Abstract
Reviewed by: Arrigo Velicogna, King’s College London, UK
In the preface to his new book, Jeremy Black sets an extremely ambitious goal, that of charting the interactions between warfare, war and state development across more than five hundred years of European history. The book does this by approaching war and warfare in a broadly chronological way, with chapters focused on specific slices of the almost 570 years it spans. This allows for a coherent and logical progression of the debate. Inside each chapter, the discussion is more thematic, trying to focus on specific themes rather than following a strict chronological order.
The good news is that the book is largely, and brilliantly, successful in this endeavour. As someone who thinks of Johann Tserclaes Count of Tilly before Charles Tilly, I found Black’s book offers a refreshing angle on a debate usually dominated by technological (I refuse the word teleological!) perspectives and European exceptionalism. He reminds the reader several times that while the focus of his work is Europe, Europe did not exist in a vacuum. With reference to Ming, Manchu and Samurai warfare, he shows that other nations and cultures were waging war as effectively as Europeans were for most of the period. Nor does he hold back from challenging well-entrenched assumptions. For example, the discussion of the ‘presumed’ decline into irrelevance of Spain is informative, intriguing and entertaining.
That said, there are several minor problems with this book. The first of them is the writing style. While the work as a whole has a coherent structure, the individual chapters do not – although, to be fair, the reader is warned about this in the preface. The author appears to follow more of a stream of consciousness than a logical argument in jumping back and forth between campaigns, nations, expeditions and battles. Any reader not familiar with the basic events will quickly lose the plot. War in Europe is certainly not a textbook on military history, and readers need to have prior knowledge to understand Black’s reasoning fully. The second problem is that there are no maps. For readers who are not familiar with geography, this is a significant and disappointing omission.
Finally, there are some factual errors and dubious claims which mar this otherwise excellent book. Some of these are minor, such as claiming that Prussian infantry was not used for pursuit because officers would have lost control (they had hussars and dragoons to pursue the enemy), or that Mussolini was overthrown after the landing in mainland Italy (he was removed during the fight for Sicily), or that Hitler moved the 5th and 6th Panzer Armies from East to West in 1944 (the 5th was already fighting in the West and the 6th was a new creation, which was moved East after the end of the Ardennes offensive). Others are more serious. The description of battles in the Napoleonic period is incorrect. Black’s view of Waterloo seems too reliant on British sources, offhandedly dismisses the entire struggle for Plancenoit, and does not acknowledge the debate on the role of the German troops.
Of course, given the scale and scope of this work, errors like these are unavoidable. It is also noteworthy that most of them relate to the period after the second half of the eighteenth century. They do not, however, detract from the overall value of the book. War in Europe is not a manual or a textbook, but nor does it pretend to be such a work. It is a thought-provoking analysis of five centuries of warfare and of some of our assumptions, namely those of European exceptionalism and the idea of technological determinism. It gives the reader a new perspective on the evolution of both the methods and the reasoning of warfare. For these two elements alone War in Europe is an important addition to every military history collection, and worth reading by any serious student of military history.