In the conclusion to the series, a series of significant observations are presented. In contrast to the pre-occupations of the field with theory and concepts, the practice of strategy shows a distinct picture. When heads of state, states, empires and other social groupings engage in strategy away from the abstract in concrete and real-life situations, it is messy, chaotic and largely ad hoc. First, core conceptual categories in the field hamper a proper understanding of strategy. The binaries of war/peace, rationality/emotion and state/non-state, as largely products of the nineteenth century, obscure rather than illuminate historical practices over the past three millennia. Second, four distinct patterns present themselves: (1) strategy as a utilitarian phenomenon with an alignment of means and ends, as the dominant perspective, holds explanatory power; (2) strategy as a performance offers a strong lens to look at the historical record as war and warfare are repeatedly part of a way of life; (3) opportunity offers a significant explanatory category; (4) practising strategy as an ordering or disordering exercise offers a way to look at reality, and is enacted as a process of making life difficult for an opponent. These findings form an invitation to reconsider the dominant perspective of strategy as stable and universal, attesting to the necessity of awarding more attention to deeds than words.

This chapter considers the strategic dimension of conflict in North America between the outbreak of fighting between the French and colonial Americans in the Ohio valley in 1754 and the formal end of the War of American Independence in 1783. While this thirty-year period saw several local struggles between colonists and Native peoples, the focus here is on the two major conflicts – the Seven Years War (1754–1760 in North America, 1756–1763 in Europe) and the War of Independence (1775–1783). Both wars were global struggles, extending well beyond North America – the Seven Years War from its outset, and the War of Independence from 1778, when the French became belligerents. Even so, the chapter will concentrate on the American aspects of these struggles, and only indirectly address the Caribbean, west African, European and Asian dimensions. It will aspire to cover all the participants in the North American parts of the two wars – settlers, Native peoples and Europeans, particularly the British and the French.

A principal reason for the continuing significance of West Side Story in the musical theatre repertory is the quality of the score, with memorable songs and dance music that are intimately tied to the plot. This chapter opens with brief consideration of significant matters for Bernstein and Sondheim as they created the score. Description of the orchestration, which Bernstein accomplished with the assistance of Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, includes the process and a description of the show’s three major soundscapes and how they interact in the score. Bernstein’s unification of the score involves shared melodic and rhythmic motives, identified here and documented through musical examples. The approach to individual numbers involves important material concerning their composition and significant aspects of lyrics and music, documented with many references to the 1957 and 2009 original cast recordings and Bernstein’s 1984 studio recording of the score.

The Russo-Japanese War was fought during 1904–1905 between Tsarist Russia and Imperial Japan. The war broke out due to their conflicting interests in the Korean Peninsula and the north-eastern region of China, known then as Manchuria. Both saw the conflict as a zero-sum game in which compromise was a temporary solution. Japan’s objectives were the control of Korea, the seizure of southern Manchuria and the conclusion of the conflict with a peace agreement that would ensure its own long-term presence and interests in Korea and China. Russia’s objectives were the inverse of Japan’s and included the control of Manchuria, seizure of Korea and the expansion of its political and economic sphere to play a pivotal role in the entire region. Japan had far more limited resources and manpower, but it could mobilise its armed forces more quickly and gain the upper hand in the region, at least initially. As an island country, Japan had to control the seas from the outset and limit the duration of the war. The war lasted seventeen months but demonstrated that when strategic objectives are carefully defined and meticulously executed, as was the case with Japan, then the prima facie weaker party may win.

Although the early part of the century involved the Nationalist Party (KMT) campaigns – the Northern Expedition (1926-28) – to reunify China after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the history of China’s military strategy in the twentieth century is largely dominated by the activities of the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Embroiled in the first civil war with the Nationalists and avoiding annihilation during the latter’s five encirclement campaigns (1927–1937), the PLA under Mao Zedong’s leadership began to develop some of the core ideas of Communist Chinese military strategy – People’s War, and Active Defense. During the anti-Japanese War of Resistance, the Communists and the Nationalists arrived at a temporary truce to fight Japanese invaders (1937–1945). This period was largely marked by stalemate, but still involved millions of casualties, the use of guerrilla warfare, and the movement of millions of troops across China. Mao’s vision of military strategy unfolded with the resumption of the Communist–Nationalist civil war: guerrilla warfare; manoeuvre warfare; a hybrid of conventional and unconventional operations; conventional warfare; and then a war of annihilation, culminating in the Nationalist retreat to Taiwan.

Evidence for discussing grand strategy in the Roman Empire is extremely limited. In reaction to Luttwak’s thought-provoking book, ancient historians have tended to focus on limitations in the information available to emperors and hence their capacity to determine priorities. Kagan’s reformulation of Luttwak’s thesis to use troop movements as a proxy for strategic decision making does not adequately take into account the personal and cultural considerations that often influenced rulers, and in particular that suppression of internal rivals took priority over external threats. That said, grand strategy remains a useful tool for investigating imperial decision making, especially for emperors such as Augustus and Diocletian, both of whom had to stabilize the empire after protracted bouts of civil war and enjoyed long reigns. It is also relevant to the later empire (after AD 300) when rulers regularly had to balance threats and opportunities on different frontiers against the more limited resources that were available.

The rise and the survival of the Ottoman Empire for six centuries is one of the most important event of the European and Middle Eastern histories. At the apex of the Ottoman conquests in the mid-1500s, Süleyman the Magnificent pushed deep into Hungary and Mesopotamia, as well as making the empire the master of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Later sultans advanced into southern Russia, Caucasia, Persia and north Africa. In concert with these military successes, the empire transformed itself into a sophisticated administrative entity of great strength, which encouraged diversity, culture, learning and religious activity. The Ottoman high tide reached the gates of Vienna in 1683, only to fail because of faulty command decisions and internal deficiencies. While the Ottomans were trying to counter the military reverses, the forces of the socio-economic revolutions in the West and rapidly evolving market economies added new stresses to it. A new generation of sultans and members of the governing elite evolved, who were convinced of the need for modernisation and westernisation (both terms have been used synonymously and interchangeably) and were committed to change in order to keep the empire intact. They did achieve some results but they failed to stop the interventions and machinations of the Great Powers, which sought to benefit from the empire’s collapse. The Ottoman Empire gained notoriety as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ and additionally became a target for the forces of ethnic nationalism that fought to dismember it. The First World War became the swan song of the empire. For the first time since the 1680s, the Ottoman Army consistently defeated its European enemies. But it was too late. The empire, bankrupt and blockaded, could not match the resources of its enemies and surrendered.

Sondheim was an unknown and untested man of the professional theatre when Arthur Laurents suggested him as a possible collaborator on West Side Story. Sondheim had hoped to bring his music and lyrics to the Broadway stage, but Saturday Night (1955, with book by Julius and Philip Epstein) stalled after its main producer, Lemuel Ayers, died in August 1955. With this project stalled, Sondheim heeded the recommendation from his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, to seize the opportunity to work with Laurents, Bernstein, and Jerome Robbins. This article attempts to explain the opinions of Laurents and others in the mid-1950s that Sondheim’s lyrics were brilliant but his music left them cold. Sampling his early lyrics and Sondheim’s recordings of himself singing his songs, I show how his music might be considered challenging but would nevertheless propel his words and musical theatre in general to a greater understanding of music’s dramatic possibilities.

In this first global history of strategic practice, we define strategy making (following K. Kagan) as making choices, prioritising means in pursuit of political ends in the context of armed conflict, actual or threatened. The usage of the term took a long time to spread from the East Roman Empire to the Occident, and most civilisations discussed in these volumes did not have a distinct word to describe what they were doing in the modern sense. Yet by applying Kagan’s definition, we see evidence of complex reasoning and prioritisation of means and ways; even the greatest empires could not pursue unlimited ends. Our volumes bring together experts on each individual civilisation and period to explore analogous dimensions of strategy making: who are the enemies, and why? What means are available to them? What are the political strategic goals? And the central questions: how were ultimate and immediate goals formulated, and how were they linked up with military means? What were the enablers and limitations, in terms of geography, resources and other means, which produced distinctive approaches? But also, was there a transfer of ideas and methods? How were they translated, adopted, enacted, imitated and emulated in warfare around the world?

The Asia–Pacific War was caused by the expansionist ambitions of Imperial Japan, which by the 1920s had secured Taiwan, Korea and Manchuria. This strategy led to war with Nationalist China in 1937, and to provide fuel and supplies Japan seized the oil-rich Netherlands East Indies and Malaya. When the Japanese moved into southern Indo-China in 1941 the United States applied an oil embargo. Japan struck first at the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, hoping to form a defensive ring around its captured territories and reach an acceptable peace. But having been humiliated at Pearl Harbor, the United States would never have agreed to a negotiated peace.

The Allied strategy was largely reactive. To deter Japan, Britain applied the faulty Singapore Strategy. The US planned to advance gradually across the central Pacific, but were thwarted by Japan. Although the Allies’ overall strategy was to ‘beat Hitler first’, the United States continued to pursue and control the war in the Pacific. Given the industrial power of the United States, it was inevitable that it would prevail in the largely maritime war. By 1945 Japan was being strangled by the Allied blockade and conventional bombing. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 forced Japan’s surrender.

Here we lay the ground and define the parameters of this project. Definitions of strategy are discussed, giving the rationale for the one chosen to guide our work: Kimberly Kagan’s definition that sees evidence of strategy where prioritisation and choices about means of pursuing political aims at the level of the state (or higher social entity) have been made. This allows us to identify strategic decision making even when no documents have survived that contain explicit articulations of such reasoning.

One can divide sources regarding Byzantine strategy into three main categories: sources dedicated to the exposition of strategy, tactics and logistics, i.e. military manuals and administrative documents;' Byzantine historical narratives; and non-Byzantine historical accounts written in various dialects such as Slavic, Arabic and Armenian. Still, there is an ongoing debate whether military manuals reflected current tactical and strategic practise. Equally uncertain is the extent to which Byzantine historians employed military manuals or idealised biographies as models in order to present favoured figures in an ideal light. The emperor was usually the one who set priorities and objectives, assisted by advisers as well as by treatises on strategy and logistics. Sometimes, however, high-ranking military officers, the strategoi, local commanders who executed military and political authority over their districts, also took the initiative to undertake operations. The Byzantines faced various peoples: Slavic and Turkish peoples and polities threatened and occupied its Balkan frontier; Arabs, Turks and Armenians dominated the eastern frontier (Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia and Armenia), and the Normans, Crusaders and various pirates threatened Greece, Thrace and the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian Gulf. The objectives of the Byzantines varied according to the period. Defence and survival were among the dominant ones; others included retaliation, devastation of the enemy’s potential through raiding and acquisition of booty, marching deep and showing the flag in order to achieve more favourable treaties, the reconquest of lost key cities and fortresses, and, rarely, the total elimination of enemy polities. The Byzantines relied greatly on money and diplomacy to achieve their goals. When these were not enough, they would mobilise their army and navy comprising indigenous professional and semi-professional troops, as well as foreign and allied troops. The main priority in terms of strategy was to conduct military operations, as far as possible, on only one front at a time. The latter was chosen with various goals in mind: the control of major cities, fortresses, routes and mountain passes; the establishment of a client ruler; acquiring of a quick victory in order to enhance the emperor’s image; and acquiring an acknowledgement of the emperor’s overlordship in order to adhere to Byzantine political ideology which saw the emperor as the supreme ruler of the world and the legitimate claimant to the Roman Empire. It is interesting to note that religion seems to have played a lesser role than realpolitik and political ideology. When fighting their wars, the Byzantines mostly adhered to the advice found in military treatises, but there were also occasions when the neglect of such matters brought devastating defeats.

Warfare did not evolve in a linear fashion. This is most obvious on the physical level: the weapons and armies of polities across time and space have fluctuated in sophistication, so that early European medieval armies had more in common with ancient Israelite or Greek contingents than with the Roman war machinery, and, up to the nineteenth century or even the twentieth, raiding warfare in some parts of Africa or the islands of south-east Asia was akin to patterns of pre-Columbian warfare in the Americas, prehistoric warfare in Europe and ghazis and booty expeditions in Europe and around the Mediterranean. Where warfare’s aims went beyond mere raiding, for much of world history, the paucity or even absence of relevant sources has made it difficult to reconstruct political–strategic aims. We also encounter vast varieties conditioned in part by hard factors such as climate, geography and resources. We have encountered and possibly not always avoided the danger of squeezing cultural differences into a Procrustean bed of Western concepts and languages. Yet some striking patterns have emerged. Not only Indo-European cultures, but also Mongols and Chinese, came up with a strategic aim of establishing a universal monarchy, or defending against the imposition of such an overlordship. The forming of alliances for common strategic purposes and the defence of allies or clients is another widespread pattern, strategic co-operation counterbalancing long-term hostilities. The distinction between client states and allies was often blurred. Non-kinetic tools of strategy were also employed widely, from giving gifts, to tribute payments (again a distinction often difficult to make), to marriages to confirm peace treaties or cement alliances. And most cultures seem to have had some rules or code of honour with regard to the conduct of war which in many contexts imposed limits on the pursuit of strategic aims.

The strategies devised throughout the interwar years and applied in Europe at the beginning of the Second World War were related to the consequences of the Great War. Due to the Third Reich’s aggressive foreign policy, war broke out in September 1939. Germany’s grand strategy consisted in proceeding one front at a time and launching bold onslaughts destined to lead the enemy to the negotiation table. By signing the agreement of August 1939 with the Reich, the USSR expanded its territory and bought time. Italy tried to wage a ‘parallel war’ but failed and had to resort to German help. Britain and France stuck to a defensive strategy of checking the enemies’ offensives on the European continent, building up their forces with US support and finally counterattacking. Britain held on until the US went to war in December 1941, while the USSR narrowly managed to face the first German onslaught. From 1942, the Allies steadily implemented a broad strategy of pushing back the enemy forces on land, at sea and in the air, imposing unconditional surrender on the Axis powers. The latter’s total defeat and the emergence of new superpowers and weaponry paved the way for new strategic perspectives.

The creators of West Side Story were liberal artists who updated Romeo and Juliet amidst youth gangs and racism, and each felt the sting of discrimination because they were Jewish and gay, but neither good intentions nor their own status as ‘Others’ in American society allowed them to realize fully the class advantages they had over the Puerto Rican minorities depicted in their show. Through consideration of Theodor Adorno’s concept of ‘Culture Industry,’ what one learns about Bernstein from his 1970 meeting with the Black Panthers immortalized as ‘Radical Chic’ by Tom Wolfe, Teju Cole’s concept of the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex,’ how the show has been cast, and other lenses, the author demonstrates how West Side Story can be described as insensitive in areas of class, the politics of colour, and race. The chapter also considers Bernstein’s cultural appropriation of African American and Latinx tropes in his music.

This chapter traces Robbins’s formative training years, early career, and then focuses on several foundational shows that set-in motion his choreographic career along with lesser-known creations that helped shaped his mode of expression building up to West Side Story. I consider the tensions that continued to mount for Robbins between his personal life and his professional career and how they colour his way of working. This chapter draws out a collection of primary threads that weave together to create the dance-driven storytelling that comes to full fruition in West Side Story. Enroute, the chapter explores Robbins’s choreographic strategies, and ingenuities that began in his early career, helped along by key mentorships and collaborations with fellow artists both in ballet and musical theatre.