Exploring the effects of war on state power in early modern Europe, this book asks if military competition increased rulers' power over their subjects and forged more modern states, or if the strains of war broke down political and administrative systems. Comparing England and the Netherlands in the age of warrior princes such as Henry VIII and Charles V, it examines the development of new military and fiscal institutions, and asks how mobilization for war changed political relationships throughout society. Towns in England, such as Norwich, York, Exeter, and Rye, are compared with towns in the Netherlands, such as Antwerp, Leiden, 's-Hertogenbosch and Valenciennes, to see how the magistrates' relations with central government and the urban populace were modified by war. Great noblemen from the Howard and Percy families are set alongside their equivalents from the houses of Cro and Egmond to examine the role of recruitment, army command, and heroic reputation in maintaining noble power. The wider interactions of subjects and rulers in wartime are reviewed to measure how effectively war extended princes' claims on their subjects' loyalty and service, their ambitions to control news and opinion and to promote national identity, and their ability to manage the economy and harness religious change to dynastic purposes. The result is a compelling but nuanced picture of societies and polities tested and shaped by the pressures of ever more demanding warfare.

War should be recognised as one of the defining features of life in the England of Henry VIII. Henry fought many wars throughout his reign, and this book explores how this came to dominate English culture and shape attitudes to the king and to national history, with people talking and reading about war, and spending money on weaponry and defence.

War was a central theme in the world history of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with military capability and activity central to its states, societies, economies and cultures. War in the World 1450–1600 provides an account of warfare in the period, placing it in global context. It offers a corrective to a narrative that has emphasised European developments and obscured the history of non-European military systems and cultures of war. Highlighting conflict between non-Western powers, which constituted most of the conflict around the world, as well as giving due attention to warfare between Western and non-Western powers, Black emphasises the breadth and variety of military trajectories and connections. This comparative context also provides a framework for considering the idea of a European-based Military Revolution. A wide-ranging account of world military history in a period of substantial development, the book will be essential reading for those interested in global history and conflict. War in the World 1450–1600 is designed as a companion volume to Jeremy Black's Beyond the Military Revolution: Warfare in the Seventeenth-Century World.

The Wars of the Roses (c. 1455-1487) are renowned as an infamously savage and tangled slice of English history. A bloody thirty-year struggle between the dynastic houses of Lancaster and York, they embraced localised vendetta (such as the bitter northern feud between the Percies and Nevilles) as well as the formal clash of royalist and rebel armies at St Albans, Ludford Bridge, Mortimer's Cross, Towton, Tewkesbury and finally Bosworth, when the usurping Yorkist king, Richard III, was crushed by Henry Tudor. Powerful personalities dominate the period: the charismatic and enigmatic Richard III, immortalized by Shakespeare; the slippery Warwick, the Kingmaker', who finally over-reached ambition to be cut down at the Battle of Barnet; and guileful women like Elizabeth Woodville and Margaret of Anjou, who for a time ruled the kingdom in her husband's stead. David Grummitt places the violent events of this complex time in the wider context of fifteenth-century kingship and the development of English political culture.Never losing sight of the traumatic impact of war on the lives of those who either fought in or were touched by battle, this captivating new history will make compelling reading for students of the late medieval period and Tudor England, as well as for general readers.

Explores how the earliest printers moulded demand and created new markets and argues that marketing changed what was read and the place of reading in sixteenth-century readers' lives, shaping their expectations, tastes, and their practices and beliefs.

A comprehensive dissection of the making of urban society in the Low Countries during the middle ages and the sixteenth century.

Examines how urban citizenship gave many people a real stake in their own communities, even before the rise of modern democracy.

Historian Wayne Lee here presents a searching exploration of early modern English and American warfare, including the English Civil War and the American Revolution. He shows that, in the end, the repeated experience of wars with barbarians or brothers created an American culture of war that demands absolute solutions: enemies are either to be incorporated or rejected, included or excluded. And that determination plays a major role in defining the violence used against them.

Britain has historically been seen as an upholder of international norms, at least in its relations with western powers. This has often been contrasted with the violence perpetrated in colonial contexts on other continents. What is often missed, however, is the extent to which the state with its capital in London—first England, then Great Britain—inflicted extreme violence on its European neighbours, even when still using the rhetoric of neighbourliness and friendship. This book comprises eleven case-studies of Anglo-British strategic violence, from the siege of Harfleur in 1415 to the fire-bombing of Hamburg in 1943. Chapters examine actions that were top-down and directed, and perpetrated for specific geopolitical reasons—many of them at, or well beyond, the bounds of what was sanctioned by prevailing international norms at the time. The contributors look at how these actions were conceived, executed and perceived by the English/British public, by the international legal community of the time, and by the victims. This history of English violence in Europe complicates not only easy notions of England/Britain as a champion of the ‘standards of civilisation’ or of the ‘liberal international order’, but also of the supposed distinction between ‘European’ and ‘extra-European’ warfare.

This book offers a substantial reconsideration of early modern warfare and its relationship to the power of the state.