This book explores European soldiers’ encounters with their continent’s exotic frontiers from the French Revolution to the First World War.  In numerous military expeditions to Italy, Spain, Russia, Greece and the ‘Levant’ they found wild landscapes and strange societies inhabited by peoples who needed to be ‘civilized.’ Yet often they also discovered founding sites of Europe’s own ‘civilization’ (Rome, Jerusalem) or decaying reminders of ancient grandeur. The resulting encounters proved seminal in forging a military version of the ‘civilizing mission’ that shaped Europe’s image of itself as well as its relations with its own periphery during the long nineteenth century.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Peripheral Visions - Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century; Joseph Clarke and John Horne.- Part I: Encounters.- 2. French Soldiers and the Revolutionary Origins of the Colonial Mind; Fergus Robson.-  3. Encountering the Sacred: British and French Soldiers in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Mediterranean; Joseph Clarke.- 4. Violence and the Barbaric East: Germans and the Russian Campaign of 1812; Leighton S. James.-  5. Kodaking a Just War: Photography, Architecture and the Language of Damage in the Egyptian Sudan, 1884-1898; Paul Fox.-  6. Rise Phoenix-like: British Soldiers, Civilization and the First World War in Greek Macedonia, 1915-1918; Justin Fantauzzo.- Part II: Counter-Encounters.- 7. A Crisis of Images: The French, Jihad, and the Plague in Upper Egypt, 1798-1801; Zeinab Abul-Magd.- 8. ‘Their Lives Have Become Ours’: Counter-Encounters in Mesopotamia, 1915-1918; Santanu Das.- Part III: Capturing Landscapes.- 9. Military Wars of Seeing: British Soldiers’ Sketches from the Egyptian Campaign of 1801; Catriona Kennedy.- 10. Edgy Encounters in North Africa and the Balkans: R. C. Woodville’s Pictures of Conflict-Zone life for the Illustrated London News, 1880-1903; Tom Gretton.- 11. Imagined Landscapes in Palestine during the Great War; Jennifer Wellington.- Part IV: Power and Patrimonies.- 12. Constructing A Literary Memory of the 1812 Russian Campaign in German Central Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century; Leighton S. James and Sheona Davies.- 13. Archaeology and Monument Protection in War: The Collaboration between the German Army and Researchers in the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1918; Oliver Stein.- 14. A ‘Civilizing Work’? The French Army in Macedonia, 1915-1918; John Horne.- 15. The ‘Hole-y’ City: British Soldiers’ Perceptions of Jerusalem during its Occupation 1917-1920; Mahon Murphy.- Index.