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I picked up this book for cheap some time ago, and I’m quite happy to have finally gotten to it. This is definitely on the “layman’s” side of military history, but he does a very good job with it.

The background and aftermath make up fairly significant portions of the book, and serve the purpose well. Especially nice is the chapter where he goes into the construction and outfitting of HMS Vanguard (Nelson’s flagship at the Nile). This lets him talk about ship designs of the period, the “74”s (which the Vanguard was), and what went into outfitting a complete ship at the time. Its mostly things I’ve seen elsewhere, but it’s well-presented here, and a worthy diversion.

The central part of the book of course is about Nelson’s chase back-and-forth across the Mediterranean, reconstructing not only the lines across the map that the French and British fleets took, but the missed opportunities, the gaps in information that crippled Nelson’s initial attempts to find the French fleet before it got to Egypt.

One of Lavery’s main ideas is that the Battle of the Nile was the central hinge of the the wars of the period, and was more important than Trafalgar, which does have better heroic trappings. He makes a good case for this, but not an especially great case, and much of the extended aftermath portion where he tries to drive this idea home drags a bit. The immediate aftermath, with the victorious British fleet still greatly damaged and working its way back to friendly bases to spread the news is however, still very interesting, and a part you don’t get to see as often.

David A. Bell tackles a fairly big concept in a merely moderate-sized book. The main thesis is that warfare underwent a profound change at the end of the Eighteenth Century that still drives how we think of it today.

Now, this has nothing to do with technical details, such as how deadly particular weapons are, or how fast an army can sweep across the landscape, or how more bigger and more complicated governments can finance bigger and more complicated armed forces. No, this is about how society as a whole views the concepts of “war”, “peace”, and the military itself.

Bell posits that warfare in Europe at this time was a relatively ordered and limited affair. Aristocratic gentlemen were expected to be well-rounded individuals, and part of that was knowledge and training in the arts of war. Men could be generals and courtiers and literati all at the same time, and this was expected of them. Contrast that to current norms where the military is almost a world apart, its own splinter society, with its own ethos and social circles. At the same time warfare has become less of a contest between limited elements of society, to being struggles between those societies themselves, with mass conscription, and the targeting of civilian populations.

Bell does well presenting the social shifts of this period, and has some very interesting things to say about the Enlightenment as something of a ‘peace movement’ that also came to embrace (in some threads at least) the idea of a final apocalyptic war to sweep aside the old order and bring about a more peaceful world (that is, a “war to end all wars”). He then traces these thoughts through Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, with the Vendee and the Spanish Ulcer coming in for especial attention.

However, I think Bell has mistaken an especially large tree for the forest. Human history is full of a tension between “total” and “limited” warfare, and what is acceptable varies over time and culture. He is so busy looking at this, fairly dramatic, shift, that he completely fails to acknowledge that this has ever been different. This weakens the overall argument and keeps it from being as informative as it might be. That said, the lens he his looking through is a worthwhile one, and this is a book to provoke thought, but it’s not as complete a package as he would like to believe.

The second volume of Sumption’s massive, and excellent history of the Hundred Years War covers just over twenty years, from 1347 to 1369. The first volume ended with the siege of Calais, which the English ended up occupying for 212 years.

Of course, a city on the coast by itself is not a very secure, nor self-sustaining location. So even as a truce is agreed to, it becomes a friction point as English troops start taking over other nearby locations and building up a proper defensive zone for the city, which became the Pale of Calais. This was made all the more important by the collapse of Flanders communes, and the Count of Flanders’ reasserting control, which meant that Calais was now the only realistic point of debarkation of an English army in northern France.

So even as repeated efforts at truces and real peace are made, there’s plenty of friction and not a little actual fighting. A few things complicate what would ordinarily have probably led to a renewed round of hostilities. First, the arrival of the Black Death disrupts plans, and more seriously(!) France’s finances are a shambles, and collecting money to collect troops is nearly impossible in any great scale.

Fortunately for France, England’s financial woes are also serious. There’s actually a fair amount of money coming in (unlike France, which misses out on a decade of economic prosperity enjoyed by the rest of western Europe), but just garrisoning Calais and other ‘static’ military expenditures eat up most of what is left after paying off the debts caused by the previous decade of warfare.

However, the real action is in south-western France, where all this trouble began. Companies of military adventurers had gotten fairly well organized (as far as such things go) and were carrying out operations of seizing local castles and fortified points, and then effectively holding the surrounding region for ransom. Then, they find somewhere else in reach of that point and take that.

This isn’t armies on the move, and sieges, great or small, these are quick operations done by surprise at night, generally by escalade (and I’ll save you trip to the dictionary; it means taking the place by putting ladders against the walls, and climbing over; this is also a commentary on how boring guard duty is). A lot of the book is actually taken up describing the course of these campaigns and showing how widespread they ended up. The upshot is that these regions are effectively no longer administered by France, and aren’t contributing any taxes, and most of the rest of France was insisting that taxes collected be used for local defense instead of providing an army to defeat the English and retake strategically important castles.

The ending portion of the book deals with the sequel to all of this as the formal Treaty of Bretigny puts these companies out of any official work, and both sides are trying to get them out so that the terms of the treaty can be implemented. This turns into several years of trying to corner and ship out of the country bands of experienced military adventurers.

Meanwhile, we have the King of Navarre, who has extensive holdings in France, has a number of grievances with the French court, and quite a lot of ambition. He murders one of John II’s advisors and launches several rounds of civil war with France. There’s the battle of Poitiers, in which John II is captured, and the interminable treaty wrangling after that (and need to gather a ‘king’s ransom’ for real). The Estates General and the Dauphin struggle for control, and neither can raise the money needed for the war effort or ransoming the king, and Paris ends up cut off on all sides and controlled a middle-class council. All of this erodes the power and prestige as France as a nation.

But all of this is not enough to actually dissolve it as an entity, and end of the book shows how French authority recovered in the late 1360s, as well as going into the complicated situation around Pedro of Castile and Henry of Trastamara, which both sides get involved in. Sumption takes his time with all these complications, which is why this is such a massive series, and of course, why it such an informative one. This is definitely an essential work on the period.

I picked this up for cheap on Kindle some time ago, and meant to get to it a lot sooner than this. Especially as its part of an interesting period as our perception of how the world works.

Winchester is as some pains to show how much of a change in thought was going on. This informs the main subject, which is a biography of William Smith. Smith is quite definitely Winchester’s big hero, and the source of his interest in geology. I’ve seen some complaints that Smith’s role in a lot of this is overemphasized, but I’ll have to leave that to people with a lot more knowledge than I. No matter how true that may be, much of the central focus is the map Smith produced, which is certainly a tour-de-force of applied practical knowledge and theory.

The most annoying point for me is yet another in medias res start to a popular history book. In this case, it centers Smith’s incarceration in debtor’s prison, or actually, when he gets out, and leaves London, where he’s been trying to get contacts with the upper classes to spread knowledge of his ideas. Frankly, his life, as presented in order in the main book itself is interesting enough to not need this sort of thing, and the constant referrals back to this part that haunt the book are annoying.

There’s quite a lot of extended asides during the book, which range in interest and presentation, but almost all are about painting the world around the subject (one chapter instead goes into Winchester’s interest in geology, and serves as an intro to Smith’s study of rocks instead). This is very effective in generating much needed context, which it should be, as it does occupy a fair amount of page count. But this combined approach is what makes this a good book worth reading, there’s plenty in here that layers in more knowledge of the world.

This was a difficult book for me. In general, an examination of food sources and consumption in the Revolutionary War era is a good topic. Personally, I found the treatment here not so good.

One problem, of course, is I want far more solid facts to go off of that could ever be available in that era. Another is consistent use of the word “hunger” (n. an uneasy sensation occasioned by the lack of food), used in ways which make me uneasy. Apparently the term has been redefined for the social sciences (“a condition in which a person cannot eat sufficient food to meet basic nutritional needs for a sustained period”), so I’m being something of a fuddy-duddy but that definition is never given in the book, either.

Herrman does define three other useful terms in her introduction however. Food diplomacy is the sharing of food, or lack thereof, in order cement alliances (or at least peace). Victual warfare is the usual scorched earth tactics (by either side), as well as hording or stealing food. And victual imperialism is using laws and institutions (price fixing, land use, food aid…) to transform power relationships (…she doesn’t put it that way, but the book would be better if she did).

I also sometimes wonder about Herrman’s knowledge of some of the era she’s writing about. The biggest trouble was where she points up changing attitudes towards Indian Affairs by the British by comparing two letters, one from Howe, and the other from Germain. From my knowledge of them, I’d say the letters are quite emblematic of the differences in how those two approached everything, not just Indian Affairs, and therefore is more administration change than policy change.

The better part of the book is where she tackles the idea of a ‘long American Revolution’, that is to say, a period centered on it, but in no way confined to it. She starts with the years leading up to the war (common enough in any subject in history), but as Herrman’s looking at how all this affected Native American and Black peoples, not only looks at what happened in the direct aftermath of the Revolution, but also at the Loyalist colony founded in Nova Scotia, and then in Sierra Leone, where a lot of the Black ex-slaves ended up after their power-base collapsed in Nova Scotia.

There’s some important things to look at there, but I think she misses the implications again. There is a nice discussion about whether the violence in 1800 Sierra Leone is better termed a “rebellion” or a “riot” (with some on-the-point mention of riot having more negative connotations today than then). Herrman also mention’s King Tom’s (Pa Kokelly) apparent overtures to both sides, and never seems to realize he was quite likely just waiting to see who came out on top before committing himself to anything.

I just can’t recommend this, despite some good pieces, as there’s just too many missed opportunities here.