Professor Wayne Lee, The Global History of War Lecture

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Oxford’s Centre for Global History and the Changing Character of War Centre, Pembroke College are pleased to host:

 

​THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF WAR LECTURE

Reaping the Rewards:  How the Governor, the Priest, the Taxman, and the Garrison Secure Victory in World History

Wayne E. Lee (UNC)

 

Saturday 2 June 2018, 5pm (followed by drinks)

Pembroke College Pichette Auditorium

 

 

 

All welcome. Registration essential. For further information and to register, please contact global@history.ox.ac.uk

Francis Bacon once opined: "Augustus Caesar would say, that he wondered that Alexander feared he should want work, having no more worlds to conquer: as if it were not as hard a matter to keep as to conquer."  Many societies have found that the process of converting military success into a consolidated conquest was harder than they expected.  Oddly, historians have not spent that much time on the problem either, preferring to focus more on the battles than the ensuing garrisons.  In this sweep through world military history, strategy, and logistics, Lee explores the "four pillars" of conquest (the titular governor, priest, tax man and garrison) and he then compares how those same pillars worked in non-state societies on the Eurasian steppe and in the Native American woodlands.

 

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Wayne E. Lee is the Dowd Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, where he also chairs the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense. He is the author of Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History (2016), Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500-1865 (2011), and Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina (2001) as well as two edited volumes on world military history and many articles and book chapters.  Lee has an additional career as an archaeologist, having done field work in Greece, Albania, Hungary, Croatia, and Virginia, including co-directing two field projects.  He was a principal author and a co-editor of Light and Shadow: Isolation and Interaction in the Shala Valley of Northern Albania, winner of the 2014 Society for American Archaeology's book award. In 2015/16 Lee was the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army War College.