Small Wars of the Great Powers: Charles Edward Callwell and the Russian Empire in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

In this article the author focuses on the semantic and substantive aspects of the colonial conflict analysis model presented in the work of the British Army Major General Charles Edward Collwell, “Small Wars: Their Principles and Practices”, which became the most notable British treatise on the subject at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A distinctive feature of the work is the comparative approach to the analysis of the British colonial wars fought in the Victorian era. It is established that the Russian case (the annexation of Central Asia and the pacification of the North Caucasus) is a golden thread running through all sections of the work, serving, along with similar examples from French, Spanish, and US history, as a kind of tuning fork for the universal principles of successful small warfare that Callwell laid out in his work. The aim of the paper is to form a more substantive account of the significance of comparative colonialism for British military thinking and the place of the Russian experience in its evolution. The study has shown that “Small Wars” reflected a course towards the normalisation of the Russian Empire within a professional discourse. In addition, the historiography focuses on Callwell's selective approach to the choice of factual material and its place in the evolution of British counterinsurgency. In this article, the author focuses on identifying the reasons for differences in the forms and ways of systematizing the experience of small wars in the colonial and frontier policies of both the Russian and British empires. Particular attention is paid to the circumstances that led to the gradual loss of Callwell's work to its former importance on the eve and after the Great War.