Wars And Revolutions

War and Revolution identifies and takes to task a reactionary trend among contemporary historians, one that’s grown increasingly apparent in recent years. It’s a revisionist tendency discernible in the work of authors such as Ernst Nolte, who traces the impetus behind the Holocaust to the excesses of the Russian Revolution; or François Furet, who links the Stalinist purges to an “illness” originating with the French Revolution. The intention of these revisionists is to eradicate the revolutionary tradition. Their true motives have little to do with the quest for a greater understanding of the past, but lie in the climate of the present day and the ideological needs of the political classes, as is most clearly seen now in the work of the Anglophone imperial revivalists Paul Johnson and Niall Ferguson. In this vigorous riposte to those who would denigrate the history of emancipatory struggle, Losurdo captivates the reader with a tour de force account of modern revolt, providing a new perspective on the English, American, French and twentieth-century revolutions.

Revolution within a state almost invariably leads to intense security competition between states, and often to war. In Revolution and War, Stephen M. Walt explains why this is so, and suggests how the risk of conflicts brought on by domestic upheaval might be reduced in the future. In doing so, he explores one of the basic questions of international relations: What are the connections between domestic politics and foreign policy? Walt begins by exposing the flaws in existing theories about the relationship between revolution and war. Drawing on the theoretical literature about revolution and the realist perspective on international politics, he argues that revolutions cause wars by altering the balance of threats between a revolutionary state and its rivals. Each state sees the other as both a looming danger and a vulnerable adversary, making war seem both necessary and attractive. Walt traces the dynamics of this argument through detailed studies of the French, Russian, and Iranian revolutions, and through briefer treatment of the American, Mexican, Turkish, and Chinese cases. He also considers the experience of the Soviet Union, whose revolutionary transformation led to conflict within the former Soviet empire but not with the outside world. An important refinement of realist approaches to international politics, this book unites the study of revolution with scholarship on the causes of war.

Reassesses the role of revolution as a force that has shaped the development of world politics.

This book studies the changes that have marked war in the Western World since the thirteenth century.

This volume examines the impact of the wars in the Atlantic world between 1770 and 1830, focusing both on the military, economic, political, social and cultural demobilization that occurred immediately at their end, and their long-term legacy and memory.

This book is a comprehensive study of the Iraq Wars in the context of the revolution in military affairs debate.

The author shows the resiliency of British society as it held together against manifold events. His particular emphasis on war and empire illuminates the important relationship between the evolution of the British polity and imperial and international affairs.

First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. We can define war as organised fighting between groups of individuals belonging to the same species but occupying distinct territories, thus distinguishing war from fights between isolated individuals as well as from struggles between groups living intermingled within the same territory, which can be classified as rebellions, revolutions, riots and so on.The articles included in this volume were written in the 1970s and 1980s and published in very diverse journals and proceedings of conferences, in one case only in German.

The essays in this volume examine the historical place of revolutionary warfare on both sides of the Atlantic, focusing on the degree to which they extended practices common in the eighteenth century or introduced fundamentally new forms of warfare.