08/23/2026
A NYMAS Book Review:
War in the Early Modern World
“The Cambridge History of War, Volume III, War and the Early Modern World,” edited by David Parrott & Gábor Ágoston. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025. Pp. 688. Illus, maps, notes, biblio., index. $180.00 / £140.00, ISBN 978-0-5218-7428-1; e-editions.
War. If the modern age is a revenge on those naive commentators who thought war could be banished by law, humanitarianism, or technology controlled by a superpower, then its frequency and apparently incipient spread ensure that we still need to study it. This of course is not the pattern in universities, where the preference is for identity politics, as attested by trendy titles such as “ ‘So Manly and Ornamental’: Shoe Buckles and Britain’s Eighteenth Century,” in the June 2023 issue of “The English Historical Review”.
Fortunately, there are some readily accessible ways to keep up with current studies, and thus to short-circuit both the wasteland of much of current academe as well as the facile repetition of all too much popular work, notably, but not only, regarding World War II. In America, the excellent “Journal of Military History” has been recently joined by the “War Studies Journal,” while the “Rivista di Studi Militari” and the “Nuova Antologia Militare” both come free, online, and mostly in English despite being based in Italy.
The third of a four-part series, the “Cambridge History of War’s” most recent volume is an expensive edition that captures a moment in time. It is a summary—due to the delays in publication from a far-from-nimble press—of the views of a few years back. After a very substantial, shrewd, and important introduction by the coeditor David Parrott, there are twenty-four chapters. They are primarily geographical in focus, which is both good and bad: good because there is much here on areas that tend to be underplayed in overall accounts, notably Beatrice F. Manz on the nomadic empires, Morris Rossabi on Ming conflicts with their neighbors, Rudolph Matthee on Safavid Iran, Richard Reid on early modern Africa, Kaushik Roy on India, Eugene Park on Japan and Korea, Michael Charney on Southeast Asia, and Gabriel Paquette on the maintenance of Iberian dominance in Latin America. Roy’s valuable contribution dismisses the idea of Mughal warfare as a theatrical political show, instead presenting the army as a bureaucratic, combat-effective, and technologically proficient force. He focuses on the British challenge from the mid-eighteenth century but could have made more of the threat posed to India by the Afghans, including after the Third Battle of Panipat. Park finds instructive parallels and contrasts between Japan and Korea, with leadership playing a role and with a warning against too strong an emphasis on the sociology of military attitudes. Charney suggests that resistance to change, in part a matter of lethargy, was responsible for the limited response to the potential for development in the Southeast Asia of the 1630s to the mid-eighteenth century. In part, however, this was a result of an inherent practice of maintaining social norms and systems. Yet there was also the strength of the successful Burmese resistance to Chinese invasion in the late 1760s, a resistance that is essentially neglected in a book that frequently tends to have a teleology predicated on European capability and expansionism. Gábor Ágoston, Parrott’s coeditor, emphasizes the adaptability lying behind Ottoman staying power, while Matthee finds insufficiency in both those traits in the case of the Safavids. Kevin McCranie provides a highly effective account of American developments from 1776 to 1848, commenting on the extent to which conflict, notably the War of 1812, revealed the deficiencies of militia systems.
All these perspectives are valuable, and that is the good. Now for some bad: as is usually the case, Oceania and Morocco are largely ignored, the latter despite its success in projecting and sustaining power across the Sahara in the 1590s. Pamela Crossley, unfortunately, is somewhat rushed on the Qing (Manchu), dismissing the War of the Three Feudatories (1673–81) in only two sentences.
Given the geographical approach, why are there two pieces on Russian wars and only one on India? Or why did the editors not pursue a different spatial understanding, for example in terms of warfare in tropical spheres or in urban settings? Instead we get a division via geographical notions that had scant meaning at the time. Thus, as Reid notes, Africa was varied as a military environment, as indeed were Southeast Asia and India.
Moreover, despite the editors’ valuable efforts, this volume is overly devoted to Europe. Simon Pepper’s “Fortification and siege warfare” deals with the significance of the practices elsewhere, for example in India, by ignoring them totally. It is the same with Peter Wilson’s also otherwise excellent “Military finance, organisation, and state development, 1450–1650.” This approach, while possibly understandable at the level of the author, is very disappointing at that of the reader, and ultimately makes the volume a useful document and also a failure.
Do we need a comparison of France and Prussia in a book on the wide world? The European chapters vary in their quality, with Hamish Scott’s “Wars of dynasties, wars of empires: The nature of European conflicts, 1648–1792” forgetting to discuss conflict or, indeed, to treat adequately the use of force within states. Many of the contributors underplay rebellions and civil wars. The European emphasis is increased by the decision to devote several chapters to naval warfare, although that is essentially blue rather than brown water, and again weak on the comparative dimension.
All this just goes to show how far even the best available volume has to be selective and has to work with the authorial resources available. Possibly the editors could have encouraged some of the authors to cast their eyes further afield. It might also have been valuable to have overall chapters on tactics, strategies, logistics, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and contemporaneous writings on war, as well as the relationship between past and present.
There is also the disappointment that the excellence of the introduction is not matched by a conclusion. Here again comparative approaches would have been valuable. Crossley stresses the effort involved in suppressing the Chinese White Lotus Rebellion of 1795–1804 and presents an imperial military that had not been restructured and which maintained a distinctly defensive military posture. But the Chinese nonetheless avoided the total failures of Austria in 1805, Prussia in 1806, Spain in 1808, and France in 1814 and 1815, as well as a Britain driven from the European continent in 1795–96 and faced with rebellion and invasion in Ireland in 1798. The extent to which the campaign and battle at Waterloo at the close of the Napoleonic Wars represented “restructuring” might be queried.
Instead, it is the period thereafter that deserves consideration. Andrew Lambert, on “European” (but essentially only British) sea power from 1800 to 1850, comments on China, but only from the outside, and he does not address such questions as the greater significance of the Taiping Revolution that began in 1850, which prefigured (and exceeded) the American Civil War in showing what destructive forces can be unleashed when geographically contiguous entities have different ideas about governance and culture.
Yet as long as those points are borne in mind, this volume should be welcomed. It is easily the best in the field and reflects much wisdom.
There is also the obvious question of the relevance of the volume for the present day. Here we must consider the degree to which technological change produces not an isotropic surface defined only by respective capability, but rather operates within very differing social, political, and environmental contexts in which tasking, prioritization, and conduct reflect political contingencies. As a result, effectiveness in terms of the imposition of will—and that, of course, is the idea of war—in part depends on understanding other societies and their drives and divisions. Strategic value, and intelligence in a profound sense, can draw on an understanding of the past, but then that entails accepting that there is no definitive guide to past, present, or future. Instead, what is always needed is a skepticism born of an engagement with the variety of ways of assessing a situation.
- Jeremy Black
Originally published online in The New Criterion, vol. 44, no. 8 (April 2026), (https://newcriterion.com/article/fighting-the-last-war/), this review appears by kind permission of Prof. Black and the editors.
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Our Reviewer: Jeremy Black, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Exeter, is a Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of an impressive number of works in history and international affairs, frequently demonstrating unique interactions and trends among events, including The Great War and the Making of the Modern World, Combined Operations: A Global History of Amphibious and Airborne Warfare, and The War of 1812 in the Age of Napoleon. Among others, he has previously reviewed here Military History for the Modern Strategist, The Great Siege of Malta, Hi**er’s Fatal Miscalculation, Superpower Britain, Josephine Baker’s Secret War, Captives and Companions. A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World, War and Power: Who Wins Wars—and Why, The Pacific’s New Navies, No More Napoleons, Republic and Empire. Crisis, Revolution, America’s Early Independence, The Fate of the Day, The Maginot Line: A New History, The Nuclear Age. An Epic Race for Arms, Power and Survival, Daring to Be Free: Rebellion and Resistance of the Enslaved in the Atlantic World, Mexico: A 500-Year History, A World Safe for Commerce: American Foreign Policy from the Revolution to the Rise of China, On Strategists and Strategy, Japan’s Grand Strategy: Liminal Power in an Uncertain World, and The War that Made the Middle East..
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