Volume 74, Number 1 · January 2010

An unprecedented spate of wars and revolutions took place around the world in the mid-seventeenth century. Many contemporaries, followed by many historians, have argued that the former caused the latter; few have considered other factors. This essay seeks to clarify the issues at the heart of the “General Crisis Debate” among early modern historians by examining evidence from around the world, including newly available data on global climatic change. It concludes, first, that only a synergy between natural and man-made disasters produced state-breakdown; and, second, that “coping skills” critically affected the impact of these disasters.

Writing on modern warfare lately has tended to focus upon two vital but divergent trends, which might be termed the War from Above and War from Below schools of analysis. This essay concentrates instead upon the middle levels of warfare, drawing examples from mid-World War Two, where the chief operational objectives of the Allies were clearly established (at Casablanca, January 1943), but had yet to be realized. The realization of such military goals as defeat of the U-boat threat, or gaining domination of the air over Europe, in turn required breakthroughs that could only come from what one might term “the mid-level managers of war” – inventors, scientists, civil servants, captains of naval squadrons, and commanders of air groups. Scholars of these campaigns have long recognized the importance of the changes that occurred at the operational level of war between 1943 and 1944; this essay offers a larger synthetic analysis of their argument.

Is it necessary to understand the experience of war in order to understand war? And is it possible to understand the experience of war at second hand? This article surveys how soldiers, scholars, and the general public approached and answered these questions from the eleventh century to the twentieth century. The article thereby offers a long-term history of war-witnessing, and of the authority it carried. It argues that the Middle Ages and early modern era were dominated by the eye-witness, who drew authority from the observation of objective facts. The late modern era is dominated by the flesh-witness, who draws authority from undergoing subjective experiences.

Music was an omnipresent part of American Civil War battlefields, yet the role of music in tactical situations has received little scholarly attention. Firsthand accounts reveal that certain officers and enlisted men recognized and drew upon the communicative potential of military music. Alert scouts realized that field musicians and brass bands conveyed valuable information about the enemy position they were reconnoitering, while creative officers used both the connotative and denotative potential of music to enhance tactical deceptions. These occurrences affirm the intrinsic role that music played in the lives of nineteenth-century Americans while revealing an expanding awareness of battlefield psychology.

Andrew Gordon explores the joint, amphibious assault on the dervish stronghold of Illig, in Somaliland, in 1904. The operation exactly matched the task, and the skills employed were taken down from the Royal Navy’s shelf without rehearsal or conscious innovation. Those in command had not been to Staff College, yet at Illig one can check off today’s Principles of War, one by one. The quintessentially Victorian ‘littoral warfare era’ was soon eclipsed by the blue-water rivalry of the twentieth century, but it has enjoyed renewed interest at the start of the twenty-first—especially where the security condition of the Horn of Africa is concerned.

The end of the First World War found Britain in dire economic straits, burdened with the costs of converting a wartime economy and straining under an enormous load of debt. As is often the case in such situations, politicians and the public looked to the budgets of the armed services for a large portion of the savings that would presumably enable economic recovery and restore fiscal rectitude. The Royal Navy was a major target of the cost-cutters in post-1918 Britain. Their demands for steep reductions in its budget, however, ran counter to the navy’s pursuit of parity with its new major rival, the USA, and its mission of two-ocean imperial defence. This article examines the budget battle that ensued through a close study of the 1919-1922 debates over Royal Navy appropriations bills in the British Parliament and in the British public at large.

This article examines the frequent comparisons drawn between the American intervention in Iraq in 2003 and the French intervention in Spain in 1808. In brief, George Bush and Napoleon Bonaparte have been said to have been driven by the same motivation–according to taste, imperialism, hubris or misplaced crusading fervor–and to have achieved the same result, namely an unwinnable guerrilla war fuelled by xenophobia and fundamentalist religion. Whilst no attempt is made to attack the opposition to the war in Iraq from which these claims stem, it is here argued that they rest on a false impression of the Peninsular War of 1808-14 that is in large part derived from, first, the construction of a national myth in nineteenth-century Spain, and, second, the desire of French veterans and historians to explain away Napoleon’s defeat in Spain and legitimise his cause. In short, then, this article argues that, just as intelligence was spun to support the cause of intervention, so history has been spun to support its anti-thesis.