Wayne E. Lee. Warfare and Culture in World History. New York and London: New

York University Press, 2011. Pp. 231. US$23.00 (paper).

Is this yet another collection of chapters, in this volume nine to be precise, largely

unconnected in time, geographical space, and themes? This is the question every

reviewer asks themselves when presented with an edited book. In the opening chap-

ter, entitled ‘War and Culture’, the editor, Wayne E. Lee, would have us think differ-

ently. In the first paragraph we are told: ‘Military historians have been adept atexplaining where machine guns, or other weapons came from, but they have been

less attentive to the origins of the ideas that brought them to bear on the battlefield’

(1). This statement will certainly come as a surprise to many military historians.

As with other recent works which claim to be part of a ‘paradigm shift’ in the

writing of military history, little space is devoted to considering the historiography

or its alleged omissions. We are told, however, that the book has arisen from ‘the

ongoing work of military historians to contextualize war and military institutions

more deeply within the culture that produced them’. This is to be accomplishedwithin the context of world history because military history has been too Western-

centric for too long: thus, it would be more useful to compare Britain and Japan, for

instance, than Britain and France. We also learn that ‘there is more than one way to

define culture.’ More helpfully, at least five types of culture in military history are

identified: societal, strategic, organisational, military, and soldiers. It is also pointed

out that students of culture repeatedly return to the problem of change, yet little fur-

ther conceptual elucidation is offered. Hence, it is hard to see what the substantive

difference is between this new, cultural approach and the more established fields oforganisational culture, military innovation, ‘national style’ in strategy, and the devel-

opment of military thought. Arguably, the specific chapter case studies only deal with

this problem indirectly, if at all.

Of these, the second and third cover themes from ancient history: Sarah C. Mel-

ville considers the Assyrian way of war and explains the collapse of their Empire as

due to an offensive approach, which left them unprepared for defensive warfare in

their heartland; Lee L. Brice’s chapter on Roman military culture, 44�30 BC, argues

that among its principal components were training, drill, punishments, obedience, andthe oath, with the main reform in the period being the restoration of discipline. The

fourth provides a bridge between the ancient and modern periods, Kenneth M.

Swope’s contribution on ‘Confucianism and Antirebel Strategy at the End of the

Ming Dynasty’. This offers an interesting interpretation of ‘strategic culture’: although

traditional Chinese culture saw civilian and military authority as complementary, the

pendulum could swing one way or another depending on the circumstances.

The remaining five chapters span a variety of ‘Western-centric subjects’: John A.

Lynn II, ‘The Battleculture of Forbearance, 1660�1789’; Mark Grimsley, ‘Successand Failure in Civil War Armies: Clues from Organizational Culture’; Isabel V.

Hull, ‘German Military Culture and the Colonial War in Southwest Africa,

1904�1907’; ‘David Silbey, ‘Connecting Culture and the Battlefield: Britain and the

Empire Fight the Hundred Days’; and Adrian R. Lewis, ‘The American Culture of

War in the Age of Artificial Limited War’. Of these, Lynn’s chapter is the most stim-

ulating, most notably his critique of technological determinism, his argument that

social class had a significant impact on Frederick the Great’s battle culture of for-

bearance and that, furthermore, radical changes in society bring about radicalchanges in military culture.

Book reviews 595

In summary, a reading of this book provokes two critical observations: first,

despite the programmatic call made in the opening chapter of the need to break

away from Western-centric studies of world history, this volume contains only one

piece on Asia; and, second, if there is a common thread to be found in each of the

chapters, it is the rather questionable claim that military historians have not used all

the tools available to them. Nevertheless, even if the contributions are too brief to

expand upon Lee’s ideas on reconfiguring military history, brevity does have its

advantages. Several chapters - specifically those by Melville, Brice, Swope, Lynn,and Hull - provide interesting and provocative arguments in a compact form. So,

while a number of the editor’s hypotheses about warfare and culture really required

more detailed consideration, some of the chapters would be ideal for teaching

purposes.

Alaric Searle

University of Salford

� 2014, Alaric Searlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2014.917490

Bevan Sewell and Scott Lucas (eds). Challenging US Foreign Policy: America and the

World in the Long Twentieth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. Pp. xii. 302.

The editors’ case for this interesting collection of essays is that the debate about US for-

eign policy has been unduly constrained by essentialist arguments about the nature of

the United States and its ability to wield a predominance of power in the world. In

practice this has generally meant considerations within constructs of imperial power

and it has led to two important simplifications. First, a return to a cold-war perspective

which saw the United States ‘as being posited against an irrational “other” and whichportrayed US pre-eminence and its capacity to project power where it saw fit as a nec-

essary counter-measure’; and secondly ‘the over-simplification of global anti-American

sentiments. The post-9/11 context of “you are either with us or with the terrorists” sty-

mied our understanding of anti-Americanism, sublimated to the idea of an irrational

hatred of America, its institutions, and beliefs’ (2). This collection of papers, assembled

by the editors, examines different aspects of US power, how it has been understood

and deployed, how it has impacted, and how it has evolved. It is attractively engaging

in the eclecticism of the different approaches in evidence and how they relate to the keytheme laid down by the editors is generally easy to grasp, though in one or two cases

that proves a little more elusive. The editors, however, provide signposts in the intro-

duction regarding the direction of each contribution (7�10), and indeed to the overall

aggregation of findings, which offer an understanding of US diplomacy that is driven

by ‘an amalgamation of domestic and international factors’ (7).

There is insufficient space here to deal individually with each of the contributions,

but hopefully the comments on the selection that follows will provide prospective

readers with intimations of the rich array of material that may be found in this collec-tion as a whole. Paul Kramer offers an erudite account and an interesting argument

about the relationship between imperial civil servants and the metropolitan centre

and how their good practice affected the understanding of the role and potential of

empire and that this was not without impact on US thinking. Frank Costigliola takes

596 Book reviews