Rethinking Military History: A Critical Book Review
This paper critically reviews Jeremy Black's Rethinking Military History (2004), assessing both its contributions and its limitations as a theoretical intervention in the field. The review examines Black's six identified problems with military historiography—including Eurocentricity, technological determinism, the land-sea distinction, and insufficient attention to political tasking—and evaluates the strength of his proposed correctives. While praising Black's careful argument structure and his challenges to technological bias, the reviewer argues that Black fails to adequately account for the reciprocal influence that actual military institutions exert on the historiography that studies them, a blind spot that undermines one of his central goals.
- Overview and Structure of Black's Argument: Black's goals, scope, and argumentative structure
- Problems Black Identifies in Military Historiography: Six core problems Black diagnoses in the field
- The Land-Sea Distinction and Institutional Influence: How militaries shape the distinctions historians adopt
- Military Historiography's Failure of Self-Reflection: Historiography's uncritical relationship with its object
- Technology, Political Tasking, and Black's Core Contribution: Black's strongest argument against technological determinism
- Conclusion: Strengths, Shortcomings, and Scholarly Value: Final assessment of Black's book and its legacy
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What makes this paper effective
- The review balances genuine praise with pointed criticism, demonstrating sophisticated engagement rather than simple acceptance or rejection of Black's thesis.
- The author uses the land-sea distinction as a concrete, well-developed example to anchor the abstract critique about military institutions influencing historiography, making the argument accessible and persuasive.
- The paper situates military history within a broader disciplinary conversation — drawing comparisons to literary criticism and postcolonial studies — to measure Black's work against established scholarly standards.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper exemplifies evaluative synthesis: it does not merely summarize Black's argument but tests it against its own stated goals. The reviewer identifies the gap between what Black sets out to do (bring military history in line with other critical fields) and what he actually achieves, then uses that gap as the basis for an original scholarly observation about military historiography's self-conception.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a characterization of Black's project and overall thesis, then moves through Black's six identified problems in sequence before focusing in depth on the land-sea distinction as a case study for a broader critique. The middle sections develop the reviewer's original argument about institutional influence, while the closing section acknowledges Black's most valuable contributions — the challenges to technological determinism and the call for political tasking — before offering a measured final verdict.
Overview and Structure of Black's Argument
The goal of Jeremy Black's book Rethinking Military History is simultaneously modest and groundbreaking. Black describes it as "a short 'ideas book'" that nevertheless attempts "to re-position military history at the beginning of the twenty-first century" by identifying and challenging what he views as the central problems facing the discipline. He recognizes the potentially hubristic quality of this approach by noting that it is "the sort of remark guaranteed to raise every reviewer's ire," but, for the most part, Black does manage to succeed in succinctly outlining the practical issues facing military history without becoming overwhelmed by the task.
One must laud Black for the careful structuring of his argument. Like the most successful theoretical texts, he begins by outlining the problem, describes and justifies his particular theoretical approach, and then concludes with an application of that approach to the subject at hand in order to demonstrate its efficacy clearly. However, while Black's analysis goes a long way towards identifying the major problems of military history and offering solutions, he errs by not considering the symbiotic relationship between the discipline and its object. He regards military historiography as a field apart from the military itself, and in doing so fails to recognize that some of the major issues facing military historiography stem not solely from the practice of historians, but from their reliance on distinctions and definitions provided by the very military apparatus they discuss. This issue becomes clear when examining Black's treatment of the historical distinction between land and sea operations, though it surfaces elsewhere as well.
Problems Black Identifies in Military Historiography
In his preface, Black outlines what he sees as the most pressing issues facing military history, and he is careful to note that these issues stem not so much from the larger practice of military historiography as from the particular topics and concepts that historiography focuses on. Black argues that the practice of military history suffers from:
a) Eurocentricity — more specifically, a focus on Europe, especially Western Europe and North America, or, more precisely, the United States.
b) A technological bias in explaining military capability, and a fascination with technology in accounting for military developments — more specifically, a "machinization" of war.
c) A focus on leading powers and dominant military systems, leading to a paradigm/diffusion model of military capability and change.
d) A separation of land from sea conflict in most analysis.
e) A focus on state-to-state conflict, rather than on the use of force within states.
f) A lack of focus on political "tasking" in the setting of force structures, doctrines, and goals, and in the judging of military success.
Some of these problems may be viewed as specific examples of more general problems that have long faced historiography, such as the focus on Europe and the United States at the expense of the rest of the world, or the tendency to treat technology as the primary — and sometimes singular — driver of historical development. In these instances, Black is not proposing something entirely new so much as attempting to bring military history up to the standards of other fields. For example, while literary and cultural studies have confronted their colonial myopia since at least the 1970s, thanks to the work of Edward Said and others, military history has remained largely concerned with the "great" exploits of the Western world. When it has considered the larger world, it has often done so through extremely problematic, Eurocentric lenses — such as Samuel Huntington's notion of the "clash of civilizations" — lenses that ultimately misinform the public not only about the Western development of war, but also about the complexities of military history as such. As a result, military history has largely consisted of "thought about the place of war in Western societies," rather than the function and development of war in general.
The Land-Sea Distinction and Institutional Influence
Other problems in military historiography are matters of arbitrary distinctions whose problematic nature can be understood with little argument. For example, the largely unnecessary distinction between land and sea conflicts that Black points out appears problematic even on cursory examination. Although "the unnatural character of fighting at sea, and the need for specialized facilities in the form of ships, provide a very different context from that of conflict at land," Black notes that "it is not helpful to study it without the comparative context provided by conflict on land and in the air." Maintaining this separation is as unhelpful as, for example, discussing rural, agrarian communities without mentioning how they differ from urban, industrialized ones.
Black notes that "a distinct institutional context, in the shape of naval academies, has helped to underline the difference, as has the practice of naval history," but he does not examine the relationship between the two — an examination that would have greatly contributed to his larger argument. It seems reasonable to presume that the distinction maintained in military history between land and sea conflict is not due solely to "the sense among publishers that there is a distinctive and important market" in these two areas, but rather to the fact that military historiography has largely adopted the distinctions held by militaries themselves.
In other words, the fact that most major national militaries continue to maintain official divisions between their land, air, and sea forces — even as modern conflict usually involves highly coordinated joint operations — almost certainly contributes to the academic tendency to treat these forces and their conflicts as distinct phenomena. This omission stands out precisely because Black is so careful elsewhere to point out that "it is necessary to appreciate the pluralistic nature of warfare and then to build this into theoretical discussions about the process of military development."
While Black recognizes the importance of challenging received wisdom regarding the supposedly clear-cut nature of warfare, he seemingly ignores one of the most common means by which military historians have failed to challenge this wisdom. The fact that he appears reluctant or unable to recognize the influence that militaries themselves have on the practice of military historiography seems indicative of a broader tendency in the field to treat its object of study with a kind of reverence, such that the detrimental influence of military standards on critical rigor is not adequately considered. This failure is made all the more evident by Black's own stated goal of bringing military history in line with the critical and academic standards of other fields — yet this reluctance to note the ideological weight of militaries themselves is precisely the kind of factor that has kept military history from exhibiting the same critical rigor as those fields.
Conclusion: Strengths, Shortcomings, and Scholarly Value
Despite perpetuating some of the underlying problems inherent in all extant military history, Jeremy Black's Rethinking Military History nevertheless provides useful insight into some of the major issues facing military historiography. Furthermore, even the critical omissions discussed above point the way toward a more robust criticism of military history, because they highlight the influence of military organization, practice, and discourse on military history itself.
Thus, one may consider Black's book an important contribution to both military history and historical scholarship in general. Its shortcomings only serve to highlight the importance of continued self-reflection and examination on the part of military historians, and its contributions cut straight to the heart of those issues that have kept military history from demonstrating the same level of critical and academic rigor expected of other fields.
Bibliography
Black, Jeremy. "Determinisms and Other Issues." The Journal of Military History 68, no. 4 (2004): 1217–32.
Black, Jeremy. Rethinking Military History. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Black, Jeremy. "Victory in War: Foundations of Modern Military Policy." The Journal of Military History 71, no. 3 (2007): 983–4.
Grau, Lester W. "War since 1990." The Journal of Military History 73, no. 3 (2009): 1026–7.
Lynn, John A. "Breaching the Walls of Academe: The Purposes, Problems, and Prospects of Military History." Academic Questions 21, no. 1 (2008): 18–36.
Reid, Brian Holden. "Michael Howard and the Evolution of Modern War Studies." The Journal of Military History 73, no. 3 (2009): 869–904.
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