This classic work is a distillation of the knowledge, intuition and wisdom of one of history's greatest military commanders. Napoleon's success was built upon practical experience combined with his own study of classical warfare and his natural grasp of the key principles of war. His thoughts and theories on the art of waging war are presented here in the form of accessible and readable maxims. This edition also features additional contextual commentary by historians David Chandler and Bea...

Why are some battles remembered more than others? Surprisingly, it is not just size that matters, nor the number of dead, the decisiveness of battles or their effects on communities and civilisations. It is their political afterlife the multiple meanings and political uses attributed to them that determines their fame. This ground-breaking series goes well beyond military history by exploring the transformation of battles into sites of memory and meaning. Cast into epic myths of the fight ...

This first of two books on pivotal battles in Western Civilisation and their legacy in politics, history & society focuses on ancient & medieval times.Why are some battles remembered more than others? Surprisingly, it is not just size that matters, nor the number of dead, the 'decisiveness' of battles or their effects on communities and civilisations. It is their political afterlife—the multiple meanings and political uses attributed to them—that determines their fa...

Is there a 'Western way of war' which pursues battles of annihilation and single-minded military victory? Is warfare on a path to ever greater destructive force? This magisterial 2010 account answers these questions by tracing the history of Western thinking about strategy - the employment of military force as a political instrument - from antiquity to the present day. Assessing sources from Vegetius to contemporary America, and with a particular focus on strategy since the Napoleonic Wars...

Why did Volodymyr Zelensky doubt that Russia was preparing a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022? Why did British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain decide to 'do business with Herr Hitler' in Munich in 1938? And how was it that Israeli elites dismissed intelligence warnings of the Hamas attack in 2023? Had they not learned their lesson from the Egyptian‒Syrian attack on Yom Kippur fifty years earlier?In all these cases, smart decision makers misjudged their adversaries, largely...

Volume I of The Cambridge History of Strategy offers a history of the practice of strategy from the beginning of recorded history, to the late eighteenth century, from all parts of the world. Drawing on material evidence covering two and a half millennia, an international team of leading scholars in each subject examines how strategy was formulated and applied and with what tools, from ancient Greece and China to the Ottoman and Mughal Empires and the American Revolutionary War. They explo...

Volume II of The Cambridge History of Strategy focuses on the practice of strategy from 1800 to the present day. A team of eminent scholars examine how leaders of states, empires and non-state groups (such as guerrilla forces, rebel groups and terrorists) have attempted to practise strategy in the modern period. With a focus on the actual 'doing' of strategy, the volume aims to understand real-world experiences when ideas about conflict are carried out against a responding and proactive op...

Clausewitz's On War, first published in 1832, remains the most famous study of the nature and conditions of warfare. Contemporaries found him 'endearing' or 'totally unpalatable', while later generations called him 'the father of modern strategical study', whose tenets have 'eternal relevance', or dismissed him as outdated. Was it really he who made the discovery that warfare is a continuation of politics? Was he the 'Mahdi of mass and mutual massacre', in part responsible for the...

War has been conceptualised from a military perspective, but also from ethical, legal, and philosophical viewpoints. These different analytical perspectives are all necessary to understand the many dimensions war, the continua on which war is situated - from small-scale to large-scale, from limited in time or long, from less to extremely destructive, with varying aims, and degrees of involvement of populations. Western civilisations have conceptualised war in binary ways denying the variet...

This tightly argued and profoundly thought provoking book tackles a huge subject: the coming of the nuclear age with bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and the ways in which it has changed our lives since. Dr Heuser sets these events in their historical context and tackles key issues about the effect of nuclear weapons on modern attitudes to conflict, and on the ethics of warfare. Ducking nothing, she demystifies the subject, seeing `the bomb' not as something unique and par...

This book is a major new study of the extent to which national mentalities, or 'ways of war', are responsible for 'national styles' of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Leading scholars examine the ways of war of particular insurgent movements, and the standard operational procedures of states and occupation forces to suppress them. Through case studies ranging from British, American and French counterinsurgency to the IRA and the Taliban, they show how 'national styles' evolve, influenced...

This book explores a new way for students of International Relations to look at war, peace and world orders throughout European history. The contributors argue that the predominant 'realist' paradigm that focuses on states and their self-interest is not applicable to the largest period of European history, because states either did not exist or were only in the making. Instead, they argue, we have to look through the eyes of historical entities to see how they understood the world in which...