Abstract
Until recently Western military history has concentrated on battles, technology, and the biographies of great generals. The roots of this tradition of history writing lie in the Ancient Greeks and this orientation has carried through to the present. Military historians studying other cultures, like China’s, have usually tried to make very different traditions of commemorating war match or fit into the Western tradition. Although there is no established Chinese tradition of military history writing, an implicit tradition embedded in its extensive historiography suggests an emphasis on conflicts between military systems rather than specific weapons, battles, or individuals.
War is a great matter of state, the place of life and death, the way of existence and destruction, it cannot not be investigated. –Sunzi.Footnote1 Footnote2
China’s historiographical tradition always included wars and battles in its narratives, seeing them as important parts of political, social, and cultural struggles for authority, but seldom provided the sorts of tactical details that dominated in the Western historiographical tradition. The lack of focus on battles has frequently been misunderstood as an anti-military bias, and an explanation for the Qing dynasty’s failures to prevent Western imperialist incursions in the nineteenth century. This profound misunderstanding of China’s military history has struggled to explain millennia of wars, and thousands upon thousands of campaigns, battles, skirmishes, and rebellions. Chinese historians never fetishised battles because they saw battles as parts of a larger whole. Perhaps as a consequence of that tradition of history-writing, a distinct Chinese sub-discipline of military history has not hitherto been created.
Military history as a distinct civilian discipline separated from general history is a twentieth century Western phenomenon. This is partly due to the fact that most sub-disciplines of history as an academic would understand them are also twentieth century creations and partly due to the fact that the idea of studying war separately from the rest of history outside of military circles would not have made much sense to earlier historians. War was obviously part of history, and even historical studies that focused on a particular war, battle, or campaign would have been understood to have functioned in service to the more general understanding of history. That said, the description of, explanation for, and functions of war, battles, and military institutions contained in broader histories were part of distinct historiographical traditions that also profoundly affected military planning. This was true in the West as well as China. Military history was and remains a practical subject in the sense that its form directly influences current practice.
Because military history, or, before its establishment as a sub-discipline, the historical discussion of war affects statesmen and generals’ planning for war, and because the Western and Chinese historical traditions are separate and quite different, the historiography of military history is actually more important for understanding past and present military behaviour than the study of the different strategic traditions. Studying Sunzi’s Art of War is less informative than studying the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) textbooks on military history for understanding the PLA’s thinking. The PLA has absorbed Western traditions of military history writing and produces military histories that fit into the Western historiographical tradition. Chinese and Taiwanese historians outside of the PLA also produce Western-style military histories. But Chinese and Taiwanese historians also produce distinctively Chinese style military histories consistent with pre-modern Chinese traditions.Footnote3 These Chinese traditional forms were usually incorporated into broader works but have sometimes been separated out since the twentieth century. Chinese military historiography, like Chinese history-writing, was much more extensive, sophisticated, and systematic than its Western counterpart.
The disparities in extent alone make comparisons between Western and Chinese history-writing unfair, without even considering explicit discussions of historiography itself. Chinese historians were self-conscious of their activities as historians writing history within their own traditions and knew that history-writing directly affected politics and policies.Footnote4 Considerations of space do not allow me to do more than gesture to those issues here, but I will highlight that issue where it is directly relevant. Of course, government officials working in government historical institutions produced and preserved enormous quantities of Chinese history-writing as part of their official duties. As such, it was inherently political, policy relevant, and culturally central to government officials and emperors. Imperial Chinese rulers and officials understood themselves to be operating within a historical continuum where their actions would be recorded and judged by similar men in the future.
The post-Warring States (475-221 BCE) Chinese tradition of history-writing inherently supported the creation of centralised, imperial governments that exercised unified authority over the territory of previous Chinese empires beginning with the Qin in 221 BCE. One of the ways a newly established dynasty reinforced its rightful overthrow of the preceding regime was to write an official history of that regime based upon the documents collected by its history bureau.Footnote5 Consequently, official histories proceeded from the assumption that a dynasty’s process of conquest would be successful. Battles and campaigns led to political consolidation, making them mere markers on the road to an inevitable conquest rather than fully contingent events. Individual battles were seldom politically decisive or even regarded as particularly noteworthy by themselves. In this respect as well as others, the Chinese starting point in writing the history of war is very different than that in the West.
A Chinese approach to military history would focus on war as a contest of two or more systems, measuring success by the effectiveness of a system in achieving its goals. In order to theorise a different Chinese perspective on military history, I will first sketch out a simplified overview of Western military history. This will be followed by a similar overview of the military perspective on Chinese history, or perhaps Chinese history’s perspective on the military. With those two overviews in place, I will suggest a different approach to military history that grows out of traditional Chinese historiography. Because my approach is based upon Chinese standards of historical records, I will also try to broaden it so that it can be applied to other places and times with less full records.
The Western tradition
The Western tradition of writing about war focuses on decisive battles and secondarily on changes in technology. The earliest extant Western history to focus on war is Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War though Herodotus also included critical accounts of war in his The History.Footnote6 The classical roots of Western history writing established consistent norms for narratives of war that were also affected by literary traditions like those of Homer. Educated Westerners were taught classical history and literature which shaped their expectations of accounts of war. These themes were then reproduced when later educated men wrote their own accounts of wars. Those accounts also informed military planning and strategic thinking.
The classical tradition continued through works like Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars (Commentarii de Bello Gallico), an account that obviously favoured Caesar and whose accuracy only began to be systematically criticised in the twentieth century.Footnote7 Rather than providing a comprehensive list of military works from the Romans through the Medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods, it is enough here to note that the classical tradition in some senses continued into the early twentieth century. Classical works were not subjected to critical analysis as to their accuracy, and many primary sources for the Medieval and Renaissance periods were written in Latin. Even accounts written in vernacular language were still archaic and generally only available to highly educated men. That only began to change toward the end of the nineteenth century.
Hans Delbrück (1848–1929) was one of the founding fathers of modern military history. He was very much concerned with placing military history within culture and society, and in using both a critical approach to the sources and newer sub-disciplines of history like economics to explain military institutions.Footnote8 Delbrück began publishing in the late nineteenth century like his contemporary Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914). Mahan would shape not only naval history, but naval strategy in the twentieth century with his 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783. Delbrück and Mahan, among several others, helped inaugurate the practice of military history as a distinct sub-discipline in the twentieth century. Both men approached history from the perspective of war in order to explain war’s role in history. Their emphasis on the technical realities and constraints of war separated their studies from more general historical works, ironically alienating some lay and professional readers. In Delbrück’s case, for example, his explanation for how Herodotus’ figures for the Persian army at Thermopylae were prima facie impossible and had to be vastly overinflated collided with the Classicists’ insistence that the Ancient Greek text was clear on the numbers.Footnote9
Delbrück also offended the Prussian military by writing about war. Military history from the army’s perspective was their domain. An accurate appraisal of war required the kind of technical military knowledge that only officers had. A civilian simply did not have the necessary skills and experience to make sense of war. Just as critically, if mostly unspoken, since the writing of military history directly affected planning and decision-making regarding war, the army would lose its monopoly on military advising if someone outside the military could credibly analyse war. Civilian politicians would then not be wholly dependent upon officers to explain, characterise, and make proposals with respect to war. In its most extreme sense, this led to the often-repeated idea that once diplomacy had failed and war began, the political authorities should step back and cede control to the military.
Although Delbrück and other modern military historians like Charles Oman sought to place war in broader cultural and political concerns, their narratives were still built around famous battles, time periods defined by technology, and notable generals. Thus, for example, Hannibal and the Battle of Cannae are always foundational Western military history touchstones.Footnote10 The list of important Western battles, seen in the West simply as important battles without the modification of ‘Western’, has been fairly stable for at least a century and would be accepted unconditionally by most professional military historians. Some battles have been further apotheosised through fiction, like Agincourt via Shakespeare or more recently Thermopylae via the 1999 graphic novel 300 by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley and the 1999 book Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield. Miller’s graphic novel provided the basis for Zach Snyder’s 2006 movie 300.Footnote11
This intensification of the emphasis on battle also stemmed in part from John Keegan, whose book The Face of Battle focused the attention of military history on the experience of the individual fighter on the battlefield. Keegan claimed to take an anthropological approach to three famous battles—Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme, without actually engaging much with anthropological scholarship. His point was to examine what it was like for a soldier to fight in these battles and to try to explain how the battles functioned by working up from the bottom in a creative reconstruction of the cut and thrust of fighting. It was a very engaging approach that has been broadly applied to other times and places. For Keegan a lot of the significance of a battle, what it meant, was embodied in the soldier’s physical and psychological practice during the fighting. He assumed that the battles he had chosen were historically or politically significant.Footnote12
Keegan’s methodology was entirely consistent with the tradition of Western writing about war, and very much a move away from the sort of academic tendency toward placing war in cultural, political, and strategic frameworks. Where Delbrück had tried to make war part of the rest of history and used technical details to critique the historical accounts, Keegan took Delbrück’s perspective as a given and sought to focus exclusively on the battle. Keegan’s work was extremely popular outside of academia, but his focus on the soldier also managed to interest some academics who were otherwise hostile to academic military history. From my own perspective, there is a certain amount of irony to the fact that the resistance of American academia to the study of military history stems not only from its general interest to lay readers but also the fact that academic military history is not as immediately accessible.
Returning to the basic Western interests in the study of war, two paradigmatic examples of these threads in Western military history are Victor Davis Hanson’s The Western Way of War and Geoffrey Parker’s The Military Revolution. (Keegan wrote a preface for The Western Way of War.) Setting aside the rejection of the central arguments of both books by many academic military historians, they exemplify the Western emphasis on battle (Hanson) and technology (Parker). Outside of academic historians, however, Hanson and Parker’s arguments have been broadly accepted. This is so deeply embedded that when Brett Devereaux, a historian of the Roman military, published an article in Foreign Policy magazine titled ‘Spartans Were Losers’, he ignited a firestorm of angry replies.Footnote13 Lay readers and many non-military history academics are wedded to their battle-centred conceptions of the past. The best warriors must be the most successful and woe betide an expert who says otherwise, no matter how cogent his or her evidence and argument.
The Chinese tradition
Although there is no Chinese tradition of military history as a separate sub-discipline of history, there were some histories of battles, campaigns, and wars, as well as strategic texts, and military manuals. Arguably, the coverage of the rise of new dynasties narrated in the standard histories of those dynasties was a form of military history since it encompassed the military campaigns involved in forming the dynasty and its territory. Chinese histories were written by and for literate men who mostly served as civil officials, or as civilian officials within the military bureaucracy. There were few literate generals and written military accounts do not appear to have been compiled by generals or to inform the education or decision-making of generals.
There were several salient features of Chinese military accounts. Some of these features, like the emphasis on the importance of individual generals, were similar to those of the Western tradition of writing about war. Fundamentally, however, battles were not characterised as the culminating events of military campaigns or political struggles. Battles were significant and important in campaigns and politics, but they were not the focus of accounts. Chinese accounts like those of the Five Great Battles of the Zuozhuan, all of which occurred in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, do portray the battles as critical to military, and thus political, outcomes, but they do not stress the tactical aspects of the fighting.Footnote14 The fighting itself is used to highlight the consequences of personal morality and decision-making. From the Western perspective, Chinese battle accounts seldom offer satisfactory descriptions of tactics. The basic chronological annals sections of Chinese histories tend to describe the events leading up to a battle, its general course, and its outcome, but are usually content to gloss over the details of the fighting. Greater tactical details are sometimes available in the biographies section of the dynastic histories for the generals involved in a given battle.
Chinese accounts cover campaigns well, though the events of a campaign are often contained in more general narratives of events from the perspective of a ruler. These accounts provide all the many matters placed before a ruler on a day-to-day basis, among which were the military events of ongoing campaigns. During a major campaign there would also be policy and strategy debates pertinent to the war, but not to the exclusion of all sorts of other issues. Emperors continued to rule their empires even when battles were being fought.
Perhaps because the standard histories were written by and for government bureaucrats, military institutions are extremely well described. There is an extremely long and well-developed tradition of institutional history-writing in ChinaFootnote15 Armies and navies were bureaucratic institutions that absorbed most of a state’s economic and personnel resources. Military institutions were central to the imperial Chinese understanding of war, and one of the main distinguishing features of a given dynasty was its particular military institutions. The Tang dynasty, for example, was known for its garrison-militia (Fubing) system, in contrast to the Song dynasty professional army.
Modern secondary scholarship on Chinese military history remains extremely limited. Xiaobing Li has recently discussed this directly.Footnote16 In the simplest terms, far more has been written about twentieth century Chinese military history than any earlier period. The current focus on the twenty first century People’s Liberation Army is growing in depth and breadth but concerned with present-day issues rather than history.
A new Chinese military history
Having sketched out the respective Western and Chinese traditions of military history, I would now like to propose and explain a new approach to military history informed by Chinese traditions. I will set out the goals of such a new approach, and then offer two variations of it in practice. The first variation is a Chinese for Chinese’s sake conception and the second a Chinese for the rest of the world’s sake conception. Given that my proposals might be seen as inherently arrogant or at least pretentious insofar as I am putting forth a new way to do things, I would like to temper any otherwise deserved criticism by arguing that I have set them up more as critiques than rigid methodologies. All the components of the study of war are already known and well-established. Battle accounts, biographies, strategic studies, and studies of military technology, for example, will always remain critical to the broader field. The different approaches I propose concern the relationships between those components and the relative emphasis placed upon them for understanding war.
The primary function of military history is to understand the phenomenon of war by studying its manifestations in the past. This is distinct from a social science perspective that is more heavily dependent upon creating abstract theoretical models to explain war as a phenomenon, or an archaeological approach based upon excavations.Footnote17 As a process of historical study, military history emphasises that wars in different times and places functioned differently across space and time.Footnote18 There was no one Chinese way of war in the same way that there was no one Western way of war. Even if some cultural ideals might be repeated over time by transmission through literature or history, that is not the same as mistakenly believing that the actual conduct and causes of war were static, monolithic, and used in practice.Footnote19 Warfare in history is not a simple phenomenon characterized by a few fundamental principles, thus separating strategy from military history.
Recognising the diversity of war has tremendous significance for the application of military history. Diversity makes war more difficult to understand and therefore to study. In principle this should also make its practitioners more cautious in planning and preparation. The key point about war’s diversity in a new Chinese military history is that it places that complication at the center of its understanding. This complication functions in tension with the efforts during a conflict of the generals and statesmen to simplify that complexity into a comprehensible picture. A similar process is at play for the historian in trying to render a clear and comprehensible narrative of a conflict. In both cases the perspective of the general, statesman, or historian is fundamentally configured by their personal judgement, background, and goals whether or not they are self-conscious.
History, however, has a function beyond edification and personal growth. In the case of military history, it can inform a current circumstance and it can provide a catalogue of case studies that develops strategic judgement as well as possible approaches to problems. Military history is a storehouse of knowledge concerning war whose strength lies in its transmitted experiences. Since all wars are different past wars cannot simply be mapped onto a current war. One can learn from the study of previous wars without falling into the trap of believing that earlier causes and effects can be simply repeated. Not only do the significant factors in war change from one time and place to another; they also change during a specific war as well. Military and political goals usually shift as well during a prolonged conflict, particularly as pre-war expectations break down in the face of reality on the ground. It is not enough to recognise that ‘the enemy also gets a vote’ but also that one’s own forces are likely not to function exactly as expected and that the weather or other environmental factors will impact one’s plans.
Historical narratives inherently neaten events by virtue of knowing what events or factors were more important in the ultimate outcome. This effect is most pronounced in those battle accounts that are aimed at explaining why one side won and the other lost. Strangely, however, the knowledge of the outcome of a campaign or war does not seem to diminish the centrality of battle accounts in Western military history. The Battle of Cannae will probably always be a key battle in Western military history despite the failure of Hannibal’s campaign. A Chinese style history of the war would downplay Hannibal’s series of successful battles in preference for Rome’s successful campaign. And in stressing the campaign Hannibal’s logistical and political problems would matter far more than his tactical genius. Roman political strength allowed it to overcome all of Hannibal’s successes.
I have already noted the Western stress on battles versus the characteristic neglect of this in Chinese histories. The technical issues of tactics and command during battle are extremely ephemeral. Generals and their quality of command is a critical factor in the outcome of battles, operations, and campaigns. The question is not whether those factors are important, but how important they should be with respect to history-writing. Military biographies make confusing events comprehensible and human. They also inform practitioners of the sorts of qualities that are and are not effective during war. For some practitioners the possible glory of a historical account is an incentive for noble behaviour.
Wars are not won, however, by the heroic efforts of one or two individuals. Similarly, campaigns and wars are not won by one or two individual battles in and of themselves. Wars are contests between two or more military systems that are sometimes very similar and sometimes quite different. Military systems evolve in a context to address specific problems and balance out concerns, loyalty versus effectiveness, costs versus other needs, etc. A war often presents problems that a system was not designed to address, confronting leaders with the question of whether the system can adapt, can it do so fast enough to save itself, and what new problems might be caused by the changes. To further complicate matters, circumstances change during wars, making adaptation a continuous process in seeking ultimate victory. Most military systems stop changing at the end of a successful war, leading to future mismatches between the system and new threats or tasks.
A final problem that must be addressed before presenting a full methodology is the question of what Turney-High called ‘The Military Horizon’, and the related question of the distinction between organised crime and military action. For Turney-High the military horizon was the dividing line between primitive war and complex war. Organised crime can closely resemble primitive war in the sense of a small armed band using force to acquire resources rather than struggling to establish political control over a demarcated territory or people.Footnote20 More recently modern states have realized that they are poorly configured to resolve threats posed by non-state actors. Categories like ‘irregular warfare’, ‘guerrilla warfare’ and ‘counterinsurgency’ are so imperfectly defined that it is often unclear what sort of problem a state faces or who within that state is responsible for addressing it.
These categories are critically important for modern, law-based forms of government, but not for forms of government unconstrained by law. A ruler in an authoritarian state, whether imperial, royal, or otherwise, can simply decide to respond to threats as he or she sees fit. Moreover, there was often no distinction between the army and the police force in premodern states. There were extensive laws in imperial China that governed society, and few if any emperors casually disregarded them, but the army in its many forms constituted the police force. A local magistrate had to follow both the laws and administrative rules in carrying out his duties, but he was also expected to keep the peace, suppress bandits, prevent rebellion, and eliminate any political threat that arose. If he failed to do so with the limited forces at his disposal, and military units from higher up the chain of command had to be called in, then he had failed as an official. General crime was bad, persistent; organised banditry was worse, but outright open resistance to government authority was a catastrophe. Even so, it might not constitute war since the units for enforcing and reestablishing peace were all military units of one kind or another.
From the imperial Chinese perspective banditry became war when the bandits either announced that they were in opposition to the government or took a ritual action like producing their own calendar that indicated rejection of the incumbent dynasty’s authority. Faced with a real rebellion, the court would then dramatically increase the military resources devoted to the problem and possibly publicly condemn the rebels. This did not mean that the court necessarily escalated the punishments it might mete out to the bandits and might even, ironically, offer more favourable treatment for rank-and-file members who surrendered. A mere criminal could be severely punished where a surrendered rebel might have been offered amnesty. During the Song dynasty, for example, both captured criminals and surrendered rebels were likely to be drafted into the army.Footnote21
A Chinese military history
A purely Chinese approach to military history writing would proceed from the assumption of an extensive historical record. This might be reproducible in the rest of the world for modern wars where the records are sufficient. Of course, this inherently privileges literate societies. Chinese histories also privilege a construction of society based upon a centralized imperial government system. Again, this would work reasonably well for modern wars, minus the assumption of an imperial government. From this perspective, the function of war is to establish and maintain central government authority. Centralised governments or forces seeking to overthrow those governments and establish themselves as the new centralised government authority create systems to bring organised military force to bear. The key aspect of the military struggle is that it is a contest between two (or more) systems of organised force.
Systems of organised force are not cultures, though they originate from them and contain them. Hence Chinese culture has produced many varied military systems over time that are all Chinese even though they are not the same. An effective military history would strive to delineate how and why a given system functions the way it does. A system does not culminate or prove itself in a climactic battle but rather in carrying out the task it was created to do. This approach would also harshly critique a system that emphasised battle even when that did not accomplish its purpose. There is a great deal of scholarship that explains why Hannibal’s army functioned the way it did, including the political limitations Hannibal faced with Carthaginian society. There is also a solid understanding of why Hannibal’s victory at Cannae could not be exploited to destroy Rome. A Chinese approach would present Hannibal’s campaign against Rome as a failed Carthaginian offensive in which there were a series of successful battles punctuating his declining fortunes. In one sense that is how the campaign is presented in academic studies, but somehow the moment of glory remains the battle.
From the system versus system perspective Carthage should not have started a war with Rome as matters stood in 216. To some extent it was Hannibal himself who initiated the war rather than the Carthaginian government, but that government was prepared to allow matters to play out. Perhaps the Carthaginians believed that their system was, in fact, superior to that of the Romans, and events proved them wrong. But they were unwilling to support Hannibal’s efforts even as he achieved battlefield success. There was a significant flaw in their system, and they were either unwilling to acknowledge it and address it, or they neither saw nor cared that it was functioning as it did. Hannibal’s tactical successes made a greater impression on historians than on the outcome of the campaign.
The struggle between the rival generals Xiang Yu and Liu Bang (who would win out and found the Han dynasty) after the fall of the Qin dynasty was extremely similar in that the superior general, Xiang Yu, lost despite his claim to having never been defeated in battle. (He did, in fact, lose the Battle of Gaixia, but he nonetheless had a far better record in winning battles than Liu Bang.) Liu Bang’s system defeated Xiang Yu’s most obviously because Liu relied upon a group of generals and advisers and Xiang relied upon himself. In a remarkable exchange, Liu Bang asked his courtiers why he had won, and Xiang Yu had lost. Liu’s courtiers were remarkably blunt in pointing out his personal failings and ascribed his success to rewarding his subordinates for their successes, unlike Xiang Yu. Liu in turn stressed that Xiang Yu did not have a group of competent men to rely upon choosing instead to rely on himself. The success of the Han founding was a group effort with ups and downs and no single climactic battle.Footnote22
Following Chinese practice, the tactical accomplishments of generals should be contained in their individual biographies, rather than the military chronicle. The military account of a campaign will focus on the many events and decisions that affect the outcome of the war, which will include battles too, but does not expect that the outcome of the war will be determined by a climactic battle. Technology plays a supporting role in war on and off the battlefield without defining war itself. New weapons, for example, change many aspects of a war without necessarily altering the nature of war. Air power theorists have been repeatedly disappointed in the ability of air power by itself to resolve conflicts. This is not to say that air power or its technological development are not important, only that the other aspects of war also remain important.
A ‘universal’ Chinese military history
The world is not just made up of the West and China, though it might often seem that is the case in comparative history. Western economic dominance and Western imperialism have placed Western academia in a hegemonic position, at least from the West’s own perspective, in academic discussions of the various aspects of the humanities. Particularly in the case of the modern field of military history, which developed in the West, the West is the standard, virtually universal, perspective against which any other tradition should be measured. China stands as the obvious counterpoint in this schema because of its size, current economic power, and extensive written records. Despite gestures toward world or global history, the non-Western world is given short shrift. In American academia most history departments in the past focused on American history with the addition of one or two Europeanists, including a medievalist. The recent recognition of the rest of the world has often resulted in the Europeanist position being replaced by first a Japanese historian in the 1980s, and most recently a modern Chinese historian. World or global positions now frequently seem to be Europeanist positions with mentions of the non-West.
A military history methodology that was useful for considering more than just Chinese or modern history would have to present a process that did not rely entirely on extensive written records. The Chinese methodology I presented above presumes both deep literacy and powerful government support for record keeping. It is functionally impossible to replace written records with nothing, so it is important to recognise the limitations of history writing without those components. Far more cultures, polities, groups, and territories are the subject of written records in the modern period, so the limitations I am concerned with here apply mostly to pre-modern, non-Chinese histories.
The main function for this sort of military history remains the same as for any other as I defined above: to understand the phenomenon of war by studying its manifestations in the past. A culture constructs meaning around violence and organised, armed violence. History is ultimately commemoration and different cultures commemorate organised, armed violence even when the details of that violence were not written down. War is often the way one group distinguishes itself from another and the way a group or individual achieves political power. Once in power, the violence used to obtain authority is presented in a manner that legitimises either those in power or the violence used, or both. Sometimes the violence is concealed and sometimes dramatised.
A more universal military history would not seek to reconstruct the tactics of battles where the available historical materials did not make this possible. If the records do focus on tactics, then that should be understood as important to that culture rather than a marker, from the Western perspective, of that group or culture being smart or sophisticated enough to include that information. The kinds of information about war that a group records, whether orally, pictorially, in monuments, or other forms indicate not only the available media but also how that group understands war.
This aspect of a universal military history points most directly to my critique of Western military history writing. A Chinese perspective does not proceed from Western assumptions that place battles and technology at the centre of military history. The preeminence of battles and technology are a feature of the Western historical tradition instantiated and re-instantiated year after year. This tradition is not wrong, it is just Western, and it reflects Western values. Moreover, as with any tradition, it creates blind spots and influences the understanding of readers as much by what is left out as by what has been included. Historical records and the writing of histories as distinct from primary sources serve the purposes of the people who created them. The description of battles or wars had specific cultural functions and values. Historians wrote or compiled histories for their own purposes, whether to influence rulers, make a living selling books, or obtain tenure.
Historiography reveals as much about a culture as the place of historians within that culture. The historiography of military history reveals both the place of war in a culture as the place of historians with respect to war. How a war is characterised affects political and military careers, social capital, economics, and social organization, to name only a few aspects so influenced. It is therefore a critically important issue for many people with power and influence. Because this is the case, an approach to military history that seeks to understand how war is commemorated or remembered and how it is written about would reveal an enormous amount about a society or culture. The ultimate question underlying a universal military history methodology is why wars in a culture are described the way they are regardless of their focus or the medium in which it is carried out.
Conclusion
Chinese military history remains an extremely understudied field, both inside and outside of China. The overwhelming majority of research on the Chinese military presently being done outside of China focuses on current military affairs and follows Western methodologies of security studies and international relations rather than military history. Even inside of China, current affairs predominate in research and most of that work with respect to military affairs is done by the People’s Liberation Army. The very small amount of Chinese military history being researched has mostly tried to ‘come up to’ or meet Western expectations for military history methodology (mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa). It seems strange in this context to offer a new perspective on military history methodology from the perspective of Chinese military history.
I have argued that a military history that is not as focused on climactic battles and technological change would more accurately describe the phenomenon of war and allow for a better understanding of non-Western warfare. I have not argued that the individual components of our current, Western originated methodology like climactic battles, technology, biographies, or the lived experience of combat should be done away with or are inherently wrong. Chinese history is also well-provided, for example, with the biographies of generals. I have argued instead that the Western tradition of emphasising these aspects of military history has created significant intellectual blind spots that have important ramifications in both history-writing and the conception of war for practitioners.
The most basic problem with the overall conception of the Western approach to military history is imagining that the Western approach is objective, universal, and scientific rather than a reflection of the Western tradition of history-writing. While it is sometimes possible to use Chinese records, even pre-modern records, to write Western-style military histories of Chinese history this requires a radical act of reading against the Chinese historiography. There is a great deal of good to be found in reading against the grain of an epistemology, but it is also important to acknowledge and understand that epistemology. And while it may be possible to fit Chinese history into the Western mode because of its historical traditions, the same cannot be said of every other culture or society. A claim to universality that excludes the military history of most of the rest of the world is at best hobbled and at worst functionally mortally compromised. If war by some definition is a general human phenomenon, then an effective methodology needs to have some way to include more than just the West and China.
I have proceeded from the pretext of offering a Chinese military history methodology to critique what I see as the limitations of Western military history. The methodology I offered from the Chinese perspective focuses much more on systems waging war with each other and downplays the importance of climactic battles and technology. It also stresses the changing nature of war in different times and places, and the struggles of leaders to adapt to changes during wars as well as afterward. The military effects of wars extend beyond the political control of territory and the life and death of regimes. Even the winning side in a conflict will experience internal social, political, and cultural change that may be profoundly unwelcome to some.
Wars are wrenching events that societies struggle to manage. The immediate cost in lives is transformed into acceptable cultural investment, and the resulting psychological trauma of fighting, pillage, and rapine subsumed within social norms that allow life to go on. Maintaining the ability to fight to defend oneself, one’s family, one’s town, or one’s state justifies the ideological support for organised violence. A society must be capable of defending itself or it will cease to exist. Yet most of what military history discusses takes place above Turney-High’s military horizon where complex systems of warfare clash with other complex systems of warfare.
In his account of the Battle of Novi (15 August 1799), Clausewitz struggled to explain why Suvorov, ordinarily an extremely aggressive general, appeared to have been uncharacteristically restrained in following up his victory against the French. Although Clausewitz says, ‘it is not the role of military history to look after Suvorov’s reputation’, he tries his circumspect best to do so. All he can offer is that Suvorov must have intended a limited operation from the beginning, because
We find such a notion possible simply because Suvorov was used to fighting the Turks and because that conflict, like all conflicts with semicivilised nations, was notable for its lack of internal coherence, or, rather, of any organising principle according to which the activity of the smallest part is more or less an expression of the whole. Such a war is the domain of limited operations, which take effect not by their coherence but by their cumulation.Footnote23
Clausewitz, usually if perhaps unfairly characterised as a champion of the Western focus on climactic battles, acknowledges a different mode of warfare among ‘semicivilised’ nations but takes it as a given that this was not a correct or appropriate approach to warfare among civilised nations. A good general would aggressively pursue decisive battles whenever victory seemed likely. That was the correct mode of Western warfare.
Rather than suggest that Clausewitz’s search for ‘coherence’ in the wars of his time was wrong (though it is difficult to see the extensive campaigning in Italy and Switzerland in 1799 as coherent), it is more useful to see his accounts in historiographical terms. The value of a different perspective, here claimed to originate in Chinese history, is its ability to fill in some lacunae that cannot otherwise be explained, and to encompass a vast military history that has hitherto been ignored. The Western approach to military history privileges modern, Western warfare, and grew out of classical traditions of historiography that were reproduced until the present. That tradition has struggled to explain many aspects of warfare even in the West and scholars like John Lynn and Wayne Lee have searched for other approaches to war that would more fully capture the phenomena of war.Footnote24 The Chinese tradition of writing about war has also struggled to explain some aspects of war in China, satisfying its conception of organized, armed conflict by glossing over those lacunae with moral condemnations rather than operational analyses. The conventional powers that be are by definition at a loss to accept as legitimate modes of warfare outside of the system that established them. Yet the current dominant paradigm of military history in the West and throughout most of the world is Western and stems from the Western tradition. It has great strengths and also great weaknesses. Perhaps a new methodology that proceeds from quite different assumptions will advance our general search for a more comprehensive understanding of war.
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Peter Lorge
Peter Lorge is Associate Professor of Pre-Modern Chinese and Military history at Vanderbilt University. His most recent book is Sun Tzu in the West: The Anglo-American Art of War.
Notes
1 I would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments that improved the article and helped me avoid several errors.
2 Sunzi, The Art of War, chapter one line one.
3 For a magnificent example of Taiwanese military historical writing: Li Tianming, Song-Yuan Zhanzhengshi (Taibei: Shihuo Chubanshe, 1988).
4 The most important pre-modern Chinese work on historiography, the Shitong, has just recently been translated into English by Victor Cunrui Xiong: Liu Zhiji, (Victor Cunrui Xiong trans.), A Thorough Exploration in Historiography (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023).
5 This is, of course, a vast simplification of the process and overlooks many nuances and variations in reality.
6 Thucydides, David Greene, trans., The Peloponnesian War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989); Herodotus, David Greene, trans., The History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).
7 David Henige, ‘He Came, He Saw, We Counted: The Historiography and Demography of Caeser’s Gallic Numbers,’ Annales de Démographie Historique, 1 (1998), 215–42.
8 This discussion of Delbrück follows Arden Bucholz, Hans Delbrück and the German Military Establishment (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1985).
9 Hans Delbrück, Warfare in Antiquity: History of the Art of War, Vol. I, trans. By Walter Renfroe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 35.
10 For a recent book on the Battle of Cannae: Adrian Goldsworthy, Cannae (London: Cassell, 2001).
11 Steven Pressfield, Gates of Fire (New York: Bantam, 1999).
12 John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976).
13 Bret Devereaux, ‘Spartans Were Losers’, Foreign Policy, 22 July 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/22/sparta-popular-culture-united-states-military-bad-history/#cookie_message_anchor, accessed 13 April 2024.
14 The Commentary of Zuo (Zuozhuan) was traditionally understood to be a commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, the chronological record of the Spring and Autumn Period (771-476 BCE), to which the record gave its name. The Commentary of Zuo elaborates on the terse recording of events in the Spring and Autumn Annals, providing more detailed military and political information, as well as moral lessons.
15 Peter Lorge, ‘Institutional Histories,’ in The Oxford History of Historical Writing, ed. by Sarah Foot and Chase Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 476–95. On Chinese military institutional history, see the special issue of The Journal of Chinese History, ‘Chinese Military Institutions,’ Vol. 1, Special Issue 2, July 2017.
16 Xiaobing Li, ‘Chinese Military History Research in the Past Forty Years,’ War & Society, 42:2, 197–213.
17 For an anthropological approach to war: Harry Holbert Turney-High, Primitive War: Its Practices and Concepts (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971); for a sociological-historical approach: Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); and for a political science approach: Alastair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998);Yuan-Kung Wang, Harmony and War: Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Moving away from social science to an archaeological perspective on war: Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
18 A point previously made by, among others, John Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003).
19 Harry Sidebottom commented on Hanson’s Western Way of War that, ‘it is best for us to interpret the “Western Way of War” more as an ideology than an objective reality’: Harry Sidebottom, Ancient Warfare: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), xiii.
20 Turney-High, passim.
21 Elad Alyagon, Inked (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023) for the ‘penal-military complex’ that created a pipeline of criminals into the military where soldiers were treated like criminals.
22 Qian Sima, Records of the Grand Historian of China, Vol. 1, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 107–8.
23 Carl von Clausewitz, Napoleon Absent, Coalition Ascendant: The 1799 Campaign in Italy and Switzerland, Volume 1, trans. and ed. by Nicholas Murray and Christopher Pringle (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2021), 404–5.
24 Lynn argues for extending the consideration of warfare outside of just the Western experience and the Clausewitzian paradigm. Military history needs to incorporate the fact that war was partly rational and partly irrational. Wayne Lee, et al., The Other Face of Battle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), emphasises the difficulties of incorporating the experiences of irregular warfare into the general paradigm of war.