ABSTRACT
If the cultural turn discussed in the last chapter is one of the major developments in the study of war, whether the emphasis is on strategic, organizational, social, or other cultures, then this turn has largely affected only academic military history. The results of the emphasis on cultural factors are far less prominent in the popular market, other than through a simplistic stress on supposed cultural attributes contributing to a Western way of war. The major impact in academe has been a questioning of what can now be seen as an early cultural stress on machines, and an emphasis instead not only on the different types of culture mentioned above, but also on the need to consider the variety of cultures within the world. This consideration has been linked to a critique of Eurocentricity, specifically the focus on European militaries and, to a lesser extent, analytical concepts. The use of this term, however, should be sharpened as the focus in fact is on Western Europe and the USA, and even then, as discussed later in this chapter, the presentation of medieval European military history has been in part as one with that of the non-European world.
