Isandlwana and Maiwand ignored : the limits of British military innovation in late nineteenth-century asymmetric wars.

45 p.For a full century, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) to the outbreak of the Great War (1914), Britain fought only one "conventional" war, against the Russians in the Crimea between 1853 and 1856. In contrast, it was engaged in numerous "small", colonial wars within and without its empire during the same period. Despite the frequency of such conflicts, the Victorian Armies never developed an official "small" wars doctrine to fight the asymmetrical enemies it encountered overseas, preferring to generally adopt a European style of warfare. By using concepts provided by the recent field of Military Innovation Studies, this dissertation seeks to investigate and analyse the reasons why the late Victorian Armies failed to develop an official "small" wars doctrine in the nineteenth-century. Despite the reality of the type of wars it fought, and the public outrage which should have triggered change following defeat, such as after Isandlwana (1879) and Maiwand (1880), it was not until the turn of the century that the Victorian Armies paid closer attention to colonial campaigning. This belated interest, coming on the eve of the transformational Great War, was in the words of one scholar, "anachronistic", and too late.Master of Science (Strategic Studies