Content area
Full Text
Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865. By wayne e. lee. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 352 pp. $34.95 (cloth).
The subject of Wayne E. Lee's book is both narrower and broader than its title might suggest: narrower, because it does not survey Anglo-American warfare between 1500 and 1865 in its entirety; broader, because it seeks to establish universals about restraint and frightfulness in warfare. Particularly interested in contests involving "barbarians" and "brothers," Lee draws case studies from England's sixteenth-century experience in Ireland, the first English Civil War (1642-1646), conflicts between Native Americans and English colonists, and the American Revolution. According to Lee, scholarship about war's limits has traditionally focused on the rules of war and the demonization of the enemy. While he believes these approaches reveal something of the truth, he finds them inadequate. Rather, he argues, four "categories of analysis" do a better job of explaining restraint and frightfulness: capacity (the ability of a state and society to raise effective forces), control (the ability to sustain and direct that force, as well as the extent to which that force bows to social norms), calculation (the reckoning that culminates in the choice of tactics and strategy), and culture (the values and beliefs surrounding war). As Lee puts it, "Capacity, control, calculation, and culture intersect in different ways, and their particular intersection determines the level of frightfulness within a conflict" (p. 8). In other words, Lee has produced a paradoxical quadrivium that supplements Carl von Clausewitz's famous paradoxical trinity in On War (1832), which consists of passion, chance, and reason.
In reaching these conclusions, Lee highlights the significance of culture. This stress on culture is part of a new emphasis among military historians that has gained ground in the last two decades and manifested itself in major works like Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001) and John A. Lynn's Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (New York: Westview Press, 2003; Lee himself is the editor of the New York University Press series Warfare and Culture). Culture, Lee claims, plays an important role in influencing his categories...