Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I'll begin by saying that I don't understand how anyone can award this book anything less than 5 stars. Some books you read simply to get information but this is one book that is a pleasure to read. Aside from being well-researched and well-written it is pleasing to the eye as well, with many interesting illustrations. The book covers warfare around the world in the period from 1450-2000. It's meant to be a survey rather than a comprehensive account of the history of warfare over the past 550 years. If it were comprehensive it would probably require something like 10 volumes at a thousand pages each! Instead what Black manages to convey to the reader is the idea that while Europe was evolving, there were major developments taking place in other continents and regions around the world. He also demonstrates that for much of this period European nations were not the pre-eminent military powers around the world. The Chinese, and the Mughals in India, were both expanding and conquering neighbouring territories as were the Ottoman Turks. It has the effect of enlarging your point of view and understanding that the military supremacy of the West was not the foregone conclusion that some historians have made it out to be. Well worth getting if you come across it.

There are already some good reviews so I will only suggest reading the following books on war in addition to Black's somehow dry work: a) "War in human civilization" by Azar Gat; b) "War before Civilization. The Myth of the Peaceful Savage", by Lawrence Keeley; c) "How War Began" by Keith F. Otterbein; d) "War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires" by Peter Turchin; and e) "War and the Law of Nations: A General History" by Stephen Neff.

I read this because of a History of War class in college. Black does a remarkable job of making mention of lots of conflicts that most people have never heard of before. But he jumps around alot, mentioning some people and wars very briefly and totally out of nowhere and often jumping around a bit. If you a want a very summarized look at military history in the last 550 years, this is it. Just don't expect details or alot of coherency.