Warfare and Culture in World History, Second Edition

An expanded edition of the leading text on military history and the role of culture on the battlefield

Ideas matter in warfare. Guns may kill, but ideas determine when, where, and how they are used. Traditionally, military historians attempted to explain the ideas behind warfare in strictly rational terms, but over the past few decades, a stronger focus has been placed on how societies conceptualize war, weapons, violence, and military service, to determine how culture informs the battlefield.

Warfare and Culture in World History, Second Edition, is a collection of some of the most compelling recent efforts to analyze warfare through a cultural lens. These curated essays draw on, and aggressively expand, traditional scholarship on war and society through sophisticated cultural analysis. Chapters range from an organizational analysis of American Civil War field armies, to an exploration of military culture in late Republican Rome, to debates within Ming Chinese officialdom over extermination versus pacification.

In addition to a revised and expanded introduction, the second edition of Warfare and Culture in World History now adds new chapters on the role of herding in shaping Mongol strategies, Spanish military culture and its effects on the conquest of the New World, and the blending of German and East African military cultures among the Africans who served in the German colonial army. This volume provides a full range of case studies of how culture, whether societal, strategic, organizational, or military, could shape not only military institutions but also actual battlefield choices.

Wayne E. Lee is Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. He is author of Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History and Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865. Wayne E. Lee is Bruce W. Carney Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. He is author of Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History and Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865.

Geoff Plank, University of East Anglia:
Like other collective human endeavors, the practice of warfare reflects the participants’ shared values, fears, implicit and expressed norms of behavior and communal aspirations. With detailed, illuminating case studies that together span more than 2,500 years and circle the globe from the ancient near east to 21st-century America by way of central Asia, China, Europe, Spanish America and Africa, Warfare and Culture in World History makes a forceful case for the importance of culture in shaping military outcomes.

Stephen Morillo, Wabash College:
An excellent update to an already crucial collection. Expanded global coverage and a Lee’s expanded and revised theoretical introduction keep this volume at the forefront of the cultural history of warfare.

Rob Citino, Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian, The National World War II Museum:
Military history today is cultural history or it isn’t anything at all, and Wayne Lee has been one of the gurus of the cultural approach for a long time. This updated edition of the 2011 original retains Lee’s incisive theoretical framework, but contains new essays reflecting a less Western and more global approach. Ranging from ancient Assyria to the Mongols to modern America, this volume is as erudite as it is indispensable.

Michael Neiberg, author of The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America:
A major contribution to the evolving literature on the importance of culture to understanding the history of warfare. It brings together some of the field's most learned experts and presents us with an insightful global view that should change every reader's ways of understanding this crucial topic.

J.R. McNeill, Georgetown University:
This new edition is significantly more global than the first, with new chapters on the Mongols, the conquest of Mexico, and German East Africa as well as a new introduction by one of the foremost military historians at work today. The book ranges from ancient Assyria to the present, and provides an excellent introduction to the theme of cultural influences upon warmaking, military organizations, and military matters generally.