ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts of the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. At the present moment, these contours are apparently readily obvious, although an important caveat must be expressed at the outset: most discussion of military history focuses on the Western world in the last half millennium; and non-Western military history is, in part, a branch of what might almost be discussed as area studies. Thus, the cultural turn is in some respects another version of the war and society approach, while any stress, in the discussion of technology, of the impact in the use of weaponry of factors such as drill and discipline directs attention to the overlap with cultural and social perspectives. The looseness of the cultural description in military history, as well as the difficulty of employing the concept as either a precise analytical term or a methodology, does not undermine the value of the cultural perspective.
