Jeremy Black,War and the Cultural Turn

Abstract

Jeremy Black, War and the Cultural Turn, Polity Press: Cambridge, 2012; 198 pp.; 9780745648330, £55.00 (hbk); 9780745648347, £17.99 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Michael Paris, University of Central Lancashire, UK

In War and the Cultural Turn, the latest offering from the prolific military historian Jeremy Black, the author analyses the concept of culture as a descriptive and analytical approach for the history of warfare. Black suggests that there have been previous attempts to consider the cultural element in analyses of warfare, ‘especially in understanding military conduct, victory, defeat, and causality, which are all culturally conditioned’, but, given the difficulty of defining ‘culture’, what is needed is a detailed and overarching examination. The American analyst Adrian Lewis argued in his The American Culture of War (2007) that ‘culture decisively influences the way nation-states conduct war’. But ‘culture’ is difficult to define and has many diverse meanings. Thus the author sensibly devotes some 40 pages of the introduction to defining the terms of his study. This is wide-ranging stuff indeed, demonstrating Black’s considerable knowledge and understanding of the past and of the historiography of military history, and throwing out ideas left, right and centre, some of which are controversial to say the least. However, having explored some of the many meanings of culture and how they have been applied to military history, the author then presents

an interlinked series of chapters that focus on differing types of culture in particular chronological periods. This approach has been taken to indicate the variety of the cultural turn, and, in doing so, to suggest that culture as a descriptive and analytical term, is both nebulous and part of the realist world, at once frustratingly malleable and actually quite useful. (43)

The case studies include ‘the Culture of Gloire: The Royal Military’ – a study which actually examines a variety of cases that range from Mesoamerica and the Ottomans, among others, to the Royal Families of Early Modern Europe, and which climaxed in the ‘valorous self-sacrifice advocated before and during the Great War’. Black’s second case study is what he refers to as ‘Strategic Culture: The Case of Britain, 1688–1815’. The gist of this example is that Britain’s growing economy and oceanic trading system dominated British military strategy and way of making war. Other sections include, ‘Organizational Culture: Western Warfare, 1815–1950’, ‘Strategic Culture: The Cold War’ and ‘Culture and Military Analysis’. In this last chapter, Black ‘moves from the uses of culture as a means of analysis, in order to discuss commentary on the military, both past and present, as a form of cultural activity’ (141).

War and the Cultural Turn is a thoughtful and informed study that draws on a wide range of examples. Perhaps a little more detail in some of the case studies would have been useful. However, there is sometimes a rather breathless quality about Black’s writing – a sense that he cannot wait to move on to the next idea. While I understand (and applaud) his enthusiasm, I think the reader may well feel a slightly irritating sense of being pressured to hasten on. This is a great pity for Black’s arguments are always stimulating and frequently provocative, but, like fine wine, they need to be savoured not gulped.