War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450-2000 [Paperback]

Jeremy Black (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0300082851 | ISBN-13: 978-0300082852

In this brilliant history of warfare, Jeremy Black is the first to approach the entire modern era from a comprehensive global perspective. He provides a wide-ranging account of the nature, purpose, and experience of war over the past half-millennium and argues the importance of viewing the rise of European power within a wider international context. Investigating both land and sea warfare, Black examines weaponry, tactics, strategy, and resources as well as the political, social, and cultural impact of conflict. The book takes issue with established interpretations, not least those that emphasize technology, and challenges the view that European military and naval forces were dominant throughout the period. European mastery at sea did not always translate into equivalent success on land, says Black, and many non-European military systems-the Ottomans in their expansionist years, Babur and the Mughals in sixteenth-century India, and the Manchu in China in the following century, for example-were formidable in their own right. The author contends that in the nineteenth century, the focal period of Europe's military revolution, the international military balance shifted decisively. Black shows how military developments, combined with political, economic, and ideological shifts, influenced the nature and success of European imperialism. Linking debates on early modern history with those of more recent centuries, he offers a fundamental reexamination of the role of war in the progress of nations.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a tribute to Black's industry and scholarship...I am confident that it will feature prominently in the working libraries of professional historians and the reading lists of their students." Richard Holmes, Literary Review "This volume is essential for military historians and could be perused profitably by the general reader." Virginia Quarterly Review "With this book, Jeremy Black provides an account of how war has been waged over the past five and a half centuries in the European and non-European worlds. He has written what is in effect a global history of armed conflict." David B. Ralston, American Historical Review

About the Author

Jeremy Black is professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is the author of many books, including Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (ISBN: 0 300 06976 6, #25.00), also published by Yale University Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300082851
• ISBN-13: 978-0300082852
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #270,788 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book on military history I,ve read thus far., August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450-2000 (Hardcover)

War and the World is an extremely well researched and informative account of military history that is truly universal in scope. Jeremy Black has wisely expanded his focus beyond the constricting binds of Eurocentrism to produce a work of scholarship that douments, in detail, military developments in parts of the world ignored by conventional military history. His assertion that future domination by Europeans of most of the world after the fifteenth century was by no means a foregone conclusion is a legitimate one in light of the opposition they would receive from equally determined, aggressive and expansionist non-Europeans. He explores the limitations of European power, expounding on their powerful naval capabilty, but emphasizing their inabilty to be more then a significant presence beyond the coastal regions of places like West Africa. Expansionist peoples like the Dzhungars of central Asia, the Fulani of west Africa and the Moroccans (notably in the context of their little known, but spectacular defeat of the Portugeuse at the battle of Alcazarquivir in 1578) are mentioned, their successes or failures examined. In other military history texts, they would have been outright ignored. It is because of this kind of depth to the author's research that War and the World was a far more satisfying read then John Keegan's A History of Warfare. While War and the World spans a period of history from 1450-2000, I hope that Jeremy Black, should he decide to write another book on world military history, will extend his chronological scope to encompass warfare from the dawn of man onward. It would be interesting to read his perspectives on the Romans, Mongols and other aggressive peoples who forged bloody niches in the pre-modern age.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Evolution not Revolution in Military Affairs, October 18, 2002

By 

10th Legion "10th Legion" (Central Texas, United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450-2000 (Hardcover)

First of all this is not a book for the casual reader of military history. Although it reads as if it was designed to be used in a university history course, it assumes a fairly extensive knowledge of major world military events throughout the period under review. For the more knowledgeable reader of historical and contemporary military affairs, Jeremy Black offers a less radical view of the Revolution in Military Affairs based on a European-centric view of events. The strength of this book is that is broadens the scope of major military evolutionary trends to address the impact of geography, political, scientific, and demographic influences. Mr. Black strives and generally succeeds in bringing a "balanced" view of why military "revolutions" did and did not occur. I highly recommend this book to readers who have extensive background in both military and general world history. For more casual readers I recommend having a copy of R. Ernest and Trevor N. Dupuy's Encyclopedia of Military History and a good historical atlas for ready reference. Well done and recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Military Revolution meets The Will to Power, September 22, 2009

By 

Glenn McDorman (Denver) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: War and the World: Military Power and the Fate of Continents, 1450-2000 (Paperback)

With War and the World, Jeremy Black constructs a revisionist history of what has come to be known as "the military revolution." Black's approach is broader in both time and scope than those of Michael Roberts and Geoffrey Parker, the traditional proponents of the European military revolution. Unlike the work of Roberts, Black's history is a global history, and Black takes his argument up to the present day. Geoffrey Parker's work on the subject attempted to be global, but, as Black points out, it still took Europeans as the protagonists, and it did not extend beyond the early modern period. Instead, Black treats the "Rise of the West" from a detached perspective. And so, where Black is revisionist, it is not in arguing against the notion that the West employed novel technologies in its rise to global dominance, but rather in seeking to contextualize that story, to see it as contemporaries would have, and to resist the temptation of presentism that so often plagues historians writing large, synthetic theses.

Black's central argument is that there was no single cause for the success of European expansion. Rather, there was a complex interaction of developments around the world that provided an environment for expansion. Black argues that what historians and the general public have long regarded as a triumphant march to dominance was in fact fraught with defeat. Furthermore, Black demonstrates that many of the European "military" successes relied much less on raw military might than is generally assumed. Black writes that it is "necessary to note the extent to which the Europeans were not the sole dynamic powers in the world and, more generally, to draw attention to the limitations of European military power." Where Black does point to a general cause, he finds it in the combination of two things: the ability of Europeans to project their military capabilities around the world (what Black calls "global reach"), an ability that was not unique to Europe; and the willingness to project their power, which Black argues was the factor that set Europeans apart from the rest of the world.

War and the World is not a work of new research into contemporary primary sources, but rather a synthetic work reliant on the recent work of historians researching all areas of the modern world. Consequently, Black organizes his argument chronologically, devoting a chapter to each era in the standard European periodization. Within each chapter, Black presents European developments first, depicts those developments in action on the global stage, then offers a treatment of developments in the rest of the world. Broken down into this formula, it would appear that Black fails to live up to his own call for giving up the triumphalist approach, but such is not the case. Black is careful in each chapter to give near-equal weight to non-European history, writing at length of warfare in India, or central Asia, or sub-Saharan Africa in the complete absence of Europeans, presenting the expansions of the Mughals, the Ottomans, and the Japanese, for example, from their own perspective. Furthermore, Black is masterful in bringing the gradual Russian domination of central Asia and conflicts with Japan into the umbrella of European expansion, demonstrating that much of China's contact with the West occurred along its own frontier with Russia. When he reaches the end of the nineteenth century, Black takes a break from his chronological march to offer some thoughts about the effects that military developments and the rise of overseas empires had within Europe from 1450 until 1900, pointing out the dynamic way in which the use of global reach led to social and political systems that allowed for even more and better use.

Ultimately, Black's work is a success. From the start, Black sets out to place European expansion into a context and to examine it without the lenses of presentism. Black accomplishes both feats. This is not to say that the work is without faults. For all of Black's attempts to offer a work that is not Euro-centric, it remains so. Indeed, synthetic work will continue to be Euro-centric so long as it continues to be the work of scholars of European history. Compared to Roberts, Parker, and McNeil, War and the World is a study of world history. Compared to Huntington's clashing civilizations or Kissinger's "there can be only one" approach to international history, Black's work appears to be a calm and reasoned examination of material that is often used as ideological fodder. War and the World will be the dominant synthetic work describing "The Rise of the West" for at least a generation, and may very well come to serve as a textbook for many an undergraduate World History course. These places of honor are well deserved.