The Roots and Consequences of Civil Wars and Revolutions: Conflicts that Changed World History. By Spencer C. Tucker. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2017. 529 pages. Acid-free $80 (ISBN 978-1-4408-4293-1). E-book available (978-1-4408-4294-8), call for pricing.

Here we have an interesting idea for a monograph that is instead presented as a reference book and leaves a reviewer unsatisfied. In his short introduction, Tucker acknowledges the thirty entries are a small sample of all history, but says he has tried to strike a representative balance across time and geography. He further says the selections “have much to teach us about interpreting historical events.”

Yet, where is the teaching? The entries are accounts of events followed by assessments of their importance, without comparative analysis or drawing of lessons. There is no essay to tell what can be learned from events as diverse as the Taiping Rebellion and the twenty-first century Libyan Civil War.

Nor is there discussion about the relationship of civil wars and revolutions and why the two subjects are combined in a relatively small volume. For instance, are civil wars just internal revolutions that failed? (Would the American Civil War be called the Confederate Revolution today if Lee had succeeded?) How does a revolution against a foreign power (America’s, Hungary’s) compare to one against domestic power (France’s, Iran’s)?

To add quibble to complaint, how were the Peloponnesian Wars between famously independent Athens and Sparta either civil wars or a revolution? Presumably the notion is that they were sort of cultural civil wars because both city states spoke Greek, but the argument is not made and would be hard to sustain. As for the Thirty Years War, Prof. Tucker notes it was started by a Bohemian religious revolt, but the monster became Europe’s first continental conflict.

On the plus side, the prose is straightforward, as is to be expected from this prolific author/editor. The promise to roam the world across a long span of time is fulfilled, leading to a few entries on such obscure subjects as the Boshin Civil War. (Bet you have to Google that one!) Each entry is completed with a chronology and bibliography. Maps, tables and black and white images are sprinkled throughout.

Tucker’s latest work arrives close on the heels of David Armitage’s monograph Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Knopf, 2017), which, in part, uses history to examine the muddy relationship of the terms “civil war” and “revolution.” A much smaller but still analytical historical assessment is Jack A. Goldstone’s Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Reference works comparable to Roots include James V. DeFronzo’s three-volume Revolutionary Movements in World History: From 1750 to the Present (ABC-CLIO, 2006) and Goldstone’s The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions (Congressional Quarterly, 1998). DeFronzo’s project covers a much shorter span of time than Tucker’s, but addresses 108 post-Enlightenment revolutionary movements with chronologies, histories, assessments, and biographical sketches. Goldstone, who has made a career focusing on revolutions, used his conventionally formatted encyclopedia to address not only revolutionary movements since the Renaissance, but also revolutionary ideas and actors.

Perhaps the seemingly synchronized arrival of the Armitage and Tucker volumes is the serendipitous answer for someone seeking to understand the nature of civil wars; Armitage for the overview, Tucker for some blow-by-blow details. On its own, Roots works for a library filling gaps in accounts of certain conflicts, but as a necessary resource for its subject, it is not well realized.—Evan Davis, Librarian, Allen County Public Library, Fort Wayne, Indiana