Parts of this book were previously presented at conferences and seminars at the University of Chicago, York University, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), the Advanced Studies Institute of the University of Michigan, Washington University, the University of Cologne, and the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique in Paris. I would like to thank Carolyne Johnson, Beverley Diamond, Stephen Blum, David Cohen, Nicholas Dirks, Dick Fox, Heike Behrend, and Bernard Lortat-Jacob for hosting these events. In addition to these occasions, I benefited enormously from the interaction with my colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin, most notably Gerard Behague, Stuart Goosman, and Steve Slawek. Drafts of various chapters have also been read by Peter Wicke and Stuart Goosman. Thomas Turino read the entire manuscript and provided invaluable comments and criticism. Tom Gruning prepared the index, and Ian Eagleson read the page proofs.

In writing this book I was heavily dependent on the help of others. I am particularly grateful to Mark Smith for his advice and his patience in answering my questions about Coptic and Egyptology, and to Wadi Abullif for his generous assistance in Cairo. I would like to thank Sydney Aufre`re, Anne Boud’hors, Nathalie Bosson, Charles Libois, and the late Maurice Martin for allowing me to profit from their discoveries and expertise, Colin Wakefield for his help at the Bodleian Library and his advice about Arabic transcriptions, Nigel Hope for his proof correcting and Bonnie Blackburn for her copy-editing. My thanks also go to Anne Ashby, Alice Bailey, Maurits van den Boogert, Anthony Grafton, Nelly Hanna, Johannes den Heijer, Jan Helderman, Karim Ibrahim, Robert Jones, Gautier Juynboll, Ivo Klaver, Jill Kraye, William Lyster, Dorothea McEwan, Ian MacLean, Georges Masson, Peter Miller, Andrew Pettegree, Paul Botley, Jenny Boyle, Francis Richard, Jonathan Rolls, Lydia Salviucci Insolera, Rijk Smitskamp, Gerald Toomer, Hans van der Velde, Michael Walsh, Nicholas Warner, Joanna Weinberg, and Jan Just Witkam. I gratefully acknowledge an S. T. Lee Fellowship at the School of Advanced Study, London University, the subsidies given to me for travel in Egypt by the Leidse Universitaire Fonds, the library and hospitality of the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo, and above all of the Warburg Institute in London, and, finally, the support of the Dr C. LouiseThijssen-Schoute Stichting, to whose former chairman,A. G. H . Bachrach, this book is affectionately dedicated.

Attempting a comprehensive catalog and commentary devoted to the wars of the world is, tragically enough, a labor that might consume several lifetimes. We took about 10 years, during which time we incurred a heavy debt to the authors whose works are listed in the bibliographies that accompany each entry in this encyclopedia. In addition to these books, which typically focus on a particular war, historical period, nation, or personality, we had the inestimable benefit of five masterpieces of military encyclopedia making. First and foremost was George Childs Kohn’s Dictionary of Wars (revised edition, New York: Checkmark Books, 1999), which guided us in both our selection and coverage of many of the wars included here. Another indispensable guide was Micheal Clodfelter’s Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1500–2000 (second edition, Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2002). In addition, like all military historians, we made frequent and extensive use of The Harper Encyclopedia of Military History: From 3500 B.C. to the Present by R. Ernest Dupuy and Trevor N. Dupuy (fourth edition, New York: Harper- Collins, 1993); The Oxford Companion to Military History, edited by Richard Holmes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); and The Oxford Companion to American Military History, edited by John Whiteclay Chambers II (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). In the creation of this encyclopedia, we also worked directly with distinguished military historians, who contributed to this book as writers of individual articles or as readers on our editorial board. We acknowledge and offer our thanks to Edward Countryman, Allan R. Millett, Mark Parillo, John Childs, Ian Gentles, Geoffrey Parker, John Lynn, Ian K. Steele, and, in memorium, to John Erickson. Finally, no book sees the light of day without an editor, and ours, Claudia Schaab of Facts On File, is one of the very best. She kept our focus on the details but never let us lose sight of the light at the end of the tunnel.

I could not have written this book without assistance from faculty and students in various English departments around the world. My colleagues at Penn, especially Peter Conn and Max Cavitch, have been among my most thoughtful and well-informed interlocutors. During my time teaching at Kings College, London, I learned much about the specificities of the British system from conversations with Mark Turner, Jo McDonagh, and Gordon McMullan. When he was at the University of Edinburgh, John Frow engaged me in a project of administrative data exchange between the English departments there, at Penn, and at the University of Melbourne. Elizabeth Anderson performed heroic labor in assembling the Penn data for that study, the results of which proved helpful to this book in a number of ways. David Carter arranged for me to make an extended visit to the University of Queensland, where my sense of the situation of English departments in Australia was sharpened by conversations with Nathan Garvey, Roger Osborne, Ian Hunter, and David himself. I also learned much from the Australian and New Zealand scholars at the 2011 SHARP Conference in Brisbane, and especially from Simone Murray of Monash University, who, among other things, explained to me the “Melbourne model.” Henrik Enbohm of the Swedish Writers’ Union invited me to a large gathering of writers, scholars, and translators in Stockholm, where I was able to speak with faculty and graduate students from literature departments in Sweden and elsewhere in Scandinavia. Andrew Shields at the University of Basel provided me with helpful information about English studies in Switzerland and Germany, as did Philipp Schweighauser and Ina Habermann. In Vienna, my Austrian guide was Hanno Biber,and I am grateful to Lianna Giorgi of the ICCR and the Euro- Festival Project for arranging my visit to that city, as well as to Bologna.Most recently, Rudolph Glitz arranged for me to visit the University of Amsterdam and provided clear and detailed answers to my queries regarding English studies in the Netherlands. For helping me to learn something about English departments in China, I owe a particular debt to Danling Li, my tireless guide and native informant in Beijing, who has continued to assist me back in Philadelphia. Wang Ning arranged my visit to Tsinghua University and set up a series of meetings and meals there; Shen Anfeng gave me a most informative tour of the campus. Mao Liang arranged my visit to Peking University, where he, Ding Hongwei, Thomas Rendall, and Shen Dan all patiently answered my many questions about their students, curriculums, teaching methods, and funding arrangements. Zhang Hongxia was a charming and informative guide in Shanghai. Junsong Chen of Shanghai International Studies University led me on a most enlightening tour of the English literature section of the SISU bookstore. He Weiwen, vice dean of the School of Foreign Languages at Shanghai Jiaotong University, hosted me on his campus, where I enjoyed helpful discussions with him and Wang Zhenhua. Sun Jian, the chair of English at Fudan University, generously made time for me in the middle of a busy week. My visit to Nanjing University was especially productive, and Liu Haiping did me great service in arranging for meetings with groups of administrators, faculty, and graduate students. Especially helpful was the participation of Yang Jincai, the dean of the School of Foreign Studies, and Gao Wei, Zhu Gang, Zhao Wenshu, Zhu Xuefeng, Hu Jing, and Fan Hao. Finally, Phoebe Liu, my student at Penn, translated Chinese documents and websites for me, and canvassed her friends at universities in China for information that we could not find online. No one has assisted me more with this book than David Dunning, who prepared all the charts and contributed much clarity of thought to the task of gathering and analyzing the statistical data. David also read the book in manuscript, steering me around numerous mistakes, as did the copyeditor Cheryl Adam at a later stage in the process. Fraser Sutherland worked rapidly to prepare an index. Aileen Castell was a superbly efficient project manager. Emma Bennett is the editor who originally encouraged me to write the book for her Manifesto series, and Ben Thatcher kept the projectmoving forward despite my habitual dodges, detours, and delays. None of these people will fully agree with the analysis and arguments in the book. Nor do they share responsibility for whatever errors of fact and flaws of reasoning it contains. But the opportunity to discuss with them the present circumstances and possible futures of a discipline in which we are all invested has greatlyenriched my understanding and enlivened my professional life these past few years.