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  • A Global History of War: From Assyria to the Twenty-First Century by Gérard Chaliand
  • Stephen Morillo
A Global History of War: From Assyria to the Twenty-First Century. By gérard chaliand. Translated by Michèle Mangin-Woods and David Woods. Forward by R. Bin Wong. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 293 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

This is, unfortunately, a comprehensively bad book. Chaliand proposes to bring an analytical lens to bear, to quote the back cover, “not on the impact of war on civilizations, but rather on how civilizations impact the art and execution of war,” although he also purports to explain “the crises and conflicts that have shaped the current world order.” As far as this reviewer can see, he does neither. Nor, in the process, does he generate any other insights of value to the readers of this journal.

The book is misleading starting from its title. Chaliand’s view is not global; it is Eurasian. Africa is nowhere to be found, nor is pre-Columbian [End Page 681] America. What follows the title is flawed in both historiography and content.

The book’s cover, again, claims that “few [books] study the history of war worldwide.” This claim, which has not been true for at least ten years, reflects one fundamental problem at the heart of the work: The scholarship is significantly out of date and inadequate. At the highest level, it should have been impossible to write a global history of war without reference to the many works of Jeremy Black, the foremost global historian of warfare, but Chaliand accomplishes this dubious feat. All of the individual sections reflect this weakness: The brief section in the first “Overview” chapter that deals with medieval Europe (the only place this topic is addressed) is essentially a summary of the work of Charles Oman, which dates to the nineteenth century. Discussing the development of gunpowder weapons in the fifteenth century, Chaliand states, “Gunpowder was also used outside of Europe, although little is known about its deployment in combat” (p. 31). In fact, massive amounts are known. Ken Chase, Peter Lorge, and John Thornton are only among the best known authors to have explored non-European uses of gunpowder in detail, never mind the vast historiography of Sengoku jidai warfare in Japan. Thus, not only does Chaliand rest his arguments on outdated scholarship; he also reproduces the Eurocentric, orientalist assumptions of his outdated sources.

On top of bad historiography, Chaliand adds bad to nonexistent historical analysis, starting with weak geography. To take a simple example, he notes that “the nomad advances [across the Eurasian steppes] followed a trajectory from east to west” (p. 110). He does not explain why. He then asserts that “all sedentary civilizations had to confront nomadic invasions” (p. 114), which really is not true in any meaningful way for most of the outer edges of Afro-Eurasia, never mind for American civilizations. He elaborates by claiming that “Western Europe was twice overrun by Central Asia nomads” (pp. 114–15), meaning Attila’s Huns and the Magyars of the ninth century. “Overrun” is at best a serious exaggeration that the kings of England and France, among others, would find surprising, to say nothing of the Ottonians who defeated the Magyars.

Moreover, Chaliand makes no attempt to connect in any systematic way social structures and cultural beliefs to styles of warfare. As a result, he does not distinguish in any analytically useful way between military forces that arose organically out of social structural organization, especially from the dominance in some societies of warrior elites, and military forces created by state initiative.

What passes for analysis comes down to two factors that explain the [End Page 682] success of various military systems: great men leading successfully and discipline. The former is theoretically suspect and highlights the lack of meaningful social structural analysis that might contextualize the success of great leaders. The latter is meaningless without that same social (and cultural) analysis, because discipline, while important, takes different forms depending on whether it is imposed top-down in state constructed forces or emerges organically from the social organization of social armies. Nor...

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