1st Edition

British Ways of Counter-insurgency A Historical Perspective

Edited By Matthew Hughes Copyright 2013
258 Pages
by Routledge

266 Pages
by Routledge

266 Pages
by Routledge

This edited collection examines the British ‘way’ in counter-insurgency. It brings together and consolidates new scholarship on the counter-insurgency associated with the end of empire, foregrounding a dark and violent history of British imperial rule, one that stretched back to the nineteenth century and continued until the final collapse of the British Empire in the 1960s. The essays gathered... Read more

1. Introduction: British ways of counter-insurgency  2. ‘Savage warfare’: C.E. Callwell, the roots of counter-insurgency, and the nineteenth century context  3. An example to be followed or a warning to be avoided? The British, Boers, and guerrilla warfare, 1900 – 1902  4. Suppressing insurgencies in comparison: the Germans in the Ukraine, 1918, and the British in Mesopotamia, 1920  5. The war on terror that failed: British counter-insurgency in Palestine 1945 – 1947 and the ‘Farran Affair’  6. Everyone lived in fear: Malaya and the British way of counter-insurgency  7. British abuse and torture in Kenya’s counter-insurgency, 1952 – 1960  8. The British counter-insurgency in Cyprus  9. Nasty not nice: British counter-insurgency doctrine and practice, 1945 – 1967  10. The minimum force debate: contemporary sensibilities meet imperial practice  11. British counter-insurgency: a historiographical reflection  12. Historians, a legacy of suspicion and the ‘migrated archives’

Biography

Matthew Hughes is Chair in History and Head of the Department of Politics and History at Brunel University. Professor Hughes wrote his PhD in War Studies at King's College London. From 2008 to 2010, he held the Major-General Matthew C. Horner Chair at the US Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia, sponsored by the U.S. Marine Corps University Foundation. He is currently working on a monograph on the Arab revolt in Palestine, 1936–39, entitled 'The Opaque War: Britain's Pacification of Palestine, 1936–39'.