Empire of Chance

"Empire of Chance examines the place of war in the history of knowledge. It argues that with the Napoleonic Wars, chance came to be installed as the basic operative principle of history. Attending to a vast array of fields and disciplines -- military theory, literature, philosophy, cartography, mathematics, and pedagogy -- the book charts the momentous shift in the thinking of war that took place around 1800. It examines the efforts to rethink the state of war as a variegated epistemic regime of chance events, contingencies, conjectures, and probabilities, and it tells the story of the inventions devised to handle and manage it. Juxtaposing traditional philosophy and military theory, literature and cartography, war games and historiography, knowledge and poetics, Engberg-Pedersen reveals how the Napoleonic Wars served as a catalyst for the emergence of a worldly thought that turns its attention outward to the flux of the empirical world in order to come to grips with the pervasive disorder of things. War came to be conceived not as an exceptional state, but as a cipher of modernity"--