Independent India developed a three-tiered approach to its grand strategy: first, dealing with the challenges of national integration and threats on its immediate periphery from Pakistan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC); second, carving a role for itself as a significant actor in the emergence of a recently decolonised Asia; third, attempting to shape the post-war global order through ideational means. It was able, to a very considerable extent, to achieve its first goal although it failed to secure its Himalayan border with the PRC and suffered a disastrous military defeat in 1962. Its second objective ultimately failed to materialise, largely because of flawed strategies and domestic constraints. The final aim met with very partial success. It played an outsized role in promoting decolonisation, had a limited impact on global disarmament negotiations and made minor contributions to the peaceful resolution of international disputes. Until the end of the Cold War, while India’s stated strategic goals mostly remained the same, it lacked the material capabilities and requisite moral authority to influence key developments in global politics. Only with renewed economic growth, growing military clout and an expanded diplomatic presence has India now become a more influential actor in global politics. However, domestic political choices may undermine the realisation of all three goals.

The Civil War provides an example of a war between two democratic powers with similar constitutions, styles of government and military culture. This helps produce some similarities in strategy making (particularly the role of commanding generals) but also distinct differences, such as the control exercised by respective presidents. The differences in approach are apparent from the beginning of the war. The initial Confederate strategy of a cordon defense arose not from its president, Jefferson Davis, or his officials but from governors and commanders in the field. The Union’s initial strategy, the Anaconda Plan, came from the Union General in Chief, Winfield Scott. This position gave the Union’s creation of strategy a focus which the Confederates did not possess, leading to poor co-ordination of military forces across the Confederacy and weak political control of the South’s generals. This produced blunders such as the Confederate invasion of Kentucky – which had declared itself neutral – without Davis’s knowledge or consent. This was also an example of poor political military control in the South. By comparison, the leadership of Abraham Lincoln – after a weak start – provides an interesting case of the beneficial effects of strong political leadership in the creation and execution of strategy.

From the 16th century onwards, the Republic of the United Provinces, or the Dutch Republic, developed into a state with extensive maritime economic activities (fisheries, trade and whaling) with an extensive trade network in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and North and South America. In the wake of these developments, the navy of the republic found itself involved in many conflicts throughout the early modern era. Sometimes this was for conquest, but most of the time these involvements were to defend. In other words, the maritime power of the republic was mostly used for defensive, rather than offensive, operations. In this chapter we will explore two cases where the republic used naval powers: the Eighty Years War (1568–1648), a struggle between a few rebellious states in the Netherlands and the Spanish Habsburg Empire, and three wars between England and the republic that happened in the second half of the seventeenth century. We will discuss the sources, the presence of a maritime revolution, and the question of who was in charge in deciding the objective for the creation of grand strategy, who were the opponents, what were the causes of the wars, what where the objectives, what means were at the disposal of the republic to achieve its objectives, how priorities were decided and to what degree did cultural and emotional factors play a role in prioritisation.

Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great, despite coming to power in similar circumstances, approached their rule in very different ways. In particular, it suggests that along with a contrast of style, in Keegan’s terms Alexander being a ‘heroic’ leader, his father an ‘unheroic’, one their approach and, as a consequence, the aims and practice of their strategies were quite different. While it could be argued that Philip’s was simply one of survival exacerbated by ever more ‘mission creep’ towards the south of Greece, here it is suggested that instead Philip had from very early on a firm proactive vision of ruling all Greece and used an integrated strategy of diplomacy, financial subversion, and military force to achieve that end and on its success established a firm method of retaining his rule. In contrast, Alexander, while tactically brilliant, unlike his father was a reactive rather than a proactive strategist and his campaigns are best seen as a series of micro-strategies responding to specific circumstances as opposed to an overarching vision. This approach explains the lack of a firm political strand to his strategy and the subsequent collapse of his empire on his death.

Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) was a poet firmly embedded in tradition, not a radical innovator but always aware of his predecessors and alert to ways of adapting and improving the models they provided. The exception that proves the rule is the Onegin stanza, the only instance in all of Pushkin’s oeuvre where he created his own stanzaic form. He did so for his unprecedented ‘novel in verse’ Eugene Onegin (Evgenii Onegin), widely considered the cornerstone of the Russian literary tradition. Composed from 1823 to 1831 and published serially between 1825 and 1832, the work is marked by sudden shifts in theme, character, setting, and mood.

Translated Byzantine lives of saints occupied considerable space in the hagiographic corpus of Rus and medieval Russia. But original (non-translated) vitae differ significantly from their Greek models in several respects: the very causes of their subjects’ sanctity (the Rus corpus emphasises saintly princes and founders of monasteries); their extremes of self-mortification (as in the case of Varlaam of Keret); and the extravagance of their feats (such as those of Andrew of Crete, or Petr and Fevroniia). Compared to Byzantine hagiography, the Lives of holy fools are overrepresented in the repertoire of medieval Rus, while female saints are underrepresented in it. In the modern era, Russian literature has drawn heavily on the medieval vitae. This tradition became pronounced in the mid-nineteenth century, but communist writers of the twentieth century also fashioned their heroes in the hagiographic mould.

This chapter describes the development of Russian drama over the first two centuries of its history. It begins with the court theatre of the seventeenth century, which formed under the influence of Polish and Ukrainian examples, and goes on to trace the slow development of public theatre. The chapter presents the political and social transformation of the audience as both a driving force behind the evolution of Russian drama and an important theme of numerous authors, including but not limited to Aleksandr Sumarokov, Denis Fonvizin, Aleksandr Griboedov, Nikolai Gogol, and Aleksandr Ostrovskii. The work of these authors reflected the shifting values and conditions of Russian society and state ideology, and influenced spectators and readers by offering up models of behaviour.

This chapter outlines the history of Russian Realism against a European backdrop. In the Russian Empire, as in Europe, there were no influential aesthetic manifestos predating the rise of Realist literature. Although the first seeds of the movement can be seen in the work of Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, and the critic Vissarion Belinskii, this chapter considers the dominant period of Russian Realism to be the period from 1845 to the 1880s. The Natural School foregrounded the genre of the physiological sketch and produced the first Realist novels by Fedor Dostoevskii, Aleksandr Herzen, and Ivan Goncharov. The ‘High’ Realism of the 1850s−80s featured a proliferation of the novel as a genre and thematic preoccupations with the role of gentry, the peasant question, political radicalism, the ‘woman question’, and bureaucracy.

This chapter describes the process whereby modern Russian literature came into being and entered the western European cultural mainstream in the eighteenth century. The period witnessed the creation of a modern vernacular Russian literary language and saw the development of the basic features of a modern literature with its literary and institutional infrastructure. The term ‘Classicism’ came into use in the 1820s as a retroactive label that disparaged the previous century’s literature as hopelessly rule-bound and obsolete, but this hardly corresponds to its complex, dynamic, and in fact intensely creative character. The chapter surveys the period through the lens of the modern literary language, with a focus on the creation of the so-called ‘Slaveno-Russian cultural and linguistic synthesis’ of mid-century that resolved the problem of the Baroque heritage and fundamentally shaped the literary practice of the age.

This chapter traces the development of Russian poetry from the earliest known texts to the late nineteenth century. The emphasis is on versification (syllabic, syllabo-tonic, and tonic [also called accentual] systems, all of which appear at times in Russia), genre, and style. Examples come primarily from the work of canonic poets. A distinction is drawn between folkloric and literary verse, which intersected only infrequently. Some attention is devoted to the ways that Russian poetry was indebted to Polish, German, and French models. The focus is on two periods: the eighteenth century, when secular Russian literature first began to flourish, and the ‘Golden Age’ of Aleksandr Pushkin.