Bøker av Peter Stanley

In the White Mutiny of 1859-61--the largest revolt the British army ever faced--European troops operating on behalf of the East India Company rebelled against their transfer to the service of the Queen of England. Through an analysis of the White Mutiny, Peter Stanley provides a portrait of emerging working-class consciousness among the troops and reveals how the British army, the preeminent icon of English imperialism, first maintained, then lost, control over a vast and generally hostile sub-continent. In cantonment offices in Meerut and Calcutta, we find unimpaired the class distinctions and aspirations of contemporary Britain. Penetrating the hidden worlds of the barrack room and the officers' mess, White Mutiny demonstrates the intimate relationship between the military and the social history of British culture in India, and how awareness of each can enrich the other.

It finally happened... and the aliens were out for conquest. Amid a worldwide invasion, a secluded part of the world holds its own against the unwelcome intruders. Flight Lieutenant Nathan Harvey, a helicopter pilot from the Royal New Zealand Air Force is recruited into the CAVDEV, an experimental powered armor unit. He quickly finds himself leading the fight on the front lines against an overwhelming alien force. Can Harvey and his clandestine unit of powered armor drive back the invading forces and secure a foothold for the human race?

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.

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.

If not for the famous Indian mutiny-rebellion of 1857, the Santal ''Hul'' (rebellion) of 1855 would today be remembered as the most serious uprising that the East India Company ever faced. Instead, this rebellion-to which 10 per cent of the Bengal Army''s infantry was committed and in which at least 10,000 Santals died-has been forgotten. While its memory lived among Santals, British officers published little about it, and most of the sepoys involved died in 1857. In the words of one British officer, the Hul was ''not war ... but execution'', and perhaps thus was dismissed as unworthy of attention by military historians.Drawing for the first time on the Bengal officers'' voluminous reports on its suppression, Peter Stanley has produced the first comprehensive interpretation of the Hul, investigating why it occurred, how it was fought and why it ended as it did. Despite the Bengal Army virtually inventing counterinsurgency operations in the field (and the Santals improvising their first war), the Hul came to an end amid starvation and disease. But between its bloody outbreak, its protracted suppression and its far-reaching effects, Stanley demonstrates that the Hul was more than just ''execution''-it was indeed a war.

The first book since 1915 about the part the Indians played in the Gallipoli campaign, telling their story in new and unexpected ways.