Seven chapters from ancient to modern warfare is an ambitious undertaking and as such the book gives a generic overview of many wars from ancient tribal conflicts to today's modern hybrid wars. The book is organised with a brief description of major wars, technological leaps and some personalities. Thus it serves as a brief outline or overview of most wars for those interested in short overviews.

This was a hugely ambitious effort to summarize the History of War in under 233 pages … that is some 5 thousand years of perhaps to most prominent human activity since we came together in communities to control the natural resources around us. As might be expected, it is frequently overly general in its treatment for many of the pivotal moments in history. That would not have been as much of a problem, expect the work also suffers from a confusing organization of what facts are actually presented that the principle question was often left unanswered … and this is how did this specific fact alter our world (or as the blurb states how did these conflict periodically reshape history). In nearly every battle, we see some combination of foot soldiers, mobile warriors and ranged combatants … but we don’t often see how these actually evolved. There is some discussion of a few formations … but there is not so much an explanation of of how one formation had an advantage over another formation and how the weapons and technology influenced that effectiveness. Finally … the early history did not appears to be as well researched as I had expected … example: the claim that Scythian horse archers could hit a SINGLE target from horseback at a gallop is not supported in any of my historical sources outside of myth and legend. Instead, they were know for showing [as a group] “clouds” of arrows back toward their opponents while riding away (which was awesomely effective and very dangerous in its own right without need of exaggeration). There are fewer of these issues as we move more into modern history, so perhaps there is where the author’s specialty is and perhaps that is why the early treatment of war history (in the first half of the book) was not as solid I as wanted … since the modern history from the 19th century on was much better. Over all, I just didn’t get what I wanted to out of this book.

I was given this free advance review copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

#AHistoryOfWar #NetGalley.