The Wandering Army

A compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuriesshowing how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe Superb analysis.William Anthony Hay, Wall Street Journal At the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession in 1742, the British Armys military tactics were tired and outdated, stultified after three decades of peace. The armys leadership was conservative, resistant to change, and unable to match new military techniques developing on the continent. Losses were cataclysmic and the force was in dire need of modernizationboth in terms of strategy and in leadership and technology. In this wide-ranging and highly original account, Huw J. Davies traces the British Armys accumulation of military knowledge across the following century. An essentially global force, British armies and soldiers continually gleaned and synthesized strategy from war zones the world over: from Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Davies records how the army and its officers put this globally acquired knowledge to use, exchanging information and developing into a remarkable vehicle of innovationleading to the pinnacle of its military prowess in the nineteenth century.