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Arming slaves as soldiers is a counterintuitive idea. Yet throughout history, in many varied societies, slaveholders have entrusted slaves with the use of deadly force. This book surveys the practice broadly across space and time, encompassing the cultures of classical Greece, the early Islamic kingdoms of the Near East, West and East Africa, the British and French Caribbean, the United States, and Latin America. To facilitate cross-cultural comparisons, each chapter addresses four crucial issues: the social and cultural facts regarding the arming of slaves, the experience of slave soldiers, the ideological origins and consequences of equipping enslaved peoples for battle, and the impact of the practice on the status of slaves and slavery itself.

More than three-and-a-half million men served in the British Army during the Second World War, the vast majority of them civilians who had never expected to become soldiers and had little idea what military life, with all its strange rituals, discomforts, and dangers, was going to be like. The author's rich and luminous social history examines the experience of the greatest and most terrible war in history from the perspective of these ordinary, extraordinary men, who were plucked from their peacetime families and workplaces and sent to fight for King and Country. The book chronicles the huge diversity of their wartime trajectories, tracing how soldiers responded to and were shaped by their years with the British Army, and how that army, however reluctantly, had to accommodate itself to them. Touching on issues of class, sex, crime, trauma, and national identity, through a colorful multitude of fresh individual perspectives, the book provides an enlightening, deeply moving perspective on how a generation of very modern-minded young men responded to the challenges of a brutal and disorienting conflict.

Medieval states, and particularly crusader societies, often have been considered brutish and culturally isolated. It seems unlikely that they could develop “strategy” in any meaningful sense. However, the crusaders were actually highly organized in their thinking and their decision making was rarely random. This book draws on a rich array of primary sources to reassess events on the ground and patterns of behavior over time. The book shows how, from aggressive castle building to implementing a series of invasions of Egypt, crusader leaders tenaciously pursued long-term plans and devoted single-minded attention to clear strategic goals. Crusader states were permanently on the brink of destruction; resources were scarce and the penalties for failure severe. Intuitive strategic thinking, the book argues, was a necessity, not a luxury.

This book is the history of the quarter of the century that led up to the American disaster in Somalia. It also describes the rise and fall of the Ethiopian socialist dictator and ruler, Mengistu Haile Mariam. The collapse of that tyranny in 1991 spawned civil wars and regional conflicts that devastated this impoverished region and brought into question the very feasibility of maintaining state structures in the Horn of Africa. That devastation happened at the same time as the rise of al Qaeda and the expansion of Iranian efforts to establish links with Islamist extremists in Africa in the 1990s. These effects converged in Sudan, where they remained intertwined. This book integrates detailed narratives of conventional military operations and multiple revolutionary wars.

More than 12,000 soldiers from the Highlands of Scotland were recruited to serve in Great Britain's colonies in the Americas in the middle to the late decades of the eighteenth century. This history corrects the mythologized image of the Highland soldier as a noble savage, a primitive if courageous relic of clanship, revealing instead how the Gaels used their military service to further their own interests and, in doing so, transformed the most maligned region of the British Isles into an important center of the British Empire.

Can the use of force first against a less-than-imminent threat be both morally acceptable and consistent with American values? This book offers an in-depth, historical examination of the use of preemptive and preventive force through the lens of the just war tradition. Although critical of the United States' incursion into Iraq as a so-called preemptive war, the book argues that the threat posed by terrorism nonetheless demands careful consideration of when the first use of preemptive force is legitimate. The moral tradition, it concludes, provides a principled way forward that reconciles American values and the demands of security.

This book presents a new account of the long-overlooked achievement of British-led forces who, against all odds, scored the first major Allied victory of the Second World War. Surprisingly neglected in accounts of Allied wartime triumphs, in 1941 British and Commonwealth forces completed a stunning and important victory in East Africa against an overwhelmingly superior Italian opponent. A hastily formed British-led force, never larger than 70,000 strong, advanced along two fronts to defeat nearly 300,000 Italian and colonial troops. This book draws on an array of previously unseen documents to provide both a detailed campaign history and a fresh appreciation of the first significant Allied success of the war. The book investigates such topics as Britain's African wartime strategy; how the fighting forces were assembled (most from British colonies, none from the U.S.); General Archibald Wavell's command abilities and his difficult relationship with Winston Churchill; the resolute Italian defense at Keren, one of the most bitterly fought battles of the entire war; the legacy of the campaign in East Africa; and much more.

This book presents an account of the Habsburg army. The text shows how the Imperial Austrian Army, time and again, was a decisive factor in the story of Europe, the balance of international power, and the defense of Christendom. Moreover, it was the first pan-European army made up of different nationalities and faiths, counting among its soldiers not only Christians but also Muslims and Jews. The book tours some of the most important campaigns and battles in modern European military history, from the seventeenth century through World War I. It details technical and social developments that coincided with the army's story and provides fascinating portraits of the great military leaders as well as noteworthy figures of lesser renown. Departing from conventional assessments of the Habsburg army as ineffective, outdated, and repeatedly inadequate, the book argues that it was a uniquely cohesive and formidable fighting force, in many respects one of the glories of the old Europe.

During the Persian Wars, Sparta and Athens worked in tandem to defeat what was, in terms of relative resources and power, the greatest empire in human history. For the decade and a half that followed, they continued their collaboration until a rift opened and an intense, strategic rivalry began. This book examines the grounds for their alliance, the reasons for its eventual collapse, and the first stage in an enduring conflict that would wreak havoc on Greece for six decades. Throughout, the book argues that the alliance between Sparta and Athens and their eventual rivalry were extensions of their domestic policy and that the grand strategy each articulated in the wake of the Persian Wars and the conflict that arose in due course grew out of the opposed material interests and moral imperatives inherent in their different regimes.