For over half a century, discussion of the relationship between military finance, organisation, and state development has been dominated by the contested concept of a ‘military revolution’; the belief that there were one or a few periods of fundamental change that transformed both war and wider European history. More recently, this has been supplemented by the idea of smaller, but more frequent ‘revolutions in military affairs’ (RMAs) as individual military organisations respond to, or anticipate, changes made by their likely opponents. Technology is generally considered to drive both forms of ‘revolution’, as innovative weaponry and institutional practice transform war, rendering older models ineffective and obsolete. Change flows through a series of chain reactions, as states adapt to new conditions, modifying their structures to sustain and direct altered armed forces, and revising their forms of interaction with society both to extract the necessary resources and to legitimate their use in war-making.

Russia emerged as a European power in the early eighteenth century with a suddenness that alarmed its neighbors – and indeed some of its more distant potential supporters. Russia’s newfound prominence was in large part the outcome of a series of international conflicts often referred to as “the Northern Wars.” Conflict over the fate of the eastern Baltic littoral had entered a new phase near the middle of the sixteenth century with the decline of the Livonian Order and the growing territorial ambitions of nearby states. Aside from the crusading Order itself, which had formally disbanded by 1561, the nearby states of Denmark, Sweden, Muscovy, Poland-Lithuania, and Brandenburg persistently battled one another over the fate of the littoral, in varying configurations but with surprisingly few intermissions until 1721. The more important of these multilateral conflicts are conventionally identified as the Livonian War (1558–83), the mid-seventeenth-century conflicts among Sweden, the Commonwealth, Muscovy, Brandenburg, and Denmark that included the Thirteen-Years’ War (1654–67), and finally the “Great Northern War” (1720–21) which ended in Russian victory. While the earlier conflicts remained relatively confined, in diplomatic and military terms, to Northern and Eastern Europe, the outcome of the last Northern War not only established the Russian Empire as the dominant Baltic state; it also led to Russia’s broader recognition as a major force in the broader European diplomatic world.

The dominant interpretation of warfare in the Indian subcontinent before the establishment of British rule is that it was comprised of unorganised melees by forces of undisciplined militia. This stemmed from the fact that pre-British Indian states were weak polities with divisible sovereignty; they were – to use the terminology of Burton Stein – segmentary states, lacking any concept of frontiers and standing armies. The divisive caste system of India further debilitated the pre-British indigenous states and armies. The argument goes that the rise of British power in the second half of the eighteenth century resulted in a sea change in warfare. The British introduced a bureaucratic state with standing armies capable of waging decisive battles and conclusive sieges in India. This interpretation dates back to two nineteenth-century British scholars of colonial India. They argued that Indians were incapable of constructing stable states and structured armies due to their racial failings. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians may have substituted a racial analysis for a cultural one, but otherwise they argue along more or less the same lines, that the limited scale of organised inter-state violence reflected the constraints upon the states of pre-British India.

The years of the French Revolution and First Empire are remembered as much for war and imperial expansion as for the great political and social reforms they introduced. The Revolutionaries saw themselves as sons of the Enlightenment, devoted to ideals of freedom and the betterment of humanity. Yet they unleashed a long period of almost continuous warfare, fought across the European continent and beyond, in North Africa and the Near East, in North America, Asia, and the Caribbean. In Europe, France faced a succession of coalitions of other European powers, from the First Coalition of 1792–7 – an international alliance that included Austria, Prussia, Britain, Spain, Piedmont, Naples, and Sardinia – through to the final coalition, the Seventh, which wearily regrouped to defeat Napoleon after his ill-judged return to France in 1815. The other governments of Europe feared France’s political ambitions as much as its military might, and they invariably saw themselves as the victims of French aggression, forced to make war to protect their territory from attack. Britain also feared the challenge to its naval and colonial supremacy which a revitalised France would pose; for London the war was as much about Jamaica and India as the balance of power in Continental Europe, about global competition for resources as much as the ideas of the Revolution in France.

Around 1900, scholars commonly marked modern history from the French invasion of Italy in 1494. The size of the army that crossed the Alps – about 30,000 men – and its use of field artillery to batter down the curtain walls of ancient towns was, supposedly, unprecedented. As France’s claims in Italy were subsequently challenged by Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, the duchy of Milan and other Italian states collapsed, or changed hands, with astonishing abruptness. Today, it is no longer clear that the campaigns of the Wars of Italy (1494–1559) were so sharply differentiated from those of the last phase of the Hundred Years’ War (1415–53). But the political cataclysms of our own time seem to confirm Niccolò Machiavelli’s insights into the precariousness of power at the turn of the sixteenth century. No boundary was sacred, and no government lacked a portfolio of ideas for expansion, to be tested if circumstances seemed ripe. Since a power dominant in a given region often worked to keep things as they were, one might distinguish between ambitious governments eager for war and cautious governments concerned to preserve what they had. Any move by a hegemonic power was taken by its rivals as an attempt to reduce them to abject servitude.

Ottoman wars from the mid-fifteenth century through the end of the eighteenth century fundamentally changed the geopolitics of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and the Middle East. The Ottomans emerged in West Asia Minor toward the end of the thirteenth century. Known as “Turks” in contemporaneous Europe, the Ottoman ruling elite incorporated people of a wide variety of ethnic origins who considered themselves the followers and descendants of Osman (d. 1324?), the dynasty’s founder. Those loyal to the dynasty of Osman used the Turkish designation of “Osmanlı” (Turkish, “of Osman”), which over time came to be rendered in English as “Ottoman.” Within three generations after Osman’s death, the Ottomans had either conquered or subjugated into vassalage most of the preexisting polities and rival dynasties in the Balkans and Asia Minor. Timur Lenk’s victory over the Ottomans near Ankara in 1402 temporarily checked Ottoman expansion. Still, the dynasty recovered, and by 1453 Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1444–46, 1451–81) sealed the Ottomans’ status as a formidable military power by conquering Constantinople, the capital of the thousand-year-old Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire. Expansion through conquest continued well into the sixteenth century. Ottoman battlefield victories under Sultan Selim I (r. 1512–20) against the Safavids of Persia (Chaldiran in 1514) and the Mamluks of Syria and Egypt (Marj Dabiq in 1516 and Raydaniyya in 1517) and under Sultan Süleyman (r. 1520–66) against the Hungarians (Mohács in 1526) resulted in spectacular Ottoman territorial gains in eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan, Syria, Egypt, and Hungary.

This chapter studies the history of European expansion in the oceans and the seas stretching east from the Cape of Good Hope. It aims to look at European violent activity here within the broader context of the history of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the South Chinese Sea, and the Pacific Ocean. In this short chapter, only a few major developments can be traced. Roughly three phases can be distinguished: first, armed vessels – sea power – opened the door for later European success. Then overseas bases – factories – were consolidated by the construction of fortresses. Finally, the Europeans – the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English, and the French – became drawn into military enterprises inland. This chapter, though, focuses on the naval aspects of European expansion, more specifically on the use of warfare to support overseas trade or to prevent competitors from trading.

After the conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru, Spanish dominance in the Americas was maintained through a combination of “soft” and “hard” power: a mixture of armed coercion and an elaborate legal-administrative apparatus which ensured that tension rarely escalated into full-blown conflict. The sturdiness of Spain’s empire may also be attributed to other significant factors, including epidemiology (differential immunity), topography, and the avoidance of certain types of military engagement, all of which tended to intersect with or reinforce the deployment of “soft” and “hard” power. There were at least three broad threats to Spain’s dominance: external enemies, particularly rival European states covetous of the economic advantages Spain obtained from its New World dominions; unsubdued Amerindians on the fringes of Spanish settlement, who clung to their autonomy and effectively controlled vast swathes of territory through to the end of the colonial period; and an internal, heterogeneous group from all rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, from wealthy, privileged merchants to mistreated African slaves. At some point or other from 1521 until 1808, an internal challenge to Spanish dominance emerged from every sector of colonial society. Whether by design or felicitous coincidence, external and internal threats to Spanish dominance were rarely coterminous, which may help to explain the empire’s resilience and longevity.

Parallel to the anti-Jewish policy of the National Socialists that culminated in mass murder, so-called “Judenforschung” was established in the Third Reich as an independent field of study, outside traditional disciplines, through a number of institutions, publications, and public events. In Nazi “Judenforschung,” antisemitism was the leading principle, and the antisemitically constructed “Jewish Question” was the focus of research activity. Thereby, contrary to the tradition of German academia, themes of Jewish history became in themselves respectable subjects of research. The chapter gives an overview of the different institutions for “Judenforschung” in the Third Reich and the dynamics of the field from the mid 1930s until the end of the Second World War; presents different responses to and perceptions of Nazi “Judenforschung” during and after the Second World War; analyzes the relationship between scholarship and antisemitism in Nazi “Judenforschung” that is crucial for the whole research field and its practice in the Third Reich; discusses the role of scholarship in the Holocaust; and finally explores the role of scholars in perpetrating Nazi crimes.

This chapter examines how the Holocaust affected thinking about the humanities and social sciences throughout the West. It offers an intellectual history of key responses to the Holocaust, with an emphasis on political philosophy and social theory. Major intellectuals (Arendt, Adorno, Agamben), as well as less well-known thinkers (Günther Anders, Moishe Postone) are considered. The trajectory of post-Holocaust thought forms the throughline. In the first postwar decades, the Jewish genocide was considered as part of a broader eruption of war and totalitarian violence, while more recent thinkers have tended to subsume the entire history of Western violence, perhaps even “the West” itself, under the sign of the Holocaust.

This chapter traces the long trajectory of Holocaust testimony from the 1940s to the present. It notes that there are different temporal registers for testimony, from accounts offered during the war to retrospective accounts offered after 1945, sometimes decades later. It notes the ways in which the testimony considered valuable expanded over time to include not just that of survivors of camps or ghettos, but also that of hidden children or Jews living in hiding with false papers. It also evolved in content, as testimony came to not just remember the dead, but also shape the living and the reconstruction of Jewish life. Even material culture has been incorporated into testimony, as artifacts from survivors have become “sacred relics” of a sort.

Few events, if any, in the modern era have been more disturbing than the Holocaust. This four-volume Cambridge History, with over 100 contributions from leading scholars in the field, represents the most wide-ranging effort in decades to grapple with the catastrophe. The present moment seems an ideal time to offer such an extensive review. Since the end of the Cold War there has been an explosion of scholarship on every aspect of the Holocaust, from origins and participation to memory and memorialization, from top-level decision-making to everyday responses and experiences across all the regions involved. As part of this wave of new work there has been an integration into English-language scholarship of historiographies too long segregated into separate enclaves, not least the extraordinarily rich Yiddish-language and other Jewish research of the early postwar period (in whose recovery several authors in this collection have played a pivotal role). All this cries out for a synthesis.

The chapter opens with the challenge of connecting fascism to explanations of the Holocaust, given the many distinctive, or purportedly distinctive, elements of National Socialism, not least the radical character of its antisemitism. The chapter argues, however, that thinking about fascism in relation to the Holocaust has three main virtues. First, it prompts us to reconsider the boundaries and distinctiveness of both fascism and Holocaust. Secondly, it suggests that fascist ideology made some critical moves that helped make the Holocaust conceivable and possible. Finally, fascist taboo-breaking helped to create receptive audiences and collaborators across Europe, “catalysing, and radicalising a nexus of local eliminationist agencies.”

Few events, if any, in the modern era have been more disturbing than the Holocaust. This four-volume Cambridge History, with over 100 contributions from leading scholars in the field, represents the most wide-ranging effort in decades to grapple with the catastrophe. The present moment seems an ideal time to offer such an extensive review. Since the end of the Cold War there has been an explosion of scholarship on every aspect of the Holocaust, from origins and participation to memory and memorialization, from top-level decision-making to everyday responses and experiences across all the regions involved. As part of this wave of new work there has been an integration into English-language scholarship of historiographies too long segregated into separate enclaves, not least the extraordinarily rich Yiddish-language and other Jewish research of the early postwar period (in whose recovery several authors in this collection have played a pivotal role). All this cries out for a synthesis.

Jews trying to survive in Poland, on the “Aryan” side, were exposed to permanent risk of detection not so much by the Germans, but by their Polish neighbors, passers-by, officers of the “Blue” police and the ever-present szmalcovnicy (blackmailers). The behavior, cultural and religious codes, speech, aand stereotyped physical characteristics of Jews conspired to make Jewish survival so very unlikely.

This chapter discusses the emergence of networks of help and rescue for and by Polish Jews during the Holocaust. It focuses on the activities of individual non-Jews who risked not only harsh measures imposed by the Germans but also social ostracism. The chapter stresses the centrality of Jews’ participation in the rescue initiatives, in particular the role of the Council to Aid Jews “Żegota.”