Investigations of a Dog

Following on from my previous post, these are some random thoughts on how military history might develop in the future. This post points out a few examples of cutting edge work that I’m aware of and some possibilities for using new approaches to military history.

I’m increasingly turning against the whole idea of dividing academic studies into disciplines, sub-disciplines, periods, and specialisations. To put it bluntly, I think a “discipline” is not much more than a set of blinkers and an accumulation of cultural baggage. In my ideal world there would be no disciplines, only problems and methodologies. Researchers (individually or in groups) would identify a problem which they considered to be interesting and important, then attempt to solve it by applying the methodologies they considered most appropriate. This isn’t just a utilitarian approach in which research has to be “useful”. By “problem”, I just mean a question which the researchers would like to answer. The methodologies could and perhaps should be very disparate, destroying distinctions between humanities and science. For example, the question “what is meaning?” might need to be answered through a combination of structuralism, post-structuralism, information theory, cybernetics, cognitive psychology, neurology, genetics, memetics, computer science, and perhaps some other things that haven’t been invented yet. Thus spoke Zarathustra, and left reality.

Returning to reality, I can’t see this happening any time soon. I’m going to have to accept that we’re stuck with departments and disciplines. In that case, military history is just as valid and significant as any other sub-discipline within or outside history. War affects nearly all human societies, and affects most aspects of those societies. You can’t understand the past without understanding war, just like you can’t understand the past without understanding gender, or culture, or economics. A certain amount of military history needs to be integrated into all general history degree courses, as it was in my BA at Reading. On top of that, we need at least a few dedicated military history departments or centres which offer courses for graduates who want to specialise in military history.

I think it would be a mistake to construct a binary opposition between strategic/operational/tactical history on the one hand, and “war and society” on the other. Miller is wrong to see social and cultural history as alien parasites which are killing military history. The “new military history” is an example of military history successfully adapting to changing circumstances and getting ahead of the game by including aspects social history which had been ignored even by social historians. Military history can and should include all these things and more. They are not opposed to each other, they are inextricably linked. For example, the impact of armies on economy and society is heavily influenced by where the armies are and what they are doing. To understand this, you have to know something about operations, and to understand operations you have to know how they were influenced by logistics and finance, which brings us back to the impact of war on economy, society, and government.

Ultimately, everything is connected to everything else somehow or other, not just in military history, but in the whole of human and non-human history. I think most historians realise that, but in practice time and money are limited and so the scope of teaching and research has to be limited to match. Nevertheless, I’d like to see military history become broader and more eclectic. In terms of teaching, this might just put more pressure on resources and make prioritising more difficult, but on the other hand it might make it easier for military history to be integrated into history degree courses. I don’t really know anything about teaching because I’ve always focused on research, so I won’t say much more about it.

I know more about research and I think there is a lot of scope for making military history research “sexy”. Right now, cultural history/cultural studies seems to be the most fashionable thing around. Military history should see this as an opportunity rather than a threat. The cultural history of war has great potential, both in terms of the impact of war on culture and the impact of culture on war. For example, Esther MacCallum-Stewart is doing some really exciting work on cultural perceptions of the First World War and on representations of war in computer games. We need more of this.

Cultural history is strongly associated with literary and cultural theory in a way that military history isn’t. By the time I finished my PhD I was still completely unaware of theory. I’m not blaming anyone else for that ignorance, because if anyone had tried to teach me about theory back then I wouldn’t have been interested anyway. Now it seems quite strange that I could have got my doctorate without ever having heard of Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard, or Baudrillard. Even Ferdinand de Saussure was just a character in a Magnetic Fields song whose name didn’t have nearly as much significance for me as Holland-Dozier-Holland. I hope something so extreme couldn’t happen now, but I get the impression that military history is still much more traditional and less theoretically aware than cultural history. If these thinkers are wrong, we at least need to be able to say why rather than just ignoring them.

A big mistake that I see historians making quite often is to lump all theories together and label the whole thing as “postmodernism”. I prefer splitting to lumping, so I have to point out that there isn’t one Theory but many theories and approaches beside postmodernism, not all of which are necessarily compatible. Some of these theories raise fundamental questions about what we can know and how we can know it. Again, this should be seen as an opportunity rather than a threat. Reassessing the epistemology of military history can make the discipline stronger.

Cultural and theoretical approaches to military history could throw up new questions and new ways of addressing old questions. Mark Grimsley has already given a lot of thought to postcolonial and postmodern approaches to military history and noted some of the most important work in these areas. Meanwhile, in a post about war nicknames, Esther MacCallum-Stewart notes how armies can have their own language and culture. There is a lot more potential in the study of armies as a sub-culture, and the relationships between military and civilian culture. David French recently published a cultural history of British Army regiments in the 19th and 20th centuries (Military Identities: The Regimental System, the British Army, and the British People C.1870-2000, Oxford, OUP, 2005), which I haven’t read yet, but looks very promising. It’s got me wondering whether the concept of conspicuous consumption can be applied to military history. When I was researching what armies bought, I assumed their purchases were utilitarian, but this might not be entirely true. What role did the display of uniforms, flags, equipment, and even horses, play in legitimation of causes and the establishment of collective identities? There must still be plenty of potential PhD topics in that.

One of the newest approaches to literature and culture is eco-criticism. This focuses on the relationship between the human and the non-human (although many eco-critics are trying to reclaim the word “nature” from centuries of cultural baggage, I tend to think this is a lost cause; “non-human” is much less problematic), and is a radical break from the anthropocentric focus of all previous approaches, whether traditional or theoretical. This can only go so far, since most of the time we can only access the non-human past through sources created by human culture. Nevertheless, eco-criticism gives us a very different perspective on human culture and reminds us that the “right” of humans to exploit the non-human is an ideology constructed in human culture. I find this an exciting and useful approach, not least because I have a long track record of researching the use of horses in war.

Hayden White is famous/notorious (depending on your point of view) for criticising the ways historians use certain devices to create a false sense of truth and objectivity. This is something all historians need to consider, but there are some unique considerations for military history. For example, it’s almost a truism that squares and arrows on a map aren’t very accurate representations of the messy realities of campaigns and battles. I don’t know whether anyone has done any work on finding alternative ways of representing operations and tactics in time and space, but it’s something I’d like to see more people thinking about.

One unusual thing about military history is the position it occupies somewhere between academic and popular history. We should be careful not to throw that link away. The main danger of embracing theory is that while it impresses academics, it can also alienate general readers. I don’t have a solution to that dilemma, but it’s worth pointing out that not all literary criticism is full of pretentious jargon. Whatever its other limitations might be, new historicism certainly knows how to grab the reader’s attention with fascinating and unusual anecdotes.

The potential of information technology is both more obvious and less controversial. Digitization of records is already making academic research easier and cheaper, and making primary sources accessible to non-academics. In the distant future this could lead to major changes in the role of the academic historian and the way that history is written, but for now we need to concentrate on building new digital resources. This will involve being eclectic and inclusive rather than trying to privilege military history over other interests. Funding applications for major digitization projects need to show that the resources created will be useful to a large number and broad range of researchers. Stressing the interactions between war, society, economy, and culture are crucial, since records related to armies and wars can be highly relevant to non-military historians.

The civil war administrative records which dominated my PhD research are full of the experiences of ordinary men and women, and provide unique insights into the English economy which we don’t have for earlier or later years in the seventeenth century. When I started my PhD I thought that women’s history wasn’t relevant to my project. Three years of going through SP28 persuaded me that I couldn’t ignore women’s history. This is just one class of war-related documents in the PRO. There are many others. For example, they have started putting scans of First World War British Army battalion war diaries online. This is a good start, but imagine how much better it would be if the full text of every diary was digitized and XML tagged, creating a fully searchable body of records linked to scans of trench maps. That would be an amazing resource for academic research and teaching on operations and tactics, and for amateur enthusiasts, family historians, wargamers, re-enactors, game designers, film makers etc.

Finally I’d like to point to Joshua Goldstein’s War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge, CUP, 2003).This is on my “to read” pile, and when I do read it I might find that it’s totally wrong. Nevertheless, I think it’s exactly the kind of ambitious and eclectic work that military historians should be attempting. In the course of examining the relationship between war and gender, and trying to find out why women have mostly been excluded from combat roles, Goldstein makes use of approaches as diverse history, anthropology, psychology, and biology. Whatever the merits of his proposed solution, he has certainly identified a very important problem and shown that military history and gender history don’t have to be opposed to each other.

Bibliography

1. David French, Military Identities (OUP: Oxford, 2005).
2. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender (CUP: Cambridge, 2003).