Overview

In early modern times, warfare in Europe took on many diverse and overlapping forms. Our modern notions of ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ warfare, of ‘major war’ and ‘small war’, have their roots in much greater diversity than such binary notions allow for. While insurgencies go back to time immemorial, they have become conceptually fused with ‘small wars’. This is a term first used to denote special operations, often carried out by military companies formed from special ethnic groups and then recruited into larger armies. In its Spanish form, guerrilla, the term ‘small war’ came to stand for an ideologically-motivated insurgency against the state authorities or occupying forces of another power. There is much overlap between the phenomena of irregular warfare in the sense of special operations alongside regular operations, and irregular warfare of insurgents against the regular forces of a state. This book demonstrates how long the two phenomena were in flux and fed on each other, from the raiding operations of the 16th century to the ‘small wars’ or special operations conducted by special units in the 19th century, which existed alongside and could merge with a popular insurgency. This book is based on a special issue of the journal Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Full Product Details

Author:   Beatrice Heuser (University of Reading, UK)
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 1.40cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.476kg
ISBN:  

9781138941670

ISBN 10:   1138941670
Pages:   234
Publication Date:   06 November 2015
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Undergraduate
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Preface: ‘The Origins of Small Wars from Special Operations to Ideological Insurgencies’: A National Army Museum response Introduction: Exploring the jungle of terminology 1. The sixteenth-century antecedents of special operations ‘small war’ 2. The essence of war: French armies and small war in the Low Countries (1672 – 1697) 3. Initiating insurgencies abroad: French plans to ‘chouannise’ Britain and Ireland, 1793 – 1798 4. The insurgency of the Vendée 5. Guerrillas and bandits in the Serranía de Ronda, 1810 – 1812 6. The German wars of liberation 1807 – 1815: The restrained insurgency 7. Poachers turned gamekeepers: A study of the guerrilla phenomenon in Spain, 1808 – 1840 8. Small Wars in the Age of Clausewitz: The Watershed Between Partisan War and People’s War 9. Atrocities in Theory and Practice 10. Lessons learnt? Cultural transfer and revolutionary wars, 1775 – 1831

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Author Information

Beatrice Heuser is Chair in International Relations at the University of Reading, UK. Her research focuses on strategy, European security, transatlantic relations, Britain, France, USA, Germany, and defence policy making. She has published on nuclear strategy, Clausewitz, and the evolution of strategy since Antiquity.

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