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.

Was Luigi Cadorna bound to head the Italian army in 1914? For over a century those tracing the Chief of Staff’s rise and fall across the Great War have argued it was highly likely, if not a foregone conclusion. Scion of a dynasty of soldiers serving the Savoys since the eighteenth century, he was in uniform from childhood, and enjoyed an exceptional career. Come the European conflict, Cadorna appeared to have all the qualities of a national condottiero: the brilliant heir to noble warrior stock, to use one of his hagiographers’ formulas. But the most surprising thing about that personal myth is that Cadorna himself firmly believed it. As his confidant and informal biographer at Supreme Command, Colonel Angelo Gatti, would write: ‘he is sure he is the man of God, and the necessary continuer of his father’s work. Raffaele Cadorna took Rome, Luigi Cadorna will take Trento and Trieste.’

The inglorious twelfth Battle of the Isonzo (autumn 1917), came to be an icon of catastrophe in the national awareness. It has remained one of the most persistent memory sites in Italian culture. However, many of the revolutionary myths proved in time to be little more than legend or false reports of war. There was no betrayal, no organized subversive plot, no attempt to ‘do a Russia’, yet Caporetto still has evocative power over the collective memory, outweighing the ‘splendid recovery’ on the Piave. Not only is it the most written about (and debated) battle in the history of unified Italy, it is also the only one whose name has entered common parlance to conjure up moral and material disaster. This more than explains why it was also the culminating experience in the life of Luigi Cadorna. Not only did it end his career, it turned him into a reprobate. He who even days before had been an untouchable idol, was now tarred with the brush of incompetence, even treason, and put through the public disgrace of a court of enquiry vetting his every act of command. Unsurprisingly, Caporetto was a ghost which Cadorna tried to shake off for the rest of his days.

Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History was undoubtedly a quintessential by-product of an age that believed in universally applicable rules, in this case that a navy’s function was the same in the seventeenth as in the nineteenth century, the command of the sea its ultimate goal. Naturally enough, over the years Mahan’s sweeping theoretical framework has received its share of criticism. In his 1911 book Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, Sir Julian Corbett argued that it was more important to deny to one’s opponent the command of the sea, rather than seize it for oneself, so that ‘the enemy can no longer attack our lines of passage and communication effectively, and that he cannot use or defend his own’. Taking a leaf from Corbett, John F. Guilmartin underscored how Mahan’s principles cannot be applied to the early modern Mediterranean, the physical conditions of the area defying the paradigms applied by Anglo-American naval historians to the oceanic world. Besides, even if Mahan did acknowledge the importance of weaponry, Geoffrey Parker has pointed out that The Influence of Sea Power upon History ‘contained no discussion of guns, sails or ship design, because the author did not believe that changes in these things could affect the application of strategic principles’.

In her book A Translucent Mirror, Pamela Crossley wrote that “The Ming empire (1368–1644) was perpetually engaged in a struggle against various peoples along its northern borders.” This bald statement contradicts conventional wisdom that the Ming dynasty, having endured Mongol rule for about a century, attempted to limit relations with foreign lands and developed a policy of isolation. In fact, the Ming empire became embroiled in numerous conflicts along its frontiers. Some of these clashes were defensive, but others were attempts to annex additional territory. The court resolved a few of these conflicts through diplomacy or withdrawal from alien lands, yet others festered throughout the dynasty. It scarcely enjoyed clear-cut victories. Nonetheless, such repeated battles necessitated improvements in military strategy and technology, and it is no accident that a spate of texts on the military appeared during this time. The first Ming emperor himself had to master principles of land and naval warfare in the course of defeating other rebel groups and in seeking to gain the throne.

The Qing Empire’s military drew from the traditions of bodyguards and booty warfare in North-East Asia (primarily what is now southern Jilin province) in the late sixteenth century. The foundations of imperial expansion were built during the long war with Ming China, from 1618 to 1644, which allowed the Qing to absorb the central features of Ming military technology. Patterns of human management and technology application established in this period persisted over the next forty years as the Qing completed their conquest of China and Taiwan. After 1685, Qing expansion spread out to Mongolia, Qinghai, Tibet, and what is now the province of Xinjiang. These wars, against less densely populated, sometimes nomadic zones, changed Qing campaigns significantly. By the nineteenth century, the century and a half of focus on the continental frontiers left the Qing poorly prepared for seaborne challenges, and from some technologies that the Qing had previously regarded as less relevant to their military needs.

The Japanese archipelago and the Korean peninsula are neighbouring regions, with histories of similarities and contrasts. Currently inhabited by a population of about 123 million in an area slightly bigger than Germany, Japan has been relatively isolated throughout much of the last two millennia. In the late nineteenth century, Japan reinvented itself from a land on the margins of the Sinitic cultural zone to a world power. In contrast, Korea – a landmass a little larger than Great Britain and inhabited by about 78 million people – was an active participant in the China-centred world order during much of its 2,300 year-history before losing sovereignty to Imperial Japan in 1910. (See Map 13.)

Cadorna frequently showed signs of psychological isolation and intolerance of discussion that were to prove a source of great complication. As the other 1914–1918 European commanders learnt by experience, leading a mass of citizen-soldiers called for reserves of diplomacy, skill in dealing with civil government, and a readiness to administer areas hitherto foreign to military life, like managing consensus and organizing propaganda. Those who adjusted to the job’s new political facets prospered, but the pure technocrats in uniform came into collision with their governments sooner or later and were deposed or were forced out by the pressure of a dissatisfied public opinion. Cadorna did not exactly shine at diplomacy with politicians: from the first weeks of his appointment, he created confrontation, tension, continual defiance and clashes. Above all, his solipsistic attitude would condition the Italian High Command in all its organization.

For almost three millennia the pastoral nomads of the Eurasian steppe formed a great reserve of mounted cavalry, threatening their settled neighbours while offering them goods and services of great value – in particular horses and skilled soldiers for their armies. The Eurasian nomads were also empire-builders, creators of imperial ideology and administrative structures that were passed down through generations of successor states. Their imperial centre in Mongolia was home to two related peoples – the Turks and the Mongols – each defined by the powerful empires they erected. The Türk Empire, which flourished from the mid-sixth to mid-eighth centuries, was the first of these and it controlled the steppe from Mongolia to the Volga river, fighting and trading with China, the empires of the Middle East, and Byzantium. The second great state was the Mongol Empire, founded by Chinggis Khan in 1206. The Mongols extended their power yet further than the Turks, conquering much of Eurasia.

Few figures have been more controversial in the history of modern Italy than Luigi Cadorna. When he was appointed Chief of Staff of the Italian Army, in summer 1914, he was already popular with his fellow countrymen. Since May 1915, he became an untouchable autocrat. Enjoying exceptional powers, he governed the war zone – virtually the whole of Northern Italy – with an iron fist, more and more explicitly defying government and parliament who were, he claimed, a bunch of weak, inept, radical progressives who would lead the country to ruin. He was too much of a monarchist to aspire to dictatorship, as some of his supporters actually proposed. But he sincerely believed Italy needed a strong man in command and did his utmost to achieve his purpose. Only the catastrophe of Caporetto in autumn 1917 eventually toppled him. He was relieved of his command, held to account for his performance, and turned into the scapegoat for all the woes of the Italian war: bloodbaths in the trenches, iron discipline, firing squads galore, the home territory overrun. For several years he vanished from the scene until Mussolini, firmly ensconced as dictator, decided to call him back to the public eye.

Generations of historians have seen the interplay between the early modern state and its armed forces, and between warfare and state formation, as key factors in the process of modernisation. The creation of the modern state was most powerfully expressed through the supposed symbiosis between absolute regimes and standing armies. The image of geometric order and discipline generated by formations of infantry drawn up in kilometre-long battle lines; the authorities’ direct involvement in provisioning, equipping, and uniforming its soldiers; central government’s reach into every aspect of warfare and military planning. All of these have been regarded as defining traits of the interconnection between the standing army and the state. Research on the inner structures of early modern military society has, until recently, been coloured by preconceptions about functioning hierarchies and chains of command, an increasingly effective military administration, rigid discipline, and corresponding efficiency in the waging of warfare. Such a top-down view remained unchallenged as long as researchers relied almost exclusively on sources derived from governmental and/or legal provenance, leaving an impression of overwhelming state authority reaching right down to the level of the common soldier.

The axiomatic claim that the volunteers ߢfought fascismߣ in Spain is often made in response to questions concerning their motivation for enlisting. Chapter three instead treats it as the starting-point for uncovering how they imagined, represented and engaged with the Nationalists and, in so doing, argues that the making of antifascist war was dependent on the making of fascist enemies. It traces the volunteersߣ vision of the conflict as a struggle between a sovereign nation and a fascist invader back to a transnational understanding of world politics before continuing the story within Spain itself, where representations of enemy soldiers as coerced Italian peasants, barbaric Moroccan mercenaries or ignorant Spanish conscripts reinforced their partisan interpretation of the violence and legitimised their own involvement within it. It then turns from abstract understandings of the enemy towards frontline encounters with flesh-and-blood soldiers. Whilst the volunteersߣ emotional responses therein were as varied as the kind of killing being done, they agreed that any feelings of sympathy had to be subordinated to the objective of violently defeating an uncompromising ideology.