The publishers of Fontana Paperbacks have for some time past earned the gratitude of students of European history for bringing out a highly succ-essful series on the history of Europe written by eminent scholars, and a companion series on the economic history of Europe under the editor¬ship of CM. Cipolla. To this they have added a third string, the Fontana History of War and European Society, under the general editorship of the noted social historian Geoffrey Best. The book under review is part of this series and deals with the military dimension of European overseas expansion, from both the colonial and the metropolitan perspectives.
It is not enough to say that European countries developed their colonial empires because of the growth of commercial and (later) industrial capita¬lism in Europe. At the level of a very broad generalization it is mostly true, but it is also rather trite. Apart from its inability to explain the expan¬sionism of powers like the Tsarist Empire or the Habs-burg monarchy, which contain¬ed a substantial proportion of pre-capitalist elements well into the nineteenth century, such a generalization fails to explain the wide variety of colonial political structures that emerged.