This timely book offers a world history of insurgencies and of counterinsurgency warfare. Jeremy Black moves beyond the conventional Western-centric narrative, arguing that it is crucial to ground contemporary experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq in a global framework. Unlike other studies that begin with the American and French revolutions, this book reaches back to antiquity to trace the pre-modern origins of war within states. Interweaving thematic and chronological narratives, Black probes the enduring linkages between beliefs, events, and people on the one hand and changes over time on the other hand. He shows the extent to which power politics, technologies, and ideologies have evolved, creating new parameters and paradigms that have framed both governmental and public views.
Tracing insurgencies ranging from China to Africa to Latin America, Black highlights the widely differing military and political dimensions of each conflict. He weighs how, and why, lessons were “learned” or, rather, asserted, in both insurgency and counterinsurgency warfare. At every stage, he considers lessons learned by contemporaries, the ways in which norms developed within militaries and societies, and their impact on doctrine and policy. His sweeping study of insurrectionary warfare and its counterinsurgency counterpart will be essential reading for all students of military history.
Industry Reviews
As an explicit rejection of analyses that simplistically ‘read backward’ from contemporary geopolitics to explain away the complexities of insurrection and rebellion, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency is a welcome addition to this evergrowing body of literature. Starting with the central premise that insurgent warfare is decidedly not a modern phenomenon, Jeremy Black is driven by an over-arching concern—one that rises to the level of a warning—that the political and military effectiveness of counterinsurgency measures remains encumbered by limited learning from previous historical examples…. No stone goes unturned in this dense yet highly readable book (its subtitle, A Global History, is no exaggeration or misnomer). Although organized chronologically, it is not merely a chronology; and although explicitly comparative, it is not properly a comparative study. Black seeks to ‘probe the linkage between beliefs, events, people, and time progression,’ thus making his work akin to an encyclopedic, narrative compendium of exhaustive research that culminates in a vast wealth of knowledge on the provenance of insurgencies throughout world history…. [A] commendable work.
