Military History: An Introduction

Niels Bo Poulsen

Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Defining Military History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
The Study of the Past as Military History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Military History Becomes a Subdiscipline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Decreasing Civil Academic Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Military History Commercialized . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
New Military History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Future Challenges for Military History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Military History: Some Typologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Military History Milieus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
In Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Abstract
This chapter offers an introduction to military history. It outlines the relation
between history in general and the subdiscipline of military history. Traditionally
military history has been “war-centric” and during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century a significant split occurred between military professionals who
studied the past in order to find military lessons and establish principles of war
and civilian academics who increasingly came to see military history as method-
ologically primitive and war-glorifying. Contemporary military history, however,
has to some extent bridged this gap, and today military history is “a broad church”
characterized by a rich variety of approaches. Nevertheless, a number of profound
challenges face historians wanting to do military history, including commercial-
ization of the field, a strong tendency to Euro-Atlantic centrism, lack of repre-
sentation, and a paucity of theoretical and methodological debates. Currently the
N. B. Poulsen (*)
Institute of Strategy and War Studies, Royal Danish Defence College, Copenhagen, Denmark
e-mail: nipo@fak.dk

© The Author(s) 2022 1

A. Sookermany (ed.), Handbook of Military Sciences,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02866-4_24-1
2 N. B. Poulsen

most notable principal approaches to military history are operational military

history, war and society (new military history), deconstructivist military history,
and memory culture oriented military history.

Keywords
History · Historiography · Armed Forces · Military Education · Principles of
War · Methodology · Epistemology

Introduction

This chapter offers an introduction to military history – one among many sub-
disciplines within the discipline of history. Military history is among the oldest
forms of history and has served a broad range of purposes. Traditionally military
history has been “war-centric,” and during much of the twentieth century, military
historians suffered from the reputation of being war-glorifying and of carrying out
methodologically unsophisticated work. Historically speaking a major producer (and
consumer) of military history have been military professionals who studied war and
warfare in order to derive useful lessons from it. Contemporary military history,
however, is a much more diverse undertaking, characterized by a relatively broad
definition of what comes under the heading of military history. Thus there are many
different approaches to studying the subject. Over the last decades some of the new
developments have been an increasing mainstreaming of gender perspectives and
replacing a Eurocentric approach with a more global history oriented approach.
Despite such new and innovative ways of doing military history, the field may still be
regarded as one of the most conservative within history. It is also one of the few
fields of history which continuously relates to a large milieu of professionals – that
is, officers and military specialists who seek inspiration and guidance from military
history when preparing for war. Thus military history may be characterized as one of
the oldest and most widely used among the military sciences. In addition, military
history is a remarkably commercially oriented subdiscipline as a large market for
books, films, and other types of media related to historical narratives of war exist.
Currently some of the principal approaches to military history are operational
military history, war and society/new military history, deconstructivist military
history, and memory culture oriented military history.

Defining Military History

Military history is just one among many fields in the discipline of history. Although a
concise delimitation to other fields of history is difficult, military history may
according to Michael Howard simply be defined as “the history of armed forces
and the conduct of war” (Howard, 1988, p. 4). While this definition encapsulates
what many still view as the defining content of military history, other scholars have
Military History: An Introduction 3

advocated for a broader and more inclusive definition (e.g., Messerschmidt et al.,
1982, p. 48). According to Stephen Morillo, apart from wars and warfare, military
history includes the history of military institutions, “the varying roles of soldiers and
warriors in different societies and the social impact of warfare” as well as such topics
as war’s interaction with economics, technology, culture, and social structures,
including gender roles (Morillo, 2006, p. 3f). As Matthew Hughes and William
Philpott notes “there is very little in modern human history which has not been
determined or touched by war” (Hughes & Philpott, 2006, p. 1) – an observation
which makes it tempting to define military history as broadly and inclusively as
possibly. Yet, if military history is to function as a distinct area within the historical
science, a certain topical core is useful. War (including the preparation for war and
the termination of war), warfare, and armed forces may be said to represent the
phenomenon, the social practices, and the institutions which are at the center of
military history.
In the Anglo-Saxon scholarly community, “military history” is the preferred term,
although there exist a number of partly overlapping and competing terms such as
“war and society” (Speller, 2012). The term military history has equivalents in many
other European languages (French: Histoire militaire; Spanish: Historia militar; and
German: Militärgeschichte). Traditionally, however, the German term has been
Kriegsgeschichte, similarly to today’s Russian term voennaya istoria (both terms
literally meaning “war history”). This is not merely a semantic subtlety, but reflects
the narrower scope of military history before the twentieth century; war and warfare
was the focal point rather than military affairs in a broad sense.

The Study of the Past as Military History

Military history and its parent discipline, history, share an interest in studying and
explaining the course of the past, including contextualizing and interpreting the
causes of historical change. History has been – and still is – characterized by a
variety of approaches on how to study the past, including different positions on
whether historical explanations amount to anything other than narrative construc-
tions of an irretrievable past (Munslow, 2006). Some historians still believe that it is
possible to establish by means of historical study a relatively high degree of
correspondence between the historian’s narrated account of the past and what most
likely happened in the past (Evans, 1997). Others are much more skeptical, and some
would argue that the very notion of a well-defined past is doubtful thus preferring
speaking of the past in plural.
Not only do historians struggle with the question how (and if) the past can be
reconstructed and narrated in a theoretically and methodologically sound way. They
have also increasingly become interested in how the past is used by contemporary
society and in the processes of how collective memory function (Kansteiner, 2002).
This interest reflects that gaining scholarly insight is just one of several ways of
addressing the past. Human collectives also use the past in numerous other ways,
most prominently to create and maintain identities, to entertain themselves, to derive
4 N. B. Poulsen

useful lessons, and to seek guidance for future action. Military history has served all
these functions. In much traditional military history, past victories and defeats were
used to create unifying narratives about one’s own nation while vilifying other
nations. Inside the armed forces, a certain type of history writing, often termed
“regimental history,” was (and is) used to create a strong corporate identity by
stressing the heroic and successful exploits of the military unit in question rather
than studying it in a reflective, critical, and dispassionate manner (Millett, 1992,
p. 4).
The increased focus among historians on how the past is used has contributed to a
considerably broadening of the field, thereby giving birth to memory studies, one of
the areas where history links up with other disciplines such as sociology, psychology,
and anthropology (Kansteiner, 2002). Yet, it is no novelty that history is closely
related to other disciplines and professions and military history is a case in point.
Traditionally, military history has occupied a central position in the military sci-
ences. As recorded experience from past battles and wars, military history has been
used to formulate principles of warfare, to develop doctrine and to teach future
officers their profession. Sun Tsu, Vegetius, Machiavelli, Saxe, Bülow, Clausewitz,
and Jomini (to mention but a few military thinkers) have all, in various ways, drawn
extensively on military history when formulating their observations on war and
warfare (Lider, 1983; Angstrom & Widen, 2015, pp. 79–81). Even among those
not believing in the possibility of establishing fixed principles of war on the basis of
past military experiences, such as the chief of the Prussian General Staff, Helmuth
von Moltke the Elder, military history was seen as a valuable tool of education for
officers because it offered a pool of experience and thereby served to demonstrate the
intricacies and complexities of warfare (Holborn, 1986, p. 289). Military history is
thus a field which engages a large milieu of professionals – that is, officers and
military specialists; by seeking inspiration and guidance from past military events
this milieu contributes significantly to the considerable demand that exist for military
history. How exactly to derive lessons from the past and how to translate such
insights into improving the performance of officers is, however, a disputed subject
(Beaumont, 1994; Evans, 2020; Kerttunen, 2011).
In terms of epistemological approach and theoretical debates, history has often
been influenced by other disciplines, primarily within the social sciences – for
example, by Marxism and by the Linguistic Turn. This has led to considerable
theoretical convergence between history and other disciplines. Nevertheless, there
is also a strong methodologically oriented strand among historians, which tends to
disregard such theoretical debates and rather focus on reconstructing the past by
applying ad hoc multilayered and multi-causal models of explanation (Gaddis,
2002). These historians generally focus on identifying and utilizing huge bodies of
sources and often they are more interested in the methodological problems of
finding, evaluating, and exploring the sources than in the larger epistemological
and theoretical implications of their craft. This may result in written texts which are
narratively strong, easily read and to the general reader appears to be “to-the-point,”
but which also offer a relatively low level of abstraction and reflection. Together with
the fact that history pertains to all fields of human activity and thus is highly relatable
Military History: An Introduction 5

to the interested layman, this may explain why well-written history often entertains a
large non-scholarly readership. Thus, serious research and popularized writing are
often easier to combine than in many other scientific disciplines. This, however,
comes with a price – rigid (and to the reader boring) methodological and theoretical
deliberations are often absent.

Military History Becomes a Subdiscipline

Traditionally, history has been dominated by tales of kings, state-like entities, and
wars. In that sense, military history represents one of the classic areas addressed by
historians. The often-mentioned paradigmatic example of that is Thucydides’ history
of the Peloponnesian War (written around 431 BC). In this work, the causes and the
course of the war between the Greek city states of Sparta and Athens are investigated
in a detached and critical manner, relying upon written and oral sources. In addition,
the events studied by Thucydides are being subjected to a clear analytical scheme –
the driving forces behind the war famously described as “fear, honor and interest”
(Thucydides, 1998). In fact, military history may been seen “as the oldest form of
history writing in many cultures” due to the fact that rulers actively sought the
recording of their military exploits from the time when writing was invented
(Morillo, 2006, p. 2). Statehood and military power were thus legitimized by
being narrated and written down. Not only were war and warfare integrated in
most major works devoted to the history of nations from early modernity and
onwards: important developments such as the emergence of state-based standing
armies and rapid technological change contributed to the creation of a distinct
subdiscipline of military history. The establishment of standing armies and state
institutions created bureaucracies, and this in turn resulted in the creation of military
archives and in specialized entities in the armed forces that were tasked with
studying military history and derive lessons from it, or teaching it to military
students. The first instance was the establishment of the Austrian military archive
in 1801. This archive contained a section for military history with the goal of
providing the army with relevant historical material (Nowosadtko, 2002, p. 58).
Fifteen years later, the Prussian General Staff established a war history section and
by the second half of the nineteenth century, most European armed forces not only
possessed archives but also had established military history sections, which
published substantial and detailed studies of their own and foreign armies’ wars
(Echevarria II, 1997). Simultaneously, history in general and especially military
history became a central part of the curriculum at institutions of military education,
such as the Prussian Kriegsakademie. Yet, the same processes also resulted in
military and civilian institutions studying military history gradually moving apart
and taking two main directions, which were highly different in terms of their
perception of the past and whether history could offer lessons. Inside the armed
forces, for example in military academies and research sections under the general
staffs, the focus was dominantly on deriving useful lessons from war and on
justifying and glorifying one’s own armed forces. This approach resulted in “a
6 N. B. Poulsen

romantic-heroic history that centered on an intuited understanding and vicarious

experience of the past” and paid little attention to contextualization of the matter to
be studied (Echevarria II, 1997, p. 573f). In civilian academia, however, it was the
dominant position that past events were unique and should be studied and under-
stood in their historical context rather than being sifted for militarily useful lessons
which could transcend time and place. These conflicting views materialized during
the late nineteenth century – the paradigmatic example being the debate between
German historian Hans Delbrück and representatives of the German General Staff in
the so-called Strategiestreit (i.e., strategy controversy). As opposed to the German
armed forces’ perception of strategic thought as transcending time and culture,
Delbrück maintained that wars could only be studied in their historical context and
that they offered no enduring lessons. On their side, representatives of the history
section of the German General Staff argued that civilian historians were neither
qualified nor entitled to study how militaries fought at war (Lange, 1995).

Decreasing Civil Academic Interest

As indicated, during the nineteenth century also the civilian academic world related
strongly to military history. Not only historians as Hans Delbrück but also social
scientists and other thinkers like Friedrich Engels took a major interest in war’s role
in history. Some, such as Edward Creasy, even saw war as a main agent of historical
change – a perspective, which was reflected in his famous 1851 book Fifteen
Decisive Battles of the World (Morillo, 2006, p. 35). By the turn of the century,
however, military history began to look like a dead end to most university-based
historians. Writing a few decades after Creasy’s book, J.R. Green in his History of
the English People declared that “it is the reproach of historians that they have too
often turned history into a mere record of the butchery of men by their fellow-men.”
He added: “But war plays a small part in the real history of European nations and, in
that of England, its part is smaller than in any” (Quoted from Oman, 1939, p. 160).
Especially after the First World War, military history increasingly came to be seen as
war-glorifying and unworthy of scholarly study at civilian universities (Creveld,
1983, p. 552). Rather than as a cause of historical change, war came to be viewed as a
symptom merely reflecting deep rooted economic and social structural forces in
society at large. This led to a general isolation of military history from other types of
history through most of the twentieth century. Admittedly, the marginalization of
military history was a process characterized by considerable national variations in
terms of when, why, and how much this type of history lost terrain. In Germany, it
was the cumulative effect of two disastrous wars, the immense Nazi atrocities during
the Second World War, and a wholly new approach to military history in the new
democratic Bundeswehr as well as in academia that triggered the change, and the
decisive marginalization of military history did not start until the end of the Second
World War (Kollmer, 2013). In neighboring Denmark, the process had started
already at the end of the nineteenth century and is normally associated with
Denmark’s defeat in the 1864 war against Austria and Prussia in combination with
Military History: An Introduction 7

the alleged dominance in academia of historians with a pacifist outlook (Jespersen,

2008, p. 8f). Also in other countries such as France and the United States, university-
based military history experienced an eclipse during much of the twentieth century.
However, no studies have demonstrated exactly how and why the process unfolded,
and there are conflicting views on how severe the marginalization was. In addition,
we know little about the degree to which the same tendency manifested itself in
non-western or illiberal societies during the twentieth century.
Nevertheless, during the said period, military history occupied two significant
niches: As described above, it was studied and taught at military institutions of
higher learning or within specialized research units, such as the US Army Historical
Division. This institution produced a sequence of high-quality official histories of
the US army, including the monumental “green book” series on the Second World
War. In a similar vein, the German Bundeswehr operated an in-house institute for
military history: Militärgeschichtliche Forschungsamt (today Zentrum für
Militärgeschichte und Sozialwissenschaft). This body consistently turned out solid
works on German military history and had a pioneering role in studying the armed
forces of the Third Reich. In the case of Germany, the Forschungsamt enjoyed full
academic freedom – a liberty not necessarily shared by military history research
institutes within the armed forces in other countries. Thus, while much valuable
work has been done by historians in the service of their armed forces, their efforts
have typically been circumscribed by a combination of self-censorship, document
classification, and political considerations (Freedman, 2017).

Military History Commercialized

Military history also occupied another niche: that of a highly lucrative and deeply
popular genre of history. Probably more than any other area of history, military
history has become commercialized. It offers a mass market and “draws writers not
just from academics and professional military personnel, but also from professional
authors and popularizers who happen to choose military topics for their marketabil-
ity” (Morillo, 2006, p. 5). Especially Anglo-Saxon historians have proved capable of
turning out well-written (and often, but not always, well-researched) books, in the
process selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. Along with the popularity
of such books goes an equally big market for other products such as magazines and
electronic media – including for a certain period – a TV channel “Military History.”
This, in combination with a steady stream of Hollywood movies dedicated to wars
and battles involving US forces (chapter “Popular Culture and the Military”),
undoubtedly have created a considerable bias toward American military history –
at least in (west-) European-US collective memory. Nevertheless, it should be noted
that in addition to a globalized Anglo-Saxon dominated market for military history,
there are also national markets and audiences, especially oriented toward their own
nations’ wars and campaigns. A vivid example of that is the significant role played in
contemporary Russia by books and other media products about this country’s wars
(Carleton, 2017). The defining characteristics of much of the market-oriented
8 N. B. Poulsen

military history are a strong emphasis on the dramatic and spectacular, often
epitomized in terms like “decisive battle” and often written in the tradition of Creasy
– that is, with a credo of western liberal triumphalism. Other important features are a
considerable focus on the technological-material aspects of warfare, including
“super-weapons,” and on “great captains” such as Alexander the Great, Napoleon,
and the outstanding Second World War generals (Biddle & Citino, 2018; Black,
2004, p. 38). Finally, there exist a strong fascination with the military history of the
Third Reich and with the war on the eastern front 1941–1945. In both cases, the
result is often very narrow and highly tilted accounts, which for example draws
uncritically on the memoirs of German generals (Smelser & Davies, 2008). This
dimension of military history: its commercialization and its function as part of what
have aptly been termed “war as a spectator sport” remains an understudied aspect of
the subject. For more empirical examples on how this has played out in popular
culture, Ender, Reed, and Absalon provide an insightful read into the subject of
precisely Popular Culture and the Military in another chapter to this Handbook of
Military Sciences (chapter “Popular Culture and the Military”).

New Military History

Traditional military history was to a large extent “battle-centric,” and this focus has
remained strong both in the work being done inside the armed forces and among
historians writing with an eye on the market. However, during the second half of the
twentieth century, a new and more inclusive form of military history emerged – the
so-called new military history (chapter “‘New’ Military History”). A new generation
of historians, such as John Keegan, initiated a novel form of war studies, where
insights from sociology, psychology, and social history played a significant role.
Rather than treating war as an abstraction in which the fighting men were mere
pawns on a chess board, and in which the vantage point was that of the generals and
statesmen, the new military history was very much written “from below” and took
great interest in the experiences of the common soldier. In addition, “new military
historians” typically studied aspects of the life of military institutions other than
merely going to war and fighting battle. Emotions, gender roles, everyday lives of
soldiers and civilians in wartime as well as the social and mental impact of war were
among the new topics to be studied (Bourke, 2006). The research agenda suggested
by “new military history” have since then become mainstream. In fact, Biddle and
Citino have recently argued that “‘new military history’ is simply what military
history is today: broad-based, inclusive, and written from a wide range of perspec-
tives” (Biddle & Citino, 2018).
While “new military history” undoubtedly reinvigorated military history from
within, larger societal developments have also contributed to its renaissance.
Scholars have noted that the period since the end of the cold war have been
characterized by an increasing interest in military affairs in general (Kühne &
Ziemann, 2000). Today, armed forces and warfare are studied and taught at civilian
universities on a worldwide scale. Apart from holding chairs in departments of
Military History: An Introduction 9

history, military historians are an integral part of cross-disciplinary environments

such as war studies, strategic studies, conflict studies, and security studies (Spiller,
2006). How this intellectual volte-face came about is an understudied subject and
deserves additional attention. The explanation may partly be found in the emergence
of a new security landscape (Echternkamp, 2013): Beginning with the Yugoslav civil
war, and accelerating after 9/11 2001, western forces were deployed in new roles –
doing peace enforcement and counterinsurgency – and in novel types of conflicts,
so-called new wars (Kaldor, 1999). These new assignments created challenges of a
new type and historians and other scholars increasingly began to address military
affairs and contemporary security challenges by studying past analogies (Hughes &
Philpott, 2006, p. 5f). From about 2004 the defense establishment in many NATO
countries began to study past counter-insurgency operations in order to learn how to
counter the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. David M. Edelstein, for example,
published a study of 24 military occupations since 1815 with the objective of
explaining why some succeeded while others failed (Edelstein, 2004). New military
challenges are, however, unlikely to explain fully the surge in academic studies of
military affairs, including military history. It may also be linked to a general
militarization and securitization of western societies, as exemplified by Rosa
Brooks’ study of how the US armed forces increasingly have been tasked with
assignments traditionally being the responsibility of other state agencies (Brooks,
2017).
As of today, military history may be characterized as “a broad church” (Hughes &
Philpott, 2006, p. 4). It is a field of study within which one may encounter a diverse
range of theoretical and methodological approaches and highly different expecta-
tions about the scholarly output and its application in real-life situations. It is also a
field characterized by a certain sense of being the underdog among historians –
especially among those insisting on a battle-oriented perspective (Lynn, 1997). It is
also notable that the field is still characterized by a limited reflection on the
theoretical aspects of history writing and by an absence of large debates among its
practitioners about how to do military history. This especially pertains to many of the
more traditional forms of military history. Browsing the journals of the field, one
rarely encounters contributions to the basic questions of how to study history or, for
that matter, import of theoretical models from other disciplines. This is a significant
contrast to many other types of history. Characteristically, the number of works in
English tackling the basics of military history – its epistemological, ontological, and
theoretical foundations and the methodological problems associated with it – are
limited (see further reading at the end of the chapter).

Future Challenges for Military History

Among the challenges still facing military historians is that of making the field of
practitioners more diverse and of achieving a pluralistic approach. In 1997 John
Lynn stressed the importance of incorporating gender and cultural history into
military history (Lynn, 1997, p. 789). Since then many valuable works have been
10 N. B. Poulsen

produced in these fields; nevertheless “the white male” dominates the field – both as
the acting subject in the works produced and in terms of who practices military
history. Another noteworthy bias relates to military history being weak on studies
from a global perspective. Related to that has been a tendency to focus on cutting-
edge conventional military forces and failing to graph the diversity and complexity
of why armies are raised and deployed across the specter of societies (Black, 2018,
p. 2).
The increasing interest in overcoming a US/Eurocentric approach to military
history have resulted in the establishment of specialized periodicals for Chinese
and African military history (in 2012 viz. 2017) in addition to a journal devoted to
Slavic military studies (with a strong emphasis on history) in existence since the end
of the cold war. The dearth of military history focused on non-western societies and
institutions is especially remarkable given that war is a universal human social
practice, and yet a phenomenon, which is strongly culturally conditioned and
escapes simplified explanations based on technology, geography, or civilization
(Lynn, 2003). Some of the explanations for the lack of a truly globalized military
history may be structural. As explained in the introduction to the first edition of a
journal devoted to African military history, this area of study has been neglected due
to general prejudices about “the worth” of studying the history of that continent but
also due to “limited access to sources, underdeveloped supporting institutions, and
even the politics of the topic” (Thomas & Doron, 2017, p. 5). Not only does regional
studies of military history outside the United States and Europe have an intrinsic
value in themselves, they also represent important correctives to prevalent concep-
tions and syntheses founded on western source materials exclusively. Recently, for
example, a special issue of Journal of World History (no 1, 2014) was devoted to the
question of a distinct western military revolution taking place during early modernity
and making European armies superior to armies elsewhere. Based on East Asian
drilling manuals, Tonio, Kang, and Cooper have demonstrated that an almost parallel
development took place in the far east (Tonio et al., 2014), thus illustrating that the
process of European conquest and colonization cannot be reduced to a matter of
military superiority.

Military History: Some Typologies

How can military history in its present form be outlined? One possible way of
organizing the field is along functional lines. In 1984, Raymond Callahan suggested
that military history contained three dimensions or, as he termed it, “faces”: a
popular one, an academic one and an official one. He depicted their purposes as
being entertainment and instruction, critical academic study, and institutional mem-
ory of the armed forces, respectively (Callahan, 1984; Morillo, 2006, p. 5).
Callahan’s model may serve as a useful outline of the purposes of studying military
history, but it does not necessarily offer insight into the methodology associated with
doing it, or the theoretical basis on which studies of military history is written.
Military History: An Introduction 11

Other typologies are possible, like linking military history to more general types
of history, as suggested by Rolf-Dieter Müller. According to this author, military
history can be divided as follows: Military history is a subfield of political history
inasmuch as war represents the continuation of politics by other means. However,
when studying military institutions rather than war, much insight can be gained from
social history and sociology (chapter “Military Sociology”). Then there are the
technical and economic aspects of war. Here economic and technological history
plays a role in military history – for example by providing context around the
development of weapons, or because wars often have immense economic implica-
tions (chapters “Strategy and Economics” and “Behavioral Economics in Military
Research and Policy”). Müller also mentions that fresh perspectives on military
history can be gained from regional and local history as well as art and culture
history. Yet, he also stresses that military history is more than just the sum of these
(and other) possible subdisciplines, and he advocates staying focused on military
institutions and their operations as the core subject. This is a task which demands
special skills from the historian in order to understand how military practitioners
think and act (Müller, 2009, p. 19ff).
According to Robert Citino, academic military history can be divided into three
different scholarly approaches. The traditional focus on “the hows and whys of
actual warfare, strategy and battle” he terms “operational history” (campaign his-
tory). Secondly, there is the “war and society” approach, studying “the nexus
between armies and societies.” As a third “school,” Citino mentions an approach
to military affairs originating in “the history of memory and culture” (Citino, 2007).
Applying Citino’s three schools of military history as a useful starting point, this
author is of the opinion that one may distinguish between four different approaches
to military history, based on their disposition related to primary institutional bias,
primary subject, theoretical/epistemological bias and purpose, which in one way or
another permeates most of today’s scholarship. These four forms of military history
are depicted in Table 1.
Operational military history may be seen as the updated form of classical battle-
field and campaign history, that is, military history focusing on how wars are fought,
and why one side prevails over the other. In its crudest form, it can be a rather
mechanistic and simplistic undertaking – characterized by the study of force ratios
combined with the effect of leadership, morale, terrain, weather, etc. and primarily
geared toward explaining why a given battle or campaign was lost or won. In
contrast, new military history – in reality a broad and diverse category – is less
interested in fighting as a military-technical issue and focuses much more on how
war is waged from a human perspective, and how military affairs affect members of
the armed forces and society as a whole. Military history inspired by the linguistic
turn offers a different perspective, that is, how war is represented in narratives.
Indeed, the proponents of this approach would argue that this is the only way we can
study war (as well as any other historical phenomenon), because the past is trans-
mitted to us by means of narratives. Finally, memory-oriented military history looks
at how collectives make sense of past wars by selective and highly plastic processes
of memorization and amnesia (chapter “Military History and Collective Identity”).
12 N. B. Poulsen

Table 1 Principal forms of contemporary military history

Primary Theoretical/
Type of institutional epistemological
military history basis Primary subject basis Purpose
Operational Military Warfare and battle Positivist and Lesson
history research from the empiricist – war learning
institutions/ perspective of creates Identity
institutions of wanting to identifiable building
higher learning understand the patterns of Commercial
within the causes of victory causation gain
armed forces and defeat.
The preparation
for war
New military Civilian The military as an Historicism and Understanding
history/war universities institution hermeneutics war’s role in a
and society embedded in time War is a cultural given epoch’s
and culture and social society and
The soldiers’ phenomenon culture
perspective
The interaction
between war and
society
Military Civilian Narratives about The experience Understanding
history universities war of war as a war as a
inspired by the linguistic discursive and
linguistic turn/ construction socially
post- Textual analysis designed
structuralist Post- phenomenon
military history structuralism
Memory- Civilian The role of war Social Understanding
oriented universities and warfare in constructivism the role of war
military history collective memory in identity-
building
processes

The forms of military history outlined in Table 1 may easily be challenged. They
do not nearly represent the variety of real and possible approaches to military history.
Rather, they represent what may be claimed to be major contemporary strands, thus
leaving out other perspectives which earlier had a dominant position – Marxism
being one obvious example. Furthermore, to a certain extent, the four forms outlined
overlap. This is for example the case in the area of analyzing discourses of war and
analyzing how war is commemorated and used by groups and societies to create
collective identities. Despite these and other possible objections, the above outlined
four forms of military history represent significant positions and approaches in
current scholarship. Thus, they serve as a basis for the subsequent entries in this
handbook about different types of military history.
Military History: An Introduction 13

Military History Milieus

Military history is being developed across a number of publishing platforms and

associations. There are several international peer-reviewed periodicals – the oldest
being Journal of Military History published since 1937 by the US-based Society of
Military History. Other influential journals are War in History published since 1994
by SAGE and International Journal of Military History and Historiography. The
latter is affiliated with the International Commission of Military History (ICMH),
one of the principal international venues for scholarly exchange of knowledge on
military history. The Commission dates back to 1938 and is a semi-official body in
the sense that many national commissions are embedded in the defense forces of
their countries or indirectly depend on it by receiving financial or organizational
support. The annual congresses by the Commission represent a unique meeting place
for military practitioners and scholars, but are also characterized by a rather tradi-
tional, battle-oriented approach to military history. In addition, a number of univer-
sity programs, defense colleges, and research projects offer recurring conferences on
military history. There is, for example, a special track for military history at the
annual conference of the International Society of Military Sciences (ISMS). Like the
ICMH, the ISMS is a meeting place for both military personnel and civilian
academics. Regional military history organizations like the US-based Society of
Military History also host conferences, as does of course a variety of scholarly
institutions on an ad hoc basis. At the national level, there are a significant number of
chairs devoted to military history – not least in the traditional great powers, but also
in smaller states like Denmark, the Netherlands, and Sweden. As mentioned above
most national defense forces operate institutions tasked with researching and teach-
ing military history. In the case of the United States, all services have specialized
historical offices, employing a considerable number of historians; and even in small
states like Denmark and Sweden the number of historians assigned with military
history inside the armed forces constitutes distinct research environments.

In Conclusion

Albeit military history, as demonstrated above, comes in many forms and shapes, the
defining matter is still, in the words of Michael Howard, “the study of the central
activity of the armed forces, that is fighting” (Howard, 2006, p. 20). Military
historians benefit from combining the methodologies from history in general with
a solid knowledge of military affairs. Thus, in the future – as now – military history
will be a venue where methods and theoretical debates from the craft of history and
the social sciences in general engage with matters that often demand specialized
military knowledge, and where civilian academics may benefit from drawing on the
knowledge of military professionals. While military history does not necessarily
offer any ready-made lessons to military practitioners, they on their side may benefit
from military history as a way of broadening their perspective on what war is and
how human beings react when at war. In order to do so, military history must,
14 N. B. Poulsen

however, as Michael Howard suggested, be studied in breath, depth, and context

(Howard, 1962). In other words: When studying military history it is not only helpful
to compare with other cultures and time periods; we also need to take into account
the underlying societal forces and the sum of general factors in order to appreciate
why, for example, why Japanese warfare had little room for musketry long after that
weapon had been introduced on the island (Keegan, 1993).
Like all other types of human intellectual activities, the pursuit of military history
reflects the society in which it is carried out; thus future research agendas and the
basic theoretical and methodological assumptions of this subdiscipline of history are
bound to change over time. Nevertheless, for the foreseeable future it is most likely
that military history in its many forms and facets will continue to be characterized by
dynamics already notable during the nineteenth and twentieth century: a utilitarian
military-professional approach and a more broad-minded (and war-skeptical)
approach to how military history is written; the latter primarily found among civilian
historians.

Further Reading
Baudet, F., & Sibul, E. A. (2016). Chapter 7: Historical research in the military
domain. In J. Soeters, P. M. Shields, & S. Rietjens (Eds.), Routledge handbook of
research methods in military studies. New York: Routledge.
Hughes, M., & Philpott, W. J. (Eds.). (2006). Palgrave advances in modern military
history. Palgrave.
Morillo, S. (2006). What is military history? Malden: Polity.
Murray, W., & Sinnreich, R. H. (Eds.). (2006). The past as prologue: The impor-
tance of history to the military profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

Cross-References

▶ Application of Military History

▶ Classical Chronicle history of War and Military Operations
▶ Epistemology and Military Sciences
▶ Methodology and Military Sciences
▶ Military Biographical History
▶ Military Institutional History
▶ Oral Military History
▶ The War and Society School in Military History
▶ What is Military Sciences?

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