The British Army and the Legacy of C. E. Callwell’s Ideas in the Mirror of Intellectual History

The Interbellum era was marked by the competitive struggle of various interpretations over guerrilla and small war, which were a practical expression of insurgent activity in the colonies and on the outskirts of the British Empire. The struggle to control the terminological field in this matter reflected theoretical and doctrinal contradictions, bureaucratic rivalry between the departments responsible for ensuring its internal security, disputes between the military and civilian authorities over the boundaries of their responsibility in maintaining the colonial order. The change in the meaning of the concepts of “guerrilla” and “small was” in the British military thought in the first half of the 20th century revealed by highlighting the stages of this process, by the historical reconstruction of the levels of discussion on this topic in a professional environment and by identifying the degree of mutual influence of its main provisions within the context of the budgetary constraints and new challenges to the British colonial rule after the Great War. This approach made it possible to specify the military’s ideas about the place and role of the army in the functioning of the British Empire’s internal security system at the final stage of its existence — and at the same time at the moment of its highest growth. The analysis of the semantic and meaningful content of the definitions adopted by the army to describe anticolonial protest (“guerrilla”, “small war”, “sub-war” and “modern rebellion”) between the world wars made it possible to new raise the issue of disagreements between the military and civil authorities in choosing a military-political course in conflicts of this kind (an obvious choice between measures to support civil authorities and the introduction of martial law). The established differences appear as a result of not only bureaucratic disagreements, but also the lack of a unified view of the problem of insurgent activity among the military class themselves

Bureaucracy · Citizen journalism · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Field (mathematics · Intellectual history · Meaning (existential · Rivalry · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Military History and Strategy · World Wars: History, Literature, and Impact