World Military History Annotated Bibliography: Premodern and Nonwestern Military Institutions (Works Published before 1967)
According to the preface, World Military History Annotated Bibliography: Premodern and Nonwestern Military Institutions (Works Published before 1967) edition is an expansion of an earlier bibliography (by the same title) that covers works from 1967 to 1997. This volume’s objective is to include works that that focus on military institutes and methods of warfare. The coverage is not intended to include western models but does include early modern European institutions in the context of colonialism. World War II is also not covered here.
The book is divided into seven parts. The first part explores how warfare interacts with politics, economics, and culture. After that, the parts focus on specific time-periods or geographical regions. The second part covers the ancient world and includes prehistory, civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, Biblical lands, Hellenistic world, pre-Islamic Persia, Europe’s “Barbarians”, Indus civilizations, and China until the fall of the Han Dynasty.
The next three parts cover roughly from the fifth century to the early twentieth century. The individual parts cover specific geographic areas. Part three looks at the Middle East, Europe and North Africa. Part four covers the rest of Asia (Central Asia to East Asia). Part five deals with the rest of Africa and Oceania. The last two parts focus on the Americas. Part six covers the Pre-Columbian period, and part seven goes up to the mid-nineteenth century.
With the exception of the first part, each part starts with a general overview chapter followed by chapters dedicated to specific geographic regions within the scope of that part. The first part starts with an overview chapter followed by specific disciplines that influence warfare (eg. politics, economics, and culture). Each part is geographically and chronologically divided into chapters, and each chapter lists relevant work alphabetically by author. Some chapters start with a brief description of their scope, while others do not.
Not all references have annotations. Most of the annotations are brief, largely accurate, and very helpful. For example the annotation to Kabir’s The Buwayhid Dynasty of Baghdad (334/946 – 447/1055) is “Chap. 8, ‘The Army,’ 134-44” (124). The bibliography covers not only books, but also articles in journals, such as Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. In the print edition, the 1.25” margins provide space for personal notes for those of us who like to “personalize” our books.
The parts, chapters and layout in the cd-rom mirror those found in the book (see fig 1). I would have preferred having the first level of subheading named after the section titles in the print edition as it would remove a layer of nonfunctional subfolders. Under each section folder are the chapter folders arranged alphabetically rather than geographically and chronologically (as they are in the print edition).
The cd-rom version does not make efficient use of space when viewing entries. A screen can display only three entries at a time, and the title frame (see fig 2) takes up valuable real estate. The program does let the user add notes, and tags entries that have user-inserted notes – a thoughtful feature. (fig. 3)
An advantage of the cd-rom is the search engine. The search wheel is especially useful as it lists viable entries in a drop-down list once the first three letters are typed (see fig 4). Adding additional search criteria or changing existing search fields to suit the search could be used to create complex searches. The “Full text” option searches the annotations as well, but does not search user-inserted notes. Surprisingly, the search engine does not let users paste search terms copied from other electronic documents. Right click does not offer a pop-up menu as it does in standard Microsoft programs, and paste is not an option under “Edit” in the toolbar.
Of the roughly two thousand references that I thought should be included in this bibliography, all but fifty were entries. Of these fifty, half of them were published before 1900, and seventeen of them were published between 1900 and 1920. All my references for the Americas were included in the bibliography. All sections contained references of which I was previously unaware – hence a useful bibliography for me.
Overall, World Military History Annotated Bibliography: Premodern and Nonwestern Military Institutions (Works Published before 1967) adequately covers the body of published works within intended scope. My only real regret is that I wish all the entries were annotated. While I prefer the cd-rom version to the print edition, paste functionality as well as more efficient use of screen space would have made choosing the cd-rom version much easier.
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