Volume II of The Cambridge History of Strategy focuses on the practice of strategy from 1800 to the present day. A team of leading scholars examine how leaders of states and empires and non-state groups, such as guerrilla forces, rebel- groups and terrorists have attempted to practice strategy in the modern period. With a focus in the actual 'doing' of strategy, the volume aims to understand the real world experiences when ideas about conflict are carried out against a responding and pro-active opponent. The case studies and the material presented in the volume form an invitation to rethink dominant perspectives in the field of strategic studies. As the case studies demonstrate, strategy is most often not a stylized, pre-meditated and wilful phenomenon. Rather it is a product of circumstance and opportunity, both structural and agential, leading to a view of strategy as an ad hoc, if not chaotic, enterprise.