Global History of War

A Global History of War Chaliand - 9780520283602.indd i 12/08/14 3:57 PM This page intentionally left blank A Global History of War From Assyria to the Twenty-First Century Gérard Chaliand Translated by Michèle Mangin-Woods and David Woods Foreword by R. Bin Wong university of california press Chaliand - 9780520283602.indd iii 12/08/14 3:57 PM University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chaliand, Gérard, 1934– [Guerres et civilisations. English] A global history of war: From Assyria to the twenty-fi rst century / Gerard Chaliand ; translated by Michele Mangin-Woods and David Woods ; foreword by R. Bin Wong. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28360-2 (cloth : alk. paper)— isbn 978-0-520-28361-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)— isbn 978-0-520-95943-9 (e-book) 1. Strategy—History. 2. War—History. 3. War and civilization. I. Mangin-Woods, Michele, 1942– translator. II. Woods, David, 1947– translator. III. Title. u162.c424513 2014 355.0209—dc23 2014010257 Manufactured in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fi ber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper). Chaliand - 9780520283602.indd iv 12/08/14 3:57 PM Contents List of maps vii Foreword by R. Bin Wong ix Preface xi Introduction 1 1. Overview: War and History 4 2. The First Military Empire: The Assyrians 48 3. The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire 55 4. The Arabs 100 5. The Nomads of the Eurasian Steppes 108 6. The Seljuks, the Mamluks, and the Crusades 127 7. The Mongol Empire 141 8. Timur the Lame 151 9. The Ottomans 156 10. Safavid Persia 170 11. The Ming and Chinese Politico-Military Traditions 176 12. The Manchu and the End of the Nomads 185 13. The Mughals and Islam in India 187 14. Russia and the End of the Tatars 193 15. The Ascent of Europe 200 16. The Time of Revolutions 212 Chaliand - 9780520283602.indd v 12/08/14 3:57 PM vi | Contents 17. Guerrilla Warfare 225 18. From Total War to Asymmetrical Confl ict 244 19. Conclusion 251 Select Bibliography 259 Index 263 Chaliand - 9780520283602.indd vi 12/08/14 3:57 PM Maps 1. The Assyrian Empire, 1200–612 b.c.e. / 49 2. The Eastern Roman Empire, 527–1025 c.e. / 56 3. The expansion of Islam, 622–750 c.e. / 101 4. Conquests of the nomads of the Eurasian steppes, fi fth– seventeenth centuries / 109 5. The Seljuk Empire at its apogee, ca. 1090 / 128 6. Ottomans and Mamluks, ca. 1470 / 133 7. The Mongol Empire, thirteenth century / 143 8. Timur’s Empire, 1370–1405 / 154 9. The Ottoman Empire, fourteenth–seventeenth centuries / 159 10. Safavid Persia, 1512–1720 / 171 11. Ming China, 1368–1644 / 177 12. The Delhi Sultanate, 1211–1330 / 188 13. Mughal India, 1542–1605 / 190 14. Russian expansion to the east and south in the sixteenth century / 194 15. Spanish conquests in America in the sixteenth century / 201 vii Chaliand - 9780520283602.indd vii 12/08/14 3:57 PM This page intentionally left blank Foreword r. bin wong Military history has long been a popular subject for general readers, at least the male gender among us. Most everyone regrettably recognizes that war has shaped the fates of peoples and places in the dimly distant past and is violently visible in our global present. For all its manifest importance, scholars have, however, produced very little research intended to anchor our appreciation of contemporary military issues by considering the causes and consequences of war historically. Not sur- prisingly, much of what has been written about war historically con- cerns European examples, whether ancient, medieval, or modern, includ- ing wars both among Europeans and those they exported to others. But war has been a recurring feature of histories both within and beyond the boundaries of Europe. The turn toward world history has affected social studies teaching at all levels, inspired new training fi elds within the dis- cipline of history, and guided approaches to new subjects of research. We might have expected that these developments would also have included among these achievements greater attention to the roles of war in human history. In fact, little has been done. World history has been a capacious framework for examining different clusters of connections and compar- isons of cultural, economic, political, and social activities across long distances, but the topic of war and civilization fails to fi t comfortably into the taxonomy of subjects that defi nes world or global history. Moving away from a European focus on war and civilization demands a willingness and ability to consider different places as one ix Chaliand - 9780520283602.indd ix 12/08/14 3:57 PM x | Foreword moves through time, which is foreign to the usual aspiration of world history studies for consistent spatial coverage. What principles of historical practice can guide such an intellectual journey, and why would such a journey be worth making? What makes such an exploration fea- sible is the identifi cation of some basic elements to the geostrategies of war: the demands placed upon leaders bent upon pursuing such activities and the impacts of wars upon people. If one further decides to inves- tigate locations according to the importance of a place’s war-making more generally, a scholar could lead us through a variety of subjects rarely juxtaposed in a single study. The payoff from these historical travels would include a far sharper understanding of how and why contemporary conditions of war and their outcomes include dilemmas that individual states and their competitors have faced since the early days of warfare, as well as present-day problems and possibilities unimaginable in the past. Even if such an expedition across time and space to chart war- making and its human consequences can be traced on an intellectual map, is there an adventuresome explorer to lead us? Enter Gérard Chaliand, a renowned expert on international relations and violent confl ict, who has investigated armed confl ict both in the fi eld and through study. Dr. Chaliand has a skill set that spans the strengths typically found among professors, policy analysts, and journalists. I am tempted to wonder if only a European could achieve the requisite mix of capaci- ties and commitments to understand and communicate a Eurasian- based knowledge of war and civilization over more than two and a half millennia. In this book, readers are offered a remarkable synthesis of information about the long history of Eurasian war-making, which accompanied the emergence of civilizations and has marked the human condition ever since. This is a different kind of world history, covering moments over a two-and-a-half-millennia span and offering a distinct perspective on fundamental features of our global present. Chaliand - 9780520283602.indd x 12/08/14 3:57 PM Preface The outline of this book began to emerge shortly after the publication of my Anthologie mondiale de la stratégie: Des origines au nucléaire (Paris: R. Laffont, 1990), translated as The Art of War in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). From that date for- ward, the elaboration of the history of war has been one of my principal objectives. Because Western military histories remain particularly self- centered, I didn’t wish to revisit in condensed form the military histories of Europe and the West. Numerous works in German, English, and French have dealt with the history of European confl icts in Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and more recent periods. I therefore focused primarily on non-European societies. Orientalist studies of Islam, India, China, and the Middle East have rarely explored the military and strategic cultures that allowed those civilizations to fl ourish. Rather, they have largely focused on the languages, religions, and institutions of the Eastern world. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Europe conquered and colonized these regions, extinguishing the little remaining interest in the martial traditions of the vanquished. Conversely, the recent increase in interest in the sixth-century b.c.e. author Sun Zi was initially owing to study of the writings of Mao Zedong in an effort to understand his military success in 1949. Even the great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century military histo- rian Hans Delbrück paid relatively little attention to non-European events, dismissing the Mongols, who created the largest contiguous xi Chaliand - 9780520283602.indd xi 12/08/14 3:57 PM xii | Preface empire ever known, in three lines in the seven volumes of his Geschichte der Kriegskunst (History of the Art of War), on the grounds that they never developed “strategic thinking.”* However, success in war does not derive only from abstract strategic theory. Rather, successful strategic theory evolves from lessons learned during the actual experience of war. The greatest school of war has always been battle. In the gap in strategic writings between the works of Flavius Vegetius (fourth century c.e.) and Machiavelli (sixteenth century c.e.), wars were fought for twelve centuries in western Europe with little formal strategy.

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