The History of the (Military) Book

Warning: Thinking out loud in progress! This post requires a fair amount of background knowledge on EMEMH, but so be it. I’m trying to maintain a balance on the blog between serious discussion, shop talk and Caturday photos.

Note: brackets [] indicate asides, parenthetical meanderings worthy of an academic.

I’m working on a chapter on Battle As Theory – an attempt to map out the general strategic conceptions (strategic culture) of the English in the late 17C, before I dive into the War of the Spanish Succession in detail. So I have collected a wide variety of military treatises and manuals on the period, and am going through them. I know enough about the history of the book to be dangerous (i.e. a little), so I have a few thoughts and maybe a question or two that might prompt some discussion as this relates to EMEMH. Fundamentally, the critical question I’m struggling with right now is a common one: what is the relationship between what was being published and what people of the time actually thought? How big is the gulf between what published authors claimed was normative vs. what was actually practiced, and how do we explain the gulf between the two when it exists? I don’t know how much I’ll explicitly address this in the final version of the book, but it’s important background understanding, and it gives me something to blog about.

Three strands of historiographical argument seem to be at play here.
First: for decades scholars have highlighted the important distinction between prescriptive manuals (e.g. how it was supposed to be fought) and the reality (how it really was fought). We have numerous reasons to think this. In military affairs it comes from the broad consensus on the messiness of combat – epitomized in the many saying about plans not surviving first contact with the enemy, Clausewitz’s friction and fog of war, and has been empirically illustrated by Keegan’s Face of Battle and my Vauban under Siege. Further, historians analyzing early modern manuals have found that some of them were written by hacks, or at least people who had no military experience, and who either made things up or just copied other works. In legal history, the old saw that one only passes laws banning things that people are doing (but shouldn’t be) reinforces the gulf. More broadly, social history has long pointed out that most of our publications on proper behavior consist of the elites informing the lower orders of how they were to behave. Fair enough.
Second: early modern scholars have also talked for a long time about the significance of the Ancients to early moderns (the ‘renaissance’ of the Classical world…), both military and non-military. Even contemporaries debated the issue, with the late 17C witnessing a broad debate over the relative superiority of the knowledge of the Ancients vs. that of the Moderns (mostly in France, but elsewhere too). I think Anthony Grafton and others have talked in a related vein about the 16C-17C development of a clear historicizing mindset among intellectuals – a mental recognition of temporal discontinuity, that the past of even 100 years earlier was different in important ways (it can of course be traced back to the Renaissance humanists and possibly earlier as well). [As far as the Ancients vs. Moderns debate goes, it seems to have been settled largely in favor of the Moderns as far as military technology is concerned (many acknowledging that gunpowder significantly changed the art of warfare) – though, and this is important to my imminent point, here too you have change within the period, from matchlock to flintlock, pike to bayonet, platoon fire… The Romans were generally acknowledged to have the edge as far as discipline and toughness was concerned – building those camps every night sounds like a real pain. And of course you still have exceptions, like the occasional Englishman still fighting a rearguard action defending the use of the longbow.] Just so, although I think the military case needs more explication than it has received at present. [I won’t comment on a very unsatisfying Journal of Military History article from a decade back on the topic]
Third: more recently, military historians have also started looking at ‘ways of war,’ particularly nation-based models for ideal and real war (an English way of war, a French way of war…). I’ve certainly found evidence of this belief.

So when you look at these English-language manuals from the late 17C, it’s easy to see all three of these historiographical arguments: frequent references to Classical history and commanders, discussion of particular national styles of war (in this case, the English trying to catch up to the Continental style of war, with France as the paradigm army, though not in Lynn’s ‘army style’ sense), and of course you always wonder about the extent to which their ideas were accepted and implemented on campaign (the manuals tend to emphasize the union of book knowledge and practical experience).

What I haven’t seen much discussion of, however, is how anachronistic these manuals are. It’s not just that the Ancients were still held up as models – military historians have been talking for awhile about the rate and nature of military change in the early modern period (military revolution vs. evolution…), and contemporaries frequently commented on the ever-changing nature of the military art as well. But what I noticed is that these manuals are also surprisingly anachronistic on a more limited time scale; they also present insights and military practices from 50-100 years ago as current. And we’re not talking just about military strategy or stratagems, which in some respects are timeless. Tactics too were mixed together in a source, even when they were outdated a decade or more earlier. My very first introduction to this asynchronous incongruity was when I looked at the details of siege capitulations and learned that evacuating garrison soldiers were supposed to march out with their matches lit even after they had abandoned their matchlocks for flintlocks (occasionally you see mention of pikes as well) – presumably this was a capitulation convention, but it certainly undermines the stereotyped claim that siege surrenders were these ritualized events where every term had to be carefully carried out, and raises the larger question of how many other of these details were mere vestiges. Later, I found a more significant oddity when looking at English treatises on siegecraft published in the 1690s-1700s: if you know much about the period, you know that Vauban perfected a more efficient form of siege attack from the 1670s onward till his death in 1707 [If you don’t know about this, read my book]. We assume (probably correctly) that new ideas take awhile to get into print, so you expect some time lag, but what was surprising to me is how long it takes for these ‘innovations’ to make their way into print, in the face of a desire by the public to understand current affairs. Vauban’s famed trench parallels were supposedly first implemented at the 1673 siege of Maastricht (also where the real d’Artagnan died), yet thirty years after Maastricht we can still find English siege manuals that reproduce the advice of French authors from before the 1660s (i.e. before Vauban implemented his improvements). Needless to say, they don’t even mention trench parallels, trench cavaliers and ricochet fire. So their ‘expert’ discussions of the siege attack present the judgments of French practitioners from 50 years earlier to explain siegecraft in 1707; a lot changed in those five decades. This discontinuity isn’t solely because the English were particularly ignorant about siegecraft – you can find some French engineers publishing treatises in the 1690s that also ignore Vauban’s famous three tactical innovations (and an Austrian manual c. 1700 as well). Manuals on drill and battlefield tactics are possibly even more outdated or fantastical – I vaguely recall historians (maybe Duffy) mocking the ridiculously baroque maneuvers some manual authors had their hypothetical companies go through, and the same is true for the proliferation of fortress designs as well [any research on the timing of the use of platoon fire/bayonets vs. when they were discussed in published manuals?].

This doesn’t even address broader questions that I don’t want to discuss here, e.g. how many of the historical examples cited by contemporaries were even relevant to the period, given intervening changes in military technology, logistics, organization and training – and did contemporaries even think about these things?

So why the difference between reality and published works, and why would they publish info that is decades old if their proclaimed objective is to provide their readers with a reference to current operations? Secrecy surrounding new techniques is one possible answer, although 1) there are various examples where tourists visited sieges and fortifications at the invitation of the besiegers, 2) cosmopolitan service meant one day’s ally might be the next day’s enemy, 3) French newspapers described these new features in their published accounts, and 4) participants certainly saw what was being practiced in front of their eyes – as we see from defenders’ siege journals, garrisons paid particularly close attention to the conduct of the trenches. Given Vauban’s many sieges, you’d think someone would’ve caught on and bothered to write it down, maybe even circulate it. Or maybe it’s as simple (and unenlightening) as “those who say don’t know and those who know don’t say”? To the extent that such books were intended to train an army to win a war (possibly a questionable assumption, but one that Gruber and Houlding make), you’d think someone in the government or army would want to coordinate this – though perhaps the proprietary nature of regiments/companies plays a role here? Maybe we’re bumping up here against the (false) assumption of rational self-improvement and modern professionalism?

Or, maybe the history of the book offers a better explanation than a purely military one? Maybe this difference between published manual and actual practice is best explained as attempts by publishers to just make a quick profit by republishing old works? Maybe it’s cheaper to recopy an old work than interview veterans/collate various news accounts? This seems strange, however, because the public clearly clamored for the latest news from the front, and manuals/map collections advertised their relevance for following the latest news reports and siege accounts, so you think somebody would notice the difference between 50 year old prescriptions and the latest siege details. Or maybe that particular genre (manual/treatise) wasn’t intended to serve the function we think it should today? Or maybe there was a huge circulation of manuscript manuals that the practitioners had which weren’t available to the general public in print? (Though I’ve only seen one or two English ms treatises from the Spanish Succession cited by other historians.) Maybe those that were outdated didn’t sell very well, but we don’t have evidence for sales figures to know this?

So, at the end of all these twists and turns, reasons, rebuttals, and rejoinders, I don’t really have a good explanation. We have texts published c. 1700 that have bits from various centuries, all cobbled together with little apparent concern for contemporary practice, much less our tidy expectation that each period has its own unique flavor (zeitgeist). Has anyone else written about this for EMEMH? What do you think? What else am I missing?

[Note: For my current book I’m more interested in the general question of military strategy (battle and its alternatives), but given what I know about siege warfare manuals, I’d ideally like to know how people responded to these broader art of war works. Since these 17C treatises are only a contextual chapter to my main focus on how the English talked about these issues in the Spanish Succession, I’m not worried. I can see exactly how the ideas from these 17C manuals were discussed in 1701-1713, but a better sense of the background would be helpful nonetheless.]

Potential future posts: how to figure out how others read military histories; thoughts on Gruber’s methodology of counting personal library holdings.

Suggested Readings (which I’m making my way through right now):

Danley, Mark. Military Writings and the Theory and Practice of Strategy in the Eighteenth-Century British Army. Ph.D. diss., Kansas State University, 2001.

Gruber, Ira. Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2011.

Lawrence, David R. The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008.

Billiards of War

Celebrating my promotion and tenure last year, we finally had our basement finished. And, being a child of the 70s, I’d grown up always wanting a pool (billiards) table to call my own. So, I finally achieved that modest childhood dream, as the following photo indicates.

(Note that we got the ball-and-claw legs instead of the Queen Anne. Ignore the black cat toy on the floor.)

What in the world, you might ask, does this have to do with EMEMH? Think on it, go look a few things up, and then continue reading for the answer.

French logistics

Vote on the Topic of the Month for next year if you haven’t already.

In December I’ll post a number of bib catch-up posts, highlighting works on EMEMH published this year  and summarizing a few historiographical trends.

A newly published article:

Rowlands, Guy. “Moving Mars: The Logistical Geography of Louis XIV’S France.” French History 25, no. 4 (2011): 492-514.

Abstract:
This article considers France’s military potential in the later seventeenth century through an examination of logistical resources and the communication systems that could link these resources to military operations. It challenges the assumption that France possessed a military advantage as a geographically contiguous and resource-rich territory apparently able to sustain military operations on interior lines. It shows how both natural and institutional barriers handicapped France’s efforts to support military operations, despite the impressive levels of military mobilization achieved under Louis XIV.

No wonder moving Mars was so difficult!

Touché, pussy cat

Yet another (post-Thanksgiving) Caturday is upon us, and since I’m still digesting, I’ll keep it simple by reminiscing about the good old days of wholesome, family entertainment.

I will admit that I don’t think I’ve seen many of the gazillion movies on the Three Musketeers – so which one is the best and why? The latest version with Legolas and Joan of Arc has a bit of a steampunk vibe.

Suggested readings:

• Dumas, Alexander. The Three Musketeers. 1844. Many free English editions.
• Courtilz de Sandras. Memoirs of Monsieur d’Artagnan. Free 1898 English edition.

And if you like fantasy novels, Steven Brust had a good series in a Three-Musketeers-type world, with mostly Hungarian-sounding titles like Taltos.

Thanksgiving

It’s Thanksgiving here in the U.S., which of course means turkey (probably associated with Anatolia because Englishmen confused the American species with the more-familiar guineafowl from Africa imported into Europe by the Ottomans) and football (American football that is, where they don’t actually use the foot much and disdain those players that do). As we’ve discussed before, language is fun.

Back in the day, at least in Europe, they didn’t have a single Thanksgiving holiday in late November, but if you do a Google Books search on “thanksgiving” and limit it to the early modern period, you will quickly discover that they did indeed have many many many days of Thanksgiving. Yet these were not the gluttonous food-fests of today, but instead official days of prayer and righteous celebration, declared by the government to celebrate military victory, usually a battle or a successful campaign. Preachers used these opportunities to write, present and publish sermons on the topic, usually equating their country/side with God’s and thanking Him for success, and frequently calling for moral reform and regeneration at the same time. When times were tough, the preachers excoriated their sinful congregants for making God punish them with military defeat.

Here is a title page from one of the orders of worship published at the time:

If your war went well, you might have a day of thanksgiving every year; the Dutch averaged two per year between 1688 and 1713. Or maybe you pretended to celebrate a victory in order to buoy domestic morale – the English mocked the French for declaring Te Deums to cover up their defeats.

For much of the 20C, historians had argued that the Thirty Years War was the last of Europe’s ‘wars of religion.’ But over the past few decades numerous scholars studying the post-Westphalian period have pointed to practices like public days of thanksgiving in order to remind us of the ways in which religion continued to be intimately connected to war.

Suggested Readings:

Haks, Donald. “Propaganda from the Pulpit?” In J.A.F. de Jongste, ed., Anthonie Heinsius and the Dutch Republic 1688-1720. Politics, Finance and War. The Hague, 2002.

Haks, Donald. “The States General on religion and war. Manifestoes, policy documents and prayer days in the Dutch Republic, 1672-1713.” In D. Onnekink, ed., War and Religion after Westphalia, 1648-1713. Burlington, VT, 2009.

Scholarly Impact, Google Scholar-style

If you are an academic you undoubtedly know of Google Scholar; if you teach, your students certainly do. It’s primarily useful for the sciences (‘hard’ and ‘soft’), but it does include history titles as well. I’ll check it every once in awhile to check for new works, or, more importantly, to see if any one else cites me (gotta keep track of how many people recognize your brilliance! ;)) So I was listening to the Digital Campus podcast the other day and they talked about a new feature of Google Scholar: Google Scholar Citation. You sign in to your Google account, identify yourself and your publications, and it will keep track of works citing yours, as well as calculate impact scores (used in Europe for funding, I’ve heard). The Digital Campus group expressed some concern about Google knowing all that info about you, but with a name like mine, it’s hard to keep authorship a secret.

Since it’s Google Scholar, there are inevitably errors and omissions (including in mine), but here’s a screen shot to give you an idea of what it looks like when it’s set up:

Google Scholar Citation example

To give a comparison of what the metrics should look like, here’s the screen shot of my mother’s citations (she’ll be retiring from the School of Nursing at UT-Houston next year):

So if you’re bored (and egotistical), you can check it out.

7YW Art

Review of Fordham, Douglas. British Art in the Seven Years’ War: Allegiance and Autonomy. (2011) at H-Albion.

Hogarth, March to Finchley 1750

HOP Online

For those studying England/Britain, the History of Parliament series is now freely accessible online. And I just had our library shell out umpteen hundreds for the 1690-1715 volumes! Oh well, the accompanying CD-ROM with the print edition doesn’t work on my computer anyway…

Topic of the Month Poll

I think the blog is going well thus far, although I’d like to see a few more people commenting (whoa, flashback to class). To encourage that, I’ve decided to start a Topic of the Month series. At the beginning of each month (starting in January) I’ll post some comments/thoughts/hypothesis/questions/literature about a particular topic relevant to EMEMH. We can then spend the month discussing the topic, and at the end I’ll provide a summary post on what we’ve argued and concluded, maybe even make a permanent page with a visual summary. Comments will stay open after the month is over, in case anyone wants to continue the discussion. I’ll also continue my regular variety of posts throughout, and try to make at least a few of them relevant to the topic as well. Guest posts and questions are still welcome.

How will the topics be chosen, you ask? Put it to the vote I say. So here’s the poll:

I’ll try to do the topics in order of popularity, although I’m warning you right now that ‘battle’ will be high on the list, since that’s what my current book project is on.

The specifics for each topic will vary (and will be driven as much by your comments as by me), but generally we could: discuss historiographical trends, address questions and challenges raised by EME aspects of each topic, develop typologies and frameworks for better understanding the topic, discuss important works on the topic, etc. Maybe I’ll even throw out a provocative statement or two for debate.

Vote through the New Year and I’ll post a schedule of monthly topics to look forward to all year long. Since you’re the ones doing the voting, I expect some spirited discussion!

British loyalty in 18C

Don’t have access to this article (it appears to be an early online release of a forthcoming issue through Wiley Online), but it might be relevant to our recent discussions of mercenaries and nationalism, plus it seems to directly address the issue of how contemporary language might have varied from more modern connotations…

McCormack, Matthew. “Rethinking ‘Loyalty’ in Eighteenth-Century Britain.” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (21 Nov. 2011).

Abstract:
This article explores the meanings and applications of the term ‘loyalty’ in Britain between 1688 and 1815. Political historians today employ the term in an instrumental way to connote obedience, nationalism, conservatism and monarchism: this finds its expression in the phenomenon of ‘loyalism’. This article instead argues that ‘loyalism’ was not a current term in the eighteenth century, and that ‘loyalty’ had specific meanings for different political groups. It could connote a religious, a legal or an emotional tie: as such, the changing concept of ‘loyalty’ is indicative of the shifting relationship between the individual and the state.