Senior Lecturer at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, a Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King's College London, and the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of War at the University of Oxford. He is the author of A Progressive Occupation? The Gallieni-Lyautey Method and Colonial Pacification in Tonkin and Madagascar, 1885-1900 (2013).
Finch applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Making Makers: The Past, the Present, and the Study of War, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Making Makers marks the beginning of a new chapter. This is fortuitous. New chapters often bring changes in direction, but in this case the transition is useful as it marks the point at which the book at the centre of my book – Makers of Modern Strategy – starts to take on a life beyond its original conception. It explains how the book’s original editor, Edward Mead Earle, failed to follow through on his plan to revise it before to his death in 1954, and that subsequently others would attempt to revise it in the period prior to the appearance of a new version in 1986. In this way, this page situates the reader quite well in showing the transformations of a book across decades, and something of the personalities involved in that process – which is really the core of the book.Learn more about Making Makers at the Oxford University Press website.
The page begins with a quotation from Theodore Ropp – a would-be editor of the book, whose unsuccessful project is the focus of the chapter in question. Characteristically, it is a somewhat oblique quote, however one thing it does is to emphasize the importance of the historical discipline. Ropp’s point is to stress the utility of history in the study of war, relative to emergent disciplines in the post-Second World War era which often seemed to promise firmer answers to pressing problems than the older, less decisive study of history. This too is a theme of the book, although in broader terms it is as much a study in the differences in approach amongst historians, rather than the distinctions between them and other disciplines.
One thing that stands out as unrepresentative in this selection is a reference to the role of Franklin publications in translating the original book into multiple languages in the 1950s. Whilst this development demonstrated the way in which Makers became enmeshed in the cultural Cold War, and so interesting in its own right, it is not a central feature of the history I attempt to present.
--Marshal Zeringue