The Routledge History of Global War and Society

Matthew S. Muehlbauer, David J. Ulbrich, Matthew S. Muehlbauer, David J. Ulbrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317533184
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Routledge History of Global War and Society offers a sweeping introduction to the most significant research on the causes, experiences, and impacts of war throughout history. This collection of twenty-seven essays by leading historians demonstrates how war and society studies have dramatically expanded the chronological, geographic, and thematic breadth of the field of military history. Each chapter addresses the ways in which recent scholarship has integrated cultural, ethical, environmental, medical, and ideological factors to explain both conventional conflicts and genocide, terrorism, and other forms of mass violence. The broad scope of the collection makes it the perfect primer for scholars and students seeking to understand the complex interactions of warfare and those affecting and affected by conflict.

Part I

Regional and Temporal Approaches

1 War and Society in East Asia

Kenneth M. Swope

While the transformation of traditional operational military history to the field more broadly known today as “war and society” might be roughly dated to the 1970s with respect to the study of the West, in East Asian circles it might be argued that the “war and society” approach was the norm from ancient times, as official histories dating from the second century BCE and earlier sought to put military affairs and warriors themselves within a broader social and political context. Thus, the study of battles themselves was often glossed over in favor of ruminations on the importance of good government or measures to “rescue the people from fire and water.” Later primary sources stressed the negative social ramifications of prolonged conflict and the need for restoring order. While descriptions of the horrors of war are rife in such sources, specific tactical details are often lacking. Upon their first serious academic exploration of East Asian (primarily Chinese) military topics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this often led Western scholars to wrongly conclude that these societies were in fact passive and/or unconcerned with military matters. In the era of high imperialism this dovetailed with notions of Social Darwinism to perpetuate the idea that such areas were ripe for the taking by more vigorous societies.

Therefore, the study of war and society in East Asia (in the West) has followed a rather curious trajectory, conditioned by assumptions emanating from nineteenth-century imperialist clashes and then colored by the massive military conflicts of the twentieth century, most notably the Second World War. But of course even this conflict is highly contested in East Asian memories and designated differently depending upon one’s perspective. The Japanese generally call it the “Fifteen Years’ War,” or the “Greater East Asian and Pacific War,” designations that highlight both the chronological and geographic scope of the conflict and also somewhat rightly downplay the centrality of American involvement, a perspective that might be surprising to students of American history. The Chinese, on the other hand, refer to this conflict as the “War of Resistance Against Japan,” whereas for Koreans, this was merely the final stage of their colonial nightmare under Japanese domination and the lead-in to Korea’s own massively destructive civil war. Incidentally that war itself has several designations. In North Korea it is known as the “Fatherland Liberation War”; South Koreans refer to it as “Six Two-Five” in reference to the date it began in 1950; the Chinese, echoing designations for their war to assist Korea against the Japanese in the 1590s, refer to it as “The War to Resist America and Aid Korea.” In the twenty-first century, such self-serving rhetoric can be seen playing out in hyper-nationalist debates among Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scholars, as well as entire populations, regarding the blame, conduct, and memory of their nation’s wartime actions.

But while these wars have certainly been important in highlighting the complex connections between war and society in modern Asia, they also draw more attention to the rich past of East Asian military history as unbeknownst to many outside the region. These conflicts were all waged within the context of deep-seeded historical rivalries and often painful memories, passed down for generations. While space precludes going into great detail, this chapter highlights the most salient developments in the field of war and society in East Asia, which encompasses China, Japan, and Korea. It will first review major trends in the field, and then highlight some key works for each of these three places in chronological fashion, noting that the political boundaries and identities of said regions evolved considerably over time. This essay will focus on works from the past three decades because they provide the clearest view of the state of the field and represent by far the most fruitful period of scholarship.

In several ways the field of war and society in East Asia parallels its developments elsewhere, on a somewhat delayed time frame. The earliest studies in the West tended to focus upon topics of intersection with Western topics, such as the Opium War of 1839–1841, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–1864, or popular rebellions connected to Western incursions (Wakeman, 1966, and Kuhn, 1970). In the case of Chinese history this was because of two major factors. First, the earliest avenues of access and interest to Chinese history and culture occurred via missionary and commercial efforts, and the first generation of Western scholars on China was drawn from these ranks. Second, the victory of the Chinese communists in the Chinese Civil War of 1946–1949 meant that Chinese archives (outside of Taiwan) remained largely closed to outsiders. Since most of the archives in Taiwan pertained to the Qing (1644–1911) Dynasty, and because the Chinese themselves stressed the importance of imperialism in their modern history, these topics became the most prominent and served as the starting point for explorations in other eras and fields.

The first edited volume, in English, devoted to Chinese ways of warfare noted that China’s distinctive military record had been “too little studied” and suggested that further study of China’s military past could help ease the rest of the world’s adjustment to China’s participation in the new transnational order (Kierman and Fairbank, 1974, 1–2). And while laying out what he believed to be certain underlying characteristics of traditional Chinese warfare, such as the need for balancing wen (civil) and wu (military) authority, as embodied in the military and philosophical classics of ancient China, editor John King Fairbank admitted that China’s rich military past had barely been examined and future scholarship would likely reach new conclusions. To cite just two examples, Fairbank posited that bureaucratic control of the military and a constant preoccupation with military threats from Central Asia were hallmarks of premodern Chinese states. He also perpetuated the old notion that Central Asians were inherently more inclined to martial pursuits than the Han Chinese, who supposedly preferred to let “barbarians” do their dirty work of fighting whenever feasible. Therefore one could presume that non-Chinese dynasties like those of the Mongols and Manchus were inherently more aggressive, a characterization that continues to find support among some Chinese scholars.

But more recent scholarship (Di Cosmo, 2009) has revealed a far more nuanced understanding of the dynamics between the civil and military bureaucracies and a far more complicated understanding of Central Asians in Chinese military affairs (Robinson, 2013) and vice versa. The contributors to Di Cosmo’s study on military culture in Chinese history show how the military permeated virtually all segments of Chinese society, including popular culture, drama, and even painting. David Robinson’s work problematizes the simple Han-barbarian dichotomy by showing how Mongol culture and martial values influenced the Han rulers of the Ming dynasty. In addition to widely employing Mongols in their armies, the Ming rulers patronized such distinctively Central Asian institutions as royal hunts, mounted archery contests, and “willow shoots,” whereby mounted archers had to strike single branches of willow trees while loosing arrows from horseback. Utilizing heretofore largely ignored unofficial histories and poems among other sources, these scholars paint an increasingly textured picture of the multifarious links between war and society in East Asia.

In fact perhaps the most striking development of the past three decades in the field of East Asian war and society has been the emergence of the “New Qing History” (Waley-Cohen, 2006), wherein scholars make use of Manchu language materials to study Qing military and political institutions (Elliott, 2001). Elliott argues for the pervasive role of the Eight Banners in Manchu life, even beyond military operations. Recasting the Qing from a supine enervated state that practically invited Western exploitation in the nineteenth century, these scholars (Perdue, 2005, and Dai, 2009) draw attention to the dynamism of the high Qing military and situate its accomplishments more broadly in comparison to its contemporaries, such as the Russian Empire. Some (Kim, 2004) have even conducted complete studies of Muslim revolts in nineteenth-century Central Eurasia that embroiled the Chinese, Russian, Ottoman, and British empires, shifting the focus away from mere Western imperialist exploitation. Others (Larsen, 2008) have demonstrated how the Qing used the rhetoric and tools of nineteenth-century imperialism to assert its interests in its traditional tributary, Korea, even after disastrous defeat at the hands of Japan. While produced in a postcolonial atmosphere and perhaps influenced by such studies, these works bring the empire back into late imperial history and draw parallels between the Qing and other early modern empires.

Still others have returned to older topics in new ways—for example, highlighting the surprising impact of the Taiping Rebellion on the American Civil War (Platt, 2012) or looking at its social implications for China in terms of reconstructing shattered communities (Meyer-Fong, 2013). In fact neither of these historians is really interested in the military aspects of what was the bloodiest civil war in world history. Platt wants to show how China was important economically to the United States even in the nineteenth century, while also exploring the unintended ramifications of missionary activity. Meyer-Fong focuses on reconstruction and memory, drawing extensively on literary and trauma studies to inform her analysis of diaries, memoirs, and other unofficial histories. Ironically, she seems rather ignorant of the broader war and society literature that might further inform her study. This shortcoming plagues many historians of East Asia who continue to marginalize themselves by not engaging more widely with literature and debates outside their immediate fields.

Nonetheless, others have sought to examine China’s military past in explicit comparison with the West, especially engaging debates concerning the “military revolution” proposed by Geoffrey Parker (1996) and others. Tonio Andrade (2011) has studied the only full-scale clash between Chinese and Western parties, between the pirate lord Koxinga and the Dutch over Taiwan in the early 1660s, and determined that the Chinese armies were in fact superior to those of the Dutch in many respects, though they remained confounded by certain technologies, such as the artillery fortress. In the process, Andrade also engages issues such as climate change and cultural predilections concerning the development and deployment of new technologies, having been influenced by his former mentor, Geoffrey Parker. Most notably, Andrade notes how weather patterns affected ship construction and development and challenges the idea that Westerners were more adept at drilling and training than their Eastern counterparts.

Andrade takes up the comparison more explicitly in a subsequent work (2016) that examines military innovation and the broader question of the rise of the West in world history despite China’s early edge in gunpowder technologies. He concludes that, because of alternate phases of innovation and stagnation, European technology did not surge ahead of China until the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, this surge was aided by constant warfare between European states roughly in parity, a situation not present in East Asia for centuries except for the especially violent era of 1550–1683, as noted by Geoffrey Parker in his recent book on global crisis in the seventeenth century (2014). Indeed, Parker finds that China was the area of the globe most profoundly affected by the seventeenth-century crisis, losing perhaps 40 percent of its total population between 1600–1680, owing to incessant warfare, natural disasters, and epidemics, not to mention attacks by wild animals (Swope, 2018). The Chinese even developed a new term, the “soldier calamity” (bing huo), to refer to hardships caused by the depredations of roving soldiers and bandits.

During the past three decades, the study of modern Chinese warfare has been an especially fruitful area of study. The field has expanded exponentially with the opening of Chinese archives to the West. In addition to general surveys covering all or part of the twentieth century, a plethora of monographs have appeared. These include studies of such phenomena as warlordism (McCord, 1993), the War of Resistance against Japan (Lary, 2010a; Lary and MacKinnon, 2001; Peattie et al., 2011), and the Chinese Civil War, though most studies of the latter have still been of the operational variety. Surprisingly, only Diana Lary (2015), building upon her fine earlier work on Chinese warlord soldiers and on her study of the Japanese invasion, has embarked upon a serious study of the societal impact of the Chinese Civil War. She concludes that the social leveling begun during the Japanese invasion accelerated during the subsequent civil war, and culminated in the disasters of the Cultural Revolution during the 1960s. Because declassification of Chinese documents offers greater access to archives, China’s involvement in the Cold War and Korean and Vietnam Wars has attracted increased attention among scholars (Chen, 2001). But, to date, the bulk of these works focuses more on traditional diplomatic and military history and does not explicitly address topics addressed in the war and society field, such as the social implications of mobilization for war.

In marked contrast to China, premodern Japan and Korea have not fared as well in Western scholarship despite their rich military pasts. While there remains tremendous popular interest in topics such as samurai and ninja, few academics in the West have deigned to examine these topics in any depth. The creation of the Japanese bakufu, or shogunate, government was the subject of many earlier studies (Mass and Hauser, 1993), and the institutional history of the samurai remains quite popular, though such studies tended to be remarkably free of the messy details that actually precipitated military rule in Japan. This has continued with studies of institutions such as sankin kotai, the “alternate attendance” system of the Tokugawa (Vaporis, 2009), which has been identified as one of the key sources for Japan’s rapid modernization as it created a truly “national” culture and established the infrastructure needed for rapid industrial development.

Other scholars have examined the origins of the samurai themselves, coming to rather different conclusions about their origins as either “hired swords” (Friday, 1992) or “heavenly warriors” (Farris, 1992), but making important connections between the Japanese state and society. In particular they note how the samurai emerged out of the noble class itself and gradually arrogated more authority to themselves by virtue of their ability to collect rents and maintain order in the countryside, with Friday highlighting warrior agency and Farris positing a more evolutionary model. This was a long process as the old authorities resisted their loss of influence and the rising elements of society were forced to work with those they sought to replace. Such conclusions led to the more intensive study of the effects of warfare itself on medieval Japanese society (Conlan, 2003, and Friday, 2003). These authors demonstrate how central authority devolved from the court to the localities and how Japan became increasingly militarized. These processes culminated in the era of Warring States (Sengoku, 1467–1603), which finally ended in the Tokugawa defeat of its rivals in part because earlier military leaders had effectively crushed militant religious sects and other sources of strife.

Modern topics have received much more extensive treatment, no doubt due to Japan’s prominence in world affairs in the first half of the twentieth century and its key role in the Greater East Asian and Pacific War. Earlier studies tended to focus more specifically on colonial conflicts (Duus, 1989, 1995) or on relations with the United States. But more comprehensive surveys of military institutions, drawing upon both primary sources and the latest Japanese scholarly research (Drea, 2009), have filled im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Regional and Temporal Approaches
• Part II Thematic Approaches
• Index