Wayne Lee’s engaging and rewarding volume is the latest entry into the ranks of recent surveys of Anglo-American warfare, joining those by Jeremy Black, Armstrong Starkey, John Grenier, and others. In what is certain to become a defining work, Lee reveals many original and insightful perspectives on the relationships between war and culture. The book’s central argument is that because war “is defined both by violence and restraint,” it is necessary to understand “the many ways societies seek to limit war’s destructive power, and … the choices and systems that unleash it” (2). Lee’s steady emphasis on the idea of restraint underscores his understanding of war as “an act of communication,” with “its own structures, patterns, and internally consistent logic, a ‘grammar,’ in which violent acts carry meaning and convey intention” (2). Lee explains the relationship between restraint and atrocity through four categories: a society’s actual logistical and demographic capacity to wage war, its mechanisms for controlling the use of force, the precise legal and moral calculations on the conduct of war, and specific cultural values, all of which influence the degree to which war becomes “frightful” in its destructiveness (6).

Readers should not expect, on the basis of the subtitle, a thoroughgoing survey of all wars between 1500 and 1865. Rather, the book is a series of finely crafted essays that model Lee’s useful theoretical apparatus. The author highlights telling episodes from five different struggles: warfare in Ireland, the English Civil War, Indian conflicts in colonial America, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. Unlike other volumes that focus predominantly on American developments, this one is distinctive for its careful depiction of how campaigns in Ireland and England presaged the character of those in America. Readers of this journal will be interested to note that fully one-half of the book focuses on Irish and English warfare during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lee skillfully interweaves broader patterns of war with engaging stories and episodes, such as Sir Henry Sidney confronting a mutiny at Clonmel in 1569, Sir William Waller’s generalship during the English Civil War, encounters between Algonquians and Roanoke colonists in 1586, and General John Sullivan’s fiery campaign against the Iroquois in 1779.

In wars against “barbarians”—whether those in Ireland or in North America—Lee finds that the central problem was “making one’s grammar of violence comprehensible to peoples who did not share the same language and logic of war” (8). For example, English colonists often misunderstood the difference in Native warfare between raids conducted for blood revenge and campaigns for captives, spoils of war, and broader strategic ends. Conflicts involving “brothers,” by contrast, were often more restrained by “showing terror or extending mercy to traitors who might yet be reincorporated into the nation” (8). Ultimately, he argues, warfare against “barbarians” became more destructive because of the Anglo-American inability to imagine or incorporate them as subjects.

Two of Lee’s finest chapters, on the American Indian warfare from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, advance some very important questions: “What were Indian systems of restraint? How did they imagine victory, and what was their social capacity for wielding violence?” (130). Lee attributes to Native warfare things that have long been overlooked, such as discernible strategy, logic, and consistency. He correctly finds that “Native Americans had a highly graduated or calibrated vision of war” that differed in intensity, scope, and its intended message (164). Despite a tendency to conflate evidence from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and thus diminish evolutionary changes in Native practices, these chapters are strikingly insightful readings of the deeper meanings of Native warfare.

Lee’s final chapters contrast the two warfare styles that emerged in the American Revolution. Using the Philadelphia Campaign of 1777 for illustration, Lee argues that the conventionally minded Continental and British armies ultimately communicated the same language of warfare, thus restraining its potential destructiveness. But when the same Continental Army units marched in General John Sullivan’s campaign against warring Iroquois nations two years later, it “represented a different way of war” that was “more frightful both in its level of destruction and its casual atrocity.” Sullivan’s Campaign underscores the book’s conclusion regarding “forms of violence against Indians that were qualitatively different than those considered appropriate for brothers” (214).

If there is a slight weakness to be found, it would be the book’s somewhat rigid categories of “barbarians” and “brothers” that leave little room for historical contingencies. Why, for example, did “barbarians” and “brothers” fight together as allies quite effectively during the American Revolution? A more complex story, in direct contrast to Sullivan’s Campaign, would examine how the foundations of Canada’s more inclusive society were partly laid by American loyalists and British Regulars fighting side by side with Iroquois and other Native allies whom they had often known for decades. Their alliance was not merely one of convenience, as it was rooted in the previously peaceful coexistence of colonists and Iroquois on the New York frontier and their history of joint military activity during King George’s War, the French and Indian War, and Pontiac’s War. These minor points of emphasis aside, Lee’s volume is both rewarding and requisite reading for scholars of military history, early modern Britain, colonial British America, and American Indians. Lee’s framework for the study of war and culture, and his original exploration of the idea of restraint, will inform and enrich all future discussions.