War and the Rise of the State.

• Author: Spector, Ronald H.

MANY HISTORIANS and social scientists harbor a strong antipathy toward the serious study of war and its influence. Their dislike is based not only on understandable emotional and moral considerations, but also on intellectual ones. The history of wars and warfare as it is taught in most general high school and college history courses appears not only repulsive, but sterile, repetitive and boring. The same countries always seem to be marching their armies across Europe and fighting big, bloody but inconclusive battles--the names to be memorized for the final exam. One war and battle follows another all waged by kings and generals with easily forgettable names over equally arcane and forgettable issues: "the Habsburg-Valois struggle," "the Austrian Succession," "the Schleswig-Holstein Question." Even before the era of music videos and computer games, this was the kind of stuff guaranteed to induce terminal boredom in any red-blooded high school or college student.

For those with a serious interest in history there were also more interesting subjects to pursue in the areas of political and intellectual and, more recently, social, cultural, urban and gender history. Left to themselves, military historians--many of them soldiers, or former soldiers, rather than academics--concentrated their efforts on chronicling battles and campaigns, analyzing strategy, tactics and generalships and tracing the development of weapons and their impact on the battlefield. Historians of foreign relations, more numerous and respectable than military historians, but still a somewhat isolated and narrow group, focused their efforts on identifying the causes of war and the subsequent course of peace negotiations. Many historians of both sorts produced important, even distinguished work, but their impact on their academic colleagues and the larger reading public was negligible.

All that began to change with the publication of John Keegan's The Face of Battle in 1976. Keegan chose to examine three battles, Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, which had often been described before. Yet by attempting to reconstruct what these battles were like for those who actually fought them, by looking at them from the point of view of the combatants, rather than the generals, the strategists or the chroniclers, he was able to show that the history of war was both more awful and more interesting than had previously been supposed. His work captured a large audience, including many people who had read no military history before, and inspired graduate students and younger academics to apply and expand his methods and techniques and to ask new questions about old subjects such as battles, leadership and the relationships between technology and warfare. As for Keegan, he received the ultimate accolade for an academic: he was invited to contribute to The New York Review of Books. Over the next fifteen years he continued to author books which dealt imaginatively with broad and difficult subjects relating to war, generalship, and command and control in The Mask of Command (1987) and war at sea in The Price of Admiralty (1989). In A History of Warfare he addresses an even broader subject, war in human history.

BRUCE O. PORTER'S book is also about war in human history, at least in the period since the Renaissance. Yet his book...