War in Europe

A bold, tightly-conceived overview of European military history from 1450 to the present, which combines a wealth of often unfamiliar detail with characteristically provocative and challenging re-interpretations of traditional opinion on warfare, state and society. From scepticism about the role of military revolution during the early modern centuries, through challenges to the nation in arms of the Revolutionary Wars, or to his stress on the increase in civilian control over armies as a phenomenon of WW2 and thereafter, War in Europe draws upon patterns, changes and continuities in conflict from the Hundred Years War to the War in Iraq. The book will not disappoint those already familiar with Professor Black's iconoclastic and revisionist approaches, and provides a point of departure for students and other interested readers wanting an accessible but distinctive approach to the history of organizing and fighting war in Europe. David Parrott, University of Oxford, UK Addressing the relationship between war and state formation, Jeremy Black offers a skeptical examination of Charles Tilly's formulation that war made the state and the state made war. Black's study suggests that Tilly's adage tells us more about the centrality of national governments for citizens (and social scientists) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than it does about pre-modern states, societies, and war. Black's historiographical breadth and global scope will challenge readers' assumptions regarding well established models, such as the rise of the State, the rise of the West, and the gunpowder revolution. Guy Chet, University of North Texas, USA A thoughtful and wide-ranging reappraisal of the role of war in European history from early modernity to the present, stressing the complexities and ambiguities in the interaction of military and political change. Peter H. Wilson, Chichele Professor of the History of War, University of Hull, UK