The British Army's devastating effectiveness against colonial rebellion is exposed in this military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine.

“Chronicles the run up to Jallianwala Bagh with spellbinding . . . focus. . . . Mr. Wagner’s achievement is one of balance . . . and, above, all, of perspective.” (The Wall Street Journal) The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 was a seminal moment in the history of the British Empire, yet it remains poorly understood. In this dramatic account, Kim A. Wagner details the perspectives of ordinary people and argues that General Dyer’s order to open fire at Jallianwalla Bagh was an act of fear. Situating the massacre within the “deep” context of British colonial mentality and the local dynamics of Indian nationalism, Wagner provides a genuinely nuanced approach to the bloody history of the British Empire. “Mr Wagner argues his case fluently and rigorously in this excellent book.” —The Economist “Written with a humane commitment to the truth that will impress.” —The Times “Skillfully maps a tale of growing tensions, precipitate action, and troubled aftermath.” —The Telegraph “A compelling account” —Financial Times “Wagner's postmortem of an imperial disaster should be widely read.” —R.A. Callahan, emeritus, Choice “The fullest, and by far the most authoritative, account of the causes and course of the Jallianwala massacre in any language.” —Nigel Collett, author of The Butcher of Amritsar “Mining a variety of sources – diaries, memoirs and court testimonies—[Wagner] uncovers fresh perspectives and examines the relation between colonial panic and state brutality with sophistication, sincerity and style.” —Santanu Das, author of India, Empire, and First World War Culture “Analytically sharp but gripping to read, the book is a page-turner”—Barbara D. Metcalf, co-author of A Concise History of India “An important book.” –Yasmin Khan, author of The Partition

In this complete military history of Britain's pacification of the Arab revolt in Palestine, Matthew Hughes shows how the British Army was so devastatingly effective against colonial rebellion. The Army had a long tradition of pacification to draw upon to support operations, underpinned by the creation of an emergency colonial state in Palestine. After conquering Palestine in 1917, the British established a civil Government that ruled by proclamation and, without any local legislature, the colonial authorities codified in law norms of collective punishment that the Army used in 1936. The Army used 'lawfare', emergency legislation enabled by the colonial state, to grind out the rebellion. Soldiers with support from the RAF launched kinetic operations to search and destroy rebel bands, alongside which the villagers on whom the rebels depended were subjected to curfews, fines, detention, punitive searches, demolitions and reprisals. Rebels were disorganised and unable to withstand the power of such pacification measures.

War Against the People focuses on Israel's unique role in international affairs, highlighting how it promotes a global system of militarism and domestic control – a form of "global Palestine." Jeff Halper investigates how Israel exports the weaponry and techniques of occupation. He shows how it uses the West Bank and Gaza as a "laboratory" for the development of these weapons, instruments of population control and models of permanent pacification. These are used not only to armies but internal security agencies and police forces as well. Halper locates Israel's system of pacification within the broader project of global "transcapital pacification." War Against the People provides a valuable window into the workings of pacification on a global level and the latest in military and counter-insurgency doctrine, outlining critical aspects of global politics that activists often miss in their struggle for global justice.

The Palestinian national movement gestated in the early decades of the twentieth century, but it was born during the Great Revolt of 1936–39, a period of Arab rebellion against British policy in the Palestine mandate. In The Crime of Nationalism, Matthew Kraig Kelly makes the unique case that the key to understanding the Great Revolt lies in what he calls the “crimino-national” domain—the overlap between the criminological and the nationalist dimensions of British imperial discourse, and the primary terrain upon which the war of 1936–39 was fought. Kelly’s analysis amounts to a new history of one of the major anticolonial insurgencies of the interwar period and a critical moment in the lead-up to Israel’s founding. The Crime of Nationalism offers crucial lessons for the scholarly understanding of nationalism and insurgency more broadly.

This study uses the private papers of Glubb Pasha to rethink the end of Britain's imperial presence in the Middle East.

A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, “in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.” Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi’s great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective. Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process. Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.

A Commerce of Knowledge tells the story of three generations of Church of England chaplains who worked in Ottoman Aleppo during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By reconstructing their careers, Simon Mills shows the links between English commercial and diplomatic expansion, and English scholarly and missionary interests.

This edited collection examines the British ‘way’ in counter-insurgency. It brings together and consolidates new scholarship on the counter-insurgency associated with the end of empire, foregrounding a dark and violent history of British imperial rule, one that stretched back to the nineteenth century and continued until the final collapse of the British Empire in the 1960s. The essays gathered in the collection cover the period from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s; they are both empirical and conceptual in tone. This edited collection pivots on the theme of the nature of the force used by Britain against colonial insurgents. It argues that the violence employed by British security forces in counter-insurgency to maintain imperial rule is best seen from a maximal perspective, contra traditional arguments that the British used minimum force to defeat colonial rebellions. Case studies are drawn from across the British Empire, covering a period of some hundred years, but they concentrate on the savage wars of decolonisation after 1945. The collection includes a historiographical essay and one on the ‘lost’ Hanslope archive by the scholar chosen by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to manage the release of the papers held. This book was published as a special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies.

In the first and only examination of how the British Empire and Commonwealth sustained its soldiers before, during, and after both world wars, a cast of leading military historians explores how the empire mobilized manpower to recruit workers, care for veterans, and transform factory workers and farmers into riflemen. Raising armies is more than counting people, putting them in uniform, and assigning them to formations. It demands efficient measures for recruitment, registration, and assignment. It requires processes for transforming common people into soldiers and then producing officers, staffs, and commanders to lead them. It necessitates balancing the needs of the armed services with industry and agriculture. And, often overlooked but illuminated incisively here, raising armies relies on medical services for mending wounded soldiers and programs and pensions to look after them when demobilized. Manpower and the Armies of the British Empire in the Two World Wars is a transnational look at how the empire did not always get these things right. But through trial, error, analysis, and introspection, it levied the large armies needed to prosecute both wars. Contributors Paul R. Bartrop, Charles Booth, Jean Bou, Daniel Byers, Kent Fedorowich, Jonathan Fennell, Meghan Fitzpatrick, Richard S. Grayson, Ian McGibbon, Jessica Meyer, Emma Newlands, Kaushik Roy, Roger Sarty, Gary Sheffield, Ian van der Waag