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Warfare and Culture in World History, Second Edition
About this book
An expanded edition of the leading text on military history and the role of culture on the battlefield
Ideas matter in warfare. Guns may kill, but ideas determine when, where, and how they are used. Traditionally, military historians attempted to explain the ideas behind warfare in strictly rational terms, but over the past few decades, a stronger focus has been placed on how societies conceptualize war, weapons, violence, and military service, to determine how culture informs the battlefield.
Warfare and Culture in World History, Second Edition, is a collection of some of the most compelling recent efforts to analyze warfare through a cultural lens. These curated essays draw on, and aggressively expand, traditional scholarship on war and society through sophisticated cultural analysis. Chapters range from an organizational analysis of American Civil War field armies, to an exploration of military culture in late Republican Rome, to debates within Ming Chinese officialdom over extermination versus pacification.
In addition to a revised and expanded introduction, the second edition of Warfare and Culture in World History now adds new chapters on the role of herding in shaping Mongol strategies, Spanish military culture and its effects on the conquest of the New World, and the blending of German and East African military cultures among the Africans who served in the German colonial army. This volume provides a full range of case studies of how culture, whether societal, strategic, organizational, or military, could shape not only military institutions but also actual battlefield choices.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half Title
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- List of Maps and Figures
- Preface to the Second Edition
- 1. Warfare and Culture
- 2. The Last Campaign: The Assyrian Way of War and the Collapse of the Empire
- 3. Disciplining Octavian: A Case Study of Roman Military Culture, 44–30 BCE
- 4. Herding the Enemy: Culture in Nomadic Warfare
- 5. How Spanish Was the Spanish Conquest? Reexamining Spanish Success in the New World
- 6. Of Bureaucrats and Bandits: Confucianism and Antirebel Strategy at the End of the Ming Dynasty
- 7. The Battle Culture of Forbearance, 1660–1789
- 8. Success and Failure in Civil War Armies: Clues from Organizational Culture
- 9. Imagining African Warfare: War Games and Military Cultures in German East Africa
- 10. German Military Culture and the Colonial War in Southwest Africa, 1904–1907
- 11. Connecting Culture and the Battlefield: Britain and the Empire Fight the Hundred Days
- 12. The American Culture of War in the Age of Artificial Limited War
- About the Contributors
- Index