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Book Review
| Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology through History. By ALFRED CROSBY. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 206 + xii pp. $26.00 (cloth).Warfare in Inner Asian History (500–1800). Edited by NICOLA DI COSMO. Leiden: Brill, 2002. 456 + vii pp. $112.00.
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Between them, these two books contribute much to military history. From the perspective of this journal, the Cosmo volume is more important, not only because it contains far more material, but also because the chapters measure up to the subject and the introduction, a verdict that can be delivered in the case of far too few edited volumes. This is largely because the individual case studies, although disparate in time and space and based on highly detailed research on often difficult sources that require formidable linguistic skills, range widely in seeking to draw out conclusions. The most important, which emerges repeatedly, is the need to avoid a simplistic account of nomadic warfare, in particular an analysis based on innate ecological advantages. Instead, the contributors emphasize the limitations of the nomads, the need to consider inter-nomadic warfare, the extent to which nomad skills and success varied and changed, and the role of nomadic military culture in facilitating the transmission of military ideas and technology. |
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After an effective introduction by Nicola Di Cosmo presenting the major themes, there are ten essays. David Graff considers strategy and contingency in the Tang defeat of the Eastern Turks, 629–630, specifically the Tang ability to emulate the operational behavior and cavalry forces of their opponents, with their emphasis on speed and surprise. The flexibility and skill of the Tang are again in evidence in Michael Drompp's analysis of the Uighur-Chinese conflict of 840–848, while Peter Golden ranges widely in considering war and warfare in the pre-Cinggisid Western Steppes, in order to indicate common themes in nomadic warfare within a context in which the nomads oscillated between loosely or more tightly structured unions depending to some degree on external pressures. Golden suggests that, with few exceptions, nomads were not interested in large-scale conquests or the take-over of sedentary states. The latter, according to Golden, were better than the nomads at playing the "deadly game of divide and conquer." |
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