The seventeenth century has long been seen as a period of 'crisis' or transition from the pre-modern to the modern world. This book offers a chance to explore this crisis from the perspective of war and military institutions in a way that should appeal to those doing global history. By placing 17th century warfare in a global context, Black challenges conventional chronologies and permits a reappraisal of the debate over what has been seen as the Military Revolution of the early-modern period. The book discusses war with regard to strategic cultures, assesses military capability in terms of tasks and challenges faced and attaches styles of warfare to their social and political contexts. Genuinely global in range, this up-to-date and wide-ranging account provides fresh historiographical insights into this crucial period in world history.
Author
Professor Jeremy Black MBE is an English historian and a Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of over 100 books, principally but not exclusively on 18th-century British politics and international relations, and has been described as "the most prolific historical scholar of our age". Black graduated from Queens' College, Cambridge with a starred first, and then undertook postgraduate work at St John's and Merton Colleges, Oxford. He taught at Durham University for 16 years from 1980 to 1996, firstly as a lecturer and then as a Professor. In 1996 he moved to Exeter University where he took up the post of Professor of History. He has lectured extensively in Australasia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the U.S.. He was editor of Archives, the journal of the British Records Association, from 1989 to 2005. He has served on the Council of the British Records Association (1989–2005); the Council of the Royal Historical Society (1993–1996 and 1997–2000); and the Council of the List and Index Society (from 1997). He has sat on the editorial boards of History Today, International History Review, Journal of Military History, Media History and the Journal of the Royal United Services Institute (now the RUSI Journal). He is an advisory fellow of the Barsanti Military History Center at the University of North Texas. He was awarded an MBE in 2000 for services to stamp design, as advisor to the Royal Mail from 1997.
