MacArthur desired to liberate the Philippines, but the issue would be decided by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. Forces under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz conducted a drive in the Central Pacific that by the summer of 1944 culminated with the seizure of the strategically crucial Mariana Islands. By that time, MacArthur’s forces had taken key points along the northern coast of New Guinea and had conquered the Admiralty Islands, isolating the major Japanese air and naval base at Rabaul. The question for the JCS was what to do once these operations concluded. The major objective would be bounded by Luzon, Formosa, and the China coast, with an invasion of Formosa initially seen as key to the defeat of Japan. MacArthur naturally viewed Luzon as the primary objective, while Admiral Ernest King in Washington and Admiral Nimitz in Hawaii looked towards Formosa. This disparity set off a storm of messages, planning, and controversy from March through September 1944 until the JCS finally decided the issue by deferring the invasion of Formosa and agreeing to allow MacArthur to liberate both Leyte and Luzon and the capital city, Manila.

The Conclusion recapitulates and offers an additional framing of the book’s findings. Perpignan’s history in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries had been dominated by efforts to adhere to the past, whether in the form of the town’s customs or the communal charter of 1197. Those efforts had been predicated on the assumptions that old was good, and that old was better than new. During the long fifteenth century, however, Perpignan no longer valued custom as it once had. In matters of municipal government, it no longer tried to adhere to the communal charter; as regards the ma armada, it could not prevent French and Aragonese kings from suppressing it and from taking control of the municipal government. Most importantly, townspeople began to operate according to new principles: the new was better than old, that the future could consist only of unpredictable change, and that what existed in the present would almost certainly have to be altered in the future. They became temporal relativists, and they did so before the sixteenth-century emergence of relativist thinking in European high culture.

Practice single-best-answer D8questions on airways, lungs and breathing, representing all presentations and conditions listed by the GMC in their content map for the MLA AKT, and referred to by the keywords in this book. All questions are specifically tailored to the level of knowledge required for foundation clinical practice in the UK, and comprehensive in breadth, separating out the different conditions and presentations listed by the GMC, and covering them all. Not only are correct answers provided, but also explanations for all the available answer options. Every question is supported by an individual topic in the companion book which is specifically authored to cover the knowledge required for foundation clinical practice in the UK.

Practice single-best-answer questions on primary and emergency care, representing all presentations and conditions listed by the GMC in their content map for the MLA AKT, and referred to by the keywords in this book. All questions are specifically tailored to the level of knowledge required for foundation clinical practice in the UK, and comprehensive in breadth, separating out the different conditions and presentations listed by the GMC, and covering them all. Not only are correct answers provided, but also explanations for all the available answer options. Every question is supported by an individual topic in the companion book which is specifically authored to cover the knowledge required for foundation clinical practice in the UK.

The nineteenth-century Russian poet Fedor Tiutchev rightly marvelled at his motherland’s remarkable growth: ‘Moscow, and Peter’s town, and Constantine’s city, these are the Russian realm’s cherished capitals … But where is its limit? Where are its borders? The fates will reveal them in times to come …’ Over the past 400 years an obscure principality deep in the forests on Europe’s eastern edge had expanded to become the largest continental empire on Earth – a domain whose immense territory stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean and beyond, covering one-sixth of the planet’s dry surface. Although somewhat diminished in size after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians today still nickname their country ‘the seventh continent’.

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.

International relations are built on the basis of popular discourse of amity and antipathy and on the social construction of friends and enemies. They reflect the work of political entrepreneurs who try to shape and promote a dominant narrative about what is the nature of the main problem confronting a nation, and what is the best solution to solve this problem. They seek publicity to mobilize popular and elite support for their favored policy, and the policy eventually chosen often reflects the relative success of their entrepreneurial skill rather than the strict merits of their proposed solutions.

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.

Summary of the argument, implications, directions for further research.

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.