Peter H. Wilson has written a magisterial survey of Central European military history, which seeks to move against the standard fixed points of the history of war in Central Europe. There are many of these points to take issue with, and Wilson deals with almost all of them to some degree throughout this long book. From misconceptions about “mercenaries” and soldiers in the early modern era, to overestimating the role of outside powers in perpetuating the Thirty Years’ War, to mythical ideas about the age of “limited” war, Wilson works hard to undercut some of the standard ideas about war in Central Europe since 1500. Some of those ideas that Wilson finds problematic receive more attention amid the mass of material, which, at times, can come across as something of a flood of facts. Wilson argues in a careful, corrective manner on many of the conceptions that still dominate Central European military history, often noting the gap between contemporary (and frequently historical) rhetoric around issues such as conscription in Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars and the actual historical practice.

Any reader of this book will find it difficult to come away from it without recognizing Wilson’s central target. Above all, Wilson takes issue with the idea of a particular German (really, Prussian) genius for war, a trope that mainly focuses on the period from Frederick II in the eighteenth century through 1945 and emphasizes the militaristic character of Prussian (and later, German) society. This approach has held two sets of historians in its grasp. The first set comes from an older school of German history, which wrote a Prussia-focused Sonderweg history, and which was left behind long ago in the field of German history. But as a military historian, Wilson knows that a second set of military historians still exists and can appear dominant in the United States and the United Kingdom. These military historians still rely on a narrative of Prussian (frequently called German) military skill, varying in their levels of sophistication, at times, even bordering on adulation. This perspective has roots in an interaction between former Wehrmacht officers and the United States military throughout the Cold War. What this means is that this perspective lives on through professional military education in the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, which remains a large and steady consumer of military history to this day.

Wilson moves against this narrative in many ways throughout this book, but he does it first by extending the timeframe of the traditional narrative. He contends that when one views the military history of Prussia and Germany from 1500 to the present, they appear far less militaristic than when viewed through the traditional timeframes of Frederick William I through 1945. In this respect, Wilson’s expertise as an early modernist with earlier weighty books on the Holy Roman Empire and the Thirty Years’ War is put to excellent use. Even in the chronological organization of the book, Wilson cuts against the standard categorizations that characterize the traditional approach to German military history. One section considers the eighteenth century through the Napoleonic Wars rather than adhering to the usual historical signposts: the eighteenth century, limited war versus 1789, and the Napoleonic Wars. Even more unusual, Wilson considers the twentieth century as a whole, without segmenting it off into pre- and post-1945 periods. Such a periodization is especially effective when it comes to the more social, cultural, and institutionally focused chapters in each of the book’s sections. Wilson’s broad perspective also allows him to more effectively challenge the German militarism arguments by expanding his analysis to Austrian and Swiss military history. Wilson very effectively uses the military history of early modern Austria to call into question the reflexive connection between Prussia and militarism. He does exceptionally well here, bringing his enormous knowledge of German language literature on war in early modern Europe to bear on the topic. Through a masterful presentation of examples, from strategy to army organization, to recruitment, Wilson underscores how the military history of the region looks very different when we read it from the sixteenth century forward rather than from the first half of the twentieth century backward. Even after Prussia challenged Austria’s position of power in 1740, Wilson maintains that Prussia did not “inevitably supplant” Austria. Prussia remained weaker through the Napoleonic Wars, when France threatened to reduce it to a second-rank power. Prussia was also not the gifted innovator that historians like to portray. Austria, by contrast, was the dominant military force throughout much of the early modern period and not just for reasons of size or by holding the title of Holy Roman Emperor. However, the latter put Austria at the center of many disputes. If one considers its experience maintaining a constant force on the military border with the Ottoman Empire, Austria had a standing army well before other European powers.

Wilson does an excellent job of showing how contingency, instead of an innate Prussian talent for war, eventually led Prussia to leap ahead of Austria in Central Europe in a very compressed period in the 1860s. This was hardly the playing out of long-standing Prussian advantages or Austrian deficiencies. In the twentieth century, Wilson’s broader point that we should consider the Prussian “way of war” as a roadmap of how to lose catastrophically is a very valuable rejoinder to the still potent image of a Prussian genius for war.

For all that can be said about the author’s encyclopedic knowledge that the book ably displays and its very welcome plea for a fundamental change in how we view Central European military history, it does have some shortcomings. One must say that as the book progresses, Wilson’s reliance on secondary literature becomes more apparent, and the deeply insightful remarks that appear everywhere in the first part of the book become far fewer by the time we reach the twentieth century. Especially on the First and Second World Wars, there is far more of a standard narrative here, with none of the twists that accompany Wilson’s handling of the early modern material. Experts on this era will derive far less from these sections. This is a purely synthetic work in the end. While diplomatic and international history make an appearance in a book that deals, at least partially, with decisions for wars, I found it curious that the analytical work of a scholar like Paul W. Schroeder on the international system from the eighteenth century forward made only a negligible appearance in this very long volume. At one level, this reflects Wilson’s deeply historical approach, with which I am in deep sympathy, though I think that some engagement with conceptual work dealing with war and international relations would have especially helped the later chapters of the book. Finally, it must be said that this is a very long read, and I do wonder if every reader will have the patience to plow through the multiple three- or four-paragraph histories of more minor conflicts to pick out all of Wilson’s brilliant asides.

All that said, Wilson has provided us with a fundamentally new approach to the military history of Central Europe, one that brings Austria back into the center of this history. For a field like military history that has spent much of its existence in postwar Austria as something of a neglected stepchild, Wilson’s book and its notably broad approach to military history will perhaps offer a path to relegate this status to the past.