This collection constitutes the definitive guide for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students studying modern military history. It provides the reader with a clear and up-to-date survey of the significant debates, interpretations and historiographical shifts for a series of key themes in military history, ranging from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries, and across the technological, political, social, and cultural dimensions of military history.
Dr Matthew Hughes is Professor of Military History at Brunel University London, in England.
Hughes studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies and at the London School of Economics. He completed his ESRC-funded PhD in 1995 under the supervision of Professors Brian Bond and Brian Holden Reid in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London on the strategy surrounding the British campaign in Palestine in the First World War in Palestine. He has a PGCE in History from Cardiff University. After working as an intern with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Professor Hughes lectured at the universities of Northampton and Salford before coming to Brunel University in 2005. Professor Hughes has been a British Academy funded visiting fellow at the American University in Cairo, the American University in Beirut, and at Tel Aviv University. He spent two years as the Marine Corps University Foundation-funded Maj-Gen Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair in Military Theory at the US Marine Corps University, Quantico, 2008-10. His latest monograph on British counter-insurgency in Palestine in the 1930s entitled Britain's Pacification of Palestine: the British Army, the Colonial State, and the Arab Revolt, 1936-1939 (2019) was published with Cambridge University Press. He was the editor of the Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research (2004-8). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a former Chair of Council of the Army Records Society (2014-18), and is a judge for the Society for Army Historical Research's annual Templer Medal prize (2003-4, 2007-8, 2018-). He sits on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Military History and Middle Eastern Studies and is a judge for the latter's annual Elie Kedourie prize. He is currently an external examiner for the Higher Diploma awarded by Maynooth University to the Junior Command and Staff Course with the Military College, Irish Defence Forces, and a Visiting Lecturer and examiner at the University of Buckingham.
This is one of those books where you need to read the introduction before starting with the main chapters. The main focus here is to present various theories that have been researched or may need study. No significant new information is presented, as stated in the introduction. Readers will find themselves drawn to certain chapters/styles of military history while wanting to skip over other chapters they just don't have any interest in. Really only intended for a student of military history.