This book brings together, for the first time, the classic articles that began and have shaped the debate about the Military Revolution in early modern Europe, adding important new essays by eminent historians of early modern Europe to further this important scholarly interchange.

This book studies the changes that have marked war in the Western World since the thirteenth century.

The seventeenth century has long been seen as a period of 'crisis' or transition from the pre-modern to the modern world. This book offers a chance to explore this crisis from the perspective of war and military institutions in a way that should appeal to those doing global history. By placing 17th century warfare in a global context, Black challenges conventional chronologies and permits a reappraisal of the debate over what has been seen as the Military Revolution of the early-modern period. The book discusses war with regard to strategic cultures, assesses military capability in terms of tasks and challenges faced and attaches styles of warfare to their social and political contexts. Genuinely global in range, this up-to-date and wide-ranging account provides fresh historiographical insights into this crucial period in world history.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the early modern military history of Portugal and its possessions in Africa, the Americas, and Asia from the perspective of the military revolution historiographical debate. The existence of a military revolution in the early modern period has been much debated in international historiography, and this volume fills a significant gap in its relation to the history of Portugal and its overseas empire. It examines different forms of military change in specifically Portuguese case studies but also adopts a global perspective through the analysis of different contexts and episodes in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Contributors explore whether there is evidence of what could be defined as aspects of a military revolution or whether other explanatory models are needed to account for different forms of military change. In this way, it offers the reader a variety of perspectives that contribute to the debate over the applicability of the military revolution concept to Portugal and its empire during the early modern period. Broken down into four thematic parts and broad in both chronological and geographical scope, the book deepens our understanding of the art of warfare in Portugal and its empire and demonstrates how the military revolution debate can be used to examine military change in a global perspective. This is an essential text for scholars and students of military history, military architecture, global history, Asian history, and the history of Iberian empires.

Well before the Industrial Revolution, Europe developed the superior military potential and expertise that enabled her to dominate the world for the next two centuries. In this attractively illustrated and updated edition, Geoffrey Parker discusses the major changes in the military practice of the West during this time period--establishment of bigger armies, creation of superior warships, the role of firearms--and argues that these major changes amounted to a "military revolution" that gave Westerners a decided advantage over people of other continents. A new chapter addresses the controversies engendered by the previous edition.

This book is a comprehensive study of the Iraq Wars in the context of the revolution in military affairs debate.