Teaching World Military History: Some Reflections
Like many military historians, I was trained in graduate school via the “western” military history model, with a heavy dash of American history. That’s what I TA’d and taught at Duke, and also for my six years as an assistant professor at the University of Louisville. While I was there, however, Mark Grimsley at The Ohio State University hosted a weekend conference on “Teaching World Military History,” partly in recognition of the then newly released Christon I. Archer, John R. Ferris, Holger H. Herwig, and Timothy H. E. Travers, World History of Warfare (Nebraska, 2002). I eagerly drove up to Columbus (I think I stayed in a campground that weekend) to learn more. I was looking for a way to get beyond the western narrative: Ancient Near East (optional), Greece, Rome, Medieval, Military Revolution, Warring States Europe, Industrialization, World Wars, and Other Western Wars.
That tongue-in-cheek list, although seemingly short, reflects the problem! Even the western-only syllabus was packed to the gills. Everyone who taught it was already making drastic choices about what to include and what to exclude. How could you possibly expand the scope while still teaching anything worthwhile? There were a lot of good discussions that weekend, and I have notes on many of them, but I came away with two central ideas (and I’m pretty sure one of them was my original contribution). One of them was the driving notion then-current in the field of “World History” that it should be about connections, not just comparisons (although comparisons can be useful!). How did events in one part of the world affect the other parts? I’m not going to get all historiographical here, but just think World Systems Theory, and micro versions thereof. Second, any world military history course is likely to work better with a single driving theme, one that asks similar questions of every new geographical and/or chronological case. You have to give the students something familiar as they hop around the map and the timeline. The context won’t be familiar—you’ll have to teach them that—but the questions could be.
Two other things helped me enormously. First, at UofL one general education course that every student had to take was a 2-semester sequence in History of World Civilizations—which I loved teaching, and doing so taught me a lot of history. Then, a couple of years after the OSU conference, we hired Scott Levi at UofL (ironically, he’s now at OSU), a central Asianist trained by David Morgan, a Mongolist. I sat in on Scott’s graduate seminar on Mongol history, and that experience proved a key addition to my graduate training.
All these things germinated for a couple of years (I think), and then I was hired at the University of North Carolina, and I leapt at the opportunity to redesign my western course into a world military history course, and was blessed with a built-in large audience because it would be required of all majors in UNC’s Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense. So it was a large lecture format, and it would have TAs, who themselves would supervise discussion (recitation) sections. I’ve been teaching it ever since, and even wrote a book based on the outline of that course—sales pitch goes here—Wayne E. Lee, Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History (Oxford, 2015).
As my book’s title suggests, the central theme was innovation, because so much of the human history of conflict revolves around the problem of finding solutions to defeating (or resisting) an enemy. Innovation was always at the core, although I was and am careful to emphasize that I don’t always or even usually mean technological innovation. Ideas and their emergence and modification are central to the course. Furthermore, both ideas and technologies travel. They are the connections that world historians are always talking about, and so any one innovation can be traced through various contexts. Gunpowder alone occupies two weeks of my course and takes us through China, Western Europe, the Ottoman Empire, South Asia, West Africa, and the New World (and back to China and then Japan). In each “location,” we can examine how a single innovation was adapted and adopted according to the historical context. In my first course design, I chose innovations that either I knew, or for which the secondary literature was well developed. Obviously I could lean heavily on western history, especially for the post-industrial era, but the point was I could pick and choose. Innovations were everywhere, and each of them had something to teach. The students, meanwhile, would always have a list of common questions and key words to ask about as we investigated each of them—a familiar touchstone in each new alien world.
This is probably my first piece of generalizable advice: pick a theme and stick to it throughout the course, and then choose cases to teach that you’re already comfortable with. Then, over time, as you teach the course over and over, change and expand the cases. Grow with your course.
Second, assume the students know nearly nothing about anything, so establish some common ground. For example, I make them memorize only 12 dates, 6 for each half of the course. I call them “coathook dates” because they can hang the course on them, and then they should try to remember other events as being before or after this or that coathook. Examples include (these examples are all CE): 622 (the Hegira of Mohammed), 1206 (Temujin becomes Chinggis Khan), 1453 (fall of Constantinople and end of the Hundred Years War), 1789 (French Revolution), 1840 (Opium War), 1918 (end of WWI). Then, in the lectures, I continually return to those dates, using a call-and-response technique over and over: “so, shortly after Temujin became the Khan of all the Mongols in .......<wait for them all to shout 1206>......”
Further to the effort of establishing common ground, I have two map quizzes, one for the greater Mediterranean, and one for mainland Asia. In each case, they have to draw and label a very rough map, including 12-15 features. If you can draw it, you can remember it.
Unusually for a history course, I have evolved away from reading very many primary sources. We jump contexts too often. We do read some, usually in order to compare two accounts of the same event. They also read all of Clausewitz’s Book 1, just because. But for the most part, we read relevant scholarly argumentative articles, with the common task of always identifying the thesis. They discuss these pieces in recitation (max size = 18), so they can relate the arguments to the lectures, as well as discuss the use of evidence. This thesis-identification skill is universalizable in college, and in too-short supply among students.
Finally, my advice is to do some personal reading about China. Most of us don’t know nearly enough. I didn’t when I started teaching this course (although I had learned a lot about central Asia by then). When I finally sat down to write the Waging War book, I knew I needed to add a LOT more about China, and I spent much time reading the anglophone literature on Han and Ming China (with some Qing). You can’t learn it all, so, as I suggested above, expand your cases as you go. Particularly valuable for this task now is Tonio Andrade’s remarkable The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton, 2017). In my case, I ultimately related Han China to Rome via the common structural issues associated with imperial regular armies and manned frontier fortifications (one of the few strict comparisons in the book/syllabus). More in the vein of connections, I also explored the Ming reception of European versions of gunpowder weapons, something for which Andrade is spectacularly useful.
I have found teaching military history level at this expanded scope to be its own reward. I learn more every year, although I face the constant challenge of what can I squeeze in! But that’s true of all courses.