Chapter 3 Redressing Eurocentricism (p. 66-67)

Most records are from antiquity’s successful monarchs, and are accordingly biased, boasting of their military prowess. Ann Hyland, The Horse in the Ancient World (Stroud, 2003), p. 7

If the cultural turn discussed in the last chapter is one of the major developments in the study of war, whether the emphasis is on strategic, organizational, social, or other cultures, then this turn has largely affected only academic military history. The results of the emphasis on cultural factors are far less prominent in the popular market, other than through a simplistic stress on supposed cultural attributes contributing to a Western way of war. The major impact in academe has been a questioning of what can now be seen as an early cultural stress on machines, and an emphasis instead not only on the different types of culture mentioned above, but also on the need to consider the variety of cultures within the world. This consideration has been linked to a critique of Eurocentricity, specifically the focus on European militaries and, to a lesser extent, analytical concepts. The use of this term, however, should be sharpened as the focus in fact is on Western Europe and the USA, and even then, as discussed later in this chapter, the presentation of medieval European military history has been in part as one with that of the non-European world.

There have been interesting anticipations of the contemporary call to devote more attention to non-Western military history. One of the most instructive occurred in the early years of the twentieth century when Japan defeated Russia on land and sea, challenging established interpretations of the primacy of Western war-making. This was the subject of a collection The Russo–Japanese War in Cultural Perspective, 1904–5 (Basingstoke, 1999), edited by David Wells and Sandra Wilson, which deserves wider attention because of its skilful probing of the issue of symbolic memory and how it encodes the process of warlearning. The variable readings of the war made possible its presentation by contemporaries in terms of a wider Westernization, with Japan allegedly successful because it had adopted Western weapons and norms, but, in contrast, it was also possible to present Japanese victory in terms of the triumph of spirit and as a victory for a non-Western power.

Eurocentricism, understood as a focus on Europe and the USA, involves a number of problems. There is the emphasis on the military history of, and involving, the West, with the latter ensuring that other states and societies appear primarily in order to be defeated – so that the ‘non-West’ is misunderstood when it is not ignored.2 Thus, in The Oxford History of Modern War (Oxford, 2000), there was a heavy slant towards Europe and the USA, and away from other parts of the world, in particular East and South Asia. The Chinese Civil War received one short mention, and the military history of China was on the whole neglected. Similar problems affected Azar Gat’s A History of Military Thought. From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford, 2001), which the preface reveals in successive sentences was intended to tackle ‘the evolution of modern military thought’ by offering a ‘view of the wider conceptions of war, strategy, and military theory which have dominated Europe and the West’. The challenging question of thought elsewhere was not addressed.

Furthermore, the appearance of the ‘non-West’ in many works only when in conflict with the West ensures that the military cultures of the former are neglected. This was clear in the discussion of conflict in Afghanistan in 2001. The country was presented as difficult because of its terrain, and with little understanding of the contrast between mounting interventions there from abroad and the subsequent problems of maintaining control.