News from the Front:

The Military in British India:
The Development of
British Indian Forces
in South Asia
1600-1947

by T.A. Heathcote


The Military in British India:
The Development of British Indian Forces in South Asia, 1600-1947 by T.A. Heathcote
Published by the Manchester University Press, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9NR.
Price: 40.00 pounds

The M.U.P. continue to publish titles in their important history of the British army; following Spiers' The Late Victorian Army and Lahand's Lord Chelmsford's Zululand Campaign comes Tony Heathcote's look at the British military experience in India. The author is well qualified to tackle the subject, being Curator of the Collection of the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst - which includes a splendid Indian Army collection and the author of a book on the Afghan Wars.

In this work he attempts nothing less than a complete history of British military involvement in the sub-continent, having first estahlished the context of India's formidable military tradition in the years before 1600. As such, he charts the origins of the rise of the East India Company, the consolidation of British power, the threat posed by the Great Mutiny, the reconstruction of the postMutiny years, through to the days of high Empire, and finally British withdrawal in 1947.

All of this is tackled with commendable throughness and precision, though it is inevitably concise and, as an academic history, its primary aim is scholarship rather than a good read. This is not, it must be said, a book to look to for stirring accounts of great battles, or even in-depth analyses of individual commanders, but it does provide a factual framework which is probably second to none, and free of both Anglo-centricism, and the many misconceptions which still dog so many studies of Colonial military history. No serious student of the Empire in India should be without it.

For anyone whose interests extend into the modern post-Colonial period, M.U.P. have just published British Counterinsurgency in the Post-Imperial Era, by Thomas R. Mockaitis, a similarly erudite study of four more recent campaigns - Indonesia, Dhofar, South Arabia and Northern Ireland.

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© Copyright 1996 by Partizan Press.

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