- Barbarians & Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865
Barbarians and Brothers is a beautifully written work "about restraint and atrocity, about the many ways societies seek to limit war's destructive power, and about the choices and systems that unleash it" (2). In it, Lee argues that the balance between restraint and "frightfulness" in any particular conflict can best be understood in terms of four variables—capacity, control, calculation, and culture. War's devastation can be checked by the limited destructive capacity of the belligerents. Cultural values or calculations of utility can also lead communities to attempt to moderate the violence employed by their warriors, or conversely may encourage states to push their soldiers to the extremes of brutality. Either way, the question of control then comes into play—most typically when governments find it difficult to limit war's effects on enemy civilians after prolonged conflict has bred inter-society hatred or when logistical failures force troops to fend for themselves by taking food from civilians.
Barbarians in this context means enemies with a different cultural background who do not share the same "language and logic of war"; brothers means compatriots, people who might be members of the same polity after a war. In brothers' wars, the tendency was to keep violence limited: Empathy was stronger; an enemy could be expected to recognize and reciprocate restraint; and excess harm to the opponent was understood to threaten the desired post-conflict community (which would include the chastened "brothers.") In order to explore these concepts, Lee examines case studies drawn from the Anglo-Irish warfare of the sixteenth century; the English Civil War; colonial American warfare in 1586 and 1725; the American Revolution (including the 1779 campaign against the Iroquois); and more briefly, the American Civil War. His guiding idea is that "the events of one campaign, and the choices of one leader and his soldiers . . . reveals more about the nature and experience of the war, and the restraints on violence within it, than a fly-over view of the entire war" (73). This approach is fully justified by its execution.
Lee chose his chapter topics well and researched them thoroughly, eliciting fresh information and insight. Moreover, the chapters collectively enrich our understanding of how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars in the British Isles, along with local conditions, affected the military ideas and expectations of Britain's colonists in the New World at a time when the foundations of a distinctive American approach to war and military organization were being laid. Lee's most striking and important point comes in his conclusion: An exceptionally large proportion of the conflicts that shaped Anglo-American views of warfare were waged against either "barbarians" or "brothers," rather than (as was more common in Europe) against antagonists who were peer competitors (243).
Although Lee's thinking is clearly influenced by the work of sociologists and anthropologists like Bourdieu and Collins (both of whom he [End Page 309] cites in his introduction), the works of scholars outside the discipline of history are rarely referenced explicitly.1 Nonetheless, Lee's work is more informed by theory than is often the case with military history. Readers with a wide range of interests—including the cultural aspects of warfare and the debates about the value of the concepts "limited" and "total" war, the military revolution, and the "American way of war"—will find Barbarians and Brothers rewarding reading.
Footnotes
1. Pierre Bourdieu (trans. Richard Nice), Outline of a Theory of Practice (Ithaca, 2004); Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton, 2008).