War and Gender
This chapter offers an introduction to the entangled histories of gender and war from the Thirty Years’ War to the Wars of Revolution and Independence, against the background of a wider history of war and warfare in the early modern period. It starts with a critical discussion of some of the concepts historians have used to capture the nature and development of early modern war and warfare, such as military revolution, limited war, and total war. An important aspect of this discussion is the relations between transformations in early modern warfare and processes of state formation, which are central to various arguments made by historians about gender and war in the early modern period. Against this conceptual background, the chapter then presents an overview of the major wars from this period, with a focus on the Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War, and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which points, among other things, to the increasing entwinement of European and colonial war in this era. The chapter concludes with an introduction to the state of research and central themes in the history of gender and war.