The New “New” Military History: Recent Work on War in the Age of Revolutions

Abstract

* I would like to thank Heather Perry for helping me to conceptualize this essay and providing useful references on the “new” military history and especially the world wars of the twentieth century, and Jennifer Heuer for providing me with astute edits and suggestions on an earlier draft. This essay is dedicated to thememory of Katherine Aaslestad, a pioneer in combining cultural and military approaches to the Age of Revolution, who passed away in 2021. Katherine was a model scholar and mentor who helped me (and many others) to navigate this field, and she is much missed. Recent books reviewed in this essay include Walter Bruyère-Ostells, Benoît Pouget, and Michel Signoli, eds., Des chairs et des larmes: Combattre, souffrir, mourir dans les guerres de la Révolution et de l’Empire, 1792–1815 (Aix-en-Provence: Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2020), pp. 272; Beatrice De Graaf, Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. xii1506, $39.99 (cloth), $32.00 (e-book); Beatrice De Graaf, Ido de Haan, and Brian Vick, eds., Securing Europe after Napoleon: 1815 and the New European Security Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. x1316, $105.00; Thomas Dodman,What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. xii1276, $113.00 (cloth), $38.00 (paper), $37.99 (e-book); Alan Forrest, The Death of the French Atlantic: Trade, War, and Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 352, $53.00; Mark Hewitson, Absolute War: Violence and Mass Warfare in the German Lands, 1792–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. xviii1298, $100.00; Katie Hornstein, Picturing War in France, 1792– 1856 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 208, $76.00 (cloth), $70.00 (e-book); Nick Mansfield, Soldiers as Citizens: Popular Politics and the NineteenthCenturyBritishMilitary, Studies in Labor History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), pp. 264, $130.00 (cloth), $49.99 (paper); Alexander Mikaberidze, The Napoleonic Wars: A Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 960, $41.95; Satish Padiyar, Philip Shaw, and Philippa Simpson, eds., Visual Culture and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 264, $180.00 (cloth), $52.95 (paper); Christy Pichichero, The Military Enlightenment: War and Culture in the French Empire from Louis XIV to Napoleon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017), pp. xi1318, $53.95 (cloth), $27.95 (paper), $18.99 (e-book).