Making Makers: The Past, the Present, and the Study of War

Making Makers presents a comprehensive history of a seminal work of scholarship which has exerted a persistent attraction for scholars of war and strategy: Makers of Modern Strategy. It reveals the processes by which scholars conceived and devised the book, considering both successful and failed attempts to make and remake the work across the twentieth century, and illuminating its impact and legacy. It explains how and why these influential volumes took their particular forms, unearths the broader intellectual processes that shaped them, and reflects on the academic parameters of the study of war in the twentieth century. In presenting a complete genesis of the Makers project in the context of intellectual trends and historical contingency, this book reflects on a more complex and nuanced appraisal of the development of scholarship on war. In so doing it also offers contributions to the intellectual biographies of key figures in the history of war in the twentieth century, such as Edward Mead Earle, Peter Paret, Gordon Craig, and Theodore Ropp. Making Makers contributes to an intellectual history of military history and contextualises the place of history and historians in strategic and security studies. It is not only a history of the book, but a history of the networks of scholars involved in its creation, their careers, and lines of patronage, crossing international boundaries, from Europe to the USA, to Asia and Australia. It is an investigation of ideas, individuals, and groups, of work completed and scholarship produced, as well as contingency and opportunities missed.

About the Author

Michael P. M. Finch is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Deakin University. Prior to this he was a Senior Lecturer at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, a Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King's College London, and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of War at the University of Oxford. He is the author of A Progressive Occupation? The Gallieni-Lyautey Method and Colonial Pacification in Tonkin and Madagascar, 1885-1900 (OUP, 2013).