Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses-the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and extent. The effects of what ...historians call the "General Crisis" extended from England to Japan, from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. The Americas, too, did not escape the turbulence of the time.
In this meticulously researched volume, master historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who saw and suffered from the sequence of political, economic, and social crises between 1618 to the late 1680s. Parker also deploys the scientific evidence of climate change during this period. His discoveries revise entirely our understanding of the General Crisis: changes in prevailing weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world.
Parker's demonstration of the link between climate change, war, and catastrophe 350 years ago stands as an extraordinary historical achievement. And the implications of his study are equally important: are we adequately prepared-or even preparing-for the catastrophes that climate change brings?
"War . . . is merely an idea, an institution, like dueling or slavery, that has been grafted onto human existence. It is not a trick of fate, a thunderbolt from hell, a natural calamity, or a ...desperate plot contrivance dreamed up by some sadistic puppeteer on high. And it seems to me that the institution is in pronounced decline, abandoned as attitudes toward it have changed, roughly following the pattern by which the ancient and formidable institution of slavery became discredited and then mostly obsolete."-from the Introduction
War is one of the great themes of human history and now, John Mueller believes, it is clearly declining. Developed nations have generally abandoned it as a way for conducting their relations with other countries, and most current warfare (though not all) is opportunistic predation waged by packs-often remarkably small ones-of criminals and bullies. Thus, argues Mueller, war has been substantially reduced to its remnants-or dregs-and thugs are the residual combatants.
Mueller is sensitive to the policy implications of this view. When developed states commit disciplined troops to peacekeeping, the result is usually a rapid cessation of murderous disorder.The Remnants of Warthus reinvigorates our sense of the moral responsibility bound up in peacekeeping. In Mueller's view, capable domestic policing and military forces can also be effective in reestablishing civic order, and the building of competent governments is key to eliminating most of what remains of warfare.
John Ferris' work in strategic and intelligence history is widely praised for its originality and the breadth of its research. At last his major pioneering articles are now available in this one ...single volume.
In Intelligence and Strategy these essential articles have been fundamentally revised to incorporate new evidence and information withheld by governments when they were first published. This volume reshapes the study of communications intelligence by tracing Britain's development of cipher machines providing the context to Ultra and Enigma, and by explaining how British and German signals intelligence shaped the desert war. The author also explains how intelligence affected British strategy and diplomacy from 1874 to 1940 and world diplomacy during the 1930s and the Second World War. Finally he traces the roots for contemporary intelligence, and analyzes intelligence and the RMA as well as the role of intelligence in the 2003 Gulf War. This volume ultimately brings new light to our understanding of the relations between intelligence, strategy and diplomacy between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
John Ferris is a Professor of History at The University of Calgary. He has written widely on military history, strategy and intelligence studies. Among his works are The Evolution of British Strategic Policy, 1919-1926 (1989) and The British Army and Signals Intelligence during the First World War. He is a co-author of A World History of Warfare (2002).
1. Lord Salisbury, Secret Intelligence and British Policy Toward Russia and Central Asia, 1874-1878 2. 'Indulged in all Too Little'?: Vansittart, Intelligence and Appeasement 3. Image and Accident: Intelligence and the Origins of the Second World War, 1933-1941 4. The British 'Enigma': Britain, Signals Security and Cipher Machines, 1906-1953 5. The British Army, Signals and Security in the Desert Campaign, 1940-42 6. Clausewitz, Intelligence, Uncertainty and the Art of Command in Modern War (with Michael Handel) 7. NCW, C4ISR, IO and RMA: Towards a Revolution in Military Intelligence?
Why they die Rothbart, Daniel; Korostelina, Karina
2011., 20110622, 2011, c2011.
eBook
Why do civilians suffer most during times of violent conflict? Why are civilian fatalities as much as eight times higher, calculated globally for current conflicts, than military fatalities? In Why ...They Die, Daniel Rothbart and Karina V. Korostelina address these questions through a systematic study of civilian devastation in violent conflicts. Pushing aside the simplistic definition of war as a guns-and-blood battle between two militant groups, the authors investigate the identity politics underlying conflicts of many types. During a conflict, all those on the opposite side are perceived as the enemy, with little distinction between soldiers and civilians. As a result, random atrocities and systematic violence against civilian populations become acceptable.
Rothbart and Korostelina devote the first half of the book to case studies: deportation of the Crimean Tatars from the Ukraine, genocide in Rwanda, the Lebanon War, and the war in Iraq. With the second half, they present new methodological tools for understanding different types of violent conflict and discuss the implications of these tools for conflict resolution.
The book is a re-edition of a volume published by Adam Ciołkosz at the Paris Institute of Literature in 1961. The polemic between a Polish socialist and a Polish-German revolutionary is a fragment of ...a dispute within the authors of socialist thought and movement in the 20th century. The work consists of three parts: a commentary by A. Ciolkosz, the text of R. Luxemburg, an afterword and a selection of updated bibliography.
This volume titled City and War (Miasto i wojna) contains papers written by scholars from Hungary, Poland, and Romania – historians, archaeologists, and museum professionals. These papers discuss the ...functioning of military formations in towns and cities, and their role as an economic or military base or theatre of warfare, as well as the military duties of the town inhabitants and their weapons and other resources. In terms of chronology, the papers included in this volume cover the period from the Middle Ages to the present day.
In this study, I would like to pinpoint the location of the Battle of Brunanburh, which was one of the main battles in the history of the British Isles. To do that this article wasdistributed in four ...parts. The first part will tell the events, which lead to the battle. It will help us to define the motives of the participating armies. After that, a criteria system will be created to filter essential information, leading us to the location of the battle. At the end, I will make my conclusions.
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