Read history forward from contemporary choices

Earlier wars should not be measured only against industrial-age definitions or knowledge of later outcomes. Historians should begin with what contemporaries knew, the industry and institutions they possessed, and the lessons available from their own recent past. A seventeenth- or eighteenth-century state could mobilize as completely as its agriculture and transport allowed without resembling a twentieth-century mass army. Practices remembered as chivalrous often rested on cold calculations about food, prisoners, casualties, and preserving combat power. Reading history forward makes apparently strange choices intelligible and reveals how later forms of total war developed from earlier constraints instead of appearing fully formed.