Empire of chance : the Napoleonic Wars and the disorder of things / Anders Engberg-Pedersen.
2015
DC226.3 .E54 2015eb
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Details
Title
Empire of chance : the Napoleonic Wars and the disorder of things / Anders Engberg-Pedersen.
ISBN
9780674425415 (electronic book)
Published
Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, [2015].
Copyright
©2015.
Language
English
Description
1 online resource (x, 324 pages) : illustrations, maps
Item Number
10.4159/9780674425415 doi
Call Number
DC226.3 .E54 2015eb
Dewey Decimal Classification
940.2/7
Summary
"Empire of Chance examines the place of war in the history of knowledge. It argues that with the Napoleonic Wars, chance came to be installed as the basic operative principle of history. Attending to a vast array of fields and disciplines -- military theory, literature, philosophy, cartography, mathematics, and pedagogy -- the book charts the momentous shift in the thinking of war that took place around 1800. It examines the efforts to rethink the state of war as a variegated epistemic regime of chance events, contingencies, conjectures, and probabilities, and it tells the story of the inventions devised to handle and manage it. Juxtaposing traditional philosophy and military theory, literature and cartography, war games and historiography, knowledge and poetics, Engberg-Pedersen reveals how the Napoleonic Wars served as a catalyst for the emergence of a worldly thought that turns its attention outward to the flux of the empirical world in order to come to grips with the pervasive disorder of things. War came to be conceived not as an exceptional state, but as a cipher of modernity"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
Source of Description
Description based on print version record.
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Empire of chance.
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Table of Contents
Introduction : the prism of war
The geometry of war : siege architecture and narrative form
State of war 1800 : topography and chance
Modus operandi : on touch, tact, and tactics
Exercising judgment : technologies of experience
Paper empires : military cartography and the management of space
The poetics of war : cartography and the realist novel
Conclusion : the disorder of things.
The geometry of war : siege architecture and narrative form
State of war 1800 : topography and chance
Modus operandi : on touch, tact, and tactics
Exercising judgment : technologies of experience
Paper empires : military cartography and the management of space
The poetics of war : cartography and the realist novel
Conclusion : the disorder of things.