Beatrice Heuser is Chair in International Relations at the University of Reading, UK. Her research focuses on strategy, European security, transatlantic relations, Britain, France, USA, Germany, and defence policy making. She has published on nuclear strategy, Clausewitz, and the evolution of strategy since Antiquity.

In early modern times, warfare in Europe took on many diverse and overlapping forms. Our modern notions of 'regular' and 'irregular' warfare, of 'major war' and 'small war', have their roots in much greater diversity than such binary notions allow for. Insurgencies have become conceptually fused with 'small wars'. There is much overlap between the phenomena of irregular warfare in the sense of special operations alongside regular operations, and irregular warfare of insurgents against the regular forces of a state. This book demonstrates how long the two phenomena were in flux and fed on each other. It is based on a special issue of Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Preface: 'The Origins of Small Wars from Special Operations to Ideological Insurgencies': A National Army Museum response Introduction: Exploring the jungle of terminology 1. The sixteenth-century antecedents of special operations 'small war' 2. The essence of war: French armies and small war in the Low Countries (1672 - 1697) 3. Initiating insurgencies abroad: French plans to 'chouannise' Britain and Ireland, 1793 - 1798 4. The insurgency of the Vendée 5. Guerrillas and bandits in the Serranía de Ronda, 1810 - 1812 6. The German wars of liberation 1807 - 1815: The restrained insurgency 7. Poachers turned gamekeepers: A study of the guerrilla phenomenon in Spain, 1808 - 1840 8. Small Wars in the Age of Clausewitz: The Watershed Between Partisan War and People's War 9. Atrocities in Theory and Practice 10. Lessons learnt? Cultural transfer and revolutionary wars, 1775 - 1831