Opening Remarks
Conference on the History of War in Global Perspective
November 12, 2004

Good morning. I’d like to thank everyone, especially the panelists who have joined us today, for coming to this conference on the history of war in global perspective.

This conference has its roots almost ten years ago, when I proposed to my department a gateway undergraduate course on the history of war. The initial impetus for this proposal stemmed from my early experiences in teaching military history. I found that students often came to these courses with strong preconceptions about the scope and emphases of the subject matter that would be under discussion. Many seemed to expect that we would spend our weeks talking about great commanders, campaigns, and battles. The actual emphases not only took them by surprise, it often required a couple of weeks for them even to realize what those emphases were, notwithstanding the fact that I was lecturing on those emphases day in and day out. A couple of weeks, on the quarter system, is a long time. And in an upper-division course that kind of delay in picking up on the core of a given course can be fatal. So I thought it would be useful to create a lower-division course that would largely be an introduction to the broad themes involved in military history—essentially a course that would use the history of war as a vehicle for teaching students how to think about issues of war and society.

For the most part, it would have served my purpose just as well to have developed a survey course in the European history of war. But having noticed the way in which the traditional western civilization survey was giving way to new surveys in Asian, Latin American, and above all world history, I thought I should create a course description that would allow scope for a world history of war. My difficulty, though, was that my department requires new course proposals to involve not only a course description but a sample syllabus. The syllabus had to be one that bore some resemblance to one I could actually teach.

I did my best to craft such a syllabus within the limits of my training, which had been entirely within the American and European experiences. I thought I did a pretty good job and deserved credit at least for good intentions. For the most part I got it, but one colleague on the undergraduate studies committee—Marilyn Waldman, a name some of you will recognize as a distinguished Islamicist and early proponent of world history—found my efforts, well, disappointing.

Marilyn passed away some years ago, but this conference is in a real sense a tribute to her and to her scholarly insistence that if you’re going to raise the issue of a world history of war, you had better do so with good, academic rigor. It is one thing to talk about a world history of warfare. It is another to give such a concept intellectual heft and coherence.

I actually began to teach this course—History 380, The History of War—less than two years ago, and I’m currently about seven weeks into my second edition of the course. On both occasions it has been a very engaging and energizing experience. Not to mention popular. The first time I offered the course, it capped at 240 students. When my colleague Mike Pavelec offered it last spring, it enrolled 220 students, and I got 140 students when I offered it just two quarters later. But it remains a course in which this instructor, trained in the western way of war, continues to struggle with making real the ideal world history orientation. The key task can be defined as shifting the survey from from a European "master narrative" to a global "master narrative."

By master narrative I refer to the power of narrative to organize a large swath of material into a coherent storyline. Western civilization and US history courses, for example, use a grand story line that makes the deluge of historical developments they discuss coherent to undergraduates. Students mistake this—and are tacitly encouraged to mistake it—for the "real" history, but it’s really just a first step. Once you grasp the master narrative, you can begin to learn that it is really a metanarrative, a narrative about narratives. It's a narrative that implicitly determines which other narratives are considered central and which are deemed marginal.

In military history we have a Eurocentric master narrative. We need to find a global master narrative that is more inclusive but retains a coherent storyline. Thus, recasting the master narrative of military history involves not only an expansion of geographic coverage but also a reworking of the way in which we organize how we think about military history. The conceptual frameworks and themes that work for the European master narrative almost certainly won't work for a global master narrative.

That’s where the panel comes in. Basically I have bribed a bunch of distinguished scholars to tell me how we might rework the military history master narrative from a European to global emphasis, and to do it in a way that has intellectual heft and coherence.

We’ll be having a series of four focused conversations. The first will examine the strengths and limitations of the current narrative tradition. The next two will look at two attempts to operationalize what a more global master narrative might look like. The final session tomorrow afternoon will consider where we go from here, intellectually and organizationally.

The format is simple. One panelist will chair and moderate each session (but may, incidentally, participate in the discussion). Another will keynote the discussion with a 15 to 20 minute informal presentation. A discussion by the entire panel will continue for about 70-75 minutes. That will leave 30 minutes for your questions and comments. These are broad guidelines and the session chairs should feel free to modify them as they think will best serve the interests of a good, productive exchange.

Finally, I’d like to introduce the panelists themselves. You’ll find brief bios of them in the conference packet, but let me help you put faces to names where necessary. We have with us this morning Pradeep Barua, University of Nebraska at Kearney; Jeremy Black of the University of Exeter; David Graff of Kansas State University; Holger Herwig of the University of Calgary; Stephen Morillo of Wabash College; my colleague Geoffrey Parker; Mike Pavelec, a Herwig protégé who teaches at Hawaii Pacific University; his colleague Mike Pavkovic, also at Hawaii Pacific; Cliff Rogers of the U.S. Military Academy; and William Thompson of Indiana University.

I’d like you to join me in giving them a warm welcome.

Thank you all again for being here this morning. In a few moments, we’ll begin our first session.