John Keegan is regarded as one of the foremost military historians of our
time. This book covers the scope of human history, from the migrations of
prehistoric man to the atomic age. He does so to prove his central tenet:
That war is not, as Clausewitz maintained, "The continuation of Policy by
other means." By drawing on examples as disparate as primitive warfare in
the rain forests of South America, the Zulu warriors of Shaka Khan, the
cavalry revolution that emanated from the Central Asian Steppe, the (to
us) cruelly bizarre ritualisitic warfare of the Aztecs, the grand mixed
message/purpose of the Great Wall of China, the mameluke tradition of the
Islamic Middle East, and of course, the rise of the Greeks, Romans, and
Western nation States, Keegan demonstrates time and again that War as
National Policy is an extremely recent and thoroughly Western phenomena,
and that Clausewitz was trying to advance this theory to encourage
a stronger Prussian army in the 19th Century, and so was limited by his
environment in his comprehension of warfare throughout the scope of human
history and across cultures

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