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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.3 (2003) 456-457



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War and Competition between States: The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th-18th Centuries. Edited by Philippe Contamine (New York, Clarendon Press, 2000) 347 pp. $74.00.

Violence, victims, victuals, and visions of power: War inevitably makes its mark across the grand survey of European states from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries that Wim Blockmans and Jean-Philippe Genet have been organizing under European Science Foundation auspices since 1988. Although the other six volumes in the survey approach war through such topics as state finance and power elites, in this volume Contamine joins nine other outstanding European specialists in the organization, conduct, and consequences of military activity. Maria Nadia Covini (military politics in Italy), Luis Ribot García (Spanish armies), Jaap Bruijn (navies and states), Jean Meyer (geography, communications, and armies), Jan Lindegren (military wherewithal), Bernhard Kroener (eighteenth-century state-society relations), Norman Housley ("sanctified patriotism" in early modern Europe), Françoise Autrand (fourteenth-century war and diplomacy), and Heinz Duchhardt (war and international law) add meaty reports to Contamine's introduction and valuable essay on ransom and booty.

As compared with standard books about warfare, War and Competition between States says relatively little about strategy, technique, battles, generals, individual experiences, iconography, and literary representations. Instead, it concentrates on social processes and institutions. The authors take advantage of their regional expertise; Lindegren, for example, supplies precious evidence from his studies of interactions among population, finances, and military forces in Scandinavia. As a result, the [End Page 456] book provides much fuller coverage of northern and western Europe than of the Balkans, eastern Europe, and (more surprisingly) the British Isles. It is a pity that Contamine's brief introduction to the volume settles for generalities concerning war in European history rather than synthesizing his collaborators' analyses, identifying their disagreements, or laying out agenda for the next round of scholarship. As a case in point, following the scent of Herbst's recent arguments concerning variability in African states' spatial distributions of terrains and resources, the juxtaposition of Meyer on how states sought to control space and Lindegren on how states acquired "men, money, and means" for war could have started a fruitful discussion on the internal geopolitics of state transformation—for example, how the relatively limited utility of horses in compact, mountainous Switzerland favored the development of Europe's most effective infantry, capable of defeating the mighty cavalry of Charles the Bold. 1 The book's richness will encourage many informed readers to make such connections for themselves.

Having edited several volumes on related subjects in collaboration with similar international groups of authors, I must salute Contamine, his translators, and the Clarendon editors for production of a handsome book in coherent English with footnotes on the page referring to a well-edited thirty-page bibliography at the end. (The years required for such an effort take their toll, to be sure. The bibliography's exclusion of items later than 1991 means that Lynn's important volumes of the later 1990s get no attention.) 2

 



Charles Tilly
Columbia University

Notes

1. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton, 2000).

2. John Lynn (ed.), Tools of War: Instruments, Ideas, and Institutions of Warfare, 1445-1871 (Urbana, 1990); idem (ed.), Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present (Boulder, 1997); idem, Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715 (Cambridge, 1997).

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