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The book addresses the important global role of the Indian Army during the First World War. It is an academic reassessment of the army by both established and early career scholars of the Indian Army, as well as naval historians.

Some 50,000 British Territorials served in India during the Great War. Astonishingly, it has taken a century for a book on them to be written. The Territorials - citizen soldiers, members of a force formed before the war for home defense - never expected to serve abroad, but volunteered for 'Imperial Service' at Lord Kitchener's request.

Explores the unique multi-ethnic British Indian armies under the East India Company.The armies of British India were, as one of its members wrote, 'the most extraordinary phenomenon in the history of the world.' Multi-ethnic, composed of men of diverse ethnicities and faiths, under the flag of the East India Company - 'John Company' -they conquered or controlled much of the Indian sub-continent by 1850, victorious in all but one major war (the first disastrous intervention in Afghanistan).Four armies served and fought for John Company: the three 'presidency armies' of Bengal, Madras and Bombay, and the regiments of the British Army, rented from the Crown by the Company. Together, this disparate collection of European and 'Native' corps - regular and irregular -numbered over 300,000 uniformed men at its height. The army that the 1857 Mutiny destroyed or changed out of recognition essentially dated from the reorganisation of 1824. In the intervening 33 years, John Company's armies not only fought half-a-dozen major wars (in Burma, Afghanistan, China, the Punjab, and across India itself), it also faced dozens of insurrections and rebellions, some of which entailed such sustained conflict that they gained their units battle honours. In doing so, the armies of British India created a distinctive military culture, one that the Mutiny decisively changed.John Company's Armies traces what those forces constituted and how they were commanded; how they lived and died in camps and cantonments; how they prepared for war (and how conflict in India changed) and how they fought against external foes and internal threats to the Company's rule. It uses a wealth of contemporary sources, archival, visual and published, including research on the sites of battles and cantonments, to evoke the armies' composition and character. It deals with both European and Native forces, explaining their idiosyncratic organisation, practices and terminology, and shows how British-Indian armies both prepared for battle and how they experienced it, drawing on the words and images of dozens of its members.John Company's Armies is intended for both the specialist seeking the first comprehensive account of a force traditionally examined to explain the outbreak of the 1857 Mutiny, and for readers such as family historians needing to understand how the army of a distant relative was formed, functioned, and how it fought.

The Indian Army was the largest volunteer army during the Second World War. Indian Army divisions fought in the Middle East, North Africa and Italy - and went to make up the overwhelming majority of the troops in South East Asia. Over two million personnel served in the Indian Army - and India provided the base for supplies for the Middle Eastern and South East Asian theaters. This monograph is a modern historical interpretation of the Indian Army as a holistic organization during the Second World War. It will look at training in India - charting how the Indian Army developed a more comprehensive training structure than any other Commonwealth country. This was achieved through both the dissemination of doctrine and the professionalism of a small coterie of Indian Army officers who brought about a military culture within the Indian Army - starting in the 1930s - that came to fruition during the Second World War, which informed the formal learning process. Finally, it will show that the Indian Army was reorganized after experiences of the First World War. During the interwar period, the army developed training and belief for both fighting on the North West Frontier, and as an aid to civil power. With the outbreak of the Second World War, in addition to these roles, the army had to expand and adapt to fighting modern professional armies in the difficult terrains of desert, jungle and mountain warfare. A clear development of doctrine and training can be seen, with many pamphlets being produced by GHQ India that were, in turn, used to formulate training within formations and then used in divisional, brigade and unit training instructions - thus a clear line of process can be seen not only from GHQ India down to brigade and battalion level, but also upwards from battalion and brigade level based on experience in battle that was absorbed into new training instructions. Together with the added impetus for education in the army, by 1945 the Indian Army had become a modern, professional and national army.