Yea there are some. The Imperial History of China series (Belknap/Harvard Press) is a good place to start.
Professor Allan R. Millett is in the news again. He recently published an excellent Korean War history;
Millett is a professor of history at the University of New Orleans and also serves as director of the universitys Eisenhower Center for American Studies. His books go well beyond the simple narrative of strategy and battle, examining military culture and its relationship to its parent society, its leadership and structural organization.
While at Ohio State in the 1990s, Millitt wrote what I regard as the finest institutional history of the USMC;
Millett is a professor of history at the University of New Orleans and also serves as director of the universitys Eisenhower Center for American Studies. His books go well beyond the simple narrative of strategy and battle, examining military culture and its relationship to its parent society, its leadership and structural organization.
While at Ohio State in the 1990s, Millitt wrote what I regard as the finest institutional history of the USMC;
History_Buff
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Any recommendations for a complete look at the first world war? I realize such a thing would be a tome, but I feel like I've been overexposed to the British experience, and I know very little about what was happening with France, Russia, Germany, Austria, and the Balkans in general.
TheLastOne36
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I second this sentiment. School in Canada has overexposed me to the Western front and I find my Eastern front knowledge lacking.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
http://www.amazon.com/First-World-War-Oxford-Paperback/dp/0199261911/ref=la_B001ITYEL8_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1354827250&sr=1-2
enjoy. Too bad only vol 1 is out so far, but it is *comprehensive*
I finished reading of 1491 somewhat later than I anticipated, but definetly worth it.
Just two things. First, Mann deserves to be punched in the face for each description of him eating a sandwich in the jungle. Second, it seems that he kinda overshoot with the claims of high populations in Amazonia. At least the spread of terra preta is probably one order of magnitude lower than he states. But very good book, indeed.
Just two things. First, Mann deserves to be punched in the face for each description of him eating a sandwich in the jungle. Second, it seems that he kinda overshoot with the claims of high populations in Amazonia. At least the spread of terra preta is probably one order of magnitude lower than he states. But very good book, indeed.
I'm looking for a book on industrial era warfare between 1860's-to World War I. I'd like a book that covers tactics, strategy, military leaders, some of the gritty details and talks about some of the wars and things like that. Is there anything like that?
Those are two very radically different periods with not a lot of stuff between them. The wars of the 1860s have never really been dealt with as a whole; books on the American Civil War, the wars of German unification, and the Taiping conflict (and related conflicts) would have to be read separately. (There is one collection of articles, edited by Stig Förster and Roger Chickering, that attempted to view the German and American conflicts in comparison, but the actual papers presented at the conference fell somewhat short of, at least, my expectations for such a thing.) Russia's wars in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the 1877-78 war against the Ottomans have rarely been treated as a whole except in the more general topos of Russian military history e.g. by William Fuller. Later wars, such as the Balkan wars, the Second Boer War, and the Manchurian War, are sometimes considered to have strong comparative dimensions, but they are virtually never linked back to the wars of the 1860s. And the Great War is its own beast, bearing little comparison to anything else.
For the most part, this is for good reason; "industrialized war" is sufficiently vague a topic as to suggest no similarities in and of itself, and when the actual conflicts are compared to each other there's still little to recommend much of a connection. If one must hunt for such tenuous comparisons between the Civil War and the Great War as the extensive use of field fortifications - as though fortification was unknown at any prior time and as though the other wars during the period were marked by any particularly heavy use of intrenchment - then one is clearly looking too hard. Discussing just the wars of the 1860s with a strong comparative dimension has a great deal to recommend it, because there are many common threads that can be drawn together from Magenta to Sedan and connected from the Army of the Potomac to the Ever-Victorious Army. And of course the literature on the Great War and the conflicts associated with it is extremely voluminous.
Dennis Showalter's The Wars of German Unification is, in my opinion, the best work on the European wars of the 1860s. It deals with a number of different relevant topics - narrative, tactics, social contextualization, operations, institutional comparison, diplomatic context, and technical aspects. It has an excellent bibliography. There are considerable segments on comparison to the American conflict (although not to the Chinese one, understandably so as it is less well-covered and the connecting strands are more tenuous). And it is engagingly written. Its sole major flaw is the lack of maps, a publishing problem that remains somewhat problematic for many military historians. It is probably the closest thing to what you were interested in, and even so its focus is not nearly wide enough.
An interesting work that does try to get more of a wide view is Antulio Echevarria's After Clausewitz, a work that focuses on doctrinal issues (always a favorite of mine). While its primary interest is in discussing German military doctrine, specifically tactical doctrine, there is a comparative section at the end of each (chronologically and semi-thematically organized) chapter. It covers the gap between the Peace of Frankfurt and the July Crisis, with specific attention to some key events in the Bulgarian war, the Boer War, the Manchurian War, and the Balkan Wars that prominently affected doctrinal analysis and development (along with recounting some instances in the Great War where this doctrine was carried out). Echevarria's primary interest was in proving that European infantry doctrine in general (with some attention to America and Japan) and German doctrine in particular was far from stagnant during the period and that the all-out head-down close-order columnar attacks of the early days of the Great War were due more to lack of doctrinal knowledge by officers than to the doctrine itself. As such, the work cannot be viewed as a survey, but it does a decent job of being one all the same.
Since I am much more familiar with the German military as an institutional concept during this period than with any other particular military, I am hesitant to recommend books on other national contexts. This is partly because I lack the knowledge and partly because many of the books I do know about are either not that good, or are merely one of a collection of equally passable works. The American Civil War is served by a truly massive bibliography, but of those books few are comparative in the sense that you would probably like it. Many are positively parochial in their refusal to acknowledge any other context for military events other than the United States. (Mirrored by European military historians' refusal to consider the events in America as anything other than armed mobs chasing each other around the countryside, good for narrative but not for comparison to contemporary European militaries.) Hew Strachan is only the best of a stable of excellent authors on the First World War and its preceding military context; you're sure to find a lot of what you want there, as well. Oriental events are far less-well served by the literature; there are, in my opinion, no good single-volume focused military histories in English of either the civil wars associated with the Taiping rebellion or the Manchurian War. (Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear, the most recent popular work on the latter, is painfully teleological at times, irritatingly ignorant on operational matters, and overly focused on the war as a precursor of Russian military incompetence in the Great War - a trite myth - and of the so-called supremacy of firepower as a supposedly surprising thing to world military authorities, in itself a trite myth that is also patently ridiculous.)
It may be useful for you to look at institutional or national histories that extend beyond the time period that you're interested in, purely because they will cover everything, if not to the nitty-gritty detail on which you seem set. The late Russell Weigley wrote what is in my opinion the best history of American land warfare, incorporating a good deal of institutional analysis and the general tenor of strategic thought - even if he was perhaps a little too willing to systematize things that need not have been necessarily connected. Soldiers of the Sun is an old standby on the Imperial Japanese Army that still suffices reasonably well, although it too is light on actual fighting in favor of institutional history. Jeremy Black, one of the most prolific writers on military history in the period, published two books on "Western Warfare" between 1775 and 1975 that do not cover much at all in particular depth but are extremely useful, in my opinion, for their treatment of Latin American and colonial warfare events in a comparative context with the wars of Europe and the United States. William Fuller's national military history of Russia, Strategy and Power in Russia 1600-1914, is quite good, especially on higher-level concepts, but its focus is extremely wide and accounts of fighting are very short on tactics and narrative. The aforementioned collections of articles by Förster and Chickering comparing German and American experiences of warfare between the Civil War and the Great War - the most relevant is Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences 1871-1914 is quite good, but again, very low on actual fighting, and overly focused on the narrative of total war as compared to the stuff that both the German and US armies had to physically deal with during the period e.g. the Plains Wars, the Spanish War (and Filipino insurgency), and the war against the Herero and Namaqua.
I hope this post helps somewhat. If it's any consolation, it's always been my particular goal - a dream, really - to write a comparative world history of the wars of the 1860s, because I feel that there's something of a hole there. Too much parochialism, partly driven by the constraints of the literature and of learning enough to make meaningful connections, and partly driven by the difficulty of finding connecting threads. There's definitely a hole there that can be filled.
ParkCungHee
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Can anyone recommend some books on Scottish History not plagued by lowland court-centricism?
I have been looking for a book on the Balkan wars in the 19th century leading up to WW1 and more generally the fall of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Recent googling of such subjects has yielded a few titles of what appear to be questionable quality (i.e. one reviewer's top book gets an averaged 3 stars on Amazon, etc.).
Any scholar here know of a solid book on the subject?
Any scholar here know of a solid book on the subject?
That's too bad, I had been hoping to find something that showed the progression of warfare over the period. What I was particularly hoping to find is how technological improvements altered the military doctrines, dispositions and tactics of the period. Things like the railroad, improvement of artillery, machine gun etc....
By industrial era I mainly meant warfare that occurred in the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution when Europe and the US started getting factories, railroads, and other things. I'm sort of trying to identify a moment when and if there was a distinct shift to a different kind of warfare and how it happened.
I have Hew Strachen's book on World War I. Do you happen to know of any book that covers the weaponry of the period in some details?
It's a shame there isn't a comprehensive work covering that divide. The Napoleonic Wars sit on one side (and even then Britain was starting to industrialize in a few industries like textiles), and the European wars starting with the Crimean and the American Civil War on the other.
LightSpectra
me autem minui
It would have to have either encyclopedic depth or oceanic length, given the amount of information and the breadth of the time period.
ParkCungHee
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Eh. I think such a text could work, but it would have to work on the assumption of knowledge about specifics and simply move directly to broad themes.
Showalter's first book was a classic called Railroads and Rifles, one of the inaugural books of the New Military History. You may want to look into that for a partial answer.
I don't know about you, but I personally get awfully leery of creating a system where none such necessarily existed, and where it can sometimes be actively harmful to comprehension to describe one. A paradigm shift can't really be elucidated when one doesn't necessarily believe that paradigms existed. Yes, different technologies had their own impacts on the practice and theory of war in operational, strategic, and tactical senses. But these technologies were rarely, if ever, developed contemporaneously, and they cannot be said to have settled into a steady state of "ok, this is how it works now, we don't really need to change anything". Theoretical paradigms like AirLand Battle or Soviet-style combined arms as an attempt to aggregate theory and technology were still a long way off; when men wrote about systems of war in the nineteenth century, they were either attempting to describe universal truths or construct a response to specific changes in technology and theory. And those supposed universal truths of warfare also argue against a "distinct shift to a different kind of warfare", as well.
Technical military history is one of my weakest points; I have to confess that I'm singularly uninterested in the specifics of how well individual weapons and equipment matched up against each other on the workshop floor. The battlefield matters to me more than that. So I'm afraid I can't help you there.
Considering the sheer amount of literature it would have to integrate in order to be even minimally useful to people with more than just a hobby-historian interest, I strongly doubt that anybody would have the sheer doughty implacability to carry it through.
Railroads and Rifles sounds worth picking up. What I'm having trouble grasping is what was mentioned before. It seems like the Napoleonic Wars sit on one side of the fence, with the Crimean War and American Civil War on the other side. With nothing really in between.
I'm also interested in how these things were introduced. Did some military commander just say, "Hey there's this great new thing called (insert more advanced artillery/rifle) we should adopt that!". Was there some Department in charge of doing that? Was there a conscious sense of we need to reform because we're falling behind (insert x country). Or was it more organic than that, did it simply diffuse?
