Huw Davies

Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, lives on in popular memory as the "Invincible General," loved by his men, admired by his peers, formidable to his opponents. This incisive book revises such a portrait, offering an accurate-and controversial-new analysis of Wellington's remarkable military career. Unlike his nemesis Napoleon, Wellington was by no means a man of innate military talent, Huw J. Davies argues. Instead, the key to Wellington's military success was an exceptionally keen understanding of the relationship between politics and war. Drawing on extensive primary research, Davies discusses Wellington's military apprenticeship in India, where he learned through mistakes as well as successes how to plan campaigns, organize and use intelligence, and negotiate with allies. In India Wellington encountered the constant political machinations of indigenous powers, and it was there that he apprenticed in the crucial skill of balancing conflicting political pri...

In the eighteenth century, British soldiers fought wars, small and large, on all the major inhabitable continents on Earth. Traditional historiographical interpretations focus on single campaigns or wars, usually in one theatre. Few follow the experience of the soldiers themselves, who frequently travelled across the world, fighting in India, America, the West Indies and even Australia. This facilitated the transmission of knowledge within the British Army based on the experience of fighting in different terrains against different cultures which practiced different approaches to warfare. The nature of the terrain in which the fighting took place informed the individual learning experience of the soldiers, and the collective learning experience of the units. Although terrain could be radically different, the challenges encountered could be similar. Thus, light infantry was found to be a suitable response to the dense terrain encountered in North America. But in India, where the terrain varied from desert to jungle, heavy baggage trains were though to be necessary to facilitate sustained operations. The curmudgeonly and extensive supply train actually inhibited responsive operations, and a lightly laden force eventually evolved which facilitated rapid and more agile movement. Terrain, then, was a contributing factor in the process of learning and adaptation which the British Army went through in the eighteenth century. This paper explores this process, shedding new light on the intellectual and physical development of the British Army in the eighteenth century.

Throughout its history, the British Army has used that history to educate itself. On one level, this has been used to inculcate a collective ethos, based on pride and an emotional attachment to national honour. Elsewhere, military history has been, and continues to be used, as a method to educate officers in the art of war, and more recently the evolution of operational art. This paper takes a snapshot of four periods from the British Army’s history and explores how its military history has been used to educate and inform its officers. The first explores how military history was used in the eighteenth century before the formalisation of professional military education. Military enlightenment intellectuals, such as Henry Lloyd and Maurice de Saxe, are well known for their written publications espousing the art and nature of war, but alongside these were popular military histories used to illustrate the latest thinking on war. This predilection for the transmission of military history through a combination of personal memoir and polemic continued through the second half of the eighteenth century, until the creation of the Royal Military College at High Wycombe, Great Britain’s first attempt at institutionalised professional military education. By the twentieth century, military history formed an integral part of the professional preparation of the modern officer. Students on the senior and junior divisions at the Army Staff College in Camberley were asked to imagine themselves on the Duke of Wellington’s Staff the day before Waterloo. Modernists would be scandalised: on the eve of the Great War, officers were learning to prepare for the last. Such a conclusion misses the point. Essay questions on military history invited students to consider the problems of the past from the perspective of its participants. These dilemmas were self-evidently important: the enduring nature of war presented enduring dilemmas for future staff officers to overcome. Evidence suggests that rather than engaging in an analytical exercise, students simply regurgitated flawed historical presumption. The approach continued even after the First World War proved that ahistoricism was unhelpful, even dangerous. This led to an errant belief in the contemporary irrelevance of the past: in this argument technology and tactics evolve and adapt, rendering history an inappropriate learning tool. The final period looks at the modern use of military history in the Staff College curriculum. Employing the case study method, military history is used to shed light on modern military doctrinal terminology, helping students better understand their own history, as well as their present. As a result, the use of military history by the British Army has come full circle.

Eighteenth-century military personnel were among the most travelled of the British Empire. Historiographical analysis has obviously tended to focus on their military exploits, while disregarding their often extensive cultural and scientific interests. Although frequently tinged with racial prejudices that were prevalent in eighteenth century militarism, many officers made extensive observations of the cultures and peoples they encountered. This knowledge was used in a variety of ways, ranging from altruistic individual-improvement, through to militaristic collective-improvement. In 2004, Natasha Glaisyer argued that if empire could be ‘thought of as a set of networks of exchange then ... the scientific, cultural, social, political, and intellectual histories of empire’ were inextricably linked. It is curious that the military dimension is not considered by Glaisyer in her analysis, given that unlike the scientific, mercantile and political classes, those in the military travelled all over the world, forging connections and networks between and within continents and across time. This paper will analyse first the construction of military knowledge networks by utilising archival sources, including military diaries and travel journals, from America, Europe and Asia. It will then analyse the interaction of military personnel within networks of knowledge exchange and examine how knowledge and ideas were transmitted within and between different parts of Britain’s expanding eighteenth-century empire. It will suggest that these networks facilitated understanding within the military of unfamiliar cultures, and that ultimately this knowledge was frequently helpful in facilitating, whether for good or ill, Britain’s imperial expansion and control.

Feted as one of the decisive battles in history,  Waterloo is seen as a turning point in national and international affairs.  In academic literature on British military history, if not in wider academic literature, Waterloo is a turning point, an imaginary line in the sand. Authors tend to focus on events leading up to 1815, or they tend to discuss events beginning in 1815.  And there are valid reasons for this. Funding for the army was drastically cut; the victor of the battle, Wellington, attained an unassailable position in the country’s political and military establishments, and ushered in an era of conservatism that stymied effective innovation and intellectual growth; and an era of peace on the European continent allowed Britain to direct her attention at imperial expansion in the subcontinent and elsewhere, where small armies, supplemented by indigenous troops and the private army of the EIC could exert and expand authority at minimal cost to the crown. As a result, from the height of success and efficiency at the climax of the Peninsular War and Waterloo, the British Army within thirty years faced an unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan, bloody and expensive victory in the Punjab, embarrassment in the Crimea, and rebellion in India. The men who fought and won in the Peninsula and at Waterloo were the men who fought and lost in Eastern Europe, Central and South Asia.

Writing almost a century before the events discussed in this paper, soldier, diplomatist and politician Henry Seymour Conway commented to his brother on ‘how this great world is the sport of chance & how the powers of Europe seem to be playing a game of Whisk for Empire… It’s really a miserable affair; & to one who reflects seriously upon it the most mortifying proof of human littleness.’  The image of the Great Powers of Europe carving up territory for their respective empires is an appealing and enticing one. Recent ‘popular’ historiography of the First Anglo-Afghan War has sought to present the British in caricature, as fumbling bumbling incompetent idiots incapable of rational thought, hell-bent on personal gain and imperial expansion, and fearful of a distant Russian menace, which, at any moment, might descend in hordes upon India, throwing the British out of the subcontinent.  Indeed, the majority of work on Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan in the nineteenth century has sought to frame it within the context of Great Power rivalry, specifically that between Britain and Russia: the so-called Great Game.  That there was among the British political and military class a fear of Russian expansionism cannot be denied, but the degree to which it was the primary cause of the invasion of Afghanistan can be questioned. It is easy to conclude that Britain blundered into a costly invasion and occupation of Afghanistan if one has arrived at three pre-conclusions: namely, that the British were incompetent; there was no overall strategy; and there was a genuine belief that Russia posed a threat to British India. Reverse these conclusions, and it is not so easy to make such a judgement. Alternative explanations are therefore required. This paper suggests there were two views of British India in the late 1830s, the view from London and the view from Calcutta. Whilst one influenced the other, they should be considered separately. Moreover, both views were based on the information, framed within a pre-existing knowledge context, that London and Calcutta had at its disposal.

In his seminal study of the campaign, British Victory in Egypt, published in 1995, Piers Mackesy contended that Abercromby’s tactical deployments and manoeuvres were based entirely on Dundas’s Principles,  whilst seven years later, Stephen Brumwell arrived at precisely the opposite conclusion in Redcoats, arguing instead that the campaign demonstrated the importance of light infantry to British operations.  The reality, I would argue, is somewhere in between. In 2005, Kaushik Roy argued that British success in India resided in Britain’s ability to adapt to the nature of warfare on the subcontinent, which was superior to the indigenous power’s abilities to respond to the nature of European warfare forced upon them by the appearance of Western forces on their shores. This adaptability Roy labelled as ‘military synthesis’.  I argue here that this is an argument that is relevant not only on the subcontinent, but in European and Oriental theatres as well. The British Army fought in North America and India, and its officers and men inevitably utilised those experiences in the planning, preparation and decisions they took when they were ordered to fight in Europe.

On 27 May 1813, Arthur Wellesley, Lord Wellington, commanding the Anglo-Portuguese Army in a five-year long campaign against Napoleon’s Imperial French Armies in the Iberian Peninsula, set his troops on a march that would lead to the eventual collapse of French power in Spain, the liberation of the Peninsula, and the invasion of France. Over the next three weeks, 80,000 troops would march some 400 miles, in an operation that was both highly planned and risk-filled. The march would culminate in the decisive Battle of Vitoria (21 June 1813), which would all but annihilate the French Armies in Spain, and set the conditions for the eventual defeat of Napoleon. I have written and spoken at length elsewhere about this campaign, the basis of Wellington's strategic and operational planning, and the linkages between this campaign and Wellington's earlier experiences in India. It is not my intention here to rehearse in detail those arguments, but rather to explore the wider implications that this campaign has on our understanding of the theories and concepts that have been used to explain military development and advances in the west. I speak, of course, of such notions as Victor Davis Hanson's 'Western Way of Warfare' debates, and the ongoing controversy surrounding the so-called Military Revolution.

The common explanation for the repeated outbreaks of rebellions against British forces in Afghanistan focuses on the poor conduct of the British, the support her army lent to an illegitimate ruler, and the reduction of economic subsidies that had kept a lid on simmering tribal tensions. This is a simplistic interpretation. It does not explain the social and cultural origins of the rebellions; it does not take into account wider British actions during the occupation of Afghanistan from 1839 onwards; and it does not explain why the British ultimately failed to anticipate an uprising. This paper, based on research conducted in Britain and India, will offer a new explanation for the emergence of the anti-British rebellion, and the British Army’s failure to anticipate it.

It cannot be denied that the principles of manoeuvre pursued by Wellington in 1813, more closely resemble Napoleon’s approach, than it does the previously cautious, defensive stance the British had adopted in Portugal and Spain between 1808 and 1811. However, such a conclusion overlooks the fact that Wellington had never encountered Napoleon, or his particular style of manoeuvre warfare in Portugal or Spain, and was unlikely to have discussed the finer details of Napoleon’s operational and tactical techniques with anyone who had encountered them.  Moreover, it also ignores Wellington’s experience of South Asian Warfare between 1798 and 1804. This paper will argue that for a true understanding of the doctrinal origins of Wellington’s 1813 offensive, we must look to his understanding and experience of warfare against the indigenous armies of India, for it is here that he developed operational doctrine that more closely resembled his plans and actions in 1813 than any other aspect of his career.

Based on research for my thesis and a series of articles on Wellington's intelligence in the Peninsular War, I have, in the past, argued that the intelligence system in the Peninsula was certainly one of the most sophisticated networks in the nineteenth century. During research for a new biography of Wellington, it has occurred to me that this argument is in need of some revisions. Although the collection network itself was sophisticated, with multiple independent sources providing information on a range of issues for analysis; and the analysis conducted on this information was sophisticated by contemporary standards (with a range of experts with local knowledge providing informed judgement on the reliability of the information); the decision-making performed by Wellington was sometimes suspect. It is clear from a range of decisions, that Wellington did not always trust the information at his disposal. There were a range of reasons for this. In India he displayed acute cultural dissonance in prejudging his opponents, and thereafter refusing to accept intelligence reports which contradicted his own beliefs. Refusing to learn from this experience, in the Peninsula, Wellington frequently displayed a similar propensity to trust his own judgment rather than what intelligence was telling him. Sometimes he was right, sometimes he was wrong. This paper will analyse his decision-making with regard to the intelligence available. It will look first of all at the problems he experienced in India, before exploring in detail the impact of a decision-making failure in the autumn of 1812 which led to a major setback for the Anglo-Portuguese Army.

This paper will argue that those decisions were influenced by political circumstances that had framed allied relations in the months leading to the Hundred Days. In making such a statement, I am fully cognisant that I am swimming against the current of informed opinion: most histories of the Napoleonic Wars agree that Napoleon’s return signalled an end to allied divisiveness which had coloured the Congress of Vienna. Indeed, all the major Powers of Europe agreed that their ultimate objective was the defeat and removal of Napoleon permanently from the leadership of France, immediately declaring him and outlaw, and resigning the Treaty of Chaumont, which had guaranteed the continuation of the pan-European alliance until Napoleon had been defeated the first time. I do not dispute this. Napoleon’s defeat was the primary objective of the Allied Powers; but that is not to say it was the only objective of the allied powers. Although the majority of European issues had, on the face of it, been settled, Napoleon’s return and the subsequent war offered the opportunity for further gains, particularly for Prussia, and mainly at French expense. In one sense, everything was still to play for, particularly for Prussia, who arguably came of worst in the Congress, and felt under-appreciated after the enormous losses she had suffered at the height of the wars. This paper has no footnotes.

This paper will argue that the use of political, social and cultural intelligence by British Political Officers during the occupation of Afghanistan was a reasonably effective means of identifying causes of discontent within and between Afghan tribal communities. With this knowledge, the Political Officers were able to occasionally prevent violence in the first place, or, more frequently, undermine the roots of a disturbance, restoring stability without much recourse to the use of redcoats. This didn’t always work, obviously, and violence was frequently used, both judiciously and injudiciously. I cannot hope to cover the entire occupation, so I am focusing specifically on the period between the completion of the invasion and the Autumn of 1840, when the use of this intelligence, and the skills of the Political Officers prevented the deposed ruler, Dost Mohammed, from gaining any traction in his various attempts to usurp British authority and that of the puppet regime of Shah Shuja al-Mulk. There are no footnotes in this paper.

This paper charts the development of British political, social and cultural understanding of the populations they sought to dominate during the nineteenth century. It is divided into three sections. The first illuminates the various attempts by British military personnel during the nineteenth century to gain an understanding, sophisticated or otherwise, of those populations. The second section asks what motivated those attempts, usually by individuals of an adventurous and insubordinate nature, to spend a great deal of time and effort collecting information, which, in the nineteenth century context of the term, was militarily useless. The third section asks how useful this information actually was, concluding that although anthropological data of surprising detail was collected by these individuals, their desire to conceptualise this data in a format that was familiar to them, meant that their understanding remained flawed, and continued to hamper Western interventions in Central Asia throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and possibly even today.

In 1973, the noted historian of British Imperial Policy in Central Asia, Edward Ingram, summarised British strategy in the region between 1798 and 1842 in typically dead-pan fashion. ‘One of the principal characteristics of British activity in the Near East throughout the first half of the nineteenth century,’ he wrote, ‘was a sublime disregard of geography.’  This, Ingram argued, resulted in Britain forging relationships with stately princes, about which she knew little, in distant lands, about which she knew less. This ultimately led to the spectacular strategic blunder that was the invasion of Afghanistan in 1839, based on incorrect assumptions about the nature and inclinations of the government of that country. This failure, or more specifically the failures in strategic decision-making, has never really been adequately explained. This paper attempts to offer an explanation, based on the failings of intelligence brought about by cultural mismanagement and misapplication. It focuses emphasis on intelligence organisation, collection and analysis, as a central influence in strategic decision-making.