The Oxford Handbook of Warfare in Asia

Within the global history framework, books written on warfare focus exclusively on West Europe and the United States of America. Asia plays a cameo role. At best, Asian militaries are understood or measured in terms of the 'West', portrayed as a sad victim in the path of the West's onward march from the era of Classical Greece till present day. Noted scholars have argued that bureaucratic polities, standing armies, and decisive sieges were mostly absent in Asian history. Warfare in Asia is generally portrayed as a sort of 'flower war,' involving skirmishing, pillaging, and plundering backed by magic, cultural conservatism, and political intrigues. This view is historically untenable. States with sophisticated bureaucratic fabric and standing armies first evolved in Mesopotamia. Disciplined heavy infantry, which constituted the core of so-called Western Warfare, emerged in the Middle East. In fact, decisive battles were waged by armies in China, South Asia and West Asia long before the emergence of Classical Greece. The sedentary states of China and India included almost 50% of the world's population from the dawn of history. The Gross Domestic Product of the agrarian bureaucratic empires of China and India, combined with millions of soldiers mobilised by them in the premodern world, were unknown in Western Europe before the late eighteenth century Industrial Revolution. Hence, a study of the Asian militaries in their own right from the dawn of civilisation till the present day is necessary. And this is what ^iThe Oxford Handbook on Warfare in Asia endeavours to do.The aim of ^iWarfare in Asia is not to provide a linear chronological account of the development of warfare in the Asian continent. Rather, the objective is to highlight the important features of warfare as it developed in Asia during the last 2500 years. Warfare in this volume is defined broadly and includes both conventional and unconventional campaigns: at one level it involves the way various societies conceptualised it; At another, it means how organised violence has been influenced by geography, politics, culture, and economics and its societal impact. This handbook is geared towards understanding the instrumental nature of war, the variety of warfare existed in history, and brings attention to the evolving character of warfare in Asia.