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This chapter examines the military society in modern European states during the 18th century. It attempts to answer the question whether the early modern state created a military instrument commensurate with its ambitions in the realm of power politics or whether the exigencies of martial rationality militarized the machinery of power in Europe from the 16th century onwards. It suggests that the correlation between the constitution of the state and that of the army, and between the armed forces and society, was an essential characteristic of the rise, maturity, and fall of the early modern state.

This chapter discusses army intelligence during the English civil war. The war both facilitated and complicated intelligence gathering and analysis — a process that revealed again the distinctive intimacy of this war in which language formed no barrier, troops were volatile, prisoners were regularly exchanged, and clothing was a shaky guide to affiliation, and in which civil society, with its poor transients, messengers, and travelling civilians coexisted alongside armies, as did family links and friendship between enemies. The blurred boundaries between civil and military society aided information gathering, while the technological limits of communications and the confusions of war reinforced the need for it. Intelligence, once obtained, had to be translated into purposive military action. Generals and their councils of war made the best plans they could on the basis of information received, and as needs changed they dispatched aides de camp with revised orders.

This chapter explores the impact of war on society. It considers how the wars affected gender relations, social mobility, social conflict, the response to the problems generated by demobilization, the wide-ranging quest for national revival in the aftermath of the Austrian war, the attempts to break the clan system after the 'Forty-five rebellion, and the extent to which the conflicts of this period militarized British and Irish society.

This chapter examines the growth of state control and the war practices of ransom and booty in Europe during the period from 1300 to 1800, focusing on the case of France. It describes the evolution of norms and practices relating to ransoms and spoils in the context of warfare. States began to take control of regulated and integrated military machinery for reasons of efficiency and humanity. This development led to the military society becoming a perfect, complete, or model society.

The conclusion summarises the main lines of the collage and raises the question as to whether the work has succeeded in drawing the connection between the large-scale political and social changes in Egypt brought on by the 2011 revolution and the smaller story narrating the everyday interactions of a middle-class building. The collages of four tales provided a myriad of divided snapshots: scenes of Tahrir Square and its protesters; of violence and the reinvention of public spaces in a moment of insurrection; of phantasmagorias in mimicking mini-Dubai(s) and Singapore; of mushrooming mega shopping malls; of the transforming neighbourhood of Doqi pushing away its middle classes, transmuting the ‘popular’ street into a site of lucrative commercial activities; of moving to New Cairo and compound life at the far end of an exhausting commute; of evictions in popular neighbourhoods; and finally of the militarisation of urban life. In view of this overt military rule, one main recurring question raised is how to trace the elements of continuity on a micro level, when the urban transmutations in post-January Cairo are so pervasive. Here, referring time and again to the groundbreaking work of Stephen Graham (2010), to what extent is the ‘new military urbanism’ actually new, when all but one of Egypt’s presidents since 1952 have been military men?

Chapter two charts the rise of sociability as a human, but also particularly French capacity that could be deployed to remedy widespread military dysfunction. Forming a société militaire, or military society, would lead to victory and even happiness in war. Military thinkers theorized and implemented new ideas for fostering social bonds and collective masculine identity among continental French troops. In global theaters of war, sociability held different but no less important implications. While inter-racial fraternization was virtually impossible in Saint-Domingue where the racial divide was increasing, finding a “middle ground” through deeper cultural knowledge, respect, and friendship were considered essential to survival in India and North America.

This chapter describes Saddam Husayn's vision for Iraq and his influences in these ambitions. The firm establishment of force is illustrated. Furthermore, the chapter looks at the military buildup of Iraq and the change into becoming a military society. Also, the glorification of war is discussed.

This essay connects the life of John Codman Ropes, lawyer, historian, and founder of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts, with the society's purposes and the type of Civil War histories it created between 1876 and 1918. Ropes, although unable to enlist because of physical disability, was nevertheless shaken by a war that killed his brother and many Harvard classmates. Ropes honored the dead through his devotion to “true History.” Applying the methodology of the law, guided the society in crafting narratives of the war that would be stripped of partisanship, sectionalism, or apology. Ropes’s postwar life and that of the society he founded are best understood not as abstractions of the war’s transformation of a social class but rather how individuals confronted loss and its aftermath.