Keywords

Introduction

This chapter offers an introduction to military history – one among many subdisciplines within the discipline of history. Military history is among the oldest forms of history and has served a broad range of purposes. Traditionally military history has been “war-centric,” and during much of the twentieth century, military historians suffered from the reputation of being war-glorifying and of carrying out methodologically unsophisticated work. Historically speaking a major producer (and consumer) of military history have been military professionals who studied war and warfare in order to derive useful lessons from it. Contemporary military history, however, is a much more diverse undertaking, characterized by a relatively broad definition of what comes under the heading of military history. Thus there are many different approaches to studying the subject. Over the last decades some of the new developments have been an increasing mainstreaming of gender perspectives and replacing a Eurocentric approach with a more global history oriented approach. Despite such new and innovative ways of doing military history, the field may still be regarded as one of the most conservative within history. It is also one of the few fields of history which continuously relates to a large milieu of professionals – that is, officers and military specialists who seek inspiration and guidance from military history when preparing for war. Thus military history may be characterized as one of the oldest and most widely used among the military sciences. In addition, military history is a remarkably commercially oriented subdiscipline as a large market for books, films, and other types of media related to historical narratives of war exist. Currently some of the principal approaches to military history are operational military history, war and society/new military history, deconstructivist military history, and memory culture oriented military history.

Defining Military History

Military history is just one among many fields in the discipline of history. Although a concise delimitation to other fields of history is difficult, military history may according to Michael Howard simply be defined as “the history of armed forces and the conduct of war” (Howard, 1988, p. 4). While this definition encapsulates what many still view as the defining content of military history, other scholars have advocated for a broader and more inclusive definition (e.g., Messerschmidt et al., 1982, p. 48). According to Stephen Morillo, apart from wars and warfare, military history includes the history of military institutions, “the varying roles of soldiers and warriors in different societies and the social impact of warfare” as well as such topics as war’s interaction with economics, technology, culture, and social structures, including gender roles (Morillo, 2006, p. 3f). As Matthew Hughes and William Philpott notes “there is very little in modern human history which has not been determined or touched by war” (Hughes & Philpott, 2006, p. 1) – an observation which makes it tempting to define military history as broadly and inclusively as possibly. Yet, if military history is to function as a distinct area within the historical science, a certain topical core is useful. War (including the preparation for war and the termination of war), warfare, and armed forces may be said to represent the phenomenon, the social practices, and the institutions which are at the center of military history.

In the Anglo-Saxon scholarly community, “military history” is the preferred term, although there exist a number of partly overlapping and competing terms such as “war and society” (Speller, 2012). The term military history has equivalents in many other European languages (French: Histoire militaire; Spanish: Historia militar; and German: Militärgeschichte). Traditionally, however, the German term has been Kriegsgeschichte, similarly to today’s Russian term voennaya istoria (both terms literally meaning “war history”). This is not merely a semantic subtlety, but reflects the narrower scope of military history before the twentieth century; war and warfare was the focal point rather than military affairs in a broad sense.

The Study of the Past as Military History

Military history and its parent discipline, history, share an interest in studying and explaining the course of the past, including contextualizing and interpreting the causes of historical change. History has been – and still is – characterized by a variety of approaches on how to study the past, including different positions on whether historical explanations amount to anything other than narrative constructions of an irretrievable past (Munslow, 2006). Some historians still believe that it is possible to establish by means of historical study a relatively high degree of correspondence between the historian’s narrated account of the past and what most likely happened in the past (Evans, 1997). Others are much more skeptical, and some would argue that the very notion of a well-defined past is doubtful thus preferring speaking of the past in plural.

Not only do historians struggle with the question how (and if) the past can be reconstructed and narrated in a theoretically and methodologically sound way. They have also increasingly become interested in how the past is used by contemporary society and in the processes of how collective memory function (Kansteiner, 2002). This interest reflects that gaining scholarly insight is just one of several ways of addressing the past. Human collectives also use the past in numerous other ways, most prominently to create and maintain identities, to entertain themselves, to derive useful lessons, and to seek guidance for future action. Military history has served all these functions. In much traditional military history, past victories and defeats were used to create unifying narratives about one’s own nation while vilifying other nations. Inside the armed forces, a certain type of history writing, often termed “regimental history,” was (and is) used to create a strong corporate identity by stressing the heroic and successful exploits of the military unit in question rather than studying it in a reflective, critical, and dispassionate manner (Millett, 1992, p. 4).

The increased focus among historians on how the past is used has contributed to a considerably broadening of the field, thereby giving birth to memory studies, one of the areas where history links up with other disciplines such as sociology, psychology, and anthropology (Kansteiner, 2002). Yet, it is no novelty that history is closely related to other disciplines and professions and military history is a case in point. Traditionally, military history has occupied a central position in the military sciences. As recorded experience from past battles and wars, military history has been used to formulate principles of warfare, to develop doctrine and to teach future officers their profession. Sun Tsu, Vegetius, Machiavelli, Saxe, Bülow, Clausewitz, and Jomini (to mention but a few military thinkers) have all, in various ways, drawn extensively on military history when formulating their observations on war and warfare (Lider, 1983; Angstrom & Widen, 2015, pp. 79–81). Even among those not believing in the possibility of establishing fixed principles of war on the basis of past military experiences, such as the chief of the Prussian General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, military history was seen as a valuable tool of education for officers because it offered a pool of experience and thereby served to demonstrate the intricacies and complexities of warfare (Holborn, 1986, p. 289). Military history is thus a field which engages a large milieu of professionals – that is, officers and military specialists; by seeking inspiration and guidance from past military events this milieu contributes significantly to the considerable demand that exist for military history. How exactly to derive lessons from the past and how to translate such insights into improving the performance of officers is, however, a disputed subject (Beaumont, 1994; Evans, 2020; Kerttunen, 2011).

In terms of epistemological approach and theoretical debates, history has often been influenced by other disciplines, primarily within the social sciences – for example, by Marxism and by the Linguistic Turn. This has led to considerable theoretical convergence between history and other disciplines. Nevertheless, there is also a strong methodologically oriented strand among historians, which tends to disregard such theoretical debates and rather focus on reconstructing the past by applying ad hoc multilayered and multi-causal models of explanation (Gaddis, 2002). These historians generally focus on identifying and utilizing huge bodies of sources and often they are more interested in the methodological problems of finding, evaluating, and exploring the sources than in the larger epistemological and theoretical implications of their craft. This may result in written texts which are narratively strong, easily read and to the general reader appears to be “to-the-point,” but which also offer a relatively low level of abstraction and reflection. Together with the fact that history pertains to all fields of human activity and thus is highly relatable to the interested layman, this may explain why well-written history often entertains a large non-scholarly readership. Thus, serious research and popularized writing are often easier to combine than in many other scientific disciplines. This, however, comes with a price – rigid (and to the reader boring) methodological and theoretical deliberations are often absent.

Military History Becomes a Subdiscipline

Traditionally, history has been dominated by tales of kings, state-like entities, and wars. In that sense, military history represents one of the classic areas addressed by historians. The often-mentioned paradigmatic example of that is Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War (written around 431 BC). In this work, the causes and the course of the war between the Greek city states of Sparta and Athens are investigated in a detached and critical manner, relying upon written and oral sources. In addition, the events studied by Thucydides are being subjected to a clear analytical scheme – the driving forces behind the war famously described as “fear, honor and interest” (Thucydides, 1998). In fact, military history may been seen “as the oldest form of history writing in many cultures” due to the fact that rulers actively sought the recording of their military exploits from the time when writing was invented (Morillo, 2006, p. 2). Statehood and military power were thus legitimized by being narrated and written down. Not only were war and warfare integrated in most major works devoted to the history of nations from early modernity and onwards: important developments such as the emergence of state-based standing armies and rapid technological change contributed to the creation of a distinct subdiscipline of military history. The establishment of standing armies and state institutions created bureaucracies, and this in turn resulted in the creation of military archives and in specialized entities in the armed forces that were tasked with studying military history and derive lessons from it, or teaching it to military students. The first instance was the establishment of the Austrian military archive in 1801. This archive contained a section for military history with the goal of providing the army with relevant historical material (Nowosadtko, 2002, p. 58). Fifteen years later, the Prussian General Staff established a war history section and by the second half of the nineteenth century, most European armed forces not only possessed archives but also had established military history sections, which published substantial and detailed studies of their own and foreign armies’ wars (Echevarria II, 1997). Simultaneously, history in general and especially military history became a central part of the curriculum at institutions of military education, such as the Prussian Kriegsakademie. Yet, the same processes also resulted in military and civilian institutions studying military history gradually moving apart and taking two main directions, which were highly different in terms of their perception of the past and whether history could offer lessons. Inside the armed forces, for example in military academies and research sections under the general staffs, the focus was dominantly on deriving useful lessons from war and on justifying and glorifying one’s own armed forces. This approach resulted in “a romantic-heroic history that centered on an intuited understanding and vicarious experience of the past” and paid little attention to contextualization of the matter to be studied (Echevarria II, 1997, p. 573f). In civilian academia, however, it was the dominant position that past events were unique and should be studied and understood in their historical context rather than being sifted for militarily useful lessons which could transcend time and place. These conflicting views materialized during the late nineteenth century – the paradigmatic example being the debate between German historian Hans Delbrück and representatives of the German General Staff in the so-called Strategiestreit (i.e., strategy controversy). As opposed to the German armed forces’ perception of strategic thought as transcending time and culture, Delbrück maintained that wars could only be studied in their historical context and that they offered no enduring lessons. On their side, representatives of the history section of the German General Staff argued that civilian historians were neither qualified nor entitled to study how militaries fought at war (Lange, 1995).

Decreasing Civil Academic Interest

As indicated, during the nineteenth century also the civilian academic world related strongly to military history. Not only historians as Hans Delbrück but also social scientists and other thinkers like Friedrich Engels took a major interest in war’s role in history. Some, such as Edward Creasy, even saw war as a main agent of historical change – a perspective, which was reflected in his famous 1851 book Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (Morillo, 2006, p. 35). By the turn of the century, however, military history began to look like a dead end to most university-based historians. Writing a few decades after Creasy’s book, J.R. Green in his History of the English People declared that “it is the reproach of historians that they have too often turned history into a mere record of the butchery of men by their fellow-men.” He added: “But war plays a small part in the real history of European nations and, in that of England, its part is smaller than in any” (Quoted from Oman, 1939, p. 160). Especially after the First World War, military history increasingly came to be seen as war-glorifying and unworthy of scholarly study at civilian universities (Creveld, 1983, p. 552). Rather than as a cause of historical change, war came to be viewed as a symptom merely reflecting deep rooted economic and social structural forces in society at large. This led to a general isolation of military history from other types of history through most of the twentieth century. Admittedly, the marginalization of military history was a process characterized by considerable national variations in terms of when, why, and how much this type of history lost terrain. In Germany, it was the cumulative effect of two disastrous wars, the immense Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, and a wholly new approach to military history in the new democratic Bundeswehr as well as in academia that triggered the change, and the decisive marginalization of military history did not start until the end of the Second World War (Kollmer, 2013). In neighboring Denmark, the process had started already at the end of the nineteenth century and is normally associated with Denmark’s defeat in the 1864 war against Austria and Prussia in combination with the alleged dominance in academia of historians with a pacifist outlook (Jespersen, 2008, p. 8f). Also in other countries such as France and the United States, university-based military history experienced an eclipse during much of the twentieth century. However, no studies have demonstrated exactly how and why the process unfolded, and there are conflicting views on how severe the marginalization was. In addition, we know little about the degree to which the same tendency manifested itself in non-western or illiberal societies during the twentieth century.

Nevertheless, during the said period, military history occupied two significant niches: As described above, it was studied and taught at military institutions of higher learning or within specialized research units, such as the US Army Historical Division. This institution produced a sequence of high-quality official histories of the US army, including the monumental “green book” series on the Second World War. In a similar vein, the German Bundeswehr operated an in-house institute for military history: Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsamt (today Zentrum für Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaft). This body consistently turned out solid works on German military history and had a pioneering role in studying the armed forces of the Third Reich. In the case of Germany, the Forschungsamt enjoyed full academic freedom – a liberty not necessarily shared by military history research institutes within the armed forces in other countries. Thus, while much valuable work has been done by historians in the service of their armed forces, their efforts have typically been circumscribed by a combination of self-censorship, document classification, and political considerations (Freedman, 2017).

Military History Commercialized

Military history also occupied another niche: that of a highly lucrative and deeply popular genre of history. Probably more than any other area of history, military history has become commercialized. It offers a mass market and “draws writers not just from academics and professional military personnel, but also from professional authors and popularizers who happen to choose military topics for their marketability” (Morillo, 2006, p. 5). Especially Anglo-Saxon historians have proved capable of turning out well-written (and often, but not always, well-researched) books, in the process selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. Along with the popularity of such books goes an equally big market for other products such as magazines and electronic media – including for a certain period – a TV channel “Military History.” This, in combination with a steady stream of Hollywood movies dedicated to wars and battles involving US forces (chapter “Popular Culture and the Military”), undoubtedly have created a considerable bias toward American military history – at least in (west-) European-US collective memory. Nevertheless, it should be noted that in addition to a globalized Anglo-Saxon dominated market for military history, there are also national markets and audiences, especially oriented toward their own nations’ wars and campaigns. A vivid example of that is the significant role played in contemporary Russia by books and other media products about this country’s wars (Carleton, 2017). The defining characteristics of much of the market-oriented military history are a strong emphasis on the dramatic and spectacular, often epitomized in terms like “decisive battle” and often written in the tradition of Creasy – that is, with a credo of western liberal triumphalism. Other important features are a considerable focus on the technological-material aspects of warfare, including “super-weapons,” and on “great captains” such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and the outstanding Second World War generals (Biddle & Citino, 2018; Black, 2004, p. 38). Finally, there exist a strong fascination with the military history of the Third Reich and with the war on the eastern front 1941–1945. In both cases, the result is often very narrow and highly tilted accounts, which for example draws uncritically on the memoirs of German generals (Smelser & Davies, 2008). This dimension of military history: its commercialization and its function as part of what have aptly been termed “war as a spectator sport” remains an understudied aspect of the subject. For more empirical examples on how this has played out in popular culture, Ender, Reed, and Absalon provide an insightful read into the subject of precisely Popular Culture and the Military in another chapter to this Handbook of Military Sciences (chapter “Popular Culture and the Military”).

New Military History

Traditional military history was to a large extent “battle-centric,” and this focus has remained strong both in the work being done inside the armed forces and among historians writing with an eye on the market. However, during the second half of the twentieth century, a new and more inclusive form of military history emerged – the so-called new military history (chapter “‘New’ Military History”). A new generation of historians, such as John Keegan, initiated a novel form of war studies, where insights from sociology, psychology, and social history played a significant role. Rather than treating war as an abstraction in which the fighting men were mere pawns on a chess board, and in which the vantage point was that of the generals and statesmen, the new military history was very much written “from below” and took great interest in the experiences of the common soldier. In addition, “new military historians” typically studied aspects of the life of military institutions other than merely going to war and fighting battle. Emotions, gender roles, everyday lives of soldiers and civilians in wartime as well as the social and mental impact of war were among the new topics to be studied (Bourke, 2006). The research agenda suggested by “new military history” have since then become mainstream. In fact, Biddle and Citino have recently argued that “‘new military history’ is simply what military history is today: broad-based, inclusive, and written from a wide range of perspectives” (Biddle & Citino, 2018).

While “new military history” undoubtedly reinvigorated military history from within, larger societal developments have also contributed to its renaissance. Scholars have noted that the period since the end of the cold war have been characterized by an increasing interest in military affairs in general (Kühne & Ziemann, 2000). Today, armed forces and warfare are studied and taught at civilian universities on a worldwide scale. Apart from holding chairs in departments of history, military historians are an integral part of cross-disciplinary environments such as war studies, strategic studies, conflict studies, and security studies (Spiller, 2006). How this intellectual volte-face came about is an understudied subject and deserves additional attention. The explanation may partly be found in the emergence of a new security landscape (Echternkamp, 2013): Beginning with the Yugoslav civil war, and accelerating after 9/11 2001, western forces were deployed in new roles – doing peace enforcement and counterinsurgency – and in novel types of conflicts, so-called new wars (Kaldor, 1999). These new assignments created challenges of a new type and historians and other scholars increasingly began to address military affairs and contemporary security challenges by studying past analogies (Hughes & Philpott, 2006, p. 5f). From about 2004 the defense establishment in many NATO countries began to study past counter-insurgency operations in order to learn how to counter the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. David M. Edelstein, for example, published a study of 24 military occupations since 1815 with the objective of explaining why some succeeded while others failed (Edelstein, 2004). New military challenges are, however, unlikely to explain fully the surge in academic studies of military affairs, including military history. It may also be linked to a general militarization and securitization of western societies, as exemplified by Rosa Brooks’ study of how the US armed forces increasingly have been tasked with assignments traditionally being the responsibility of other state agencies (Brooks, 2017).

As of today, military history may be characterized as “a broad church” (Hughes & Philpott, 2006, p. 4). It is a field of study within which one may encounter a diverse range of theoretical and methodological approaches and highly different expectations about the scholarly output and its application in real-life situations. It is also a field characterized by a certain sense of being the underdog among historians – especially among those insisting on a battle-oriented perspective (Lynn, 1997). It is also notable that the field is still characterized by a limited reflection on the theoretical aspects of history writing and by an absence of large debates among its practitioners about how to do military history. This especially pertains to many of the more traditional forms of military history. Browsing the journals of the field, one rarely encounters contributions to the basic questions of how to study history or, for that matter, import of theoretical models from other disciplines. This is a significant contrast to many other types of history. Characteristically, the number of works in English tackling the basics of military history – its epistemological, ontological, and theoretical foundations and the methodological problems associated with it – are limited (see further reading at the end of the chapter).

Future Challenges for Military History

Among the challenges still facing military historians is that of making the field of practitioners more diverse and of achieving a pluralistic approach. In 1997 John Lynn stressed the importance of incorporating gender and cultural history into military history (Lynn, 1997, p. 789). Since then many valuable works have been produced in these fields; nevertheless “the white male” dominates the field – both as the acting subject in the works produced and in terms of who practices military history. Another noteworthy bias relates to military history being weak on studies from a global perspective. Related to that has been a tendency to focus on cutting-edge conventional military forces and failing to graph the diversity and complexity of why armies are raised and deployed across the specter of societies (Black, 2018, p. 2).

The increasing interest in overcoming a US/Eurocentric approach to military history have resulted in the establishment of specialized periodicals for Chinese and African military history (in 2012 viz. 2017) in addition to a journal devoted to Slavic military studies (with a strong emphasis on history) in existence since the end of the cold war. The dearth of military history focused on non-western societies and institutions is especially remarkable given that war is a universal human social practice, and yet a phenomenon, which is strongly culturally conditioned and escapes simplified explanations based on technology, geography, or civilization (Lynn, 2003). Some of the explanations for the lack of a truly globalized military history may be structural. As explained in the introduction to the first edition of a journal devoted to African military history, this area of study has been neglected due to general prejudices about “the worth” of studying the history of that continent but also due to “limited access to sources, underdeveloped supporting institutions, and even the politics of the topic” (Thomas & Doron, 2017, p. 5). Not only does regional studies of military history outside the United States and Europe have an intrinsic value in themselves, they also represent important correctives to prevalent conceptions and syntheses founded on western source materials exclusively. Recently, for example, a special issue of Journal of World History (no 1, 2014) was devoted to the question of a distinct western military revolution taking place during early modernity and making European armies superior to armies elsewhere. Based on East Asian drilling manuals, Tonio, Kang, and Cooper have demonstrated that an almost parallel development took place in the far east (Tonio et al., 2014), thus illustrating that the process of European conquest and colonization cannot be reduced to a matter of military superiority.

Military History: Some Typologies

How can military history in its present form be outlined? One possible way of organizing the field is along functional lines. In 1984, Raymond Callahan suggested that military history contained three dimensions or, as he termed it, “faces”: a popular one, an academic one and an official one. He depicted their purposes as being entertainment and instruction, critical academic study, and institutional memory of the armed forces, respectively (Callahan, 1984; Morillo, 2006, p. 5). Callahan’s model may serve as a useful outline of the purposes of studying military history, but it does not necessarily offer insight into the methodology associated with doing it, or the theoretical basis on which studies of military history is written.

Other typologies are possible, like linking military history to more general types of history, as suggested by Rolf-Dieter Müller. According to this author, military history can be divided as follows: Military history is a subfield of political history inasmuch as war represents the continuation of politics by other means. However, when studying military institutions rather than war, much insight can be gained from social history and sociology (chapter “Military Sociology”). Then there are the technical and economic aspects of war. Here economic and technological history plays a role in military history – for example by providing context around the development of weapons, or because wars often have immense economic implications (chapters “Strategy and Economics” and “Behavioral Economics in Military Research and Policy”). Müller also mentions that fresh perspectives on military history can be gained from regional and local history as well as art and culture history. Yet, he also stresses that military history is more than just the sum of these (and other) possible subdisciplines, and he advocates staying focused on military institutions and their operations as the core subject. This is a task which demands special skills from the historian in order to understand how military practitioners think and act (Müller, 2009, p. 19ff).

According to Robert Citino, academic military history can be divided into three different scholarly approaches. The traditional focus on “the hows and whys of actual warfare, strategy and battle” he terms “operational history” (campaign history). Secondly, there is the “war and society” approach, studying “the nexus between armies and societies.” As a third “school,” Citino mentions an approach to military affairs originating in “the history of memory and culture” (Citino, 2007).

Applying Citino’s three schools of military history as a useful starting point, this author is of the opinion that one may distinguish between four different approaches to military history, based on their disposition related to primary institutional bias, primary subject, theoretical/epistemological bias and purpose, which in one way or another permeates most of today’s scholarship. These four forms of military history are depicted in Table 1.

Table 1 Principal forms of contemporary military history
Full size table

Operational military history may be seen as the updated form of classical battlefield and campaign history, that is, military history focusing on how wars are fought, and why one side prevails over the other. In its crudest form, it can be a rather mechanistic and simplistic undertaking – characterized by the study of force ratios combined with the effect of leadership, morale, terrain, weather, etc. and primarily geared toward explaining why a given battle or campaign was lost or won. In contrast, new military history – in reality a broad and diverse category – is less interested in fighting as a military-technical issue and focuses much more on how war is waged from a human perspective, and how military affairs affect members of the armed forces and society as a whole. Military history inspired by the linguistic turn offers a different perspective, that is, how war is represented in narratives. Indeed, the proponents of this approach would argue that this is the only way we can study war (as well as any other historical phenomenon), because the past is transmitted to us by means of narratives. Finally, memory-oriented military history looks at how collectives make sense of past wars by selective and highly plastic processes of memorization and amnesia (chapter “Military History and Collective Identity”).

The forms of military history outlined in Table 1 may easily be challenged. They do not nearly represent the variety of real and possible approaches to military history. Rather, they represent what may be claimed to be major contemporary strands, thus leaving out other perspectives which earlier had a dominant position – Marxism being one obvious example. Furthermore, to a certain extent, the four forms outlined overlap. This is for example the case in the area of analyzing discourses of war and analyzing how war is commemorated and used by groups and societies to create collective identities. Despite these and other possible objections, the above outlined four forms of military history represent significant positions and approaches in current scholarship. Thus, they serve as a basis for the subsequent entries in this handbook about different types of military history.

Military History Milieus

Military history is being developed across a number of publishing platforms and associations. There are several international peer-reviewed periodicals – the oldest being Journal of Military History published since 1937 by the US-based Society of Military History. Other influential journals are War in History published since 1994 by SAGE and International Journal of Military History and Historiography. The latter is affiliated with the International Commission of Military History (ICMH), one of the principal international venues for scholarly exchange of knowledge on military history. The Commission dates back to 1938 and is a semi-official body in the sense that many national commissions are embedded in the defense forces of their countries or indirectly depend on it by receiving financial or organizational support. The annual congresses by the Commission represent a unique meeting place for military practitioners and scholars, but are also characterized by a rather traditional, battle-oriented approach to military history. In addition, a number of university programs, defense colleges, and research projects offer recurring conferences on military history. There is, for example, a special track for military history at the annual conference of the International Society of Military Sciences (ISMS). Like the ICMH, the ISMS is a meeting place for both military personnel and civilian academics. Regional military history organizations like the US-based Society of Military History also host conferences, as does of course a variety of scholarly institutions on an ad hoc basis. At the national level, there are a significant number of chairs devoted to military history – not least in the traditional great powers, but also in smaller states like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden. As mentioned above most national defense forces operate institutions tasked with researching and teaching military history. In the case of the United States, all services have specialized historical offices, employing a considerable number of historians; and even in small states like Denmark and Sweden the number of historians assigned with military history inside the armed forces constitutes distinct research environments.

In Conclusion

Albeit military history, as demonstrated above, comes in many forms and shapes, the defining matter is still, in the words of Michael Howard, “the study of the central activity of the armed forces, that is fighting” (Howard, 2006, p. 20). Military historians benefit from combining the methodologies from history in general with a solid knowledge of military affairs. Thus, in the future – as now – military history will be a venue where methods and theoretical debates from the craft of history and the social sciences in general engage with matters that often demand specialized military knowledge, and where civilian academics may benefit from drawing on the knowledge of military professionals. While military history does not necessarily offer any ready-made lessons to military practitioners, they on their side may benefit from military history as a way of broadening their perspective on what war is and how human beings react when at war. In order to do so, military history must, however, as Michael Howard suggested, be studied in breath, depth, and context (Howard, 1962). In other words: When studying military history it is not only helpful to compare with other cultures and time periods; we also need to take into account the underlying societal forces and the sum of general factors in order to appreciate why, for example, why Japanese warfare had little room for musketry long after that weapon had been introduced on the island (Keegan, 1993).

Like all other types of human intellectual activities, the pursuit of military history reflects the society in which it is carried out; thus future research agendas and the basic theoretical and methodological assumptions of this subdiscipline of history are bound to change over time. Nevertheless, for the foreseeable future it is most likely that military history in its many forms and facets will continue to be characterized by dynamics already notable during the nineteenth and twentieth century: a utilitarian military-professional approach and a more broad-minded (and war-skeptical) approach to how military history is written; the latter primarily found among civilian historians.

Further Reading

  • Baudet, F., & Sibul, E. A. (2016). Chapter 7: Historical research in the military domain. In J. Soeters, P. M. Shields, & S. Rietjens (Eds.), Routledge handbook of research methods in military studies. New York: Routledge.

  • Hughes, M., & Philpott, W. J. (Eds.). (2006). Palgrave advances in modern military history. Palgrave.

  • Morillo, S. (2006). What is military history? Malden: Polity.

  • Murray, W., & Sinnreich, R. H. (Eds.). (2006). The past as prologue: The importance of history to the military profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cross-References