War in European History (review)

In 1976 I had two encounters with Michael Howard: the first when, as a student from Harvard University clutching a letter of introduction from my adviser, I asked him for some advice about my senior honors thesis. The advice was good, I recall, but I was too dazzled by the ambience of All Souls College, Oxford, to focus on what he said, although I do remember, as so many students of his do, his graciousness and patience with a callow student. My second encounter was more lasting because it was with his newly published War in European History, now reissued and updated.

Howard has provided a new foreword (supplementing but not replacing the first), an epilogue, and, for students almost as valuable as the text, an updated reading list at the back. The core text remains largely untouched, as it should be. The one paragraph omitted from the foreword of the new edition is a tribute to his predecessor as Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford, Cyril Falls. War in European History was intended as a sequel to Falls’s The Art of War from the Age of Napoleon to the Present Day, published in 1961. “Professor Falls’s study is an inimitable gem of learning and exposition which leaves very little more to be said on the subjects that he covered,” Howard wrote, and much the same can be said of War in European History. In fewer than 150 pages—a dazzling compression of lucidly rendered scholarship—Howard sums up European history in chapters on “the wars of the knights,” “the wars of the mercenaries,” “the wars of the professionals,” “the wars of the revolution,” “the wars of the nations,” and “the wars of the technologists.”

Howard moved the study of war from “the art of war” genre, an older, perhaps too much despised technical kind of military history, into a broader study of conflict in its social, economic, and above all political contexts. That today most scholars would not know Cyril Falls’s name, much less respect his work, says something about how successful this change in the mode of military history has been. On the other hand, Howard remains, deservedly, a revered figure, partly by virtue of personality, partly by force of his astonishing scholarship, and partly because of the strength of the core ideas in this text.

War in European History traces the evolving nature of war in Europe, based in part, as the chapter titles indicate, on who waged those wars. It is a tale of one country, perhaps, getting a lead on the others—the French with their levee en masse, the Germans with their general staff—but with their rivals soon catching up. In explaining how this happened, Howard pays tribute to a pioneering German historian of the early twentieth century, Hans Delbrück, whose History of the Art of War in the Framework of Political History inspired him here.

Conflicts outside Europe, including Europe’s fantastic expansion overseas, receive far less attention from Howard: the tale here is of how different ruling groups mustered and used armed force against their European counterparts. For that reason, students of the history of war, even those primarily interested in Europe, need other introductory texts. How did this modest protrusion from the Eurasian land mass dominate the globe—and why did that domination collapse within a few short decades? That is perhaps the greatest of political-military questions, but it is not Howard’s question and so receives little attention.

Howard’s epilogue shows how much the world has changed since the mid-1970s. Although he concluded his original work with a page or two on nuclear weapons and the problems they posted for European militaries, the operating assumption seems to have been that the history of war remained relevant. The Cold War was, after all, the dominating fact in the mid-1970s, and although much of it was waged over the heads of Europeans, they were part of it. In the...