Introduction

The fact that the past 200 years of western European military history have been dominated by small and asymmetrical warfare might seem a revelation. The term ‘war’ over the past two hundred years summons images of Napoleon, trenches and Hitler much more than it does of guerrilla fighters, barricades and ‘aerial policing’. But this new study of small wars and counterinsurgency is in fact rooted in an academic trend unabated since the 1960s. The ‘new military history’ of post-Second World War era answered a problem which divided conventional historians from military tacticians. As a scholar of Habsburg military history observed at the end of the 1960s, ‘Military men seldom possess the scholarly background, and often the detachment, necessary to evaluate historical materials; professional historians lack knowledge of military organization, tactics, and armament and therefore retreat to safer and more familiar ground’. Over the course of succeeding decades historians have bridged this chasm, driven in many cases by the overlapping features of war and society of small wars. The ‘dirty child’ of military history, in the words of one social historian, became an acknowledged subdiscipline, as war and society themes fed into new studies of gender and culture in the 1990s.