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War has always been a prominent feature
in world affairs. Civil wars within countries and international
wars between states have aimed to solve disputes and settle
scores since the beginning of history. Countries and peoples
have been made and un-made by war, and the politics of defence
and offence have dominated the thoughts of leaders. Mindful
of this, a discipline of military history, largely separate
from the mainstream of historical study, has aimed to explain
warfare in the past partly in order that we might be able
to make predictions about war in the future.
This iconoclastic study of war since the
fifteenth century reassesses warfare as a whole, showing
that many of the themes identified by military historians
have been flawed or only partial in their truth. The importance
of technology, the pre-eminence of the West and clear-cut
predictions about the future of war in the nuclear age are
all demonstrated to be wide of the mark. Instead Professor
Black proposes a new history of war in the world that owes
more to chaos theory than to any neat assumptions about
the invulnerability of superpowers.
Jeremy Black places war in its social and
cultural context, from the evolution of specialised troops
in the earliest civilisations to the likely future scenarios
for war in the space age. He uses a rich array of concepts
and counterfactuals to illustrate the limitations of the
old military history and to urge careful consideration of
a much broader range of issues from which to approach the
question of what war will be like in the future. We are
shown that, for all the advances in technology, with pinpoint
accuracy of weaponry and space-age communications technology,
war in the future will not be so clear-cut as we imagine.
Warfare has never been, and can never be such a simple matter.
Anyone interested in the history of human
conflict or intrigued by the possible causes and outcomes
of war in the future will be gripped by this powerful and
provocative book by a leading military historian.
Jeremy Black MBE is Professor of History
at the University of Exeter. His many publications include
Why Wars Happen, War and the World, A New History
of Wales and A New History of England. He is a
Council member of the Royal Historical Society and the British
Records Association.
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