A History of Warfare by John Keegan
398 pages
Published 1993
Read from October 12 to October 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The
main gist of this book, repeated again and again in every chapter, is
the insufficiency or outright incorrectness of the Clauswitzian analysis
of war, "continuation of politics by other means." Keegan's essential
idea seems to be that war is an element and extension of culture, its
practice and purpose culturally bound, which as far as ideas go is
pretty darn safe and unprovocative. Keegan's explorations of martial
history have a slight tendency toward mechanistic, reductive
explanations; he traces the ultimate cause of nomadic steppe people's
willingness to fight and kill without compunction, their "dynamism and
ruthlessness" in contrast to "primitive" and "oriental" warmaking, to
their practice of slaughtering stock, for example. I do agree with
Keegan's assertion that anthropologists (and conventional historians as
well, though he doesn't single them out) have a tendency to ignore the
actual prosecution of warfare in human society and history. Overall a
stimulating, interesting read, rather tragicomically dated by its 1990s
optimism regarding peacekeeping, the United Nations, and
"neighbourliness" in the coming decades.
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