A Wider Perspective: War outside the West

Abstract

The central conceptual problem with military history is how to acknowledge, appreciate and analyse its diversity. This problem stems from the linked characteristics of the presentation of the subject in western work, with its tendency firstly to focus largely, if not exclusively, on western developments, and secondly to consider those elsewhere in terms of western paradigms and the interaction of non-western powers with the west, these latter two factors being closely intertwined, although, of course, analytically different points (Black, 2000; 2003a). Thus, for example, the focus in discussion of military revolutions is the west, the definitions are western, and in so far as non-western powers feature it is in order to record the success of their western counterparts (Knox and Murray, 2001). There is, indeed, a circular quality in this analysis, which is a serious methodological limitation, and one shared by an empirical failure to even note developments in other cultures.