Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan
by Karl F. Friday
Routledge

Warfare in early medieval Japan was intimately linked to social structure. Examining the causes and conduct of military operations informs and enhances our understanding of the 10th to 14th centuries-the formative age of the samurai.

Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan provides the first comprehensive study of the topic in English. Written by Karl Friday, UGA professor of Japanese history, the book incorporates nearly 20 years of ongoing research, drawing on both new readings of primary sources and the most recent secondary scholarship. It overturns many of the stereotypes that have dominated views of the period.

Friday analyzes Heian-, Kamakura- and Nambokucho-period warfare from five thematic angles. He examines the principles that justified armed conflict, the mechanisms used to raise and deploy armed forces, the weapons available to early medieval warriors, the means by which they obtained them and the techniques and customs of battle. A thorough, accessible and informative review, this study highlights the complex causal relationships among the structures and sources of early medieval political power, technology and the conduct of war.

Veiled Empire reconstructs the turbulent history of a Soviet campaign that sought to end the seclusion of Muslim women. Written by Douglas Northrop, UGA assistant professor of history, the book draws on research in the archives of Russia and Uzbekistan. This campaign against the veil was, in Northrop's view, emblematic of the larger Soviet attempt to bring the proletarian revolution to Muslim Central Asia, a region Soviets saw as primitive and backward. This unveiling campaign, however, took place in the context of a half-century of Russian colonization and the long-standing suspicion of rural Muslim peasants toward an urban, colonial state. Over the next quarter-century a bitter and often violent confrontation ensued, with battles being waged over practices of veiling and seclusion. Northrop's book shows the fluidity of Central Asian cultural practices and the real limits that existed on Stalinist authority, even during the ostensibly totalitarian 1930s.