Military History
Learn more about the encyclopedia
Meet the Editorial Board
Letter from the Editor in Chief
About the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Military History
With today’s overabundance of information, and misinformation, students and researchers alike can be overwhelmed when trying to identify what’s trustworthy, what’s up-to-date, and what’s accurate.
Oxford University Press will launch the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Military History to meet this challenge. We will publish long-form, peer-reviewed overview articles covering war and gender, war and the environment, concepts of war, psychology of violence, and war in popular culture, among many other topics.
Find information about the scholars who will shape the content of this exciting new resource.
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Military History is part of the larger online Oxford Research Encyclopedias (OREs). OREs are dynamic digital encyclopedias which are continuously updated by a community of leading scholars and researchers.
Join the Oxford Research Encyclopedias Community
We would like to invite you to join an engaged community of authors, scholars, librarians, and students to build a better reference platform of enduring academic values. Whether you wish to contribute, provide insights and recommendations, or simply ask a question, email us at militaryhistory.ore@oup.com to connect with the editorial team. We look forward to hearing from you.
Editorial Board
Editor in Chief
ALEXANDER WATSON
Alexander Watson is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London, specialising in Modern European and Military History. He completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford and has held research fellowships at Cambridge and Warsaw Universities. His work on the First World War is widely acclaimed and has made significant contributions to the multidisciplinary study of twentieth-century conflict.
Watson is the author of three prize-winning monographs, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters in the field of military history. His first book, Enduring the Great War. Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), was awarded the Institute of Contemporary History and Wiener Library’s Fraenkel Prize. The Fortress: The Great Siege of Przemysl (Penguin, 2019 / Basic Books, 2020) won the U.S. Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award. Ring of Steel. Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918 (Allen Lane / Basic Books, 2014) won the Wolfson History Prize and the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize for Military History, as well as the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award and the British Army Military Book of the Year Award. Watson’s work has been translated into five languages.
Alongside his research, Watson works in the public sphere to promote understanding of Military History. He designed, with Hopscotch Consulting, the first series of ‘The Great War Debate’ - the U.K. Government’s flagship programme for schools during the First World War Centennial Commemorations in 2016-18. Amongst his other diverse collaborators are the U.S. Army, Blackmill Computer Games, the City Museum in Ełk, Poland, and the U.S. National World War 2 Museum. Watson regularly appears on popular history podcasts. YouTube videos he filmed with media firm Business Insider have attracted millions of views. His books have been selected as ‘Books of the Year’ by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Financial Times, The Spectator and The Sunday Times.
Editorial Board
MATTHEW DZIENNIK
Matthew Dziennik is Associate Professor of British History at the United States Naval Academy, where he specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth century imperialism. Dziennik's scholarship focuses particularly on the recruitment of colonial peoples into the British land forces and the effects of recruitment on both Indigenous societies and the larger empire. He is the author of The Fatal Land: War, Empire, and the Highland Soldier in British America (Yale University Press, 2015) and the forthcoming Colonial Soldiers and the British Empire in the Age of Revolutions: a Global History. As a scholar, Dziennik is committed to examining marginal lives in the British Empire and has published research on Gaelic Scotland and Ireland, North and Central America, West Africa, and South Asia.
Letter from the Editor in Chief
It is with great excitement that I introduce this Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Military History. The project is extraordinarily ambitious. This online encyclopedia’s purpose is to present the state-of-the-art of research on war – one of the most profound shapers of history – globally and throughout human existence. The encyclopedia is conceived not only as a definitive resource but also as a motor for advancing new and deeper understandings of armed conflict.
The study of Military History reaches back millennia, and it was, from the very start, a core field of research when History developed during the nineteenth century into a professional academic discipline. It still occupies a central place today: past warfare is a popular subject at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and books on it fire imaginations well beyond academia, regularly featuring on bestseller lists. Over the last three decades, a third of the winners of the Wolfson History Prize and a third of the history books to have won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction have been books on war.
War’s central impact on human experience through history has inspired manifold imaginative and illuminating approaches. The early practitioners of Military History were often soldiers, concerned to draw lessons on leadership and operational art. Such endeavours remain influential today. These studies focus on the battlefield, on training, fighting, Clausewitzian ‘friction’ and command. Some of the most insightful embrace methods and incorporate ideas from other disciplines, from Psychology, Sociology and Management Studies. They occupy an important place in this encyclopedia.
Nevertheless, Military History always had a broad purview. Clausewitz’s foundational text Vom Kriege (1832), for example, was stamped by his recognition of the French Revolution’s transformative impact on society and politics, and so also on war. Armed conflict makes such profound demands on individuals, exerts so powerful an impact on culture and is such a potent driver of change that there are few, if any, specialisms in History that do not address it. Fields as diverse as Archeology, Economics, Law and International Studies have fruitfully paired with Military History. As the articles in this encyclopedia reveal, to study war in all its complexity requires an expansive, holistic and multidisciplinary approach.
Capturing this diversity and multiplicity is a core aim of this Oxford Research Encyclopedia. It will cover warfare on land, at sea and in the air. It addresses big ongoing debates, such as the impact of military technology on the changing nature of war or on the rise of the early modern European state. The encyclopedia will showcase the many innovative ways in which researchers are now analysing war. To offer a few examples, it explores armed conflict as a highly gendered activity, as well as one shaped by other evolutionary and cultural influences. It embraces new methodologies, such as Histories of the Senses and of Emotions. It draws on recent fascinating scholarship to illuminate war’s lasting devastation on human health and on the natural environment.
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Military History will function as a comprehensive guide to this vast field and aims too to promote its development. The encyclopedia’s online format not only makes new ideas accessible but also offers novel opportunities to reveal connections between subjects and cut across themes. Instead of rigid chapters, the encyclopedia is organised into flexible ‘Areas’, and each article is listed under every ‘Area’ for which it has relevance. At the bottom of every article are links to ‘related articles’ in the encyclopedia, which will further assist researchers to make connections beyond their sub-fields and provoke new conversations between the disparate areas within Military History.
This Oxford Research Encyclopedia will also act as a stimulus through its high-quality and regularly updated peer-reviewed content. Its mix of overview and specialist articles will summarise and advance knowledge in the most developed fields of European and North American Military History. The encyclopedia also provides a unique and exciting opportunity to advance beyond these core fields. One priority of this project is to commission new work on other, more sparsely researched regions – Asia, Africa and South America – and so catalyse the creation of a truly global Military History.
A second priority is to build on the interdisciplinarity which has contributed so significantly to making Military History so innovative and exhilarating. In particular, the encyclopedia seeks to reconnect and spark new dialogue between Military History and its more social science-orientated sister discipline, Strategic Studies. Despite the considerable overlap in interests, our disciplines have diverged. This project presents a chance to demonstrate how our mutual engagement and cooperation can produce new and better understanding of war, both past and present.In the context of a tense multipolar world, facing major geopolitical shifts and with wars now raging in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe, the study of human conflict and violence has an unfortunate and pressing relevance. The new Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Military History offers an insightful, wide-ranging and timely intervention to deepen our understanding of war.
Alexander Watson
Editor-in-Chief
Professor of History at Goldsmiths University
