‘The riddle of the frontier’: Winston Churchill, the Malakand Field Force and the rhetoric of imperial expansion

Abstract

Historians have frequently identified the young Winston Churchill as an opponent of the so-called ‘forward policy’, which involved the expansion of British control in the north-west frontier region of India. Yet careful reading of his war journalism reveals that he was strongly in favour of the policy, which he attempted to vindicate in his first book. Contemporary reviews reveal that this was recognized at the time. Later scholars have been misled, however, by Churchill's rhetorical stance, which has brought them to overplay the extent of his (genuine) doubts about how British frontier policy was conducted. Churchill consciously chose a ‘circuitous’ method of defending the forward policy, the continuation of which he presented as unavoidable in the light of decisions taken earlier. His intervention in this heated controversy casts light on the oblique strategies that late Victorian imperial expansionists used to advance their case.