optimize their military capability and performance, but the process of change is in fact far more complex, and often unclear.

Change

More generally, there is need for a debate on how best to explain military change. Models that assume some mechanistic, if not automatic, search for efficiency, and define this in terms of a maximization of force, do violence to the complex process by which interest in new methods interacted with powerful elements of continuity. For example, the varied reaction to firearms is best understood not in terms of military progress, nor of administrative sophistication, nor of cultural superiority, but rather as a response to the different tasks and possibilities facing the armies of the period, within a context in which it was far from clear which weaponry, force structure, tactics, or operational method were better, or could be adopted most successfully. Indeed, in the case of gunpowder, like earlier the stirrup, it has been argued that ‘administrative improvements preceded military change, and that military change preceded the introduction of any new military technology. … The age of cavalry was really the age of bad infantry, and was a political, not a technological, phenomenon’.³

Linked to this emphasis on different tasks and possibilities should be a measure of scepticism about the notion of a ‘paradigm’ power (or military culture) that others sought to emulate. This situation was indeed the case to a certain extent within particular military systems, although less so than the more common borrowing of particular techniques and weapons. The role of a paradigm power, and of the diffusion of its methods at the global level, is often exaggerated however. This is particularly the case for the situation prior to the last two centuries: the circumstances under which the USA currently fulfils the role provides scant guidance to the position with major powers several centuries ago, while the force projection sought today by the USA is exceptional, and thus lessens the applicability of the paradigm-diffusion model.

Strategic cultures

It is also necessary to consider the dynamic relationship between the problems that societies faced in determining what is optimal capability, and the contested character of what are termed the strategic cultures within which military goals were set, and thus which defined the objectives to be pursued by this apparently optimal capability. In making judgements, the perils of neglecting this contested character are significant. To take, for example, eighteenth-century India: it is fruitless to criticize Indian rulers for failing to address adequately the challenge posed by the Western-pattern militaries deployed from the 1740s by the English and French East India Companies, unless due attention is devoted to the continued assaults by cavalry forces advancing into India from the north-west: Nadir Shah of Persia in 1739, and the Afghans in the 1750s. Although the latter were to be the last iteration of a long series of attacks going back for more than two millennia, there was no reason to believe that this process was coming to a close, and that Europeans were to be a more serious military challenge. Indeed, Europeans had been active on the Indian coasts for nearly two and a half centuries before, in the 1740s, European-trained militaries started to play a key role in Indian power politics.

Similarly, to underline again the lack of agreement about strategic culture, it was far from clear in the early 1930s whether the principal challenges that Britain and France would face would be from insurrection in their colonies or from confrontation with other technologically-advanced militaries; and if the latter, there was still a considerable difference between the challenge posed by Japanese naval power in East Asian waters and what might stem from the development of the Italian or German militaries. Strategic culture as well as weaponry needs appeared to be in flux: in his Rulers of the Indian Ocean (1927), G.A. Ballard, a British admiral, argued that the rise in American and Japanese naval power had transformed the situation, as it was no longer sufficient for Britain to prevail over European rivals in order to win global naval dominance. He presented the British empire as particularly vulnerable in the Indian Ocean:

As regards its present form or fabric the Empire may be roughly divided into an occidental half – including the British Isles – and an oriental; which are held together commercially and strategically by the Imperial lines of communication across the Indian Ocean. … If those connections are cut, the two halves of the Empire will fall apart as surely as night follows day.

The argument about goals was directly linked to the debate about procurement in the shape of the desirability of the development of a major naval base at Singapore. In the event, prior to attack by Japan in 1941–2, Britain and its navy was to face, in 1940, the totally unexpected challenge of the German conquest of the European coastline from the Spanish frontier to the North Cape in Norway. This led to an increase in the number of German naval bases and a decrease in the capacity of the British navy to mount an effective blockade of its European rivals, a decrease that also owed much to the impact of air power. This issue serves as a reminder of the need to consider perception studies when discussing military history, particularly when addressing how strategic cultures moulded military goals.

The complexities and variations seen in the processes of military change also help break down or, at least qualify, attempts at environmental determinism. Thus, for example, rather than presenting Eurasian nomadic warfare just in terms of innate ecological advantages, stemming from the possibilities for horsemanship, it is appropriate also to consider the extent to which nomad skills and success varied and changed, alongside the limitations of nomads and the extent of inter-nomadic warfare.⁴

The intellectual context of military history

Environmental determinism is an instance of how thought about war was but part of wider intellectual currents. It is difficult to separate military history from thought about war, because the past has generally been used as the source of examples and ideas, and military history has usually been integral to military thought. This is least the case in the modern West, as, from the eighteenth century and even more the nineteenth, this has been focused on a cult of progress and thus on how best to get to the future. In such a context, military history has more clearly been a source of example, but not of wisdom – not least because of the notion that changes in war stemming from technological developments have made past war-making largely redundant.

The potency of the role of examples remains the case in modern Western public discussion. Thus, in the crisis stemming from the events of 11 September 2001, there were references to the Pearl Harbor attacks, while in the subsequent discussion of policy toward Iraq, critics of intervention were labelled appeasers and direct references were made to the failure to fight Hitler prior to 1939 (and, for the USA, 1941). It is, however, far less clear that such references add up to any coherent views on the use of force based on the application of historically tested concepts. Indeed, despite efforts to teach military history to officers, the historical memory of the American military establishment and of policy makers in the American government extends no further back in time than World War Two. Faith in technology is so strong and pervasive that earlier history is seen as irrelevant and there is a lack of interest in earlier historical parallels.

The academic study of war, including military history, cannot be abstracted from the particular contours of academic disciplines and how they have changed through time. Thus, the variable division of labour principle that interested British intellectuals such as Adam Smith, William Robertson and Edward Gibbon in the eighteenth century led them to consider cultural and historical variations in the sociology of warfare,⁵ and within that context, to explain the development of professional militaries of regular troops. This approach was given a more technological emphasis in the nineteenth century, as the machine age advanced, although the theme of the power of will was also potent in this culture. The stress on technology has remained a powerful emphasis, unsurprisingly given the nature of the modern world, and the political and intellectual emphasis on programmes and practices of directed modernization. After World War Two, there was also a shift in Western attention away from combat and toward conflict and the wider resonances of military activity, specifically with the ‘war and society’ approach of the so-called new military history discussed in Chapter two.

Now as far as military history is concerned, the tendency to ‘de-militarize’ military history and to consider ‘combatants’ who experienced war but not fighting, seen with part, but by no means all, of the new military history, is less novel than it was – and, at least in part, has run its course. At the same time, however, new themes have been offered within this general approach, and it has been applied widely in chronological and geographical terms.⁶ Furthermore, the relation between war and society continues to be very important as the broad context in which other issues are considered.

T...