Concerned with the mass mobilization of society for war, this study starts with the French levee en masse of 1793. It replaced former theories and regulations concerning the obligation of military service with a universal concept more encompassing in its moral claims than any that had prevailed under the Old Regime. These papers analyze and compare episodes (in which the distinctive ideological configuration that the original levee typified plays a leading role).

The Great Wall of China is renowned as one of the most impressive and intriguing man-made structures on earth. It is also the subject of an awesome mythology, embedded in both learned and popular imaginations, which has grown up and now obscured the historical record. Even the maps which chart the Wall's position offer erroneous accounts of a phenomenon which has never been accurately surveyed. Arthur Waldron reveals that the notion of an ancient and continuously existing Great Wall, one of modern China's national symbols and a legend in the eyes of the West, is in fact a myth. His...

Scholars have long recognised that Chinese politics changed fundamentally in 1925, when the radical nationalism of the May Thirtieth Movement took political centre stage. This book explains the connection between the beginning of the Nationalist revolution and the introduction of modern World War I style warfare to China. Its focus is the key year 1924, which saw a regional dispute about the status of Shanghai escalate into a massive civil war. Drawing on a wide range of newly-available archival sources, this book shows how the war of 1924 opened the way for radical nationalism, deeply...