This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. This lecture in the series

War in Our World, given by John Keegan, was originally broadcast in 1998.

Hello and welcome from King's College, London. Founded by Royal Charter in 1829, with the support of,

among others, that great soldier hero of the Duke of

Wellington, King's is the second largest college in the University of London and has a tradition

of embracing new academic developments. It was among the first to provide education for women.

It pioneered modular degrees and now boasts faculties of education, law, humanities, medicine and

both natural and life sciences.

Tonight, you join an invited audience of academics, serving officers and other defence specialists

in the elegant surroundings of the great hall at the college's main campus in the Strand.

In 1964, the Department of War Studies was established here under the direction of Sir Michael Howard and has since grown to support 27 full-time teaching staff and around 350 students.

Alongside it, the Centre for Defence Studies supports research across issues related to defence and security, and 1996 saw a further development for King's, the creation

of a consultancy, the International Center for Security Analysis, which provides strategic

analysis and research for the private and public sectors in such areas as information warfare,

space-based surveillance, and counter-terrorism.

So, since those early beginnings in the 1960s, King's College has embraced defense studies in many forms

and is an appropriate setting for the third of John Keegan's Reith Lectures of 1998, War and Our World.

Last week, he considered likely explanations for the origins of war and traced the rise of the earliest recognizable armies.

Tonight, he analyzes the changing role of the nation state in warfare.

So would you now please give a warm welcome to the 1998 Reith Lecturer John Keegan. War made the state, and the state makes war, goes an academic jingle familiar to most students

of political science. The first half of the jingle would not excite argument among lay

people who would sensibly say that the origins of the state are lost in the mists of time. The second half that, by implication,

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