Empire, war and faith in early modern Europe

by Geoffrey Parker

Failure is fascinating, partly because it is so common. In the 20th century, Enoch Powell claimed that "All political lives end in failure"; while, according the Winston Churchill, "Success is never final". This has always been Geoffrey Parker's new book examines ten cases, from the history of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory. Parker's reputation as a pre-eminent historian of the early modern world rests upon his work in two the reign of Philip II of Spain and the "military revolution" of the 16th and 17th centuries. This collection includes some of his outstanding contributions in both fields. Four chapters on Philip II and his problems beautifully illustrate how even the greatest empires fall apart when undermined by internal contradictions or unrealistic ambitions. Four more studies examine the character of early modern warfare, stressing how military innovations can provoke resistance that eventually overwhelms their creators. Parker is never afraid to place his arguments in a wider he contrasts the failure of the Spanish Armada of 1588 with the success of the Dutch Armada just a century later and compares the use of stategic terror in 16th-century Netherlands with that in 20th-century Yugoslavia. Finally, two original essays examine the failure of the Protestant Reformation to grow beyond its original, urban milieu and uncover the insecurity of the church, even when its ideology went unchallenged (as in early modern Scotland).

Genres: History

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History and an Associate of the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. He has published widely on the social, political and military history of early modern Europe, and in 2012 the Royal Dutch Academy recognized these achievements by awarding him its biennial Heineken Foundation Prize for History, open to scholars in any field, and any period, from any country.

Parker has written or co-written thirty-nine books, including The Military Revolution: Military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), winner of the 'best book prize' from both the American Military Institute and the Society for the History of Technology; The Grand Strategy of Philip II (Yale University Press, 1998), which won the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society of Military History; and Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013), which won the Society of Military History’s Distinguished Book Prize and also one of the three medals awarded in 2014 by the British Academy for ‘a landmark academic achievement… which has transformed understanding of a particular subject’.

Before moving to Ohio State in 1997, Parker taught at Cambridge and St Andrews universities in Britain, at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and at Illinois and Yale Universities in the United States, teaching courses on the Reformation, European history and military history at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has directed or co-directed over thirty Doctoral Dissertations to completion, as well as several undergraduate theses. In 2006 he won an OSU Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award.

He lives in Columbus, Ohio, and has four children. In 1987 he was diagnosed as having Multiple Sclerosis. His latest book is Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (Yale University Press, 2014).