Out of the Woodwork Productions
http://xenophon-mil.org/xenindex.htm
Xenophon Group International is organized to promote the study of military history. There is a great deal of information on this site about various topics pertinent to this bibliography, with particular emphasis on Russian and Eastern European subjects.
Black, Jeremy, "Determinism and Other Issues", The Journal of Military History, October 2004 (Vol. 68, No. 4), pp. 1217-1232. An interesting article that discusses how military history is written, from what perspectives, and how it can be improved. Discusses, among other things, the pitfalls of technological determinism and problems with the Hanson and Lynn books listed below. Definitely worth reading to help understand the nature of the writing of military history.
Raudzens, George, "In Search of Better Quantification for War History: Numerical Superiority and Casualty Rates in Early Modern Europe", War and Society, Vol. 15, No. 1 (May 1997), pp. 1-30. This article discusses the issue of quantifying the long term importance of two fundamentals: superiority of numbers in winning and the casualty costs of both winning and losing. The focus is the era of one-day battles among uniformly armed and ordered land combatants between the 1490's and the 1780's. Interesting for pointing out some of the issues and problems involved in the analysis of war history numbers, in particular the disagreements found in determining the actual numbers in the first place.
Hanson, Victor Davis. Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc. 512 pages, January 2001 (Hardcover) ISBN: 0385500521. Two of the conflicts discussed in some detail are the conquest of Mexico by Cortez and the Battle of Lepanto. The basic premise is summarized briefly in one of the reviews I found on the Web: "Examining nine landmark battles from ancient to modern times - from Salamis, where outnumbered Greeks devastated the slave army of Xerxes, to Cortes's conquest of Mexico to the Tet offensive - Victor Davis Hanson explains why the armies of the West have been the most lethal and effective of any fighting forces in the world. Looking beyond popular explanations such as geography or superior technology, Hanson argues that it is in fact Western culture and values - the tradition of dissent, the value placed on inventiveness and adaptation, the concept of citizenship - which have consistently produced superior arms and soldiers. Offering riveting battle narratives and a balanced perspective that avoids simple triumphalism, Carnage and Culture demonstrates how armies cannot be separated from the cultures that produce them and explains why an army produced by a free culture will always have the advantage" There is also a good review in The Journal of Military History, Vol. 67, No. 2 (April 2003), pp. 545-547. It is a useful and interesting book, but there are problems with the basic thesis of the military superiority of Western culture and values. John Lynn discusses some of these problems in his book Battle, reviewed below.
Landers, John. The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-Industrial West. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-19-924916-4. A very interesting and provocative book. The general argument is that from ancient times to the French Revolution, European civilization was molded by the permanent and inherent characteristics of an "organic economy", i.e., one in which most of societies labor had to be devoted to agriculture, and most of the available energy came from muscle power or wood fires. These preindustrial economies were of necessity plagued by endemic poverty, which limited specialization of labor. The high costs of land transport ensured that the population and productive capacity would be widely distributed across the countryside. These considerations, in turn, put tight limitations on the resources that societies could devote to warfare. From here, Landers explores the impact of the combination of demographics and resource limitations, which until the 1500's broadly determines whether armies emphasize quality or quantity, and the impact of the extensive use of gunpowder weapons, which changed the equation. While there are a number of points in the book in which Landers' reasoning or data is questionable, there are many other places where he reached very significant conclusions which the reviewer found very persuasive. All in all, it is a very valuable book. The reviewer states that "All historians who teach or write about the broad sweep of European history should read this book. They should do so with their skepticism fully engaged, but they should do so." Information taken from a detailed review by Clifford J. Rogers in The Journal of Military History, October 2004 (Vol. 68, No. 4), pp. 1233-1239.
Lynn, John A. Battle; A History of Combat and Culture. Boulder, CO; Westview Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-8133-3371-7 (hbk). In this volume, John Lynn provides very interesting insights on the evolution of the way of war in various societies. To quote from some comments on the book on the back cover, "John Lynn's Battle provides an incisive cultural analysis of the ways in which many different societies across three continents and three millennia have viewed and fought wars. He argues persuasively against the notion of fixed patterns or continuity in a 'Western way of war' or an 'Asian way of war'. " In essence, Lynn argues that war is culture, and the way of war in a culture is formed by-and the culture is formed by the way of war as well-in the interaction between the relationship between the real and the ideal in a culture's values, assumptions, and expectations about fighting. One should read this volume as well as Hanson for a more balanced view on war and culture. There is a good review in The Journal of Military History, Vol. 68, No. 3 (July 2004), pp. 943-945. Review in The Historian, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Summer 2004), pp. 418-419. Another review may be found in American Historical Review, Vol. 109, No. 3 (June 2004), pp. 862. Also reviewed in History, Reviews of New Books, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Summer 2005), pp. 162.
Lynn, John A., ed. Tools of War: Instruments, Ideas, and Institutions of Warfare, 1445-1871. Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 1990. This book is a collection of nine essays and an afterword, by British and American historians, whose common theme is the rejection of technological determinism. "Tools" in the title is thus used in a somewhat playful way, encompassing all contributors to war making-not only men, weapons, logistics, and fortifications, but also ideas, tactics, doctrine, economics, religion, superstition, and statecraft, among others. The essays are individually intriguing, occasionally brilliant, and there is not one that does not examine an aspect of warfare in an original way. A good read for those interested in the broader view of military history. Information taken from a review by K. E. Hamburger in The Journal of Military History, October 1990, (Vol. 54, No. 4), pp. 488-489.
McNeill, William H. The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society Since A.D. 1000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. This book abounds in examples of the underestimation of the influence of war in history. It is a book of formidable scope and daring generalization; it is, in turn, outrageously speculative and brilliantly persuasive. The author is interested in the reciprocal relationship between a society and the military system that it supports. He differentiates, for the purpose of analysis, between command societies (like the Ottoman Empire) and market societies (like the national states of the West). The former were controlled and had less innovation than the market societies, and this was notably reflected in their military institutions. It is a good book and, in the reviewer's opinion, an exceptionally exciting study of the development and social significance of war. Information taken from a review by Gordon A. Craig in American Historical Review, Vol. 88, No. 5 (December 1983), pp. 1239-1240.
Nolan, Cathal J. The Age of Wars of Religion, 1000-1650: An Encyclopedia of Global Warfare and Civilization. Vols. 1 and 2. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. ISBN 0-313-33045-X (set). 1076 pages. Wars of religion were hardly unique to early modern Europe, as the author of this fine reference work makes clear in the introduction. What makes this work significant, however, is the author's contention that religious wars changed in intensity and in global scale, in the late Middle Ages during the later Crusades and the Hundred Years' War, as the idea of a common res publica Christiana dissipated in the face of competing conceptions of the nation state. This led to a period of intensive and violent religious warfare from ca. 1450 to 1650. This forms the author's justification for a reference work covering the period 1000-1650. What stands out immediately about this encyclopedia is that the entire work-over 3,000 entries-was written by the author. He is not an editor in the usual sense of an encyclopedia, but the author of this work. This way of constructing an encyclopedia of largely military history has its strengths and weaknesses, but the advantages-coherence, readability, and focus-far outweigh the disadvantages. Moreover, in every area of expertise-from firearms and technology to social history and theology-Nolan has read and synthesized the major expert or experts in the field, making this a very impressive work of synthesis. The work is truly global in scope, even if the coverage is more weighted toward Europe and its colonies that the rest of the world and toward the second half of the period covered compared to the first. Both of these focuses, however, are convincingly explained by the way gunpowder transformed European warfare in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Finally, the work will be useful to both military historians and non-military historians of early modern Europe alike. While all the set-piece battles, firearms, wars and generals are given full coverage, the book sets out to explain the more complicated and symbiotic relationship between war and society. In addition to a bibliography of more than 40 pages (including nearly a hundred web sites and on-line sources) and 25 pages of clear and useful maps, the author's intensive efforts at cross-referencing and listing every possible way an entry might be found means that this is an extremely user-friendly as well as reliable reference work. Information taken from a review by Mack P. Holt in The Journal of Military History, Vol. 71, No. 1 (January 2007), pp. 212-213.