Victorians at War

Ian Beckett, a leading military historian, is the author of The Great War, 1914-1918 and editor of The Oxford History of the British Army. he is Horner Professor of Military Theory at the Marine Corps Research Center, Quantico, Virginia.

"...despite some thought-provoking and insightful analysis, The Victorians at War is a missed opportunity. Beckett has assembled a large corpus of material that could have been fashioned into a major and welcome analysis on the politics of command in the Victorian army. Moreover, it could have taken the debate forward by providing a useful counterfoil to Edward M. Spiers's The Late Victorian Army, 1868-1902 (1992). This book instead remains a collection of essays that needed more editorial care and closer linkages. Despite the modern advances in electronic publishing, the book is littered with spelling mistakes and typographical errors. Some unnecessary repetition signals that despite the claim that many of the chapters were substantially rewritten, they may have been done so in haste—however enjoyable they are to read." - Kent Fedorowich, Victorian Studies, Winter 2008

• Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; Part One: Reputations; 1 An English Confederacy; 2 Cleansing the East with Steel; 3 The Hand on the Throttle; 4 The Devil's Pass; 5 The Race for the Peerage; 6 Paths of Duty; 7 Doing a Billy Hicks; 8 The Excitement with Railway Carriages; 9 War, Truth and History; Part Two: Generals and Politicians. 10 Command in South Africa; 11 Islands in the Sun; 12 Cavagnari's Coup de Main; 13 Chelmsford's Major-Generals; 14 Stanhope's Storehouses; 15 One and a Half Battalions; 16 The Improbable Probability; Part Three: Ways of War; 17 The First Modern War?; 18 War, Technology and Change; 19 'Troopin'; 20 A Frenchman's Horse; 21 A Question of Totality; 22 No End of a Lesson; Notes; Bibliographical Note; Index.