Jeremy Black is author of numerous books, including A Brief History of History, Tank Warfare and Charting the Past: The Historical Worlds of Eighteenth-Century England. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Exeter and a Senior Fellow of both the British Foreign Policy Group and of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Black is a recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society for Military History. Follow Black on his website, jeremyblackhistorian.wordpress.com.

• Introduction 1. The world of war in the eighteenth century 2. Empires rise and fall, 1800–30 3. Moulding states, 1830–80 4. Building empires, 1830–1913 5. World War One, 1914–18 6. Between two world wars 7. World War Two, 1939–45 8. Wars of decolonisation, 1945–94 9. The Cold War 10. Wars between non-Western powers, 1945–90 11. War in the 1990s 12. War in the 2000s 13. War in the 2010s 14. War in the 2020s 15. Conclusions

This book encourages readers to grapple with broad questions of defence policy in the face of aggressive, revisionist powers that have at times arisen in military modern and contemporary history.Professor Constantin Hlihor, Bucharest University, Romania