Histria Books is pleased to announce the release of Catalysts for Catastrophe: Five Small Wars that Changed the Course of Modern History by Allie Stuart Povall. The book is published by Histria Academic, an imprint of Histria Books dedicated to outstanding scholarly works in the humanities by Histria Books.
Catalysts for Catastrophe asks a pointed question: how did five wars, each limited in scale, help shape the conflicts we live with now? Allie Stuart Povall follows the Franco-Prussian, Spanish-American, Russo-Japanese, and two Balkan wars beyond their battlefields, tracing their effects on alliances, empires, military thinking, and the world wars that followed.Â
The fresh angle is the choice to start before the familiar disasters of the twentieth century. Povall looks at the decisions and technologies that made those disasters possible, from railway mobilization to the growing force of modern artillery. He also makes a direct, arguable connection between that history and present tensions involving Ukraine, Taiwan, and North Korea. Readers need not accept every link in the chain to find the question worth asking. At a time when regional wars can seem distant until they are not, this book insists on taking their wider consequences seriously.
Allie Stuart Povall is a native Mississippian who holds degrees from the University of Mississippi and the Yale Law School. In addition, he studied in the graduate history program at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He served in the United States Navy for five years and saw service in Vietnam then practiced law for 25 years. After his retirement he began writing, and Catalysts for Catastrophe is his seventh book and third military history.
