A pioneering work in British military history, originally published in 1972, this book is both scholarly and entertaining. Although the book concentrates on a single institution, it illuminates a much wider area of social and intellectual change. For the Army the importance of the change was enormous: in 1854 there was neither a Staff College nor a General Staff, and professional education and training were largely despised by the officers: by 1914 the College could justly be described as ‘a school of thought’ while the officers it had trained were coming to dominate the highest posts in Commands and on the General Staff.

Common military education was the lifeblood of the armies, navies, and air forces of the British Empire. It permeated every aspect of the profession of arms and was an essential ingredient for success in both war and peace. Military Education and Empire is the first major scholarly work to address the role of military education in maintaining the empire throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bringing together the world’s top scholars on the subject, this book places distinct national narratives – Canadian, Australian, South African, British, and Indian – within a comparative context. The contributors examine military education within the British Empire as a generator of institutional knowledge, as a socializing agent, and as an enhancer of interoperability. This volume is the first to examine military education from a transnational perspective, which allows readers the opportunity to consider the connections between education and empire.

In this scholarly and original study of military thought during the nineteenth century Azar Gat continues and expands the themes he explored in his previous book, The Origins of Military Thought from the Enlightenment to Clausewitz (Oxford Historical Monographs, 1989). The present volume spans the period from the aftermath of the Napoleonic era to the outbreak of the First World War. Encompassing Prussia/Germany, France, Great Britain, the United States of America and the Marxist theory later to gain sway in Russia, The Development of Military Thought focuses on the wider conceptions of war, strategy, and military theory which dominated the West in this period. Dr. Gat's penetrating analysis uncovers the intellectual assumptions and picture of the past which underlay military policy and practice.

Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, an Irishman who in June 1922 was assassinated on his doorstep in London by Irish republicans, was one of the most controversial British soldiers of the modern age. Before 1914 he did much to secure the Anglo-French alliance and was responsible for the planning which saw the British Expeditionary Force successfully despatched to France after the outbreak of war with Germany. A passionate Irish unionist, he gained a reputation as an intensely'political' soldier, especially during the 'Curragh crisis' of 1914 when some officers resigned their commisssions rather than coerce Ulster unionists into a Home Rule Ireland. During the war he played a major role in Anglo-French liaison, and ended up as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, professionalhead of the army, a post he held until February 1922.After Wilson retired from the army, he became an MP and was chief security adviser to the new Northern Ireland government. As such, he became a target for nationalist Irish militants, being identified with the security policies of the Belfast regime, though wrongly with Protestant sectarian attacks on Catholics. He is remembered today in unionist Northern Ireland as a kind of founding martyr for the state.Wilson's reputation was ruined in 1927 with the publication of an official biography, which quoted extensively and injudiciously from his entertaining, indiscreet, and wildly opinionated diaries, giving the impression that he was some sort of Machiavellian monster. In this first modern biography, using a wide variety of official and private sources for the first time, Keith Jeffery reassesses Wilson's life and career and places him clearly in his social, national, and political context.

Presents the first full-length study of one of Britain's most important military thinkers, Major-General Sir Charles E. Callwell.

How did British authorities manage to secure the commitment of large dominion and Indian armies that could plan, fight, shoot, communicate, and sustain themselves, in concert with the British Army and with each other, during the era of the two world wars? What did the British want from the dominion and Indian armies and how did they go about trying to get it? Douglas E Delaney seeks to answer these questions to understand whether the imperial army project was successful. Answering these questions requires a long-term perspective — one that begins with efforts to fix the armies of the British Empire in the aftermath of their desultory performance in South Africa (1899-1903) and follows through to the high point of imperial military cooperation during the Second World War. Based on multi-archival research conducted in six different countries, on four continents, Delaney argues that the military compatibility of the British Empire armies was the product of a deliberate and enduring imperial army project, one that aimed at standardizing and piecing together the armies of the empire, while, at the same time, accommodating the burgeoning autonomy of the dominions and even India. At its core, this book is really about how a military coalition worked.