ABSTRACT
For millennia, historical accounts of armed conflict between people and states has been narrated primarily through an analysis of the aims, means and ends of its orchestrators – generals, admirals and politicians. Historiographies of warmaking, perhaps more than most, have remained focussed on such figures – the assumption being that – like in some strains of political history, the acts of ‘great men’ play out on a distinct and higher historical register. Unlike the substantial challenges to such narrative conventions in political history by social and cultural historiographies that aim to repatriate the subaltern into accounts of politics, historiographies of warmaking, and particularly of its intellectual dimension – strategy formation – have been slower to respond critically to this practice. Many scholars who are exceptions to this rule have provided chapters for this volume. 1 This chapter also aims to contribute to this effort as well by reflecting on how we might re-think our treatment of military leaders in histories of warmaking that are willing to consider the often substantially different world of those whose fates they are assumed to control.
