Real first world war: A monumental account of the Napoleonic Wars (2020)
the-tls.co.uk
the-tls.co.uk
Anyway, the article makes a good case. And yes, they know about the seven years’ war.
Archived here: https://archive.md/GAOgo .
That a professional should be aware of what is happening in their own profession is not a surprising idea, nor is it surprising that a reviewer would also want to give acknowledgement to those professional concerns.
Identity politics is the « cutting edge of historiography » ?! It looks like the butt-end of it to me. At least I can't say I've seen it ever being taken seriously by proper historians in the periods I'm concerned with. Of course you could make the case that it's just conservatism and intellectual stiffness, and that it'll percolate eventually. You could also make the case that's it's not a very fruitful research field. The bulk of the work in social history and the history of mentalities has been done, as far as I'm aware, especially in regards to the Modern period. Historical materialism and its descent have ran their course, more or less. If anything the cutting edge of historiography is reassessing traditional narratives that predate it, as well as feeding on the progress in other disciplines that use a lot of computer modelling (genetics, linguistics).
I'll point out that the expanding focus of history has been constant at least since the mid-1800s. The historian Fernand Braudel once quoted the historian Jules Michelet, who had boasted in 1862, "Only in the modern age have we discovered truly universal history." Braudel remarked "Even since then historian's have been looking over their shoulder."
The point is, Michelet felt he had invented universal history because he had expanded the focus of history to include some economic realities, yet his focus still seemed limited compared to the work that Braudel and the Annales School were doing in the early and mid 20th Century. And so Braudel wondered, would his own work seem limited to people living in the mid 21st Century? And of course, the answer is yes. The concerns of history, and the methods of historiography, continue to expand, constantly.
"This is history from above, which deals with foreign policy, war and some of its domestic ramifications, but not so much, or not at all, with questions of gender, race, or generational relations. To have included more on these dimensions, of which the author is perfectly aware, would have required a different and even longer book."
It doesn't really look like an apology to me. The reviewer is just telling us which prism the book uses to look at the past.
>This is history from above, which deals with foreign policy, war and some of its domestic ramifications
as far as saying gender, race and generational relations were not considered I guess we know the reason, because there are people who consider these issues of overriding importance and are bound to question why they were not included in anything they read. Perhaps the author has already had these questions asked by people who reviewed the book and they decided to forestall further questions by saying there was insufficient space to address the issues.
So even if to some extent the scope was mentioned, saying that a book about Napoleonic Wars is (surprisingly!) a book about war (which is essentially what "foreign policy, war and some of its domestic ramifications" basically boils down to) isn't quite what I'd expect as new specific information on what a book about Napoleonic wars might tackle. Subtracting a few very specific aspects doesn't help here.
war is broader than gender? Everyone has the latter.
I don't think I would agree that war is a broader issue than generational issues, since generational issues might be different from generation to generation but war tends to be a pretty well known subject.
Hey this show is about war, ok I know what that is, and this show is about generational issues - ok what's that about then? In short, I do not agree that war is a broader issue than at least two of the mentioned issues. Not sure about race but if I were to guess I'd say war is probably broader - given that race is not a real thing and thus dealing with race must in fact be dealing with racism.
Everyone has a species, and yet we share most genes with other mammals. So when you're describing some fundamental topic like the role of glucose in a mammal cell, the fact that everyone has a species suddenly becomes much less relevant.
Furthermore, your question probably should have been "war is broader than gender aspects of war?", since it's quite obvious that there is a vast space of gender topics outside of war and merely "gender" covers those (hence the broad topic), but they're also irrelevant here. Ditto generational issues, etc.
I don't even know what that means. To me that's like saying that net wealth is a social structure. Or that nationality is a social structure. I mean, in a war of nation states, nationality of an individual for example would be obviously of prime importance, but I still don't know how it is a social structure in a war.
I just mean if you were an alien anthropologist, and you were trying to understand napoleonic europe by looking at paintings or time-travel-photographs or whatever, you'd almost certainly notice gender divisions before you noticed anything else.
Nationality is obviously a social structure. That's a large part of what the napoleonic wars were about: the birth of nationalism.
All people. That's the point. All the people have two arms[0], legs, and eyes. Half the people are wearing big dresses, the other half are wearing funny-shaped hats and tight white trousers. The alien anthropologist would assume, rightly, that the first sentence is just how people look, and the second is marking some important social distinction.
Since wars are fought over social distinctions, and their conduct is largely guided by social distinctions (who fights, etc), the most obvious distinctions would seem to be relevant.
[0]: except Nelson.
Because for how important they have been over the course of history, a lot of historical analysis has closed its eyes to them.
It's like writing an analysis of bovines without any mention of the fact that they are domesticated. It doesn't mean that it's a bad analysis, it's a broad field, and anyone working in it can freely choose which particular subset of it to cover. But it is a notable omission.
I don't think Information Theory is typically covered at the 100 level, but if it were, I'm sure they would include things like conditional and relative entropy.
This statement is a false dichotomy. One does not pre-empt one's enemies from doing something unless one fears they will gain power from their use of the thing.
Of course the book deals with the topics it already listed and not gender and so on.. I’m not at all sure why it tells us it doesn’t deal with other topics.
Still don’t understand after reading all the responses here too…
Just like ww1 and ww2 are the same conflict with a 20 year ceasefire to raise more cannon fodder.
There’s some debate on which order to read the books, either the order they were published or the chronological order of the story.
It’s not a world I recognize and honestly that extends to WWI even.
Master and Commander (2003 film)