War and Conflict in the Early Modern World, 1500–1700 by Brian Sandberg (review)

This is an ambitious book. It aims to study the dynamics of war and conflict across the globe during two hundred years in which contact, encounters, colonisation and exchanges between societies and polities transformed war and military culture; and it endeavours to do this in 362 pages. Even at this cursory level, War and Conflict in the Early Modern World deserves some appreciation for its effort and relative concision. Moreover, as the author outlines in the introduction, this book is not restricted to the 'traditional' history of military operations and diplomacy. It draws upon social and cultural studies as well as violence studies that have been developed by anthropologists, sociologists and historians. This necessarily sets up some tensions about the parameters of the book around defining conflict, which is managed by focusing on 'organised armed violence'. This is a sensible choice, given the size of the subject, and means that interpersonal violence and economic conflict are eschewed. The temporal limits of the book are also explored, being bookmarked by the maritime transoceanic expeditions, new weapon systems and tactics of the 1500s at one end and the emergence of powerful fiscal-military states with permanent military forces around 1700 at the other. Although the book is pitched as a global history, the material that is used focuses on five continents—North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa—with Australasia and Oceania largely left out of the evidence base.

The overarching analysis of the book is situated within the historiography of the early modern 'military revolution' first articulated by Michael Roberts and subsequently refined by Geoffery Parker. Sandberg asserts that this military revolution is too Eurocentric and fails to fully explain the changing dynamics of war outside Europe and developments that took place for different reasons across the globe. The book's argument is outlined through its organisation into twelve thematic chapters that purposely overlap chronologically. Each chapter focuses on a form of organised violence, in so doing arguing that it was emblematic in the specified period, e.g. 'Raiding Warfare, 1580s–1640s'. Necessarily, the material for these chapters is overwhelming based on existing scholarship rather than primary research, so it provides a form of meta-analysis that seeks to make comparisons and highlight broader trends, with a conscious effort to provide case studies and examples from across the globe. In the strongest of these chapters and sections, a coherent and wide-ranging analysis is undertaken. In particular, the chapter on 'Innovative Warfare 1450–1520' compares military experimentation and diffusion across Europe, North Africa and Asia; research on the Little Ice Age is brought into the discussion of 'Peasant Revolt and Rural Conflicts, 1590s–1650'. In other chapters, though, the evidence brought before the reader can appear episodic and concurrent rather than connected, which therefore does not further the argument for the global dynamics that the book strives to explain. For example, the chapter on 'Noble Violence, 1520s–1620s' demonstrates that the phenomenon existed in various forms, with examples from Europe and Japan, but frames this within a discourse of 'warrior culture'. As such, it is largely a recounting of the facts that these things occurred; in essence, highlighting this form of violence existed, with less on why and why then. This style is exemplified in some of the conclusions of the chapters, which provide a summary sentence or two that recaps the nature and extent of the form of violence the chapter focuses on, and then proceeds to provide another case study. In some places the argument feels a little under expressed, if not under developed.

There are some aspects of the production of the book that some readers will find frustrating. Given the huge range of the examples that are deployed in the book perhaps a map would have been useful. A more significant issue is the scholarly apparatus of the text. For a work of this sort the inclusion of a bibliography...