In her book A Translucent Mirror, Pamela Crossley wrote that “The Ming empire (1368–1644) was perpetually engaged in a struggle against various peoples along its northern borders.” This bald statement contradicts conventional wisdom that the Ming dynasty, having endured Mongol rule for about a century, attempted to limit relations with foreign lands and developed a policy of isolation. In fact, the Ming empire became embroiled in numerous conflicts along its frontiers. Some of these clashes were defensive, but others were attempts to annex additional territory. The court resolved a few of these conflicts through diplomacy or withdrawal from alien lands, yet others festered throughout the dynasty. It scarcely enjoyed clear-cut victories. Nonetheless, such repeated battles necessitated improvements in military strategy and technology, and it is no accident that a spate of texts on the military appeared during this time. The first Ming emperor himself had to master principles of land and naval warfare in the course of defeating other rebel groups and in seeking to gain the throne.

The chapter examines the Yangzi as the only inland river system that played a consistent major role in strategy during World War II. It was only in China, where protracted war was waged without a nationwide network of railways, that riverine operations emerged as the pivot of military decision-making. As China’s principal waterway, the Yangtze was not only key to the projection of military power into the hinterland, but also – and more importantly – a vital channel for transporting grain to both Chinese and Japanese armies as they endured prolonged conflict. The chapter begins at the Japanese-occupied Yangzi Delta, demonstrating how the delta became central to the China Expeditionary Army’s efforts to live off the land. It then moves upriver to highlight the understudied Battle of Yichang of mid-1940 as a turning point in the war because of its repercussions for provisioning. The Nationalist loss of Yichang severed their Sichuan base from the traditional grain-producing regions of central and east China and forced a rewriting of military provisioning policies.

This chapter highlights how low-level tussles for food replaced large-scale engagements as the main mode of conflict among the Nationalists, CCP, and Japanese. In regions of military contestation, namely guerrilla war zones, civilians participated extensively in two endeavors common to all sides: procurement (acquiring grain) and protection (ensuring that grain did not fall into enemy hands). All three main belligerents attempted to control the flow of grain across ambiguous boundaries through blockades and the rush-transportation and rush-purchase of food. These practices dominated everyday civilian life and were invariably laced with violence. The daily threat of food-related bloodshed forced most ordinary Chinese to go to drastic lengths to survive the protracted three-way struggle. Such grim prospects reveal the limitations of nationalism and collaborationism as explanations for wartime behavior, even though Nationalist and CCP propaganda weaponized the “hanjian” label against each other. The moralization of collaboration and resistance in both scholarly work and popular memory has overshadowed the mundaneness of survival.

This chapter details the first attempt of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) to put together an armed wing in exile in Botswana. After engaging with the different movements in exile Mafuna, Matshoba, Mafole and Nengwekhulu had to figure out how their Black Consciousness praxis would fit in this new phase of struggle. Based out of Botswana, they were able to maintain close communications with the internal wing of the movement that was growing rapidly. They had to use the skills they learned building BCM inside the country in exile to keep their work discreet, yet, continue to organize in plain sight. Eventually, they were able to receive help from the PAC and North African/Middle Eastern radicals in their quest for military training. This represented a continuation of the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition in Botswana and showed Black Consciousness had the ability to learn from and absorb tactics, strategies and theories from wider Third-World struggles. Critically, the movement would have to encounter patriarchy and sexism as it pertained to who could even obtain military training. Marginalizing the gender question weakened the formation and demeaned the labour, triumphs and sacrifices of Black women who had with the men made their work possible.

Sunzi was a household name by the 1980s and continued to establish itself in the popular imagination in the decades that followed. It was quoted and referred to in movies and television shows without explanation. Outside academic debates as to the universality of Sunzi as a work of strategy, it clearly symbolized the use of strategy for many people. While anyone could mention Sunzi to signal their interest in strategy, serious students of strategy put Sunzi together with Clausewitz to claim to know strategy from A to Z. Robert Asprey actively promoted Sunzi within military circles, both out of conviction of its value and because of his friendship with Samuel Griffith. John Boyd, a retired air force officer, developed his own approach to strategy that was influential mostly in the Marine Corps. Some of his supporters have called Boyd “the greatest strategist since Sunzi.”

The violent disunion rhetorics that swelled in anticipation of Civil War crafted sectional identities for listeners, pitting the interests of opposing sides as irreconcilable. For some, embracing such sectional identities was a rhetorical process. The war-time diary of one Virginia plantation mistress, Ida Powell Dulany, serves as a case study to explore the process of sectional identification and to illustrate the role of proximity to war’s violence in ethos formation. The Dulany plantation, Oakley, sat on a major thoroughfare that both northern and southern troops sought to control, bringing war’s violence to its inhabitants. Oakley represents a site of competing and divergent rhetorical motives and a site of conflict over the meaning of the southern home. The concept of rhetorical becoming accounts for the circumstances, contexts, and locations that shape self-perception and rhetorical action, foregrounding the interplay of public discourses such as disunion rhetorics and individual experiences in shaping a sense of war-time ethos.

Historical analyses tend to agree that the Iranian Revolution was an overwhelmingly “urban” revolution. But how did the revolutionaries themselves see “the urban,” that is, the material, social, and ideological phenomena entangled with the processes of urbanization?In this chapter, the author explores how the arguably most prominent revolutionary Iranian socialist organization prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Organization of the Iranian People’s Fadâ‘i Guerrillas, engaged “the urban.” The author examines a range of Fadâ‘i materials from the end of the 1960s to the end of the 1970s that reflect the organization’s theory and action through four analytical points related to “the urban,” namely, (1) as a central feature of the organization’s historical context and profile; (2) as elements in the organization’s revolutionary theory and strategy; (3) as a setting and resource for its armed action; and (4) as a site for detection of revolutionary potential. The author contend that the urban was used by the guerrillas to work through the global, that is, the universalistic pretentions of Marxist ideology and of Third Worldist revolutionary theory, toward an Iran-specific praxis. “The urban” became an abstract and concrete link, the author argues, connecting a transnational space of ideas to a particular, localized struggle for national liberation and thus, in short, to anchor theory in practice.

This chapter looks at Callwell’s experience in the South African War (1899-1902), first, as part of the Natal Army and then in the protracted counter-guerrilla operations that followed the ‘conventional’ phase of the war. Callwell’s experiences of battlefield conditions and in counter-guerrilla warfare were central to his writings, especially The Tactics of To-day (1900), in which he argued that a tactical revolution had taken place.