Hello everyone welcome back to the history hit warfare podcast I'm your host James Rogers and if it's your first time here we cover military history from Napoleonic battles to Cold War confrontations from Normandy to 9-11 and we open up new perspectives on how wars have shaped and

changed our modern world in this episode with Dan Snowe speaks with one of the greatest war historians of all time.

Margaret Macmillan.

Margaret is the author of a new book,

War, how conflict shaped us,

and together they discuss the ways in which war has influenced human society.

Enjoy. Margaret, thank you very much coming on the podcast. Thank you very, very good of you.

You've written books about military history before.

You've written about the First World War, the beginning and end of the First World War.

You've written about the British in India.

But this book is huge. This is a book about

war itself. It's quite an intimidating subject. Where do you start?

Well, it's a terrifying subject because it's so enormous and so many people, often very great historians and novelists and others have written about it and I was asked to do the BBC wreath lectures and it gave me a chance to think about a subject which I've thought about on and off for years and of course talk to you and others about.

And I thought I won't try and do the whole history of war.

That's impossible.

It would mean volumes and volumes.

What I'll try and do is just pick out themes of war which interest me and which might interest other people and so why do we fight, how do we fight, what does technology mean, how do we try and stop war, those sorts of subjects.

So it's really, it's a series of explorations I suppose of different aspects of war. of And where did you sort of end up on that? I went into it because I thought it's very important and it's still something that we're much

preoccupied with.

And I think I came down, perhaps typically in the middle, and I thought, you know, we do have things

that biologically are part of us we have certain emotions we have

certain ways of reacting I mean I think the old flight or fear emotion reaction is a very strong

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