The four volumes of the Cambridge History of War were conceived in global terms. The aim was to go beyond a history centred on warfare in Europe, in which the global context emerged solely through the eyes of European exploration, trading, and colonisation. Instead, the volumes would seek to provide the reader with a broader approach to warfare across the world, in which the experiences and trajectories of states and their military systems could be examined and compared. Europe and Europe’s military engagement with the wider world would have a place, but would not be the single point of reference from which global warfare would be seen. This aim was the starting point for Volume III, both as initially conceived by the first editors, John Childs and Arthur Waldron, and then by the current editorial team.

Sub-Saharan Africa was on the threshold of a new and violent era in the second half of the fifteenth century. The ensuing four centuries would see innovative forms of military organisation, novel cultures of militarism underpinning such systems, and new wars, as well as new ways of fighting them. There were often different factors at work in different regions; the presence of external drivers was a key distinction between Atlantic Africa and the rest of the continent, for instance. However, warfare across early modern Africa had much in common, in terms of the aim to control factor endowments, to maximise population, and to construct enduring ideological systems, whether territorially or culturally defined. In some ways – certainly in terms of the underlying trends and broad contours of Africa’s military history – the existence or absence of external intrusion is a distraction, however significant it was in particular places at particular times. The outcome of the processes in motion between c. 1450 and c. 1850 was an expansion in military scale, the professionalisation of soldiery, the adoption of new weaponry, and the militarisation of the polity – whether ‘state-based’ or otherwise. The militarisation of African polities and societies was an ongoing process between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century, a period which in many ways witnessed the laying of the foundations of modern African political systems; this would culminate in a veritable military revolution in the nineteenth century, a transformation in the organisation and culture of violence, without which Europe’s later partition of the continent cannot properly be understood.

This chapter shows how the long-term changes in warfare, sometimes described as a ‘military revolution’, centring on the sixteenth century, and the Italian Wars since the end of the fifteenth century in particular, posed fundamentally new challenges to rulers, leading them – unwittingly – to bring about long-term processes of state-building.

For over half a century, discussion of the relationship between military finance, organisation, and state development has been dominated by the contested concept of a ‘military revolution’; the belief that there were one or a few periods of fundamental change that transformed both war and wider European history. More recently, this has been supplemented by the idea of smaller, but more frequent ‘revolutions in military affairs’ (RMAs) as individual military organisations respond to, or anticipate, changes made by their likely opponents. Technology is generally considered to drive both forms of ‘revolution’, as innovative weaponry and institutional practice transform war, rendering older models ineffective and obsolete. Change flows through a series of chain reactions, as states adapt to new conditions, modifying their structures to sustain and direct altered armed forces, and revising their forms of interaction with society both to extract the necessary resources and to legitimate their use in war-making.

The Mansfeld Regiment’s social organization and material contexts shaped the way it was formed, the path it took from Dresden to Lombardy, and the way it disintegrated. The concepts of the military revolution and the fiscal-military state are still relevant. But developing fiscal-military infrastructure was weak, which laid the groundwork for the Mansfeld Regiment’s loss of funding and failure. In this regiment’s daily operations I did not see the changes in social discipline that were supposedly intertwined with the military revolution. What I have found about the Mansfeld Regiment and the Saxon army may serve as a basis for re-examining some historical assumptions about early seventeenth-century armies. Daily interactions within this pathetic regiment are also an important source for the historical social anthropology of early-modern Europe, shedding light on masculinity, violence, identity formation, and marginalization.

This chapter places the actions of the Mansfeld Regiment within the context of military pay for the Saxon army during the 1620s. Pay for individual infantrymen varied substantially, and this chapter argues that it can be used as a proxy to determine these men’s social status. Mercenary soldiers and female members of the military community could act as subcontractors in their own right, which shaped the way they found sexual partners. Pay in the Saxon army in the 1620s seems high, and was disbursed on time. Although the Saxon army was at paper strength throughout the 1620s, this massive outlay may have been one reason Saxon finances fell apart in the 1640s. Meanwhile, the Mansfeld Regiment was paid far less than the customary rate in the Saxon army, and was swindled by the Governor of Milan.

The concepts of the fiscal-military state, the military revolution, and increasing control over the ordinary soldier have been intertwined in European historiography. But the assumption that the growth and development of military finance was accompanied by increasing discipline within military units has not yet been seriously tested for the early seventeenth century. The War People is a historical social anthropology of ordinary central European soldiers during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) which interrogates this assumption. It focuses on the understudied political entity of Electoral Saxony, once the most important Protestant German state and a rich source of unpublished archival records, including the legal books of a single regiment. These rich archival sources are the basis not only for statistical inquiry but for a deep microhistorical study of ordinary soldiers as human beings.

The iconic image of the knight on horseback represents just one facet of the horse’s imprint on legal, political, and social systems developing in medieval Iberian society. This chapter argues that historical and bodily relations with horses shaped the negotiation of social status and the administration of territory during the dynamic periods of peace, conflict, and negotiation among Iberian kingdoms in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. Defining the set of practices, ideals, and institutional hierarchies making up an Iberian "culture of the horse” brings to light a fundamental tension in which the horse served as both an agent of control and a means to disrupt power relations.

Michael Howard maintains that most nation-states that came into existence before the mid-twentieth century were created by war or had their boundaries defined by wars or internal violence.1 The role of war, however, has been neglected in theories of nationalism, which tend to focus on the rise of nations and nation-states as a recent phenomenon generated by various forms of modernization. This comment does not apparently apply to the work of Charles Tilly and Michael Mann, who draw on the historiography of the European early modern “military revolution.”2 Military innovations, they argue, meant that success in warfare required an efficient process of fiscal extraction (taxes), which in turn was dependent on the development of a centralized state administration. Even in these accounts, however, nationalism and nations were relatively late derivatives of these modern processes, emerging in response to state centralizing pressures in the late eighteenth century.

This chapter maps the effects of war on economies and on women’s work. First, it surveys the role of women both as an official and unofficial part of armies and other military support operations. Second, it looks at the way that military conscription of young men affected the work of women who stayed home, especially given that many of these men would never return or would return unfit for work. Third, it examines the strain that armies, whether engaged in hostilities or simply passing through a region, placed on the local resource base and the way this affected the structure of work, including, at times, amplifying its coercive character. Fourth, war encouraged women in garrison and port towns to engage in new forms of commercialized service work, while giving rise to a large body of people, including many women, to which the state owed wages or pensions. Finally, war generally went along with rising taxes, most often upon commodities and often on staples, such as salt. One result was a sharp increase in smuggling, which, in turn, altered both women’s and men’s relationship to consumption and to the State.

Chapter 4 looks specifically at the reorganisation of military power in this period, which is closely related to the declining power of aristocracies. The rise of the modern state and its monopoly of legitimate force made militaries and law enforcement bureaucratic functions of the state, rather than localised privileges of divided nobilities. The pacification of the nobilities, the subduing of their traditions of martial competition to the modern state, opens up the scope for the more civil forms of competition. The ‘wild’ can now be replaced by the ‘domesticated’.

Taking its lead from a famous scene in 2 Henry IV and drawing upon the latest historical scholarship, this chapter surveys the modernization of England’s military capacity during the reign of Elizabeth I. By contrast with the success of England’s naval revival, the parallel effort to overhaul the antiquated county militia system and to create armies for service abroad achieved only partial success. While bows and bills were gradually replaced by guns and pikes and a proportion of each county’s militia was formed into “trained bands,” the sheer scale of the effort meant that the modernization of England’s military capacity on land always remained a frustratingly incomplete endeavor. Even so, Elizabeth’s privy council and the lord lieutenants of the counties made greater progress in this effort than has typically been recognized and managed to sustain war on multiple fronts over a period of more than twenty years.

This chapter examines the fall of Dutch Taiwan to a Chinese state (the Zheng family maritime state) in 1662, suggesting that that event can be understood by focusing on two things. First, the VOC, although the most powerful maritime structure of Europe, was successful in East Asia largely because East Asian states were less interested in controlling maritime space and ports than were European states. The Zheng state, born in the 1650s, was an anomaly in East Asia: a Chinese state oriented toward seaborne commerce. Second, Zheng military power was high, although Dutch military techniques and technologies proved instrumental in holding off his numerically superior army for nearly a year. The chapter ends with counterfactual speculations about what would have happened had the Dutch held Taiwan: the Qing dynasty, which eventually defeated the Zheng family and took Taiwan, would not have incorporated Taiwan into its empire.

Before c.600, Western European military forces were recognisably descended from the last western Roman armies, as can quickly be demonstrated. Late Roman troops had sometimes been paid via the delegation of fiscal revenues and, as earlier, received allotments of land on retirement.1 Their hereditary service,2 furthermore, exempted them from certain taxes. In the fourth and fifth centuries a series of military identities evolved, based around oppositions to traditional civic Roman ideals. These turned on ideas of barbarism, enhanced by possibly increased recruitment beyond the frontiers and greater opportunities for non-Roman soldiers to rise to higher command.3 As the territory effectively governed from Ravenna, the imperial capital, shrank during the fifth century, and with it the available taxation and recruiting bases, the enlistment, and political pre-eminence, of warriors from outside the empire grew further.4