The Making of Warriors: The Militarization of the Rio de la Plata, 1806–07

Abstract

Over the past two decades, war studies have focused mainly on the processes of change in how wars have been waged. The most important and fruitful debates have been anchored by the concept of ‘military revolution’, which has been replaced recently by the concepts of military mutation or transformation. Consequently, case studies have mostly shown us either radical or progressive changes within a given form of war, or the passage from one type of war to another. This chapter will explore a different kind of change: one which takes place not in the way in which a particular society makes war, but in the advent of war itself as a social experience to a society that no longer had first-hand knowledge of war.