George White and the Victorian Army in India and Africa: Serving the Empire, by Stephen M. Miller

Abstract

Reviewed by: George White and the Victorian Army in India and Africa: Serving the Empire by Stephen M. Miller M. C. Smith (bio) George White and the Victorian Army in India and Africa: Serving the Empire, by Stephen M. Miller; pp. ix + 323. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $139.99, $139.99 paper, $109.00 ebook. Stephen M. Miller has produced a serviceable new biography of an eminent Victorian soldier, Field Marshal Sir George Stuart White, an understated yet important player in the shaping of the late-Victorian army. George White and the Victorian Army in India and Africa: Serving the Empire opens with a bit of historiography, making the valid point that White deserves an updated biography; the only substantial treatment of his life was written shortly after his death by a friend and colleague, Mortimer Durand. Although Durand’s work was no hagiography, he did treat his friend—and the upper command structure of the Victorian army—kindly. The result was an incomplete story of the life of an influential late-Victorian soldier and administrator. Miller has produced a biography with perhaps a greater degree of objectivity than Durand’s, with the added perspective of an additional century of hindsight to set the context of White’s life and his impact on Victorian military thought. White served during an era of major change as the British Army marched toward the twentieth century, and his opinions and observations provide insight to the effects of modernization, professionalization, and the upheaval of the Cardwell Reforms. [End Page 707] Miller provides but a brief sketch of White’s childhood, then picks up White’s military career with his education at Sandhurst in the early 1850s. He details the professional doldrums of a newly commissioned officer’s life and the frustrated quest for distinction in a series of desultory postings. Distinction came with a Victoria Cross earned during the Second Afghan War, along with notice by Frederick Sleigh Roberts, just as he was elevated as Lord Roberts of Kandahar. The intraservice rivalries between the partisans of Lord Roberts and the Ashanti Ring (a coterie of officers attached to another of Britain’s top soldiers, Sir Garnet Wolseley) formed a key theme in White’s life as he advanced in rank and honors. White was sometimes whipsawed between these polarities, and his experiences offer a glimpse of the factional and personal relationships/rivalries that so often determined the extension or withdrawal of a plum command appointment. Miller follows White’s career in high command from his experience as a brigadier in the conquest of Burma (1885–9) and service in Baluchistan (1889–92) through to his final posting as Governor of Gibraltar (1900–12). He pays particular attention to White’s tenure as Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Establishment from 1893 to 1898. The two chapters that detail his actions as chief military administrator and commander explore (among other things) the concept of so-called martial races in the armies of the Raj and White’s thoughts on the validity of the notion. The latter of these two chapters devotes significant ink to the situation on the Northwest Frontier in 1897 and 1898, culminating in the controversial Tirah Campaign, from both military and political vantage points. It is rather well done. Miller develops a minor chord of race (as defined by nineteenth-century standards) relations through White’s position as an Anglo-Irish landowner and officer. Miller conducted thorough research in the production of this work. His primary sources range from an extensive collection of White’s private papers, journals, and letters, to unpublished official files from the Public Record Office in Kew, to a substantial array of published public documents. He recognizes the need to read what the Victorians had to say about themselves and then-current events as a key to deciphering their social views, mores, and expectations, and consulted a significant number of contemporary or near-contemporary publications. Miller’s use of contemporary secondary sources is balanced with a selection of modern Victorian scholarship. This allows him to paint a vivid picture of late-Victorian military life without merely appearing as a ventriloquist’s dummy seated on John Bull’s...