The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War

The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War

by James Q. Whitman
The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War

The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War

by James Q. Whitman

Paperback

$32.00 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Thursday, April 4
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

Today, war is considered a last resort for resolving disagreements. But a day of staged slaughter on the battlefield was once seen as a legitimate means of settling political disputes. James Whitman argues that pitched battle was essentially a trial with a lawful verdict. And when this contained form of battle ceased to exist, the law of victory gave way to the rule of unbridled force. The Verdict of Battle explains why the ritualized violence of the past was more effective than modern warfare in bringing carnage to an end, and why humanitarian laws that cling to a notion of war as evil have led to longer, more barbaric conflicts.

Belief that sovereigns could, by rights, wage war for profit made the eighteenth century battle's golden age. A pitched battle was understood as a kind of legal proceeding in which both sides agreed to be bound by the result. To the victor went the spoils, including the fate of kingdoms. But with the nineteenth-century decline of monarchical legitimacy and the rise of republican sentiment, the public no longer accepted the verdict of pitched battles. Ideology rather than politics became war's just cause. And because modern humanitarian law provided no means for declaring a victor or dispensing spoils at the end of battle, the violence of war dragged on.

The most dangerous wars, Whitman asserts in this iconoclastic tour de force, are the lawless wars we wage today to remake the world in the name of higher moral imperatives.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780674416871
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Publication date: 11/24/2014
Pages: 336
Product dimensions: 5.60(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

James Q. Whitman is Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter Five: Were There Really Rules?


Malplaquet was the battle that saved early eighteenth-century France. It may seem bizarre, then, that contemporaries universally declared it to be a victory for the Allies—indeed, a “complete victory.” “The good lord has given us a complete victory,” exulted Marlborough in a letter to the Holy Roman Emperor on the evening after the battle. This despite the fact that the battle had taken such a toll that the Allied war effort was crippled. The Dutch commander Frans Nicolaas Fagel used the same phrase the next day: The battle had been a “complete victory”—though Fagel added that “the corpses lay on the ground in their ranks and files.” “Our troops could not have acquired more glory,” boasted another allied commander, the Count of Albemarle, that day, “but I admit that it has cost us dearly: Our poor Dutch infantry has been cut to pieces.” The Dutch had suffered such calamitous losses, in fact, that they would find it difficult to muster new forces for the remainder of the war. Yet the battle was a “complete victory” for their side, the Allies rejoiced, and the French agreed: The French sources would continue to describe Malplaquet as a “complete victory” for the enemy down into the nineteenth century.

Why was Malplaquet, a battle that took the lives of a quarter of the allied troops, a battle that by any strategic measure should have counted as perhaps the most critical French victory of a momentous war, the battle that saved France, understood to be a French defeat? If eighteenth-century observers were not judging it by the modern standard of military strategy, what standard were they applying?

The answer belongs to the standard pre-modern law of victory, and it is an answer that suggests powerfully that there were rules in eighteenth-century warfare and that those rules mattered. Under the pre-modern law of victory, the French counted as the “losers” at Malplaquet because they were the ones who retreated. The rule according to which Malplaquet was a “complete victory” for the Allies was thus the same rule that would make Chotusitz a “complete victory” for Frederick the Great thirty-three years later: It was what I shall call “the retreat rule.” Malplaquet was a “complete victory” for the Allies because they managed to gain control of the field of battle—despite the fact that they only did so at the cost of devastating and hugely disproportionate losses. As an eighteenth-century report explained, “The massacre was great . . . one saw the battalions of the Allies. . .lying dead in ranks . . . But [the French] yielded the field of battle.” To be sure, the French, like the Austrians at Chotusitz, retreated “in good order,” “with flags waving, drums beating, and drawing off sixty-five of their cannon with them.” A retreat could be as ceremonious and colorful an event as any other in the age of eighteenth-century Kriegsmanier. Nevertheless, a retreat was a retreat: The side that yielded the field of the battle, no matter how great its strategic gains, no matter how awful the cost it imposed on the enemy, was the loser.

Table of Contents

A Note to the Reader vii

Introduction 1

1 Why Battles Matter 25

2 Accepting the Wager of Battle 50

3 Laying Just Claim to the Profits of War 95

4 The Monarchical Monopolization of Military Violence 133

5 Were There Really Rules? 172

6 The Death of Pitched Battle 207

Conclusion 245

Notes 265

Acknowledgments 315

Index 317

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews