The mid-fifteenth century saw the slow emergence of new states across mainland and island South-East Asia after a period of substantial political decentralisation and fragmentation, on the one hand, and the withdrawal or ejection of Chinese armies, on the other. The new or reinvigorated states of the region – including Ava (Upper Burma), Pegu (Lower Burma), Ayudhya (today Thailand), and Dai Viet (today Vietnam) – stimulated a new period of martial vigour from the 1450s as they expanded at the expense of their neighbours. In successful campaigns in the 1450s and in 1471, Dai Viet conquered Champa on its southern frontier twice, leaving the Vietnamese state as the permanent hegemon over mainland South-East Asia’s eastern littoral, relegating Champa to a mere tributary shadow of its former self. (See Map 14.) Ava and Pegu waged a bitter war for decades for dominance over the Irrawaddy valley, a contest that spilled over into Arakan, on the Bay of Bengal, mainland South-East Asia’s thin, western littoral. Ayudhya, in the central mainland, made itself the dominant political and military power in the Chao Phraya river valley.

The years of the French Revolution and First Empire are remembered as much for war and imperial expansion as for the great political and social reforms they introduced. The Revolutionaries saw themselves as sons of the Enlightenment, devoted to ideals of freedom and the betterment of humanity. Yet they unleashed a long period of almost continuous warfare, fought across the European continent and beyond, in North Africa and the Near East, in North America, Asia, and the Caribbean. In Europe, France faced a succession of coalitions of other European powers, from the First Coalition of 1792–7 – an international alliance that included Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, Piedmont, Naples, and Sardinia – through to the final coalition, the Seventh, which wearily regrouped to defeat Napoleon after his ill-judged return to France in 1815. The other governments of Europe feared France’s political ambitions as much as its military might, and they invariably saw themselves as the victims of French aggression, forced to make war to protect their territory from attack. Britain also feared the challenge to its naval and colonial supremacy which a revitalised France would pose; for London the war was as much about Jamaica and India as the balance of power in Continental Europe, about global competition for resources as much as the ideas of the Revolution in France.

This chapter studies the history of European expansion in the oceans and the seas stretching east from the Cape of Good Hope. It aims to look at European violent activity here within the broader context of the history of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the South Chinese Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. In this short chapter, only a few major developments can be traced. Roughly three phases can be distinguished: first, armed vessels – sea power – opened the door for later European success. Then overseas bases – factories – were consolidated by the construction of fortresses. Finally, the Europeans – the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and the French – became drawn into military enterprises inland. This chapter, though, focuses on the naval aspects of European expansion, more specifically on the use of warfare to support overseas trade or to prevent competitors from trading.

Chapter 3 expands the examination of war’s great theorists and theories to include “small war,” maritime, and airpower theorists like Callwell, Galula, Trinquier, Lawrence, Mahan, Corbett, Douhet, Mitchell, Trenchard, and Slessor. This chapter emphasizes the subordinate relationship between subtheories of war and general theory and asserts that in some cases subtheories are the result of inadequacies in general theory. The chapter examines the human, political, and combat aspects of small wars from both strong and weak perspectives. Additionally, the chapter evaluates maritime and airpower subtheories and defines three tasks for domain theorists: characterize the domain in abstract terms, explain how to control it, and then show how control advances the aims of war. Finally, it synthesizes material from Chapters 2 and 3 by evaluating each theorist for balance relative to war’s twenty dialectics.

Chapter 1 analyzes the ideas of the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. It describes his life and his "America," which was socially and politically at war with itself. This chapter also discusses how the core principles Mahan borrowed from the Swiss military theorist Jomini – concentration, offensive action, and decision by battle – were brought from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. It ends with an explication of the traditional model of wars nature, which saw armed conflict as an extension of the competitive side of human nature.