De Re Militari | Book Reviews

Barton C. Hacker

World Military History Bibliography: Premodern and Nonwestern Military Institutions and Warfare

Brill History of Warfare, vol. 16 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003). 834 pp. + xi. $230. ISBN 9004129979.

A work optimistically entitled World Military History Bibliography (hereafter WMHB) must obviously cover a broad range of topics and periods, aimed at a wide audience. The emphasis of WMHB is explained by the author as focusing on “the study of military institutions rather than wars” (ix). The bibliography covers only works “published from 1967-1997” (x), though the author intends “to produce periodic supplements” (xi). I will examine this books usefulness solely from the standpoint of the medieval military historian, though from the global rather than Western European perspective. As the subtitle—Premodern and Nonwestern Military Institutions and Warfare—implies, WMHB covers only the premodern military history of the West, but includes studies of non-Western military history up to the present. Thus, overall, its focus is actually on post-medieval military history of the non-Western world. As a rough estimate, I would guess that less than 20% of the bibliography is of direct interest to medieval military historians.

The bibliography is divided into eight parts:

There is no subject, chronological or geographical index, although the bibliography is largely organized into subcategories along those lines. There are an average of ten or eleven works citied per page, giving a total of roughly 7500-8000 entries. About a third of the entries have brief annotations.

Unfortunately, there is no consistent chronological scheme for the work as a whole. From one perspective this makes sense, since the category “medieval” is a European concept, and there are no compelling reasons why the history of other regions of the world should be forced into a European chronological straightjacket. From a practical standpoint, however, since there is no chronological index, it makes a focused search more difficult. The chronological coverage for the section on North Africa (241-6), for example, runs from “the Islamic conquests through World War II.” Medieval India (260-9) covers from 1000-1800, with about half the entries in this section on the Mughal Dynasty. The Imperial China section runs “from the fall of the Han through the Opium War” (284-291). The usefulness of the bibliography would have been improved with chronological sub-categories for each section, and a chronological appendix showing where items on a particular period can be found.

In some sections the medieval period is given only nominal attention, or entirely overlooked. Medieval Russia should have been covered in the six pages on “Russia, from the fall of Rome to the Revolution of 1917” (219-225). This section has 71 entries, of which none explicitly focuses on medieval Russia; three works may have a few pages dealing with the late fifteenth century as an introduction to early modern Russia. The section on Medieval Islam (232-5) contains only thirty-six entries. The bibliography on Iran “from the Islamic conquest through World War II” (236-40) illustrates the limitations of this bibliography. Of the thirty-five entries in this section, twenty cover the medieval period (before 1500). Of those twenty, twelve are from the Cambridge History of Iran; each chapter from that excellent work is treated as a separate bibliographic entry. Only three of the twenty items on medieval Iran deal specifically with military history; the rest are general surveys. Overall, only twenty-seven pages are devoted to pre-World War II Middle East (226-253), of which roughly half focus on the early modern period. Another concern is that fundamental reference works—Dictionary of the Middle Ages, Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, and the Encyclopaeda Iranica—are no where to be found. Likewise, standard annual medieval bibliographies seem to have been completely missed.

On the other hand, Hacker’s section on Pre-Columbian American warfare is much richer, with eighty-four pages being devoted to this topic. Likewise the seventy-eight pages devoted to pre-World War II Africa compares favorably with the twenty-seven pages on the same period for the Middle East, the eleven pages on medieval Europe, and the four pages on Byzantium. Overall, the coverage on the medieval period is spotty—full for some areas and periods, but very weak or even non-existent for others.

Another problem is that, although the bibliography ends with works published in 1997, there tend to be more entries on older rather than more recent publications. Of the 41 works cited on Byzantium, for example, 3 were from the 1960s, 13 from the 1970s, 17 from the 1980s and only 8 from the 1990s. Thus, because of the lag between the completion of the bibliography in 1997 and its publication in 2003, in a sense the work is already six years old when published. Furthermore, of the forty-one Byzantine entries, fifteen are marked as having been taken from the American Historical Association Guide to Historical Literature.

The coverage of WMHB is so broad, that no scholar, however gifted, could possibly master all the material. In my view researchers would be better served by a series of shorter, more narrowly focused, and less expensive bibliographies prepared by teams of specialists scholars. At $230 WMHB is simply beyond the means of most academics, let alone the average amateur interested in military history. (As a publishing house Brill seems to never have grasped the concept that the publisher can recoup publishing costs by selling more copies of a less expensive book.) Given the fact that we have Kelly Devries’ superb Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology (Brill 2002), published in the same series, I feel the WMHB will not be of great value for the medieval military historian. Its broad geographical and chronological coverage, however, does make it useful as an introductory bibliographic resource for those wishing to pursue topics in military history beyond the medieval period.

William J. Hamblin

Brigham Young University <email>

Page Added: January 2004