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.
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