Stephen Morillo

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• DPhil
• Chair, retired at Wabash College

This collection is the most sophisticated available for the history of Geopolitics. In place of misleading cliches notably that of Geography as Destiny, we offer a conceptually and methodologically acute approach in which contingency rather than determinism is to the fore. This is focused on the military dimensions of Geopolitics and the geopolitic...

Essays on aspects of medieval military history, encompassing the most recent critical approaches.

Tonio Andrade's The Gunpowder Age is a big book. It spans roughly 800 years, in both China and Europe. Its boldest claims concern China, but Andrade delves into European history as well, making it a challenge for any one scholar to assess his evidence and arguments. Because China specialists would want to know how historians specializing in Europea...

This is, unfortunately, a comprehensively bad book. Chaliand proposes to bring an analytical lens to bear, to quote the back cover, “not on the impact of war on civilizations, but rather on how civilizations impact the art and execution of war,” although he also purports to explain “the crises and conflicts that have shaped the current world order....

The Barons' Wars are the bookends of a nearly century-long struggle on the part of the political classes of Angevin England to define the shape of the English polity. Their military operations are interesting but unexceptional, though they do reveal some of the dynamics of medieval military culture in revealing ways. They are far more important for...

We live in a so-called "Age of Information," a world tied together by the world wide web, a global internet of data and connectivity. In such a world, "informa-tion workers" who can make sense of the masses of data available and who can create new knowledge find themselves at a gleat competitive advantage in the economy of the twenty-first century,...

But the Entwives were not there. Long we called, and long we searched; and we asked all folk that we met which way the En-twives had gone. Some said they had never seen them; and some said that they had seen them walking away west, and some said east, and others south. But nowhere that we went could we find them. Our sorrow was very great. Yet the...

JEREMY BLACK. Maps and Politics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. 188. $35.00 (US). Reviewed by Peter C. Perdue

I claimed in What is Military History?, an historigraphical and methodological analysis of the field of military history, that two major challenges for military history in coming years would be the integration of global perspectives and the insights of cultural history. This claim arose in part from my own experiences writing a world military histo...

Green (University of Edinburgh) has spent her career studying aspects of Henry I's important reign, and this book synthesizes her conclusions about the reign and the ruler. Green's assessment of her subject is a complete and well-rounded one, complementing in many ways the larger but more diffuse (and arguably unfinished) biography of Henry by the...

This is, inevitably, an odd book. The late J. O. Prestwich delivered the Ford Lectures that form the bulk of the text in 1983; he had been given the Lectureship, as his son and editor of this volume, Michael Prestwich, explains in the Acknowledgments, in the hope that he would publish the lectures in timely fashion and so provide a more extended ex...

Printed on permanent paper in compliance rvith the ISO standard 9706. All rights reserved (including those of translation into other languages). No part of this book may be reproduced in any form-by photoprinting, microfrlm, or any other means-nor transmitted or translated into a machine language without written permission from the publisher.

LiddiardRobert, ed. Anglo-Norman Castles. Rochester, N. Y.: Boydell Press. 2002. Pp. Xiii, 414. $75.00. ISBN 0-85115-904-4. RickardJohn. The Castle Community: The Personnel of English and Welsh Castles, 1272–1422. Rochester, N. Y.: Boydell Press. 2002. Pp. Xii, 561. $110.00. ISBN 0-58115-913-3. - Volume 36 Issue 1 - Stephen Morillo

Journal of World History 15.4 (2004) 525-530 For world historians of military history, two related questions have tended to dominate the field in the last fifteen years. The first is the question of "Western exceptionalism": that is, to what extent if any does the history of Western military practice (assuming "the West" is a coherently definable c...

This article argues against the claims made in R. J. Barendse's article "The Feudal Mutation." It shows first that in philosophical and historiographical terms, feudalism is a term with no agreed definition that is being rejected by European medievalists, so that reviving it in a world historical context will confuse more than enlighten. Second, it...

The Journal of Military History 67.2 (2003) 548-549 It is testimony to the importance of the battle of Hastings that it continues to generate scholarship and controversy after almost 950 years. The controversy, however, is also testimony to the number and nature of the sources we have for the battle: plentiful enough that we know more about Hasting...

In the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the warrior elites of Japan and north- western Europe, despite many similarities in ethos and lifestyle, developed very different cultures of death. Japanese warriors sought battle, killed each other in battle, and killed themselves in ritual suicides. European warriors avoided battle, captured e...

"This very accessible narrative...tells the story of 'the first two important battles of 1066', Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge, and of the leaders of the opposing English and Norwegian factions. The evidence of later 12th- and 13th-century Norse sagas, Snorri Sturlusson's Heimskringla, and the less well known Norwegian Kings Sagas...present far m...

Historical background of Dark-Age Britain military organization social structure duties and obligations poets, poetry and heroic ideals the hall other social institutions and cultural concepts economic supports. Appendix - the dating of heroic poetry.

Journal of World History 8.1 (1997) 160-163 The subtitle of The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare will set off Eurocentrism alarms for readers of this journal. Unfortunately, such alarms are not false. The volume editor, Geoffrey Parker, acknowledges the Eurocentrism problem in his preface, but claims that space constraints and the fact of W...

Part 1 The military revolution in Edwardian England. Part 2 The warhorse and the aristocratic society: the image of the aristocratic warrior in 14th-century England the English warhorse in the 14th-century - the sources. Part 3 The horse inventories - documents and administrative processes: inventories and "resauro equorum" accounts the appraisal o...

Did gunpowder weapons cause the "military revolutions' in 16th-century Europe and Japan, or were prior governmental changes the key factor? Japan provides a clear control case for comparison with Europe, because the date of the introduction of gunpowder weapons is unambiguous: 1543. The evidence suggests that Japanese rulers first tightened their h...

Historians have refought the battle of Hastings regularly since the days of Freeman and Round, and its importance justifies the attention paid it. Part of the reason academic warriors have covered the ground so often is that the battle is by no means easy to understand. It was unusual in a number of ways; so unusual, that the battle demands special...