What got you interested in military history?

Originally I did my work, and I still do a lot of my work, on the history of international relations and specifically British foreign policy. But I moved into military history because I started teaching general European history and felt that the standard accounts offered of military history within it were weak and inadequate. I was also troubled by the extent to which military history and war itself tend to be underplayed. Although people, including myself, don’t like war, it is a terrible mistake to assume that it doesn’t often have a highly significant role in history. And this attempt to almost align it out, which I think one can see in the changing preferences in history courses, was in my view deeply mistaken.

What kinds of things do you think it can teach people?

I think first of all it can teach people unpredictability and discontinuity, which is tremendously important. Whatever one’s political persuasion, one of the great problems with history is that people of the left, right and centre believe in inevitability, which is generally of their own values. And one of the interesting things about war is that when two powers go to war, generally both sides think they can win and invariably at least one of them is wrong. In fact generally both of them are wrong because neither of them get out of the war what they want.

To that extent war and military history represent the revenge of the contingent on the determinist. They represent the revenge of the short term on the long term and I think that is very important because the way we think about it is often overly dependent on some kind of inevitability.

Tell me about your first book, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb by Peter Lorge.

This is a new book that I think is really important, especially as we are in a new millennium and also need to be thinking about a history that makes sense in terms of where the majority of the world’s population live. We need to think about a history that makes sense, in particular, in terms of looking at the relationship between East and South Asia on the one hand and the West on the other, in which it is not simply the case that the West are making the advances in terms of technology and in terms of interpretative analysis.

And what I think is very impressive about Lorge, who is an expert on China, is not just that he argues the importance of what goes on in East and South Asia and does so in a clear and concise fashion. But also that he takes the pretty established analytical concept of the military revolution and takes it out of the hands of the West, where it is located, and says, ‘Actually, no. The military revolution is an Asian one and the West borrowed it and copied it.’ I think that is intellectually very interesting. You don’t have to agree with every detail, and obviously in a book which is as concise as his, there are areas which could have been and should have been expanded on.

But I think the intellectual range is impressive and I am a firm believer that books are most valuable when they challenge the way that you think: so they take the established account, stand it on its head and see what happens. It is interesting that Lorge is an American and that kind of broad synoptic study is very much lacking in the British intellectual tradition at the present moment.

Why do you think that is?

I think we have the suffocating grasp of Oxford and Cambridge, both of which I have to say I have been to. But, I am afraid to say, in general there is a lack of engagement with broad themes. There is too much specialisation which leads to what I think of as telephone kiosk history, or writing in which you can fit everyone in the world interested in the subject into a telephone kiosk.

Although these specialists are often very good in their field they are not using the opportunity to say there are 61 million people in Britain, there’s an Anglo sphere of hundreds of millions, there is a world population of billions – what can we actually say that is valuable and useful to a wider constituency? I think a lot of academics are lacking a sense of public awareness in that respect, which I find deeply disturbing.

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale.

This is a new book that argues that the Ottoman Empire had a maritime interest in the Indian Ocean which we have underrated. We have found it overly easy to think about the Ottomans in terms of a land empire, which they obviously were, but they were also an important maritime power and we ought to be using that to re-examine our standard assumptions about the West, after the 15th century, being the only source of maritime power until you get the Japanese borrowing Western technology and ideas at the end 19th century.

It is a very interesting book, although I don’t think he always demonstrates his points as well as one might like, but on the other hand it’s not easy to do research in Ottoman archives and, by the nature of things, if one is writing on a broad range like him there is only so much data that one can actually produce. What is great about this book, and the fact that it was published by a mainstream publisher, is that it shows that there is this willingness to engage in the wider world.

I think this book and my first choice show that the standard military narratives are set by Western assumptions and these books aim to show a different side.