Chapter 2 brings to light a dozen desertion-themed plays and operas that followed in the wake of Le Siège de Calais. These works, which were performed during the Old Regime’s twilight, are analyzed alongside recent scholarship on military and early modern masculinities to tease out the theatricalization of an emerging martial culture that drew on emotional brotherhood and feminine exclusion. This chapter includes a comparative analysis of two versions of one play, Le Déserteur, a sentimental anti-war drame by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and an alternative version of the play that was dramaturgically “militarized” by Joseph Patrat for soldiers and sailors at the navy’s theater in Brest (Le Théâtre de la Marine). A close reading of variants, edits, and both textual and cultural manipulation presents war drama as a site of conflict in a larger intellectual battle where different factions in French society argued about reform cultures inside military and theatrical circles.

Chapter 5 examines Corippus’ accounts of military activity, his battle narratives and his use of violent imagery. The first part of this chapter discusses the likely sequence of John’s campaigns in 546, 547 and 548. Certain conclusions are drawn regarding the size of John’s army, its constitution and the strategic goals he followed, as well as Moorish fighting practices in the same period.The second part of the chapter considers the long battle accounts within the Iohannis, and the political function they may have had. Stylized combat sequences were a very common feature of Greek and Latin epic, and Corippus added new and visceral imagery to the poetic repertoire. Violent imagery of battle was a display of poetic virtuosity, but also a means to address the ambiguities of ‘Moorish’ identity and political fealty. Battle clarified loyalties – and hence identities – in a manner that was not otherwise possible. Violent imagery accentuated this process, essentially transforming the ‘good’ Moors into heroes, (and so comparable to their Roman allies), and the ‘bad’ into abject and dismembered body parts. If the Iohannis was intended to reconstitute the body politic in North Africa, it frequently did so in an unusually literal manner.

The outbreak of the First World War presented the German Kaiserreich’s cultural elite with a major dilemma. Should they jettison the output of poets and playwrights, artists and musicians from the newly hostile Entente countries from programmes for public consumption? Or should they claim them as part of the common cultural stock of humanity, and continue to enjoy them as before? These debates rose to an especially acute pitch over the works of Shakespeare, which by 1914 had become a much-loved staple of the Wilhelmine dramatic canon. Rather than abandoning Shakespeare, German elites began an intensive campaign to reframe Germany as his ‘true’ home, rooted in his apparent closeness to the essence of the ‘German spirit’ – with correlative contempt for his supposedly inadequate reception in the Anglosphere. Shakespearean texts and cultural institutions were also co-opted systematically into the Kaiserreich’s war effort: to boost the morale and lionize the calibre of the German soldiery, to mark milestone events in the war’s trajectory, and as part of German diplomatic offensives abroad, especially in neutral countries. Overall, this essay casts wartime Shakespeare in a new and unusual light, illustrating the potential for state military propaganda to engage in projects of cultural reclamation.

This chapter further explores the relationship between knowledge, archives, and power, picking up when the monarch established Madrid as the capital in 1561. This enabled ministers to establish the first European rational factual archives to exercise dominion over overseas domains. My main argument is that the Council of the Indies and, starting in the 1580s, the special imperial boards managed to create three improved spheres of imperial administration thanks to these pioneering factual archives, in the areas of war, finance, and Franciscan affairs. I analyse how royal ministers largely succeeded in implementing various decision-making innovations: understanding the Indies in a synoptic way, improving the allocation of scarce financial and military resources, and identifying dubious requests coming from the New World. In addition, I underline how already in the 1590s this limited but important archival revolution had unexpected social and epistemological consequences within the administrative field. There was the expansion of the power of the secretaries, notaries, and other subordinates whose work and archival expertise allowed the ministers to successfully if selectively improve their most important decisions. This chapter also underscores the important role of secretaries’ wives as archival custodians.

Chapter 2 looks at the formation of a highly influential genre of modern war writing, the critical-military history that can be traced to the Welsh military officer Henry Lloyd and his History of the Late War in Germany (1766-90). Recent criticism has challenged traditional views of Lloyd as a merely neo-classical author with little relevance to modern conceptions of war. Building on this new research, this chapter shows how Lloyd’s approach to military history not only helped introduce concerns with the aesthetics of genius and sublimity into military thought, but that it also established a new way of conceptualising the historical conditions of war. By turning military thought away from traditions of memoir and maxims, Lloyd’s writing was critical for breaking down a neo-classical view of the commander as a figure of authority, command and action. As it transformed the history of war from a storehouse of examples to an object to be studied, it simultaneously reimagined the commander in relation to the quasi-natural ‘life’ of the army. A new, biopolitical conception of strategy emerges from Lloyd’s history as he attempts to comprehend the army as, in effect, an organism that lies outside the general’s complete control.

Chapter 7 investigates Veracruz’s function as a military bulwark of the Spanish Caribbean, focusing on the role of the free-black militia in the defense of the port. In the second half of the seventeenth century, territorial losses in Jamaica and Hispaniola and frequent attacks on its ships and ports forced Spain to reconsider its strategic priorities. Setting aside earlier fears of arming men of African descent, Spanish ports turned to free-black militias to fulfill the duties of defense. In Veracruz, free-black militia service was formalized in 1669, when militiamen received relief from an unpopular tribute tax. Remarkably, in their petition for tribute relief, Veracruz’s free-black militia cited precedents in Havana, Cartagena, Santo Domingo, and Campeche, manifesting an explicit articulation of a Mexican-Caribbean regional identity. Over the next thirty years, tribute relief for militia service was extended to free-black men in other Gulf Coast cities, but did not reach militias in the interior until the middle of the eighteenth century. The uneven use of tribute relief thus reinforced regional variations in colonial status systems.

The Conclusion reiterates the book’s purpose—to more clearly and faithfully reveal war’s truths to help prevent wars, reduce their damaging effects, and win when there is no other choice. War encompasses humanity, politics, and combat, and its dialectic nature reflects humanity’s duality—peaceful and warlike, good and evil. War theory and strategy are most effective when we value both sides of war’s dialectics, and genius often lies in understanding how and when to move from one extreme to another. War has many forms, but all are related in a continuum where assessments of relative capacity influence force viscosity and posture (attack and defense). Predicting war’s future character is critical to strategy, and this is best done by studying history, trends, current circumstances, and theory. Finally, while thorough, objective analysis confirms the impracticality of permanent peace, the potential for peace increases with the full, truthful knowledge of war and its relationship to humanity provided by sound war theory.

The Introduction argues that war’s danger, nuances, complexity, and impact on humanity demand further study, despite our seeming reluctance to do so. It contends that war is rife with contradictions which call out for further examination. For example, war evokes humanity’s worst traits, including vengeance, treachery, and hatred, and it has claimed millions of lives, spawned atrocities, and caused massive destruction. Yet, war has also inspired courage, honor, sacrifice, and loyalty, deposed tyrants, led to larger, more peaceful civilizations, and produced remarkable innovations that protect and preserve life. The introduction concludes by recommending that war’s repulsiveness and complexity should inspire, not deter, scholarly attention, for as with any dangerous phenomenon, understanding war’s nature is the best way to gain enough control over it to prevent wars and to diminish their hazards and prevalence.

This chapter studies the four branches of the Athenian armed forces. For each branch, it discusses the legal and social positions of branch members, the means by which they were recruited and called up, and the history and the organization of their branch.

This chapter examines the fall of Dutch Taiwan to a Chinese state (the Zheng family maritime state) in 1662, suggesting that that event can be understood by focusing on two things. First, the VOC, although the most powerful maritime structure of Europe, was successful in East Asia largely because East Asian states were less interested in controlling maritime space and ports than were European states. The Zheng state, born in the 1650s, was an anomaly in East Asia: a Chinese state oriented toward seaborne commerce. Second, Zheng military power was high, although Dutch military techniques and technologies proved instrumental in holding off his numerically superior army for nearly a year. The chapter ends with counterfactual speculations about what would have happened had the Dutch held Taiwan: the Qing dynasty, which eventually defeated the Zheng family and took Taiwan, would not have incorporated Taiwan into its empire.