ABSTRACT
In 1977, the distinguished English military historian Sir Michael Howard, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, gave a celebrated series of Trevelyan Lectures at the University of Cambridge. The lectures were entitled War and the Liberal Conscience (1978). Himself a deeply conservative historian, and steeped in the modern geopolitical understanding of war, Howard described George Macaulay Trevelyan, in whose honour the lectures were given, as ‘the last of the great Victorian Liberal historians – perhaps the last of the great Victorian liberals.’ Honouring the name in which he gave the lectures did not, however, prevent Howard from delivering what has become a classic indictment of what we intend to call more directly ‘the liberal way of war’.
