Britannia's Shield: Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton and Late-Victorian Imperial Defence

Description

Britannia's Shield: Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton and the Late-Victorian Imperial Defence presents an in-depth, international study of imperial land defence prior to 1914. The book makes sense of the failures, false starts and successes that eventually led to more than 850,000 men being despatched from the Dominions to buttress Britain's Great War effort - an enormous achievement for intra-empire military cooperation. Craig Stockings presents a vivid portrayal of this complex process as it unfolded throughout the late-Victorian Empire through a biographical study of Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Hutton. As a true soldier of the Empire, the difficulties and dramas that followed Hutton's career at every step - from Cairo to Sydney, Aldershot to Ottawa, and Pretoria to Melbourne - provide key insights into imperial defence and security planning between 1880 and 1914. Richly illustrated, Britannia's Shield is an engaging and entertaining work of rigorous scholarship that will appeal to both general readers and academic researchers.

Craig Stockings is an Associate Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. His areas of academic interest concern general and Australian military history and operational analysis. He has published a history of the army cadet movement in Australia entitled: The Torch and the Sword (2007), a study of the First Libyan Campaign in North Africa 1940-41: Bardia: Myth, Reality and the Heirs of Anzac (2009), and a re-interpretation of the German invasion of Greece in 1941 entitled: Swastika over the Acropolis (2013; with Dr Eleanor Hancock). He has also edited Zombie Myths of Australian Military History (2010), Anzac's Dirty Dozen: 12 Myths of Australian Military History (2012) and Before the Anzac Dawn (2013; with Dr John Connor).