"A Short History of War

By Jeremy Black

(Yale, 258 pages, $25)

War might not be the locomotive of history, but it drives the writing of the world's most-published historian. Jeremy Black's extraordinary body of work regularly returns to themes in military history, expanding from his base in the 18th century to tackle strategic and tactical concerns with unusual chronological and geographic range. His latest book distills his achievements as the most prolific historian in the English language into 40 short chapters that describe war from the ancient world to the present day. Mr. Black, an emeritus professor of history at Exeter University and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, begins his account in prehistory, demonstrating how early rock paintings depicted the success of humans over animals, and how ancient writing portrayed the success of some humans over others. Events in the centuries that followed confirm Mr. Black's observations that "fighting is integral to human society," that the factors that determine military success are often enduring, and that war-making is likely to continue.

 

Rather than provide detailed accounts of individual actions, "A Short History of War" shows us why war matters and what it has achieved. Much of this account centers on developments in materiel. Mr. Black describes the development of "force multipliers," like medieval castles, while noting that their radius of power was determined by cavalry capacity, and therefore limited to a radius of around 25 kilometers, or about 15 miles. He illustrates the use of force conservation and describes a method of conquest adopted on the medieval steppe, in which armies devastated large parts of a region, from which they withdrew, creating an unstable buffer zone around territory that they intended to retain.

 

Mr. Black emphasizes that technology has been no guarantee of success, and that resources have only been as useful as they have been suitable to the environment in which they have been deployed. Very few fighting forces, he argues, have been as adaptable as the Mughals, whose conquest of large parts of south-central India in the 17th century required their armies and supply chains to adapt to the heat and humidity of the Brahmaputra Valley as well as to the snowy wastes of central Asia -- a challenge that few Western armies have successfully addressed.

 

"A Short History of War" is alert to the causes of armed struggle. Mr. Black shows how regional conflicts have erupted over religion and economics. The Islamic conquest of North Africa and large parts of Europe was stopped by Charles Martel's victory at Tours, which made possible the eventual establishment of the Holy Roman Empire and the prospect of civilizational struggle. The opportunity for a global war came in the late 15th century, when Portuguese forces reached India and Spaniards took control of the Caribbean, and as France, the Netherlands and England emerged as rival colonial powers. But environments are never neutral, and oceans introduced challenges that military planners also had to address.

The naval supremacy that made possible the conquests of the age of exploration ensured that the oceans would be dominated until the 20th century by Western European states. But Europe's oceanic empires were unable to survive the catastrophe of war on a global scale. World War II was followed by history's most significant transfer of territorial control. The decolonization that began with the defeat of the German and Japanese empires continued in the decline of their British and other Allied counterparts, and eventually in the collapse of European communism and the defeat of the U.S.S.R. Yet colonial conflicts have continued, and forces in Kashmir, Yemen, Tibet, Eritrea, Katanga and many other places have fought smaller engagements in pursuit of self-determination.

These kinds of insurgencies are likely to continue, Mr. Black notes, as he speculates about the future of armed conflict. Water will become the world's most contested resource. As recent events in Hong Kong suggest, cities will become theaters of war even as their population density, with the surveillance it makes possible, works to limit opportunities for resistance.

Yet for all that Mr. Black's book describes the history of conflict, "A Short History of War" is engaged in a struggle of its own. Despite its modest title, this work mounts a broadside against some of the most influential current historiographical trends. Mr. Black argues that war must be understood in global terms and that our preoccupation with local and regional histories has stymied our understanding of events beyond the West. English-language historians have made much of the attempted Spanish invasion of England in 1597, for example, forgetting the more significant fact that in the same year 140,000 Japanese troops invaded Korea.

Yet this Western-centric narrative, Mr. Black continues, also obfuscates the history of Europe. The achievements of Napoleon are widely recognized, but Mr. Black argues that his British and Russian opponents were superior military powers when their global commitments are taken into account. After all, between 1805 and 1814, while the Napoleonic Wars were at their height, Russia was also fighting the Turks, the Swedes and the Persians, while Britain was pursuing campaigns in India and North America. Ever the contrarian, Mr. Black suggests that the current concern with decolonizing history risks underestimating the significance of non-Western conflicts and imperial systems, ultimately reinforcing the same hierarchies of power that the effort to decolonize sets out to subvert.

Over and over again, war has changed the world. Sometimes its contribution has been banal: a competition to find an easily transportable alternative to butter for Napoleon III's soldiers led to the invention of margarine, for example. But its contribution has mostly been structural. Explaining global history as perpetual crisis, "A Short History of War" offers an expansive and oftenevocative account of great causes that are never lost or won." [1]

1.   Fighting The Battles
Crawford Gribben.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 11 Nov 2021: A.17.