War and the City

Book excerpt: A crucial collection of new insights into a topic too often ignored in military history: the close interrelationship between cities and warfare throughout modern history. Scenes of Aleppo's war-torn streets may be shocking to the world's majority urban population, but such destruction would be familiar to urban dwellers as early as the third millennium BCE. While war is often narrated as a clash of empires, nation-states, and 'civilizations', cities have been the strategic targets of military campaigns, to be conquered, destroyed, or occupied. Cities have likewise been shaped by war, whether transformed for the purposes of military production, reconstructed after bombardment, or renewed as sites for remembering the costs of war. This conference volume draws on the latest research in military and urban history to understand the critical intersection between war and cities.