Sandberg - War and conflict in the early modern world: 1500-1700

War and Conflict Through the Ages

Jeremy Black, War in the Nineteenth Century

Brian Sandberg, War and Conflict in the Early Modern World

Copyright Brian Sandberg 2016

The right of Brian Sandberg to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2016 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4602-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4603-9(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sandberg, Brian, 1968- author.

Title: War and conflict in the early modern world : 15001700 / Brian Sandberg.

Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Series: War and conflict through the ages | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015035482| ISBN 9780745646022 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745646039 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509503018 (mobi) | ISBN 9781509503025 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: WarHistory16th century. | WarHistory17th century. | War and societyHistory16th century. | War and societyHistory17th century.

Classification: LCC U39 .S26 2016 | DDC 355.0209/031dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035482

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For John A. Lynn, mentor and friend

This book presents a global examination of the dynamics of war, culture, and society in the early modern period. Studying warfare and its incredibly complex history on a global scale presents a truly daunting task, however. War and Conflict in the Early Modern World is situated at the intersection of several competing approaches to the study of war, violence, and conflict in current and historical contexts.

The interrelated fields of military history and diplomatic history have long focused on the history of warfare through the study of states, their military systems, and their international relations. These traditional fields, shaped by the writings of Antoine-Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz in the mid-nineteenth century, have tended to focus on major international wars fought between nation-states, narrating military operations, battles, and peace treaties. Military history and international relations history have continued to evolve, but a number of other approaches have greatly broadened notions of warfare and the study of its practices.

Historians of war and society began to incorporate social history methods in the late 1960s and 1970s, considering the social composition of armies and the relationships between military institutions and their political systems. John Keegan's The Face of Battle (1976) provided a powerful example of how historians could consider the experience of combat for ordinary soldiers in past wars. In the same period, social historians examined peasant revolts, revolutions, civil wars, crowd conflicts, bread riots, religious riots, and other forms of social conflict and organized violence significantly stretching the academic study of war and conflict.

In the 1980s and 1990s, cultural history transformed the study of warfare and conflict even further. Cultural historians have examined rhetoric, language, and political culture in the context of revolutions, civil conflicts, and major wars. Cultural histories of war have expanded the historical actors in conflicts to consider reservists, logistical personnel, military wives, camp followers, refugees, indigenous peoples, and civilian victims of war. Historians such as Christopher Browning, Jeremy Black, Drew Gilpin Faust, Isabel V. Hull, Herv Drvillon, and Wayne E. Lee have explored diverse aspects of war and culture within specific societies or in broader global and imperial contexts.

Alongside these histories of warfare, a broader history of violence has been developed by anthropologists, sociologists, and historians who examine diverse manifestations of violence often outside conventional wartime situations. Physical aggression remains important for violence studies, but some of these scholars explore psychological, economic, legal, gendered, and emotional dimensions of warfare. Elaine Scarry's pioneering work, The Body in Pain, contemplates bodily dimensions of violence, insisting that the primary purpose of war is to inflict injury on human beings. Julius Ruff, Neil L. Whitehead, Veena Das, Arthur Kleinman, Paul Virilio, and others have examined mass rape, dueling cultures, militarization, mechanization, and suffering in warfare.

Peace and conflict studies (or war and peace studies) have developed on a markedly different trajectory since the 1960s. This interdisciplinary field examines conflict resolution and peace implementation and has often been focused on contemporary cases, rather than historical analysis. Scholars such as Johan Galtung, Johannes Botes, Francis A. Beer, Larry J. Fisk, and Douglas P. Fry have pushed beyond diplomatic histories of ambassadors and international treaties to consider broader peacemaking processes. Historians are taking insights from peace and reconciliation processes in Ireland and South Africa to re-examine the dynamics of peacemaking in the past.

Serious tensions exist between these various methods of examining warfare. Proponents of each of these approaches sponsor their own conferences, journals, and publications often producing divergent lines of research and fragmented debates. This book will confront these tensions through an exploration of early modern warfare, recognizing that specialists in different fields of study will undoubtedly challenge some of my methodological and coverage choices. This study cannot consider all the possible manifestations of violence, conflict, and warfare in the early modern world, however.

I will instead concentrate on organized armed violence, examining specific forms of violence that were prevalent during the early modern period. By organized armed violence, I mean physical violence and coercion organized by clans, communities, militant groups, military elites, organizations, and institutions at the civic, regional, or state level in order to wage armed conflict internally or externally. This approach emphasizes the importance of warfare and social conflict over interpersonal violence or economic conflict, but allows for a broad examination of diverse forms of violence within and between societies.