War: What is it good for? (73 page)

American Civil War: The literature is overwhelming. McPherson 1988 puts the war in context; Keegan 2009 offers a fresh perspective on the events.

Isandlwana: David 2004, pp. 124–58. Adwa: Jonas 2011.

Naval gap between the West and the rest: Herwig 2001.

Nineteenth-century Britain and the world-system: N. Ferguson 2003; Darwin 2009.

On death tolls, see in general M. White 2011, with references. Population figures taken from Maddison 2003. New World death rates from disease: See above. American holocaust: Stannard 1993. Misra 2008 says ten million were killed in the Indian Mutiny, but most historians put the figure well under one million (see David 2006). Famines and Indian death rates: Fieldhouse 1996. Davis 2001 blames the famines strongly on Britain. Congo: Hochschild 1998.

Reception of Kipling's “White Man's Burden”: Gilmour 2002.

Indian anarchy and the East India Company's crackdown: Washbrook 1999. Violent crime in India: Fisch 1983, Yang 1985, and Singha 1998 document courts' aggressive crackdowns on interpersonal violence. More recent studies, such as Kolsky 2010 and T. Sherman 2010 (the latter taking the story into the twentieth century), however, tend to focus on British violence against Indians rather than broader efforts to suppress violence. Wiener 2008 looks at Australia, Kenya, and the Caribbean as well as India.

Rammohun Roy: Sen 2012.

Historians' evaluations of the British Empire vary wildly. Gott 2011 is the most negative that I have seen.

Decline in European violence: Spierenburg 2008. American violence: Roth 2009. Casualties in wars: M. White 2011.

Nineteenth-century economic growth: Frieden 2006, pp. 13–123.

Figure 4.17: Data from Maddison 2003.

Hague conferences: Sheehan 2008, pp. 22–26.

5.
STORM OF STEEL

The Great Illusion:
Angell 1910 (the book was frequently reissued in expanded versions; like most historians, I use the fourth edition, of 1913). On Angell himself: Ceadel 2009.

Twentieth century as age of extremes: Hobsbawm 1994.

Sarajevo: Dedijer 1966 remains the standard academic analysis, and D. Smith 2009 gives an up-to-date general treatment.

Casualties in 1914: Stevenson 2004, pp. 75–76.

Decisions to go to war in 1914: There are excellent analyses in Hamilton and Herwig 2003, McMeekin 2011, Stevenson 2004, pp. 3–36, and Strachan 2001, pp. 1–102. On ways war might not have broken out, Beatty 2012.

March of Folly:
Tuchman 1984.

British GDP: Maddison 2010. Growth of new industrial and naval powers: Broadberry
1998; P. Kennedy 1987, pp. 194–249; Trebilock 1981. American and German wars of the 1860s compared: Förster and Nagler 1999. Centrality of finance to the late-nineteenth-century British world-system: Cain and Hopkins 2000.

Figure 5.1: Data from Bairoch 1982. Figure 5.2: Data from Maddison 2003. Figure 5.3: Data from P. Kennedy 1987, table 20.

British intervention and the American Civil War: H. Fuller 2008; Foreman 2010. Great rapprochement: Perkins 1968. British and American navies: O'Brien 1998. Britain's naval alliances: Sumida 1989.

Geography and strategy: Mackinder 1904, with Kearns 2009.

Germany before 1871: Sheehan 1989; C. Clark 2006. Bismarck: Lerman 2004. A.J.P. Taylor's
Bismarck
(1967) nowadays seems very old-fashioned but remains a great read. Germany after 1890: P. Kennedy 1980; C. Clark 2009. German strategic intentions: Fritz Fischer 1967, 1974 set off a bitter debate by suggesting that Germany aimed at world domination in 1914. Strachan 2001, pp. 52–54, has a concise review of the debate, and Mulligan 2010 gives a general picture of the whole period 1870–1914.

Bond markets in summer 1914: N. Ferguson 1998, pp. 186–97.

Crises of 1905–13: Jarausch 1983.

General course of World War I: The literature is enormous. My favorites are Strachan 2003 for a brief account, Stevenson 2004 for a mid-length study, and Strachan 2001 for a comprehensive treatment of the first year of the war.

On the Schlieffen Plan, see Zuber 2011, to be read with the spirited debate in the journal
War in History,
beginning with Zuber's 1999 paper. On the eastern front, Stone 1975 and Showalter 1991 remain classics.

Germany's “September Program”: Fischer 1967; N. Ferguson 1998, pp. 168–73.

Germany's defeat on the Marne in 1914: Herwig 2009.

The war at sea: Strachan 2001, pp. 374–494; Massie 2003. Africa: Strachan 2001, pp. 495–643; Paice 2010.

Methods of fighting in 1914: Howard 1985.
Storm of Steel:
Jünger 2003, trans. from the 1961 German edition. Jünger first published
In Stahlgewittern
in 1920 but heavily revised the text in later editions. Lions led by donkeys: A. Clark 1962 is a classic account. Military learning in World War I: Doughty 2008; Lupfer 1981; W. Murray 2011, pp. 74–118; Travers 2003.

War economies: Broadberry and Harrison 2005; Chickering and Förster 2000.

Horses: The Royal National Theatre's adaptation of Michael Morpurgo's 1982 novel,
War Horse,
first staged in 2007, gives an extraordinarily powerful impression of this side of the war. The 2011 film version directed by Steven Spielberg is less memorable.

Command and control: Sheffield 2001; Sheffield and Todman 2008. Technological fixes: Travers 1992; Echevarria 2007. Gas casualties: Corrigan 2003, pp. 173–74. Tanks: Childs 1999. War in the air: M. Cooper 1986.

Attrition: Harris and Marble 2008. Cost per kill: N. Ferguson 1998, p. 336.

Jihad: Aksakal 2011. Submarine war: Halpern 1994. Atlantic lifeline: Burk 1985.

Russia's collapse: Figes 1997.

Modern system: Biddle 2004. Storm troops: Gudmundsson 1995 (Griffith 1996 argues that British troops mastered infiltration tactics earlier than the Germans).
A Farewell to Arms:
Hemingway 1929. Germany's 1918 offensive: Zabecki 2006; Hart 2008. Allied counteroffensive: Boff 2012.

British plans for 1919: J.F.C. Fuller 1936, pp. 322–36. Surrendering: N. Ferguson 2004, debated in Dollery and Parsons 2007 and A. Watson 2008. H1N1 flu and German collapse: Barry 2004; Price-Smith 2009, pp. 57–81.

Interwar world: P. Kennedy 1987, pp. 275–343; N. Ferguson 1998, pp. 395–432; Frieden 2006, pp. 127–72. British financial situation after 1918: Boyce 1987; N. Ferguson 2001, pp. 45–47, 125–27.

Wilson and the League of Nations: R. Kennedy 2009; Mazower 2012, pp. 116–53.

Russian Civil War: Figes 1997, pp. 555–720; Lincoln 1999. (My own sense of these events was indelibly imprinted by David Lean's 1965 film of Boris Pasternak's novel
Doctor Zhivago,
starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie.) Russo-Polish War: N. Davies 2003.

Crash of 1929 and subsequent banking crisis: H. James 2009, pp. 36–97.

Decline of confidence in the British Empire: J. Morris 1978, pp. 299–318, is a classic account.

Soviet violence: Conquest 2007; Naimark 2010; Snyder 2010. Soviet economy: Davies et al. 1994. Ishiwara: Peattie 1975. Japanese invasion of China: Mitter 2013. Rape of Nanjing: I. Chang 1997. Russo-Japanese war of 1939: S. Goldman 2012.

General course of World War II: The literature is so big, says Max Hastings 2007, p. 559, that “a catalogue of relevant titles becomes merely an author's peacock display.” With that caveat, my favorite readable recent mid-length surveys are Beevor 2012, Evans 2009, Hastings 2011, and Andrew Roberts 2011, and on the details Weinberg 2005. N. Davies 2006 is good on the messiness of the outcome.

Development of Hitler's thought: Kershaw 2000.

Development of blitzkrieg: Muller 1996, W. Murray 1996, and Gat 2000, suggesting that British stick-in-the-mudness was less of an issue than tank theorists such as Liddell Hart and Fuller liked to claim. On the practice of blitzkrieg, Guderian 1992 (1937) is the classic, although Guderian never used the word
blitzkrieg
in his book. It seems to have been coined by a journalist at
Time
magazine in 1939. (The famous passage in which Guderian says that he took his ideas from Liddell Hart does not appear in the original German text, apparently being inserted later at Liddell Hart's suggestion—Guderian 1992, p. 16.)

Fall of France: E. May 2001. Bloch 1999 (1946), an eyewitness account by a brave man caught up in the disaster, is subjective but powerful.

Why Germany nearly won: Mercatante 2012.

Hitler's use of violence against internal enemies: The literature is vast, but Evans 2005 is a good starting point. Massacres in World War I: Hull 2005; Kramer 2007. Greatest Possible Germany: N. Ferguson 2006, p. 315. Starving Russian cities: Weinberg 2005, p. 267.

How the Allies won: Overy 1995. Learning in World War II: W. Murray 2011, pp. 119–261. Allied economies: Harrison 1998; on the United States, Herman 2012 is very readable.

If Hitler had won: On this, novelists have the most interesting things to say (especially R. Harris 1992 and Sansom 2012).

Visions of an Anglo-American world order: Ryan 1987. American thinking about Europe: Harper 1996. Soviet thinking about Europe: Applebaum 2012.

Collapse of Britain's Asian Empire: Bayly and Harper 2004.

Cold War generally: There are excellent short accounts in D. Reynolds 2000 and Gaddis 1997 and 2005a. Leffler and Westad 2010 provide rich detail, and CNN's twenty-four-part TV documentary
The Cold War
(1998) has excellent footage and interviews. Cold War outside Europe: Westad 2005; Brands 2010.

The bomb: Rhodes 1987, 1996, and 2007 are required reading.

World government: Baratta 2004. United Nations: Mazower 2012.

U.S. nuclear strategy: Rosenberg 1983; Jervis 1990; Freedman 2003. Soviet nuclear strategy: Garthoff 1958; Holloway 1994; Fursenko and Naftali 2006. European nuclear strategy: Heuser 1997. Effects of a one-megaton bomb: Freedman 2003, p. xiii. Containment: Gaddis 2005b.

Democratic peace: Doyle 1983 elaborates Kant's
Perpetual Peace
into a philosophical account of why twentieth-century democracies rarely went to war, but the theory remains controversial among political scientists (Kinsella et al. 2005). Western murder levels: Eisner 2003,
table 1
; Roth 2009, Figure 1.1 More generally, Spierenburg 2008, pp. 165–205; and Roth 2009, pp. 435–68.

American affluence and Europe: De Grazia 2006. Car ownership: Figures from Sandbrook 2005, p. 121; and Patterson 1996, p. 71.

Figure 5.13: Data from Maddison 2003. “Western Europe” shows Maddison's twenty-nine-nation scores, and “Eastern Europe” his seven-nation scores. Maddison combined East and West German data; I have treated Germany as part of western Europe, which means that Figure 5.9 understates eastern European performance (though not enough to change the shape of the graph dramatically). Eastern European data are unreliable before 1950.

Soviet repression: Applebaum 2003, 2012. Buchenwald: M. White 2012, p. 390. Families with one child executed by Hitler and a second by Stalin: Snyder 2010, p. 149. Soviet murder levels: Pridemore 2007, p. 121. Soviet economic growth: Spufford 2010 is a quirky, fascinating account.

Lowe 2012 does a fine job comparing postwar eastern and western Europe.

Casualty estimates for 1962: N. Friedman 2000, pp. 284–85.

Figure 5.14: Data from Norris and Kristensen 2006; Kristensen and Norris 2012, 2013.

Berlin crisis: Kempe 2011. Cuban missile crisis: Fursenko and Naftali 1998. Peace movements: Wittner 2009.
Dr. Strangelove:
Columbia Pictures, 1964.

Vietnam: Among the studies written before the Vietnamese archives opened up, Karnow 1997 stands out; among those written since the opening, Nguyen 2012 is excellent. Strategy: Summers 1982; Krepinevich 1986.

Likely forms of war in Europe in the 1960s–80s: Dinter and Griffith 1983. N. Friedman 2000, pp. 271–442, is good on the larger strategic picture, and Hoffenaar et al. 2012 on the various armies' planning.
The Third World War:
Hackett et al. 1978. I take the numbers of Soviet nuclear weapons to be used from their 1983 war plan (N. Friedman 2000, pp. 424–25).

Much of the American debate over détente took place in the pages of journals such as
Commentary
and
Foreign Affairs
. Broader 1970s situation: N. Ferguson et al. 2010.

Afghanistan: Feifer 2009. China's reorientation: Lüthi 2008; Macmillan 2008. American 1980s military buildup: Zakheim 1997. November 1983 war scare: Rhodes 2007, pp. 154–67.

6.
RED IN TooTH AND CLAW

On evolution and human behavior generally, E. O. Wilson 1975 remains the classic theoretical work. Diamond 1997 and Robert Wright 2000 are (to my mind) the most interesting historical applications.

Ape and human war: Wrangham and Peterson 1996 is fundamental. Ape and human politics: De Waal 1982.

Gombe War: Goodall 1986, pp. 503–16; Wrangham and Peterson 1996, pp. 5–18.

Similarities of human and chimpanzee genome: Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium 2005 (the 98 percent similarity figure obscures several technical difficulties). Divergence of humans and chimpanzees from a shared ancestor seven to eight million years ago: Landergraber et al. 2012.

Criticisms of Goodall: See particularly Power 1991, with discussion in Wrangham 2010
(Goodall's team was in fact the first to highlight the distortions introduced by feeding chimpanzees [Wrangham 1974]). Chagnon debates: See
Chapter 1
above.

Chimpanzee wars observed since the 1970s: Wrangham 2010; M. Wilson 2013. Ngogo War: Mitani et al. 2010. A few primatologists and anthropologists continue to question the reality of chimpanzee wars (for example, Sussman and Marshack 2010; B. Ferguson 2011).

Extreme chimpanzee violence: De Waal 1986; Goodall 1991. De Waal 1982 does a wonderful job of putting the violence in perspective.

Wamba encounters: Idani 1991; Wrangham and Peterson 1996, pp. 209–16. Bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees/Pan
paniscus
): De Waal 1997; Furuichi and Thompson 2008. Bonobo genito-genital rubbing: Fruth and Hohmann 2000.

Origins of life and single-celled organisms: There are many recent accounts (Dawkins 2004 is a fascinating, quirky example), but Margulis and Sagan 1987 remains hard to beat. Dawkins 1989, Dennett 1995, and Coyne 2009 are my favorite treatments of the workings of biological evolution, and Christian 2004 and Robert Wright 2000 link the biological story to human history. Evolution of consciousness: Dennett 1991; Hofstadter 2007.