ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century "small war," partisan and guerrilla warfare fell into disregard in Europe's more developed countries. When irregular warfare was rediscovered towards the middle of the twentieth century its antecedents had been forgotten. It was generally assumed that the history of guerrilla warfare began with the Spanish insurrection against Napoleon — as if there had been no wars of liberation and wars of opinion throughout history. But since they had not been "revolutionary wars" in the fashionable twentieth-century sense they were thought to be of little interest. It was widely believed, even among experts, that previous to Mao Tse-tung no military thinker had ever systematically studied guerrilla warfare — with the possible exception of Τ. E. Lawrence, an amateur of genius, but no military philosopher. In actual fact the problem had preoccupied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century students of war in many lands; it is of some interest to establish why exactly their writings have been forgotten. 1
