Wars of Frederick the Great, The

The campaigns of Frederick the Great were more than the apogee of eighteenth-century warfare: as Dennis Showalter argues in this stimulating book which sets them in their full context, they were a watershed in the history of Europe. They inaugurated a new pattern -- of total war for limited objectives -- that was to endure until 1916. Frederick's battles were designed to convince his adversaries of the wisdom not just of making peace but also of keeping it; for him, victory in the field was the means to the more enduring victory of a successful negotiation, and, as such, his wars prefigure those of Napoleon.