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This edited volume explores conscription in the Napoleonic era, tracing the roots of European conscription and exploring the many methods that states used to obtain the manpower they needed to prosecute their wars. The levée-en-masse of the French Revolution has often been cited as a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’, but was it truly a ‘revolutionary’ break with past European practices of raising armies, or an intensification of the scope and scale of practices already inherent in the European military system? This international collection of scholars demonstrate that European conscription has far deeper roots than has been previously acknowledged, and that its intensification during the Napoleonic era was more an ‘evolutionary’ than ‘revolutionary’ change. This book will be of much interest to students of Military History, Strategic Studies, Strategic History and European History.
This anthology of historical war studies looks at military expansion from the French Revolution to WWII—and the enduring lessons for today. In the years after the Cold War, many governments sought to reduce the sizes of their armed forces. Along with this general reduction came a shift in military doctrine away from conventional warfare and toward counterinsurgency operations. But in light of new geopolitical developments, the pendulum is swinging back. Once again, armies are growing in size. Now is the time to look back at the age of total war and the hard-won military lessons about the buildup, composition and use of large formations. It is these lessons from history that this book addre...
This work seeks to offer a new way of viewing the French Wars of 1792–1815. Most studies of this period offer international, political, and military analyses using the French Revolution and Napoleon as the prime mover. But this book focuses on military and civilian responses to French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, throughout the rest of Europe and the Americas. It shows how the unprecedented mobilization of this era forged a generation of soldiers and civilians sharing a common experience of suffering, bequeathing the West with a new veteran sensibility. Using a range of sources, especially memoirs, this book reveals the adventure and suffering confronting ordinary soldiers campaigning in Europe and the Americas, and the burdens imposed on civilians enduring rising and falling empires across the West. It also reveals how the wars liberated slaves, serfs, and common people through revolutions and insurgencies.
This edited volume explores conscription in the Napoleonic era, tracing the roots of European conscription and exploring the many methods that states used to obtain the manpower they needed to prosecute their wars. The levée-en-masse of the French Revolution has often been cited as a ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’, but was it truly a ‘revolutionary’ break with past European practices of raising armies, or an intensification of the scope and scale of practices already inherent in the European military system? This international collection of scholars demonstrate that European conscription has far deeper roots than has been previously acknowledged, and that its intensification during the Napoleonic era was more an ‘evolutionary’ than ‘revolutionary’ change. This book will be of much interest to students of Military History, Strategic Studies, Strategic History and European History.
Explains the current weakness of democratic polities by addressing paradoxes in constitutional democracy and its theoretical foundations.
This book details the history of the Army's Engineer Firefighters from the U.S. Civil War to the present. --
This book offers a detailed examination of the professional military education system in the United States, from a critical, insider's perspective. The mission of America's war colleges is to educate senior military officers in both the ways of war and the defence of peace. But are these colleges doing the best job possible in carrying out that important mission? Military education faces many demands, including a lack of preparation by the students, uneven quality of the faculty, and confusion over the curriculum. Many officers attend resident programs at the war colleges programs against the career advice of their leadership, despite the fact that they are virtually guaranteed graduation af...
This new volume explores the history of an important, but neglected sector of the Western Front between 1914 and 1918 in the context of its portrayal in the media. The analysis sheds new light on of the role of the mass media in generating national mythologies. The book focuses on the largely forgotten Armentières and La Bassée sector, a section of the Western Front which saw fighting from many different nationalities on almost every day of the war. Through analysis of this section of the Western Front, this book examines the way the First World War was interpreted, both in official and semi-official sources as well as in the mass media, comparing what was apparently happening on the Western Front battlefield to what was reported in the newspapers. It follows the different sides as they responded to the changing nature of warfare and to each other, showing how reporting was adapted to changing perceptions of national needs.
Explores foreign seamen's employment in the British Royal Navy of the French Wars, and deconstructs the meanings of 'foreignness' itself.
Migrations have moulded Balkan societies. In the multiethnic empires migrations were very common, and in the modern era, economic reasons led millions of people to go abroad as overseas emigrants before World War I, as Gastarbeiter in the 1960s and 70s, or as economic migrants since 1990. In addition, many people had to leave their homes as political refugees or as victims of ethnic cleansing. But Balkan countries were and are also hosts to immigrants and refugees, and they have witnessed enormous rural-urban migrations. This volume, the first part of a selection of conference papers, focusses on historical and cultural aspects of migration in, from and to Southeastern Europe.