‘The Dread of Innovation’

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how the British Army reached a pinnacle of professionalism and innovation, through a combination of interrelated factors. It reviews the intellectual innovation and adaptation in the face of global military challenges, the concurrent circulation of military knowledge gained through the global experience of warfare, and networks that spanned the globe and facilitated the exchange of experience, ideas and military knowledge across space and time. As the chapter highlights, these factors enabled Britain's accidental military enlightenment. But in the wake of ultimate victory at Waterloo, the relationship between innovation, global challenge and knowledge circulation began to disintegrate. The chapter argues that while the British might have curtailed the transmission of ideas to indigenous foes, the localised ideas and practices which had been the key to innovative responses in the past were transmitted from the periphery to the centre only in a fragmentary manner. In an atmosphere that sought to curtail knowledge transmission and innovation in an adversary's army, the principal outcome was merely that knowledge transmission and innovation was stymied within the British Army. With intellectual innovation stagnating, circulation of new ideas curtailed and networks of knowledge exchange dismantled, the chapter stresses that British Army in the early nineteenth century quickly moved from military enlightenment to ignorance.