The Edwardian Army: Recruiting, Training, and Deploying the British Army, 1902-1914, by Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly

Abstract

The Edwardian period was a challenging time for the British army. Setbacks experienced during the unexpectedly costly and protracted war in South Africa at the turn of the century provoked grave concern about the efficiency of the nation’s armed forces. The end of Britain’s ‘splendid isolation’ in Europe, characterised by new diplomatic arrangements with France and Russia, raised new questions about the army’s strategic role, while the industrial and naval challenge from imperial Germany gave rise to renewed fears about the vulnerability of the British Isles to foreign invasion. In 1914 the British army would find itself, for the first time in a century, engaged in a struggle against a first-rate continental power. In their new book, Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly present an impressively detailed and wide-ranging study of the British army during the twelve years between the end of the conflict in South Africa and the outbreak of the Great War. Much of the existing scholarship on this period—including valuable work by John Gooch, Michael Howard, Brian Bond, and Hew Strachan—has been concerned with questions of strategy, or with institutions such as the General Staff and the Committee of Imperial Defence. By contrast, Bowman and Connelly, following the approach of historians such as Edward Spiers, Ian Beckett, and David French, focus on the army at the regimental level. This ‘bottom-up’ approach, examining the ways in which military policy was actually put into practice, proves an effective and fruitful one.