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War and Society in Europe

This research examines Wawro's War and Society in Europe 1792-1914, which covers the period from the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution to the onset of the Great War in 1914. The research will set forth the pattern of ideas in the work and then discuss the weight of evidence and argument that Weaver brings to bear on development of those ideas.

It is perhaps a hard truth that the history of Europe between the emergence of Napoleon and the beginning of World War I is very much a history of war in Europe. For most of the period Wawro takes as his subject, the nation-states of Europe more or less routinely chose to settle rivalries by warfare. Wawro takes as his thematic starting point a comment famously made by Karl von Clausewitz, a theoretician of Napoleonic war, that war is a continuation of politics by "other means," if that term is taken to mean the "larger social, political, economic and cultural context" (ix) in which war is waged.

Wawro's history of European war constitutes a history of the evolution of warfare itself. If one agrees with him that Napoleon "cudgelled modern war into existence" (1), then it is no great leap of logic to suggest that World War I cudgeled fully mechanized and industrialized war into existence. Wawro's reference to the "second industrial revolution" (1) suggests that the development of ever more mechanized warfare robbed energy from the social and political transformations that the Industrial Revolution worked on Europe irrespective of war.

The first 20% of the text focuses on the complex legacy of Napoleon. Indeed, Napoleon's impact on European history can be felt over the course of the text. The Congress of Vienna and its aftermath, anticlericalism, the rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe, the trend toward modernization in general and with regard to war in particular, even in the face of longstanding retrograde ideas about how best to resolve international disputes, and a nineteenth-cent...

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War and Society in Europe. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:25, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1682729.html