For the EMEMDH in your life

So now I have to add another letter to the abbreviation – Early Modern European Military Digital Historian. We are approaching LGBTQIA territory here – except narrowing instead of broadening.

And who leads the pack in this exciting sub-sub-sub-subfield? For my money, it would be Spanish scholar Xavier Rubio-Campillo, who’s already published an article using GIS for early modern siege reconstruction (Barcelona 1714), which I highlighted here several years back.

Now he’s applying computer modeling to early modern field battle tactics, during the War of the Spanish Succession, ‘natch: “The development of new infantry tactics during the early eighteenth century: a computer simulation approach to modern military history.” To reproduce his abstract from Academia.edu:

Computational models have been extensively used in military operations research, but they are rarely seen in military history studies. The introduction of this technique has potential benefits for the study of past conflicts. This paper presents an agent-based model (ABM) designed to help understand European military tactics during the eighteenth century, in particular during the War of the Spanish Succession. We use a computer simulation to evaluate the main variables that affect infantry performance in the battlefield, according to primary sources. The results show that the choice of a particular firing system was not as important as most historians state. In particular, it cannot be the only explanation for the superiority of Allied armies. The final discussion shows how  ABM can be used to interpret historical data, and explores under which conditions the hypotheses generated from the study of primary accounts could be valid.

Link at https://www.academia.edu/2474571/The_development_of_new_infantry_tactics_during_the_early_eighteenth_century_a_computer_simulation_approach_to_modern_military_history?auto=download&campaign=weekly_digest. Though it may require a subscription.

Maybe someday we military historians will collectively set our sights a little higher than tactics (note the military metaphor), and a little lower than grand strategy? Though, admittedly, that’ll require a lot of hard work at the operational level of war. And maybe even a better sense of what we call these different levels.