What Is Military History? by Stephen Morillo, and Michael F. Pavkovic (review)

This is the third edition of a volume first published in 2006 that was intended to give a brief introduction to the field of military history. As such, this third edition is testament to the book's reach and influence over the past eleven years in an area the authors point out is an important and ever-expanding field. It is a good starting point for students, but one that in its third iteration exposes its limitations. Morillo and Pavkovic are at pains to point out how military history is more than a simple preserve of enthusiasts and ex-military strategic experts. From an historiographical line they discuss frameworks and scope for studies, which is where the volume's strengths are to be found. The book provides an overview for the public, students, and scholars new to the area, pointing out the disjunction and tensions between the lack of professionalism and academic credit that still dogs the discipline.

While the book offers a good overview of the field from the nineteenth century onwards, there are sparse examples for the classical world, and only fleeting reference to any scholarship and approaches up to the nineteenth century. For any medieval and early modern scholars it is disappointing, as its focus is firmly from the nineteenth century onwards, and the American Civil War. Yet the women who fought in the American Civil War, discussed in DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook's Women Soldiers in the American Civil War(Louisiana State University Press, 2002) are not mentioned, and nor is Blanton and Cook's book cited.

Scholars working in the areas of medieval and early modern histories of religious wars, heresy, and witchcraft that incorporate aspects of military history will also find this book wanting. Morillo and Pavkovic are extremely limited in their discussion of non-combatants, women, children, and men, making only passing reference to women on pp. 73–74 under a subheading entitled 'gender studies'. Only one reference is cited: J. Lynn's book Women, Armies and Warfare in Early Modern Europe(Cambridge University Press, 2008). This propensity to cite male authors sees the groundbreaking work by Barbara Donagan on the early modern laws of war written in the 1990s, which remains highly relevant today, omitted. Women contributed to the war effort in a variety of ways. For the early modern period Mary Elizabeth Ailes's Courage and Grief: Women and Sweden's Thirty Years' War(University of Nebraska Press, 2018), as well as Barton C. Hacker and Margaret Vining's earlier work published in 2012, A Comparison to Women's Military History(Brill), are not cited.

On campaign women and men provided support services to armies in the field. On the home front women helped to minimize disruptions incurred within their frayed communities. As increasing numbers of men left to fight, women took over local economic activities and defended their families' interests against troops from either side of the conflict seeking quarters or armies conducting sieges. Such activities, as Ailes's work demonstrates for Sweden, significantly altered the fabric of early modern Swedish society. Studies about women during war and conflict demonstrate how the experiences of unmarried camp followers and officers' wives, as well as peasant women who remained in the countryside during times of conflict and upheaval, flesh out the reality of war's effects in societies.

As this is a book aimed at students, it is a shame that the coverage of literature for the 'English speaking student', the authors' stipulated audience, is not more comprehensive. The American focus also means the book turns a blind eye to important studies such as The British Academy Symposium of 2006 held on the weekend after the bicentenary of the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), which resulted in Holger Hoock's edited British Academy Occasional Paper, 8: History, Commemoration, and National Preoccupation: Trafalgar 1805–2005(Oxford University Press, 2007). This important...