Endorsements

Little wars of empire is the first academic history of a diverse group of British officers, soldiers, nurses, and military families who experienced multiple conflicts in the turn of the century British empire, from so-called expeditions, campaigns, rebellions, and wars to the First World War. By considering the lives of Britons who facilitated this particularly violent period in the history of the British empire and centring the military mobilization that place in response to the resistance of colonized people around the world, this book argues that British colonization and militarization were dependent upon one another. Multi-war veterans were British men and women who served in or otherwise experienced both colonial wars that took place largely in Africa and World War I. Their lives and military experiences cut across traditional chronological divides between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and across persistent geographical divides between European and colonial theatres of war. Using a wide range of archival sources, this group biography to asks how multi-war veterans understood and remembered their experiences of violent conflict. Photograph albums, letters, diaries, and family and regimental histories reveal the contradictory ways that multi-war veterans understood their wartime experiences, their roles in the racist politics of empire, and their identities as Britons. Their understandings of what their military service meant shaped how Britain itself came to remember - or disremember - its history of colonial violence. Little wars of empire argues that paradoxically, multi-war veterans themselves allowed the narrative of a "peaceable" nineteenth century British empire to persist.