Jeremy’s A Brief History of Portugal (Little Brown) is available now. Find out more.
Month: December 2019
Jeremy’s review of Abulafia
Jeremy Black’s review of David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans is available on The Critic website.
Coming soon: Military Strategy. A Global History
Military Strategy. A Global History (Yale University Press, April 2020) is a global account of military strategy, which examines the practices, rather than the theories, of the most significant military figures of the past 400 years.
Strategy has existed as long as there has been organised conflict. In this new account, Jeremy Black explores the ever-changing relationship between purpose, force, implementation and effectiveness in military strategy and its dramatic impact on the development of the global power system.
Taking a ‘total’ view of strategy, Black looks at leading powers — notably the United States, China, Britain and Russia — in the wider context of their competition and their domestic and international strengths. Ranging from France’s Ancien Regime and Britain’s empire building to present day conflicts in the Middle East, Black devotes particular attention to the strategic practice and decisions of the Kangxi Emperor, Clausewitz, Napoleon and Hitler.
Praise for Jeremy’s forthcoming publication
“Melds incisive historical insight with important modern-day lessons.”—Andrew Roberts
“Once again, Jeremy Black has shown that he can meld incisive historical insight with important modern-day lessons. Anyone connected with strategic decision-making, even far beyond the military sphere, will profit from reading this hugely readable and scholarly work, as will anyone interested in seeing how the great decision-makers of the past got things so right occasionally, but so wrong all too often.”—Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny
“Jeremy Black is one of Britain’s foremost historians and a world leader in the subject of military strategy. He has expanded his purview to the global story of strategy in a bold and imaginative study.”—John Bew, author of Citizen Clem: A Life of Attlee
“This book succeeds in communicating the dynamics of strategy across a huge canvas in an intelligent, engaging but also an extremely erudite fashion … It not only informs the reader of many aspects of the global history of strategy, it encourages readers to think about the subject matter and the historical challenges as they read.”—Alaric Searle, author of Armoured Warfare: A Military, Political and Global History
