Marble bust of Herodotus, the “Father of HIstory” – public domain image donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art
History repeats itself – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
History does not repeat but sometimes it rhymes.
History is just one damned thing after another.
Ah yes, history – and three of my favorite quotes about it.
The first is paraphrasing an actual quote by Karl Marx – often overlooked by people, even Marxists, as someone who could be quite the capable prose stylist when not bogged down in denser prose or theory.
The second is often attributed to Mark Twain – someone who is widely acknowledged as a capable prose stylist, except that he doesn’t seem to have actually said it.
The third quip is often quoted from historian Toynbee – correctly but somewhat misleadingly because firstly, it was adapted from a preceding popular saying about life, and secondly, he was using it to criticize historians who simply sought to chronicle history rather than analyze it.
Toynbee definitely fell in the latter category – a historian whose central theme was identifying, well, the themes of history, its cycles and patterns, its plot and rhythm (or history rhyming if you will).
History has been a subject that has fascinated me since childhood, when I read it avidly – and still does as I read it now, hence my Top 10 History Books.
The subject of history in its broadest sense is perhaps straightforward enough – “the systematic study and documentation” of the human past or past events, usually demarcated from prehistory as the past or events subsequent to the invention of writing systems (or written history in other words, although it might be corroborated by other sources such as archaeology).
Beyond that, it gets a little tricky with all the permutations of the various subjects of history or even the concept of history itself – so many permutations that it could be the subject of its own top ten and certainly has been the subject of debate among historians.
“History is an academic discipline which uses a narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect. Historians debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as the significance of different causes and effect. Historians debate the nature of history as an end in itself, and its usefulness in giving perspective on the problems of the present.”
I’m not here to seek to resolve any of these debates, if such a thing is even possible – I’m just here to read books on history and, you know, live in it. To adapt my own quote of living in a mythic world, I live in a historic world. We all do.
That said, what I will do is clarify my tastes in history books. I definitely lean more towards Toynbee’s concept of history as themes or patterns, preferring history books that are more analysis than chronicle. All my top ten might be said to be analytical or thematic history, albeit some more than others.
I also tend to prefer my thematic history on a grand scale – the scale of comparative or global history. Not always of course, but often – it is a preference after all, characterizing at least six of my top ten books.
I also tend to have a preference for military history – put bluntly, the history of wars and empires, or indeed of war and empire in the general thematic sense. The latter characterizes two of my top ten books as general histories of war and warfare.
Following on from the history of wars and empires, it might be cliched but foremost among my subjects of preference are the Roman Empire and the Second World War (although Alexander the Great and the Cold War are close – and somewhat overlapping – runners-up for each respectively). Two of my top ten books have their subject as a focus on the Roman Empire, while another two are with respect to the Second World War.
I also can’t invoke capable prose style in my introduction without noting my preference for a good or even literary prose style in my books of history – some historians or historical writers are definitely better than others.
So here are my top ten books of history. You know the rules – this is one of my deep dive top tens, counting down from tenth to first place and looking at individual entries in some depth or detail of themselves. Tenth place is my wildcard entry for the best entry from the previous year (2023).
But wait – there’s more! The subject is prolific enough for my usual twenty special mentions per top ten and for honorable mentions beyond that.
(10) ANTHONY KALDELLIS –
THE NEW ROMAN EMPIRE: A HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM (2023)
My wildcard tenth place entry as best history book of 2023 is this history of the eastern Roman Empire – from founding to fall of Constantinople, with more than a millennium of history in between them.
By the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 AD– on the threshold of the Spanish discovery of the Americas and marking the start of the early modern period – the empire was effectively reduced to the city itself with some spare change left behind in the couch in the Peloponnese.
It had come a long way – and fallen so far – from its glorious founding as new imperial capital from the former city of Byzantium by Constantine in 330 AD, reigning as sole emperor over the whole classical Roman empire. From that point the empire was almost inevitably destined to be divided (again) into western and eastern halves, with the latter ruled from Constantinople and almost inevitably destined to outlast the former.
The founding of Constantinople and its rule over the eastern empire that became the sole empire once its western counterpart fell prompts consideration of what to call that empire, which is addressed from the outset of the book – and in its title.
It was of course, as they considered themselves to be, the continuation of the Roman Empire, but it also had important distinctions from the former classical empire – distinctions that allowed it to endure as long as it did and not merely as a “pale facsimile of classical Rome” but “a vigorous state of its own, inheritor of many of Rome’s features, and a vital node in the first truly globalized world”.
Western history has borrowed from Constantinople’s former title Byzantium – as indeed does the book’s subtitle and its author as self-described Byzantist – to call it the Byzantine empire, often to the detriment of the empire’s continuity with the Roman Empire. I guess Constantinopolitan Empire doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
That is something which this book resists, advocating persuasively against that usage. While it is no doubt a term with an unfortunate history of usage, much like the general usage of Byzantine as a pejorative adjective, I think the title of Byzantine Empire may well be too ingrained in common usage to shake.
The common alternative has been to call it the Eastern Roman Empire – a usage similar to that of various Chinese dynasties to distinguish their geographical extent at different times, such as the Southern Song dynasty.
The book makes a persuasive case for a title as the New Roman Empire but then doesn’t really use that beyond the book’s title and introduction, instead preferring to use Romania – a usage that I don’t think will catch on for potential confusion with the modern nation of that name. Also come on – neo-Roman Empire was right there!
As for the book’s history of that thousand-year empire, it’s pretty much summed up by that earlier quote about it as a “vigorous state of its own” – one which endured through “innovative institutions and a bottomless strategic playbook”, the latter including what in modern parlance is called soft power and set out in one of the book’s many engaging points.
Another engaging point is that the book plays into my preference for thematic history, not simply chronicling what happened but asking how and why it did – above all, the question of how and why the empire “lasted so long lies at the heart of the book”.
That can be broken down into further questions, which the book engages. How and why did it survive when the western empire didn’t? How and why did it almost succumb to enemies after that, notably the Persians and Arabs when it came within a heartbeat of falling? How and why did it then rebound after those and other occasions of decline?
As to the book’s big question of how and why it lasted so long, a fundamental part of the answer is reflected in its preferred usage of Romania – that the empire transformed itself to resemble not so much subjects under imperial rule as participants in a Roman nation state.
A further engaging point is that the author doesn’t shrink on occasion from laying down some snide snark – such as when channelling his inner Procopius, he lets the occasional barb slip that he really doesn’t like Justinian. He quips that the Plague of Justinian was the only thing the emperor didn’t want to name after himself – ooo, sick imperial burn! Of course, in this house, Justinian is a hero – although even I have to admit he overextended the empire.
Less engaging for me is when he detours into the endless theological disputes in the broader history of Christianity within the empire. Yes, yes – I know the history of the empire is intimately caught up with the history of Christianity within it but my eyes mostly glazed over when the book went there.
Except for the dispute over icons – that kept my interest, although I suppose it helped it just involved the simply use (or prohibition from use) of images and not some mindbogglingly pedantic semantics. Also, there was the book’s insight that the iconoclasts were not as, well, iconoclastic as they were made out to be.
Even so, I preferred the book’s more straightforward political and military history of when the empire was kicking ass or having its ass kicked.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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Cover – 2010 Yale University Press edition
(9) ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY –
HOW ROME FELL: DEATH OF A SUPERPOWER (2009)
Adrian Goldsworthy has risen to the status of my favorite historian of the classical Roman empire, mostly on the back of this book although his 2023 book The Eagle and the Lion: Rome, Persia and an Unwinnable Conflict was a leading contender for my wildcard tenth place entry for best history book of 2023.
I’ve used the American title for the book because I prefer it as more catchy – and it also prompts to mind one of my personal highlights of the book in its introduction, dismissing the cliché of comparing the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to the modern United States (a cliché with which Goldsworthy entertainingly relates that he is routinely accosted at dinner parties when he informs someone of his historical speciality).
As to the question in the book’s title, in a nutshell Goldsworthy answers that they did it to themselves. It’s a little like the twist in Fight Club, with the Romans revealed as the protagonist beating himself up, to the bemusement of the barbarian onlookers – and their delight when picking up the pieces.
I think it’s a solid answer. Goldsworthy does not dismiss the various barbarian invasions as the reason for the empire’s demise but that looks to the question of how they did so, given that the empire’s adversaries were not fundamentally different from when the empire successfully resisted them – and in the case of the various German tribes, so surprisingly small compared to the empire.
As Goldsworthy memorably observes, no matter who won their seemingly endless civil wars or wars of imperial succession, the losses were all Roman, weakening the empire as a whole against its external adversaries. Another memorable observation is how the Romans never really left the crisis of the third century, just muted it to fewer civil wars and usurpations.
Also, the Romans ultimately played a losing game enlisting German tribes as allies or foederati in its own territory – in that the territory occupied by the Germans was no longer Roman territory, with the Romans losing any revenue from those territories, or any manpower beyond that provided by the Germans. Thanks a lot, Theodosius – you empire killer.
As for the history itself, Goldsworthy takes the same starting point as that of Gibbon’s famous History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – itself following on from Roman historian Cassius Dio who marked it as their descent from “a kingdom of gold to one of rust and iron” – the death of Marcus Aurelius and accession of Commodus in 180 AD.
However, he pulls up stumps well before Gibbon’s finishing point, wrapping up the book aptly enough with the reign of Heraclius and the empire’s territory lost to the Arabs.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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Cover 2002 Free Press edition
(8) FELIPPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO –
CIVILIZATIONS: CULTURE, AMBITION & THE TRANSFORMATION OF NATURE (2000)
A book on the suject of human civilization – or rather, civilizations, arranged by environment, consistent with the definition of civilization in the subtitle as the transformation of nature.
The book essentially treats all human societies as civilization, or at least a civilization – eschewing attempts at ‘checklist’ of criteria that define a civilization, given the problems of previous attempts to do so for any that are universally agreed, instead looking at human societies in classic Toynbee terms of challenge and response to their natural environments, at least in origin.
While such an approach may have flaws in its lack of distinction between a ‘civilization’ and other human societies, the book does have much to offer from its thematic history of human civilization from a geographic and environmental perspective.
Firstly, it vividly impresses on you the extent to which human history and societies have been shaped by nature, at least in origin – including the most basic or stark features which one might otherwise overlook from a different thematic perspective.
This is most striking when it looks at those environments it groups together as the wasteland, worlds of ice or sand deserts, which can only support the most minimalist societies – minimalist that is, beyond surviving in them, prompting to mind the lines from the poem “Australia” by A.D. Hope, about men whose boast is not “we live” but “we survive”. There’s a similar quality
Perhaps its most insightful feature – which it states in its introduction – was its comparative history of civilizations, “arranged environment by environment, rather than period by period or society by society”, thus yielding comparisons across time and space that might not otherwise occur to the reader.
The evocative part and chapter headings (or subheadings) illustrate those environmental classifications:
- Part 1: The Wasteland – Ice Worlds & Tundra, Deserts of Sand
- Part 2: Leave of Grass – Prairie & Grassy Savannah, the Eurasian Steppe (the Highway of Civilization)
- Part 3: Under the Rain – Postglacial & Temperate Woodland, Tropical Lowlands
- Part 4: The Shining Fields of Mud (alluvial or river floodplains in the ancient Near East, China and India)
- Part 5: The Mirrors of Sky – the Highland Civilizations of the New World and the Old
- Part 6: The Water Margins (Civilizations Shaped by the Sea) – Small Island Civilizations and Seaboard Civilizations such as the Seaboard Civilizations of Maritime Asia or the Greek and Roman Seaboards
- Part 7: Breaking the Waves (the Domestication of the Oceans) – the Rise of Oceanic Civilizations, the Making of Atlantic Civilization, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific – from the Pacific to the World
I was particularly fascinated by its comparison of grassland societies – prompting to mind, as such things tend to do, whether other grasslands might have produced the horse blitzkriegs that the Eurasian steppes did in other circumstances.
Or its subject of the oceans – how maritime navigation has been shaped by the distinctive currents and wind patterns of each ocean, with the Indian Ocean proving the most ”precocious’ for long distance navigation (indeed from the dawn of human history), the Atlantic being somewhat more tricky, and the Pacific trickier still (Polynesian island-hopping aside).
RATING: 4 STARS****
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Cover as published by Viking 1990
(7) JOHN ELLIS –
BRUTE FORCE: ALLIED STRATEGY & TACTICS IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1990)
Quantity has a quality all of its own.
Stalin is reputed to have said this, aptly enough about the Soviet armed forces in the Second World War. It’s probably apocryphal but I like to think that the fact it and other zingers are attributed to him implies an ability to drop one-liners unparalleled by any other war leader than Churchill – and certainly far exceeding Hitler. It amuses me to think that above all else, the Allies won the war of one-liners, the most important war of all. In modern internet parlance, you might say the Axis couldn’t meme.
More relevantly, if you were to sum up this book’s theme and thesis in one line, Stalin’s would do nicely, except that for both his Soviet forces and those of the Allies, it was a somewhat poor quality – the brute force of the title, grinding to a slower and more costly victory than might otherwise have been the case. In other words, war by attrition – and often not too different from the bloody attrition of the First World War for which that conflict’s military leadership is often faulted.
I obviously like Ellis as a historian – his Social History of the Machine Gun was similarly illuminating and insightful – although sadly his books seem somewhat neglected these days and can be elusive to find.
This book remains my favorite by Ellis – as well as one of my favorite general or thematic histories of the Second World War, exceeded only by my entry in top spot, which might arguably be paired together as alternatives (or correctives) to each other.
It certainly was an eye-opening look at Allied strategy and tactics in the war – and his critiques of their lack of finesse, proficiency or skill are persuasive, as for example with RAF Marshal Sir Arthur Harris’ area bombing dogma, a common subject of historical (and moral) criticism.
On the other hand, such critiques are easy to overstate in hindsight, particularly as opposed to the contemporary reality where each theater competed with the others, demanding troops and resources in very different ways and that could not be used elsewhere – or planning or production line decisions well in advance but which took substantial periods of time to change to battlefield requirements.
As opposed to my top spot entry (as something of an antidote), the book does lean into a historical pet peeve of mine – that tendency, dubbed in some internet circles as ‘wehraboo’ (a play on Wehrmacht and ‘weeaboo’ as slang for excessive or obsessive anime fandom), to disparage the Allies compared to so-called German military ‘excellence”.
While I would accept arguments that the Germans were the most consistent in their tactical proficiency throughout the war, albeit not so much in their strategy, much of the critiques Ellis makes about Allied “brute force” might also be made about German military successes.
In fairness, Ellis does make much of the same critiques about the Germans, particularly as the wheels started to fall off their blitzkrieg. However, the book overlooks the extent to which initial German successes relied not just on good luck and timing in a somewhat narrow window of opportunity, but also on significant advantages over their adversaries at the outset – advantages which arguably weren’t effectively matched by the comparable advantages in manpower and materiel by the Allies against them until 1944, at which point the Germans collapsed in a rapid manner similar to their own initial adversaries.
It also overlooks that the Germans owed their endurance in defense, at least in part, to the improvements in defensive firepower from that at the outset of the war, as well as their undoubted tactical proficiency in defense that enabled them to outfight numerically superior enemies until 1944.
I also took away from the book something else from the “brute force” of its title about Allied superiority – just how foolhardy the three major Axis nations in general were and Germany in particular was to decide on war in the first place, resembling nothing so much as a twentieth century version of the ghost dance seeking to conjure victory out of “triumph of the will”.
Germany and Japan even sought to make a virtue out of necessity by vaunting their so-called martial and psychological superiority over the material strength of their adversaries. History generally has a name for nations that do so – losers.
It also overlooks that Allied superiority was hard-earned. Material strength doesn’t just, well, materialize but takes a very real achievement in mobilizing manpower and materiel – one in which the Allies massively outclassed the Axis and one which is highlighted further by the fact that Germany had managed to occupy a productive potential in Europe to rival the United States but was still massively out-produced by the latter.
Italy is often disparaged for its performance in the war, particularly compared to Germany, but the underlying reality was not too different between them, albeit kept at bay for longer by Germany’s greater industrial base and tactical proficiency – such that I like to adapt the late Cold War quip about the Soviet Union being “Upper Volta with rockets” to Germany being “Italy with rockets”, in a very literal sense.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(6) J.M. ROBERTS –
THE TRIUMPH OF THE WEST: THE ORIGIN, RISE & LEGACY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1985)
Greatly expanded from the BBC TV series he presented of the same title, this book similarly looks at what is Western civilization and its titular ambigous triumph.
Roberts was a classic old school British historian – and by old school I mean Oxford, ultimately returning to his alma mater as Warden of Merton College, an academic title like many others that evoke those of a fantasy novel.
Apart from his academic distinctions, he had many published works for which he was hailed as “a master of the broad brush-stroke” – or in other words that thematic style of history which is my favorite.
That style is on display in what I regard to be the crowning achievement of any historian – a history of the world, particularly if it also spans all of history, as Roberts did with his History of the World published by Penguin (usually as the Penguin History of the World).
Given the scale, it’s obviously not light reading – but is demonstrative of Roberts’ style that pithy phrases from it still resonate in my mind many years after reading it. Roberts evoking most modern wars in the Middle East as the wars of Ottoman succession for example, or Romanticism as a secularized Protestantism.
Roberts’ style and mastery of broad brush strokes is even more on display in The Triumph of the West, perhaps not surprisingly given its origin in the television series he wrote and presented (for which prose style and mastery of broad brush strokes are effectively sine qua non for engaging an audience) as well as its shorter volume than his world history.
The chapters – corresponding to the episodes of the TV series – effectively showcase its presentation of “the origins and evolution of Western civilization, and the transformative challenges and influence it has exerted on the rest of the world”:
- 1 – One World (TV episode – Dangerous Gifts: the benefits and costs of Western influence)
- 2 – A Sense of Direction (TV episode – A New Direction: Influences from Ancient Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian Culture)
- 3 – Birth of the West (TV episode – The Heart of the West: The Middle Ages and Orbis Christiani)
- 4 – The World’s Debate (TV episode – The World’s Debate: Islam and Christianity)
- 5 – Defining a World (TV episode – East of Europe: Byzantium and Russia)
- 6 – An Exploring Civilization (TV episode – The Age of Exploration)
- 7 – New Worlds (TV episode – same)
- 8 – A New Age (TV episode – Age of Light)
- 9 – History Speeds Up (TV episode – Monuments to Progress: The Long Nineteenth Century)
- 10 – The Confident Aggressors (TV episode – India: The Ironies of Empire)
- 11 – Responses and Repercussions (TV episode – The East is Red: China in the Twentieth Century)
- 12 – A Sense of Decline (TV episode – The Decline of the West :Two World Wars and The Great Depression)
- 13 – A Post-Western World? (TV episode – Capitulations: Third World countries learn the price of dependency on the West)
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(5) GEOFFREY BLAINEY –
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD (2000)
“The most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, most controversial of Australia’s living historians” – that last epithet was for his commentary on public affairs, so naturally I like him.
Geoffrey Blainey is Australia’s leading historian – and the leading historian of Australia itself, coining the definitive phrase for that history in the famous title of his book The Tyranny of Distance.
Wide-ranging indeed – upon graduating, Blainey initially eschewed academia for the private sector as a freelance historian, studying and writing the history of a mining and railway company in Tasmania.
He subsequently ranged through Australian history, with a focus on thematic history “organized around the exploration of the impact of the single factor (distance, mining, pre-settlement Aboriginal society)”.
Of particular interest to me, his range extended to the “rhythms” of global history – “two centuries of conflict in The Causes of War (1973)”, “examining the optimism and pessimism in Western society since 1750 in The Great See-Saw”, the history of Christianity, and the “tempestuous” 20th century.
And of course this book – which with my interest in global history I tend to regard as his magnum opus, apologies to The Tyranny of Distance.
What distinguishes Blainey in my eyes, both generally and in his book, is his eye for theme – especially themes outside the usual political or military history to which history is slanted, particularly global history.
A single volume history of the world must necessarily be compact yet Blainey not only achieves this but also seamlessly works in chapters on themes that elude other such histories.
For example, a chapter on the historical impact of the night sky on humanity. Or a chapter on the conquest of night by artificial lighting. Or of time itself by mechanical clocks in western civilization.
Or such resonant images or phrases that stick in the mind like Venice as the Silicon Valley of Renaissance Italy – through its glass-making as the cutting edge of technological innovation such as lenses for telescopes or microscopes, which I’m tempted to add to the conquest of time and night as the conquest of light.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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(4) PAUL JOHNSON –
MODERN TIMES: A HISTORY OF THE WORLD FROM THE 1920S TO THE 1980S (1983)
“A latter day Mencken, Johnson is witty, gritty, and compulsively readable”.
Probably the most divisive entry in my top ten, in part because Johnson is the sole entry without a background as an academic historian (possibly except Ellis for whom I’m unable to find any biographical detail) – except perhaps for undergraduate study.
Instead, Johnson was a journalist and popular historian – although it makes you sit up and pay attention when you read that as a journalist he interviewed some of the historical figures in this book, as for example he states in a footnote he did with Kerensky (obviously in the latter’s exile as former leader of the Provisional Government of Russia overthrown by the Bolsheviks).
In part that explains the divisive nature of this entry – but perhaps mostly it’s the strength of his opinions and the prose style with which he expressed them, both of which (as well as that divisive nature) were reflected in this book.
.
Yes, yes – I know this book has been updated and reissued with various subtitles to reflect that (such as the one in my feature image) but I’m going with the original title.
It was the first book of history that I read from Johnson although afterwards I avidly read others by him as it was a huge influence on me in my youth. Not so much now as I’ve receded somewhat from him as I’ve perceived some of his more idiosyncratic opinions, albeit I still rank him highly enough for this entry.
For example, I can agree with his assessment of Eisenhower as the twentieth century’s most successful president (although he also ranks Reagan highly, perhaps even higher in the later editions) but not so much some of the other presidents he ranked highly (or badly). Sorry, I will never see Nixon as anything but crooked, even if he demonstrated a certain amoral competence.
From the above one may divine his opinions to be conservative, of a distinctly Catholic and anti-communist kind – interestingly enough as he originally was left-wing before his ideological reversal on the road to Damascus, a metaphor I think he would have particularly liked given his beliefs and name.
Whatever one may think of his opinions, the virtuosity of his prose style was undeniable – perhaps the best of any of my top ten entries, with a particular talent for turns of phrase and chapter titles, as illustrated by those for this book:
1 – A Relativistic World
2 – The First Despotic Utopias
3 – Waiting for Hitler
4 – Legitimacy in Decadence
5 – An Infernal Theocracy, a Celestial Chaos
6 – The Last Arcadia
7 – Degringolade
8 – The Devils
9 – The High Noon of Aggression
10 – The End of Old Europe
11 – The Watershed Year
12 – Superpower and Genocide
13 – Peace by Terror
14 – The Bandung Generation
15 – Caliban’s Kingdoms
16 – Experimenting with Half Mankind
17 – The European Lazarus
18 – America’s Suicide Attempt
19 – The Collectivist Seventies
20 – The Recovery of Freedom (in later editions – formerly Palimpsests of Freedom)
RATING: 4 STARS****
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Oxford University Press, 1st edition (paperback) cover 2008
(3) AZAR GAT –
WAR IN HUMAN CIVILIZATION (2006)
“War, huh, yeah
What is it good for?”
Azar Gat’s history of war in human civilization is nothing short of magisterial – and at least halfway answers that famous song lyric, telling us what war is for.
That is the fundamental question which this book examines – “Why do people go to war?”.
Is it part of human nature or a “late cultural invention” of “civilization”, linked to agriculture, the state or something else? In short, who was right – Hobbes or Rousseau?
Has war declined in modernity? If so, why?
“In this truly global study of war and civilization, Azar Gat sets out to find definitive answers to these questions in an attempt to unravel the ‘riddle of war’ throughout human history, from the early hunter-gatherers right through to the unconventional terrorism of the twenty-first century”.
The book is divided into three parts. Part 2 – titled Agriculture, Civilization, and War – is perhaps the most straightforward of the three, although the overarching question of why people go to war is still present throughout, along with the associated question of how they do. Although he gave the game away in Part 1, Gat definitely leans into Hobbes here, with the emergence of strong central states – Hobbes’ Leviathan – being a key reason for less violent societies. Yes – even when those states make a wasteland and call it peace, as with the Roman Empire and their Pax Romana. He indicates as much with the title of his conclusion for this part – War, the Leviathan, and the Pleasures and Miseries of Civilization.
However, Parts 1 and 3 were the most fascinating for me. Part 1 and its sweeping title Warfare in the First Two Million Years indicate that its gamut is the whole of human prehistory – and indeed earlier to hominid or primate prehistory. One myth that Gat dispels in Part 1 is that humans are uniquely prolific for intra-species violence. As Gat demonstrates, they are not – and indeed other animal species match or exceed humans for violence within their own species. Where humans differ is with respect to the targets of their violence. Whereas animals avoid more costly violence against evenly matched males and instead target young or females of their own species (as with the infamous example of male lions killing cubs when they take over a pride), humans are the opposite – targeting other males, often with the express motive of taking women and children as prizes. But you might ask – aren’t human males similarly evenly matched as their animal counterparts? Yes, indeed – which is why humans make it less evenly matched by the preferred strategies of the ambush or raid catching antagonists by surprise, ideally asleep, something which is easier to do for humans than for animals.
Which brings us to the other myth Gat dispels in this part – Rousseau’s “noble savage” or rather the myth of a peaceful ‘savage’, where the true escalation of violence in war arising with ‘civilization’, whether agriculture, the state, or something else. Indeed, Gat demonstrates that humans in their “state of nature” or indeed in societies not predominated by powerful central states experience much more violence, usually by substantial orders of magnitude.
As for Part 3 – Modernity: The Dual Face of Janus – Gat demonstrates that modernity has resulted in, well, more peace and less violence or war, even if that does not seem to be the case because of the destructive power of our technology. More intriguingly, Gat dispels (or at least introduces cause for caution with respect to) any monomythic explanations for this – such as “democratic peace theory” or fear of nuclear weapons.
RATING: 5 STARS*****
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(2) JOHN KEEGAN –
A HISTORY OF WARFARE (1993)
The magnum opus of one of the foremost military historians of our time – a global history of war from prehistory to nuclear weapons. (Although one might also argue his magnum opus was his trilogy of The Face of Battle, The Mask of Command, and The Price of Admiralty).
After an introductory section “War in Human History”, Keegan organizes his history in broad thematic sections invoking the four classical elements but as the four elements of war, albeit also more or less in chronological sequence – “Stone”, “Flesh”, “Iron” and “Fire”.
Between each section is an “interlude”, not so much in chronological sequence but with a focus on recurring aspects – or problems – throughout the history of warfare, respectively limitations on warmaking, fortification, armies, and logistics and supply. For example, the interlude on ärmies dealt with the basic problem of – and limited number of means for – actually raising armies.
The titles of those elemental sections speak for themselves – with fire obviously corresponding to the defining characteristic of modern warfare increasingly relying on forms of combustion or energy, from gunpower through the internal combustion engine to nuclear weapons.
A personal highlight was the book’s examination of the conquests of the various “horse peoples”, the high point of which were the Mongols, always a subject of fascination for me. Something that has always resonated in my mind ever since is Keegan’s opinion that much of the mobile tactical skill of the horse peoples originated in the same techniques they used on their herds except on their adversaries instead.
RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)
Raising the flag over the Reichstag – one of the most iconic images of WW2 (as photographed by Yevgeny Khaldei and in public domain), used for the cover of the first edition of the book (and also for its own article on Wikipedia “Raising a flag over the Reichstag”)
(1) HP WILLMOTT –
THE GREAT CRUSADE: A NEW COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1989)
The best single “volume history of the Second World War in its coverage of all the major themes and all the fronts”.
And for that matter, as you can tell by my placement of it in first place, my favorite volume of history for any subject – the one most firmly embedded in my psyche and the one to which I return the most, particularly on the subject of WW2, with insights or nuggets on almost every page.
For example, comparing the Pacific War to the American Civil War, with the former having uncanny parallels to the latter, even down to the two main American (or Union) offensive directions of each, with Imperial Japan similarly doomed to defeat as the Confederacy and for much the same reasons.
Or the transposition between Germany and the Soviet Union in military proficiency, such that by 1944-1945 the latter arguably equalled or surpassed the former at its peak, while Germany matched many of the same failings for the Soviets back in 1941.
Indeed, most of my own views of the Second World War originate in this book. Much of that is due to the style of Willmott, a strangely neglected or overlooked military historian – to quote excerpts from an Amazon review:
“Interesting, insightful, revelatory…Willmott is Willmott: never less than lucid and coherent, even when his work descends into the “mere chronicle” of army, corps and divisional movements that more properly belong to purely military history…magisterial is no more than an appropriate term with which to describe Willmott’s informative – indeed, transformative – and succinctly and clearly expressed synthesis of the knowledge on such a wide subject.”
Above all, my view of the Second World War originates in Willmott’s main theme or thesis of the book, which he was nice enough to state at the outset – debunking the myth of German military excellence. Indeed, he cheekily adapts Oscar Wilde’s famous quote from The Importance of Being Earnest – to lose one world war may be regarded as misfortune, to lose both looks like carelessness
This might seem paradoxical given the extent of Germany’s initial victories – and the Allied effort required to reverse those victories and defeat Germany – but almost as paradoxically, Willmott argues this just illustrates his theme, that Germany could succeed to that extent but still lose.
However, the paradox is resolved by Willmott’s argument, which he repeatedly demonstrates throughout the book, that “the German military genius was in fighting not in war, and along with her Japanese ally Germany was the only great power that did not understand the nature of war.”
One might add that this is the converse of the art of war, at least according to Sun Tzu – and of the Allies in general and the United States in particular. As Willmott observes, in terms of actually waging war, Germany was hopelessly outclassed by the Allies, matched only by the similar hopelessness of their ally Japan.
Willmott has yet another striking insight in his speculation about the reason for this – that the very success of Bismarck, the one German leader who had understood war, that is the limits of military and national power, “blinded successive generations of Germans to these realities because they saw only his military victories”.
RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)
HISTORY: TOP 10 BOOKS
(TIER LIST)
S-TIER (GOD TIER)
(1) H.P.WILLMOTT – THE GREAT CRUSADE
(2) JOHN KEEGAN – A HISTORY OF WARFARE
(3) AZAR GAT – WAR IN HUMAN CIVILIZATION
Yes – it’s my holy trinity of military history. If H.P. Willmott is my Old Testament of books of history, then John Keegan and Azar Gat are my New Testament.
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(4) PAUL JOHNSON – MODERN TIMES
(5) GEOFFREY BLAINEY – A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD
(6) J.M. ROBERTS – TRIUMPH OF THE WEST
(7) JOHN ELLIS – BRUTE FORCE
(8) FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO – CIVILIZATIONS
(9) ADRIAN GOLDSWORTHY – HOW ROME FELL
X-TIER (WILD TIER) – BEST OF 2023
(10) ANTHONY KALDELLIS – THE NEW ROMAN EMPIRE