Subjective practices of war: The Prussian army and the Zorndorf campaign, 1758

This article integrates the history of military theory – and the practical history of military campaigns and battles – within the broader history of knowledge. Challenging ideas that the new natural philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called Scientific Revolution) fostered attempts to make warfare mathematically calculated, it builds on work showing that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy was itself much more subjective than previously thought. It uses the figure of King Frederick II of Prussia (reigned 1740–1786) to link theoretical with practical military knowledge, placing the military treatises read and written by the king alongside the practical example of the Prussian army’s campaign against the Russians in summer 1758 at the height of the Seven Years War (1756–1763), which culminated in the battle of Zorndorf. This article shows that both the theory and practice of war – like other branches of knowledge in the long eighteenth century – were fundamentally shaped by the contemporary search for intellectual order. The inability to achieve this in practice led to a reliance on subjective judgment and individual, local knowledge. Whereas historians have noted attempts in the eighteenth century to calculate probabilities mathematically, this article shows that war continued to be conceived as the domain of fortune, subject to incalculable chance. Answering Steven Shapin’s call to define concretely “the subjective element in knowledge-making,” the examples of Frederick and his subordinate, Lieutenant General Count Christoph zu Dohna, reveal sharply different contemporary ideas about how to respond to uncertainty in war. Whereas Dohna sought to be ready for chance events and react to them, Frederick actively embraced uncertainty and risk-taking, making chance both a rhetorical argument and a positive choice guiding strategy and tactics

“Our Age”: Frederick the Great, Classical Warfare, and the Uses and Abuses of Military History

Abstract Whereas the long-running Military Revolution debate has focused primarily on changes in military technology and the growth of states in early modern Europe, the example of King Frederick ii (“the Great”) of Prussia highlights how changes in the character of war were perceived by contemporaries, and how they used narratives of change for rhetorical purposes. Frederick and his contemporaries saw their own time as more intellectually advanced than any previous age, and this narrative of intellectual progress existed alongside a narrative of states bringing order. Frederick articulated largely consistent ideas about military history, but also used concepts of the superiority of “our age” to extoll the virtues of his own oblique order of battle, and manipulated narratives of technological change to apologise for his own mistakes. Frederick also turned to an idealised classical world – particularly Julius Caesar – to envisage conquests that went beyond the limits of his own day.</jats:p

Expression and analysis of the glycosylation properties of recombinant human erythropoietin expressed in Pichia pastoris

The Pichia pastoris expression system was used to produce recombinant human erythropoietin, a protein synthesized by the adult kidney and responsible for the regulation of red blood cell production. The entire recombinant human erythropoietin (rhEPO) gene was constructed using the Splicing by Overlap Extension by PCR (SOE-PCR) technique, cloned and expressed through the secretory pathway of the Pichia expression system. Recombinant erythropoietin was successfully expressed in P. pastoris. The estimated molecular mass of the expressed protein ranged from 32 kDa to 75 kDa, with the variation in size being attributed to the presence of rhEPO glycosylation analogs. A crude functional analysis of the soluble proteins showed that all of the forms were active in vivo

‘Le Siècle de Louis XIV’: Frederick the Great and French Ways of War

Nothing seems more typically ‘Prussian’ than the wars of Frederick the Great. Frederick’s aggressive campaigns have been portrayed as precursors of Germany’s strategy in the First and Second World Wars, his military methods supposedly reflecting a ‘German Way of War’ shaped by Prussia-Germany’s geopolitical position. This article, however, for the first time examines systematically the intellectual inspirations for Frederick’s military ideas, focusing on the period up to the Seven Years War (1756-63). It shows that Frederick was primarily inspired by France, and particularly by the towering figure of King Louis XIV.I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Bühler-Bolstorff-Stiftung Berlin, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte, the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and the Stiftung Preußischer Schlösser und Gärten for funding the research that made this article possible