This study of Scottish soldiers in France in the age of the Sun King provides fascinating information about the visicitudes suffered by the brave personnel of the regiment of George Douglas, Earl of Dumbarton. Hardly the heirs of an 'auld' alliance amity, they became the playthings of a king intent on transforming the nature of war in his era.

The horrific series of conflicts known as the Thirty Years War (1618 - 48) tore the heart out of Europe, killing perhaps a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to whole areas of Central Europe to such a degree that many towns and regions never recovered. All the major European powers apart from England were heavily involved and, while each country started out with rational war aims, the fighting rapidly spiralled out of control, with great battles giving way to marauding bands of starving soldiers spreading plague and murder. The war was both a religious and a political one and it was this tangle of motives that made it impossible to stop. Whether motivated by idealism or cynicism, everyone drawn into the conflict was destroyed by it. At its end a recognizably modern Europe had been created but at a terrible price. Peter Wilson's book is a major work, the first new history of the war in a generation, and a fascinating, brilliantly written attempt to explain a compelling series of events. Wilson's great strength is in allowing the reader to understand the tragedy of mixed motives that allowed rulers to gamble their countries' future with such horrifying results. The principal actors in the drama (Wallenstein, Ferdinand II, Gustavus Adolphus, Richelieu) are all here, but so is the experience of the ordinary soldiers and civilians, desperately trying to stay alive under impossible circumstances. The extraordinary narrative of the war haunted Europe's leaders into the twentieth century (comparisons with 1939 - 45 were entirely appropriate) and modern Europe cannot be understood without reference to this dreadful conflict.

The aim of the book is to explore the long-standing and multi-faceted relationship between Scotland and the societies and cultures of the European continent, in various epochs and from a large diversity of view points and problematics. The book collects most of the contributions from the IVth annual conference of the SociÃ(c)tÃ(c) Française dâ (TM)Etudes Ecossaises, held in Toulon in October 2005. This international conference gathered fifty European academics, working in a wide range of research fields, from social history to art history, from language to literature, from politics to civilisation and cultural studies. The interdisciplinary ambition and cross-cultural perspective of the conference are reflected in the volume. The book is divided into four main sections: links with Europe, visions of Europe, voices in Europe, and current political issues within the European Union. It illustrates the richness and complexity of the dialogue between Scotland and the continent over the centuries, and underlines the open, fluid and dynamic character of the Scottish identity.

This collection of studies introduces the study of logistics in the late Roman and medieval world as an integral element in the study of resource production, allocation and consumption, and hence of the social and economic history of the societies in question.

This collection of articles offers new insights into warfare and its impact on medieval society, analyzing social and economic issues, military strategy, technology, medical developments, ideology and rhetoric, and addressing warfare in Europe, the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world.

Military institutions and methods of warfare in the non-Western world from antiquity through the early 20th century provide the chief subjects of this annotated bibliography of works published before 1967. Especially rich in references to periodical literature, it emphasizes military organization and relationships between military and other social institutions, rather than wars and battles. The bibliography comprises seven parts: (1) general and comparative topics, including works on the social, cultural, and biological causes of war; (2) the ancient world; (3) western Eurasia since antiquity; (4) eastern Eurasia since antiquity; (5) sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania; (6) pre-Columbian America; and (7) Indians in post-contact America.