Volume II of The Cambridge History of Strategy focuses on the practice of strategy from 1800 to the present day. A team of leading scholars examine how leaders of states and empires and non-state groups, such as guerrilla forces, rebel- groups and terrorists have attempted to practice strategy in the modern period. With a focus in the actual 'doing' of strategy, the volume aims to understand the real world experiences when ideas about conflict are carried out against a responding and pro-active opponent. The case studies and the material presented in the volume form an invitation to rethink dominant perspectives in the field of strategic studies. As the case studies demonstrate, strategy is most often not a stylized, pre-meditated and wilful phenomenon. Rather it is a product of circumstance and opportunity, both structural and agential, leading to a view of strategy as an ad hoc, if not chaotic, enterprise.

Volume I of The Cambridge History of Strategy offers a history of the practice of strategy from the beginning of recorded history, to the late eighteenth century, from all parts of the world. Drawing on material evidence covering two-and-a-half millennia, an international team of leading scholars in each subject examines how strategy was formulated and applied and with what tools, from ancient Greece and China to the Ottoman and Mughal Empires and the American Revolutionary War. They explore key themes from decision-makers and strategy-making processes, causes of wars and war aims, tools of strategy in war and peace, to configurations of armed forces and distinctive and shared ways of war across civilisations and periods. A comparative conclusion examines how the linking of political goals with military means took place in different parts of the world over the course of history, asking whether strategic practice has universal features.