You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book explores the Paris Ecole Militaire as an institution, arguing for its importance as a school that presented itself as a model for reform during a key moment in the movement towards military professionalism as well as state-run secular education. The school is distinguished for being an Enlightenment project, one of its founders publishing an article on it in the Encyclopédie in 1755. Its curriculum broke completely with the Latin pedagogy of the dominant Jesuit system, while adapting the legacy of seventeenth-century riding academies. Its status touches on the nature of absolutism, as it was conceived to glorify the Bourbon dynasty in a similar way to the girls’ school at Saint Cyr and the Invalides. It was also a dispensary of royal charity calculated to ally the nobility more closely to royal interests through military service. In the army, its proofs of nobility were the model for the much debated 1781 Ségur decree, often described as a notable cause of the French Revolution.
Complete Atlas of the World is the ultimate insight into our planet and the clearest, most concise overview of the world's geography. This incredible guide showcases locations from Boston to Bangkok and beyond with over 330 maps, including over 100 city plans, to truly bring these landscapes to life. Complete Atlas of the World is the definitive look at the world we live in. Detailed terrain models and colour schemes offer accessible mapping of unsurpassed quality. Complete Atlas of the World is now fully revised and updated to reflect recent geopolitical changes such as the new nation of South Sudan and the annexation of Crimea. Understand the fascinating world in which we live with this fantastic resource. Previous edition ISBN 9781405394413
None
A study of French military engineers at a crucial point in the evolution of modern engineering.
An 'invisible giant', the seventeenth-century French army was the largest and hungriest institution of the Bourbon monarchy. Combining social and cultural emphases with more traditional institutional and operational concerns, this book examines the army in depth, studying recruitment, composition, discipline, motivation, selection of officers, leadership, administration, logistics, weaponry, tactics, field warfare and siegecraft. The portrait that emerges differs from what current scholarship might have predicted. Instead of claiming that a 'military revolution' transformed warfare, Lynn stresses evolutionary change. This work also offers surprising insights into absolutism and the relationship between the monarchy and aristocracy. Questioning widely held assumptions about state formation and coercion, Lynn argues that this standing army was primarily devoted to border defence and only rarely to internal repression.
Engineering the Revolution documents the forging of a new relationship between technology and politics in Revolutionary France, and the inauguration of a distinctively modern form of the “technological life.” Here, Ken Alder rewrites the history of the eighteenth century as the total history of one particular artifact—the gun—by offering a novel and historical account of how material artifacts emerge as the outcome of political struggle. By expanding the “political” to include conflict over material objects, this volume rethinks the nature of engineering rationality, the origins of mass production, the rise of meritocracy, and our interpretation of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
The nature of warfare has always been largely determined by contemporary technology. Instances of technological change undertaken for the sake of military advantage have also been relatively common in history. The relationships between science and warfare, however, have been much more variable and ambiguous. The papers and discussions of the Symposium investigate selected aspects of the complex relationships between science and technology on the one hand, and warfare on the other, from the Renaissance to the 1960s. In the first session, Professor Hall takes up in turn the possible areas of interaction between science (exterior ballistics, engineering, explosives, mechanics, and metallurgy) a...