There can be little doubt that the export of opium from India to China by, among others, the Honourable East India Company is hard to condone. Indeed, Mark Simner makes the point that the trade was always kept quiet in Britain and, to a lesser extent, China.
Books
MHM Book of the Year 2019: Shortlist
MHM has curated a list of 2018’s best military history titles: the nominees for this year’s MHM book awards. Our selection includes some of the best-researched, most-insightful, and most-readable titles reviewed in the magazine over the last year. But we need your help to select the winners! The shortlist of 12 books can be found below. Voting […]
Masters of Mayhem: Lawrence of Arabia and the British military mission to the Hejaz
The perhaps somewhat sensationalised title should not put one off. With great accuracy, detail, enthusiasm, and insight, Masters of Mayhem recounts the evolution of Allied combined operations against the Ottoman (Turkish) forces in the Hejaz, particularly during the latter stages of WWI. For those new to this theatre of WWI, the background and context of […]
The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638-1653
Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon, described the desertion of the Royal Navy to Parliament in 1642 as an ‘unspeakable ill consequence to the King’s affairs’. For a monarch who was not unmindful of the importance of the Navy, this would have been particularly painful to Charles I. In response, the King attempted to create […]
World War II at Sea: a global history
When first approached to review Craig L Symonds’ World War II at Sea, I was somewhat ambivalent about how much value another narrative history of this subject might add to the huge volume of extant literature. I really could not have been more wrong. Symonds’ work is gripping and well written, for sure, but it […]
The Royal Navy’s Air Service in the Great War
David Hobbs’ carefully chosen title gives some indication of the political complexities surrounding his latest subject, as a book about the actual Royal Naval Air Service would technically have to end on 1 April 1918 with the RNAS’s absorption into the newly created Royal Air Force, a service which, the author robustly argues, ‘cared little […]
The Last Battle: endgame on the Western Front, 1918
The General commanding the Bollockyboos Has strictly revised all his previous views… He keeps his battalion, untiring, approving, All moving and firing and firing and moving; They know about guns, they know about tanks, They’ll take any risk you like with their flanks… They are all at one that training is fun And there’s nought […]
The Other Norfolk Admirals: Myngs, Narbrough, and Shovell
Close to Charing Cross station in London is the oddly named Ship and Shovell pub. Initially, this seems a strange combination, until you realise that the Shovell in question is not a misspelt digging implement but honours Sir Cloudesley Shovell (c.1650-1707), one of the most renowned admirals of the 17th century. Shovell is but one […]
Squadron: ending the African slave trade
The West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy had more or less terminated the slave trade on the West African coast by the 1850s. This book is not about that story. It concerns another unfolding on the opposite side of the continent. As the West African trade collapsed, the East African trade soared. The trafficking […]
Stormtroopers: a new history of Hitler’s brownshirts
Daniel Siemens’s excellent new history of the Sturmabteilungen — the SA; better known as the Nazi Party’s Stormtroopers or Brownshirts — includes a lot of violence. It begins with the horrific murder of an innocent Polish down-and-out in German Upper Silesia in August 1932. Accused of being a Communist, he was savagely beaten to death […]
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