This book is a big *wow*
War in Human Civilization is an awesomely well written and dense book. Like The Horse, the Wheel, and Language it is a scholarly work which stays broadly engaging and relevant to a wider audience than specialists. Highly recommended if you have some spare time over Christmas.
This is naturally not a endorsement of every claim made in this book. But whatever the substantive facts, the author managed to implement the plan of argument and the marshaling of evidence in a fashion which is extremely impressive.
I guess this is what comes after “War Before Civilization”.
I’m reading Bloodlands, by Yale author Snyder and it reminded me a bit of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language which your rave review spurred me to buy early this year and which I am still in medias res. The other book which I keep coming back to is the great book on Europe 9000BC-1000AD as well as the Sykes books on the Seven mitochondrial mamas and the disappearance of the Y gene.
Who is Azar Gat?
Mr. Gat is an Israeli military historian who specializes in the history of strategic thought. He is something of a polymath, writing not only for journals on strategic theory and history, but also archeogology, anthropology, and international relations.
It would appear that he uncritically repeats the assertion that the Chinese invented gunpowder. (One of his illustrations refers to that.)
My problems with this claim is that gunpowder is a very specific product that requires both the correct ingredients and a specific process in its manufacture.
My view is that the only acceptable definition of gunpowder is that mixture of saltpeter, charcoal and sulphur in the required proportions and mixed using the techniques required for use in cannon.
Some suggest that the Chinese invented it based on some references to mixtures of the basic constituents (albeit adulterated with flammable liquids, which suggest that all they had discovered was incendiaries) and others point to Roger Bacon’s claimed hiding of the ratios of the three fundamental components in a treatise in Latin, but that also seems inadequate to me because the actual process is not detailed, and the process of manufacture is extremely important.
A related example is the difference between iron and steel. It is pretty clear that the Chinese knew how to produce both iron and steel more than two thousand years ago based on the historical information available (eg, cast iron implements vs steel weaponry and references to what seems to be something approaching the puddling method of reducing the carbon content in pig iron to produce steel, see for example: http://www.staff.hum.ku.dk/dbwagner/KoreanFe/KoreanFe.html).
While the book sounds interesting, the details are incredibly important in my view and historians (including Joseph Needham who was originally a biochemist) seem to have little actual experience with the technical things they write about.
While I do not want to suggest that someone who does not have Clauswitz’s experiences cannot have anything relevant to say about war, I wonder if it is not like comparing historians of science to, say, physicists.