Warfare in the Eighteenth Century (History of Warfare)

Rating:
Summary: Improper focus
Review: The stated purpose of Cassell's History of Warfare series is to provide a richly illustrated survey of, well, the history of warfare. Series editor John Keegan has assembled a team of distinguished historians to write this history. For the eighteenth century, he has chosen Jeremy Black, who is known for his support of the 'Military Revolution' thesis.
In his introduction, Black makes it clear that military history has for too long been "Eurocentric". He considers this unacceptable, and wishes to advance the cause of - for lack of a better term - multicultural military history. The resulting work is watered-down even by the standards of a general survey.
Black argues that European military theory/practices were not universally followed. Thus, in his opening chapter "War Without Europeans", Black narrates the Dsungar (a central Asian people) invasion of Tibet, describing the effectiveness of non-European tactics when applied between non-European cultures. Throughout the book he lists scores of obscure peoples, empires, and battles, all in an effort to buttress his thesis.
You really get the sense that Black relishes his defiant stance against 'conservative' military history. He bashes Frederick the Great and the Prussians in a paragraph and a caption, and doesn't even provide a map of the Seven Years' War. But then he showers praise on Alaung-hpaya and the mighty Burmese army, even parcelling out a precious map of South-East Asia.
Black's thesis is faulty for several reasons. The first is his contention that non-European tactics are deserving of study on a wider scale because of their successful application by one non-European state against another. While this may be true within the context of a war between two South-East Asian states, when compared against the awesome effectiveness of European tactics, the former simply does not hold up.
The second problem with Black's thesis is his belief that a battle should be widely known simply because it was important to the participants, or that the bigger a battle is, the more it should be studied. All conflicts, whether they be between dozens of nomads for control of grazing land or between giant mechanized armies for control of industrial cities, are crucial and memorable to the participants involved. The question historians must ask (especially historians writing general histories encompassing whole centuries) is which conflict is more deserving of inclusion into the historical narrative. Since every military on Earth is modeled after the European one, the obvious choice is to strongly emphasize European military history, leaving non-European history to a separate volume.




Rating:
Summary: I won't buy this book
Review: Having read the other clear reviews on this book and also having browsed thru it myself, I can see that the author is probably attempting too much in trying to cover All warfare in the 18th century in this one book. He has made his task even more difficult by moving away from a Eurocentric view of global warfare. The problem of course is compounded by the fact that this would require a synopsis of warfare covering different geographical settings, different forces and logistics and different cultures. This is not achieved here.
I note with interest that this series will in the future cover other non-European warfare and colonial warfare and would prefer to save my money for these more promising offerings.

Rating:
Summary: A good try at a difficult topic
Review: Jeremy Black wrote this work as part of the Cassell History of Warfare series edited by John Keegan. Unlike the other historians in the series who were assigned specific wars (i.e. WWI, WWII, American Civil War) or types of war (i.e. War in the Air 1914-1945, Napoleonic Wars) he had to cover a whole century on a global scale. He tackled this in an interesting fashion. Rather than focusing on battles or wars as many of his predecessors had done in their sweeping works (JFC Fuller's Military History, etc.) He tried to take a mixed strategy. He first looks at the nature warfare among the different civilizations. He organizes the first three chapters along these lines: 1. War without Europeans, 2. Europeans versus Non-Europeans, 3. Transoceanic Conflict between Europeans. The remaining chapters deal with the American Revolution (a global war), wars within Europe, the importance of naval warfare - which allowed nations to fight on a global scale, and the developing background for Napoleonic innovations. It is admittedly still eurocentric, but Black acknowledges this and still does provide one of the few popular descriptions of warfare outside of Europe for this time period. It should give the reader a curiosity to read more. His bibliography is quite good, although more academic - and deserves attention by the reader. The 2nd and 3rd chapters give credence to the notion that perhaps the first "world war" was actually fought by the French and English empires of the 18th century (by Barbara Tuchman?). Though the armies were not always large, operations were planned and mounted around the globe. The text does read smoothly and there are several nice illustrations and maps. It is not without some faults as noted by the other reviewers, but the author should be given credit for the "degree of difficulty" of his task. It is a good addition to the libraries of military history buffs who are interested in the horse and musket era. It isn't for the specialist American Revolution reader - not enough depth, but for those who are curious about that era, it will open your mind to considering that grand plans were plotted out in an era where it took weeks to months to position an army or fleet for operations.

Rating:
Summary: Warfare in the Eighteenth Century
Review: Readers familiar with Jeremy Black's work will recognize Warfare in the Eighteenth Century as another solid effort by the author. This book is richly illustrated and has several good maps to help aid the book's presentation. However, if not for the many illustrations and maps, the book might barely be half as long as it is. Black does not really challenge the reader with new theories, in fact this is essentially a continuation of theories set for in his earlier work, European Warfare, 1660-1815.

Many of Black's arguments are continuations of earlier studies and this does affect the overall effectiveness of the present work. He dazzles the reader with his knowledge of obscure (are largely insignificant) conflicts, particularly those between Europeans and natives from the new worlds, but this does not necessarily make his case. He flits between battles and opponents much the way a warbler flits between branches in a tree. He is always moving, but is not always going anywhere. He randomly expands his cases into the nineteenth century when it suits him to do so, and this further confuses the reader.

But Black is not pretentious about his objectives. They are relatively contained to discussions on technology's role in warfare and a variety of locations achieving basically the same types of accomplishments. He rarely strays from this theory, but since he already did this in European Warfare 1660-1815, it is largely irrelevant or at least redundant.

Yet his knowledge is impressive and the reader should come away with knowing a bit more than before they started the book. Given this, and the fact that this effort is much more readable than European Warfare, it is worth a look.

Rating:
Summary: Warfare in the Eighteenth Century
Review: Readers familiar with Jeremy Black's work will recognize Warfare in the Eighteenth Century as another solid effort by the author. This book is richly illustrated and has several good maps to help aid the book's presentation. However, if not for the many illustrations and maps, the book might barely be half as long as it is. Black does not really challenge the reader with new theories, in fact this is essentially a continuation of theories set for in his earlier work, European Warfare, 1660-1815.

Many of Black's arguments are continuations of earlier studies and this does affect the overall effectiveness of the present work. He dazzles the reader with his knowledge of obscure (are largely insignificant) conflicts, particularly those between Europeans and natives from the new worlds, but this does not necessarily make his case. He flits between battles and opponents much the way a warbler flits between branches in a tree. He is always moving, but is not always going anywhere. He randomly expands his cases into the nineteenth century when it suits him to do so, and this further confuses the reader.

But Black is not pretentious about his objectives. They are relatively contained to discussions on technology's role in warfare and a variety of locations achieving basically the same types of accomplishments. He rarely strays from this theory, but since he already did this in European Warfare 1660-1815, it is largely irrelevant or at least redundant.

Yet his knowledge is impressive and the reader should come away with knowing a bit more than before they started the book. Given this, and the fact that this effort is much more readable than European Warfare, it is worth a look.

Rating:
Summary: Nice pictures but unsatisfying content
Review: Since a synthetic history/overview of eighteenth century warfare is long overdue, I was eagerly looking forward to the arrival of my copy of this book. However, it looks like the task of intelligently relating eighteenth century military experience still remains to be done, with this volume merely adding itself to the volumes of cursory and shoddy military scholarship. What Professor Black sets out to do is a noble (and daunting) project. Namely, he intends to move the book's focus away from a Eurocentric perspective, and to broaden his scope to include the world's systems of warfare, which in the eighteenth century still retained strong regional variety. What he achieves is only a distant shadow of his goal.

Black does succeed in recounting world wide military affairs for the period, and comes tantalizingly close at times to broadening our understanding of the complexity of the dialogue which went into shaping the European armies of this century--for despite Black's original intention of presenting an objective world picture, he still finds himself sliding down the slippery slope of Eurocentrism, with almost the entire latter half of the book dedicated to how European armies interacted with armies of other nation and how they fought on colonial soil. Not a fault in itself, but a telling sign of this book's lack of focus.

So not only does Black's general approach fail to bear fruit due his undisciplined deviance from his stated original aim, the book also fails on many smaller fronts. For this book could still prove itself of value providing that each chapter presented it subject matter in a competent, rigorous, and organized manner. But it doesn't and reading much of the book is literaly dizzying due to its disjointed style. For example, his chapter on the American Revolution is highly disorganized. At one time the reader is presented with a description of the American colonist's dogmatic adherence to European line tactics despite the many mythic images of lone American riflemen shooting from behind trees. But with out warning Black then launches into a discussion of how important small detachments of American riflemen were, and how confounding they were to hapless British commanders who would unceremoniously get picked off of their horses at rangers hitherto believed to be safe. That Black ends the discussion at this point (moving on without conclusion or warning to another unrelated topic), leaves the reader uncertain as to the actual influence of such light infantry skirmishing on the subsequent course of the Revolution (and warfare in general). In another chapter, Black extols the virtues of the socket bayonet, but then later confusingly comments on how bayonets were almost never employed in actual combat (there is a conclusion to be made here but Black simply moves on, apparently unaware of the apparent contradiction). Other problems are less ambiguous in their error, such as when he confuses 'volley' fire with firing by ranks, or when he perpetuates the myth that smoothbore muskets were unreliable and utterly inaccurate, while never then addressing why armies continued to employ them and why causalities could be so very high in some battles.

In all, I really found little of lasting value in this book since Black undermines his credibility and clarity so often. Perhaps the one thing that tempts me to keep the book are the beautifully rendered full color illustrations--many I've not seen before.