The Age of Total War, 1860-1945 (review)

Few, if any, of this generation's leading military historians have been as prolific as Jeremy Black, whose dozens of books include studies of warfare in Europe and America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a military history of World War II, and an edited anthology of essays on European warfare from 1650 to 1792. In The Age of Total War, Black builds on his impressive record of scholarship and provides an effective and useful study of the course and conduct of war during the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries that offers insightful consideration of "total war" as a central theme in the military history of this period.

Black opens by wrestling with the concept of total war and the assumptions commonly associated with that term. He follows this with an examination of how the Western powers projected power around the globe during the late nineteenth century. Because these efforts did not produce major mobilizations of populations or take place within the context of major conflict between the Western states before 1898, Black raises questions regarding their place in an "age of total war"—although he notes that for the conquered peoples, the experiences "may well have been total" (p. 23). Black then considers the American Civil War and Wars of German Unification and the ways these wars, as well as conflicts that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century in Latin America, Italy, and Poland, did and did not witness the mobilization of societies, level of destructiveness, range of conflict, or targeting of civilians that distinguish total war.

Black's pursuit of a global approach to military history, and avoidance of a teleological one, is evident in his chapter on the decades following the Franco-Prussian War, in which he considers a variety of conflicts that took place during this period, from insurgencies in Latin America to the Russo-Japanese War, rather than focusing primarily on developments whose consequences would be manifest in World War I. This is followed by analysis of World War I and the forces that shaped its conduct in the context of the total war concept. Black's discontent with a teleological approach to military history that focuses on factors that shape major wars and "is apt to drown out other aspects of military history" (p. 101) is also clear in his treatment of the period between 1919 and 1939. He devotes a great deal of attention to developments following World War I, such as the struggles to define the borders of Eastern Europe and continuance of colonial warfare, that, he argues, made the shadow of the total war of 1914–18 over this period "less pronounced than is generally believed" (p. 107). Of course, the world did end up fighting World War II, and in his treatment of that conflict Black joins a number of recent scholars in calling attention to Allied military effectiveness in explaining its outcome, rather than simply attributing it to superior resources.

Black's effective synthesis of scholarship and thought-provoking analysis make this a work of much value to students of this period in world military history. Although relatively brief and clearly written, the book is written in an analytical, rather than a narrative style and it will be helpful, perhaps essential to have a good base of knowledge of events in order to fully appreciate all of its points. Thus, it will work well for instructors seeking to stimulate thought and discussion in graduate-level courses and as a supplementary text for undergraduate courses, but not so well as a main text for the latter.