War in Germany: The Thirty Years War and the Treaty of Westphalia

Lectures 2 and 3 in the War and Germany series deal with the 17th and early 18th century. They offer sketch introductions to the Thirty Years War, the Treaties of Westphalia and their aftermath. The aim of the lectures is to make good on the program of the introduction: to set the development of “Germany” and German military history within the wider history of the development of the European mode of war-making. This requires a critique both of narratives of German victimhood proffered by nationalists and over- optimistic visions of European modernity preferred by many social scientists, which focus on the “taming of violence” or whiggish narratives of progress through vigorous competition. The aim is to show how modernization and the development of the mode of war-making went hand in hand, to show how this shaped German history, often in catastrophic ways, but also to show how German states began to develop their own agency as military state-builders.

Lecture 2: Tooze WinG2018 Lecture 2 Thirty Years War

Lecture 3: Tooze WinG2018 Lecture 3 Westphalia and after

related posts