Military history has long been a popular subject for general readers, at least the male gender among us. Most everyone regrettably recognizes that war has shaped the fates of peoples and places in the dimly distant past and is violently visible in our global present. For all its manifest importance, scholars have, however, produced very little research intended to anchor our appreciation of contemporary military issues by considering the causes and consequences of war historically. Not surprisingly, much of what has been written about war historically concerns European examples, whether ancient, medieval, or modern, including wars both among Europeans and those they exported to others. But war has been a recurring feature of histories both within and beyond the boundaries of Europe. The turn toward world history has affected social studies teaching at all levels, inspired new training fields within the discipline of history, and guided approaches to new subjects of research. We might have expected that these developments would also have included among these achievements greater attention to the roles of war in human history. In fact, little has been done. World history has been a capacious framework for examining different clusters of connections and comparisons of cultural, economic, political, and social activities across long distances, but the topic of war and civilization fails to fit comfortably into the taxonomy of subjects that defines world or global history.