The Wandering Army

The Wandering Army offers a compelling history of the British Army in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, illustrating how the military gathered knowledge from campaigns across the globe.

At the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession in 1742, the British Army's military tactics were tired and outdated, having stagnated after three decades of peace. The army's leadership was conservative, resistant to change, and unable to match the new military techniques developing on the continent. Losses were cataclysmic, highlighting the dire need for modernization in strategy, leadership, and technology.

In this wide-ranging and highly original account, Huw Davies traces the British Army's accumulation of military knowledge across the following century. As an essentially global force, British armies and soldiers continually gleaned and synthesised strategy from warzones around the world: from Europe to the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Davies records how the army and its officers put this globally acquired knowledge to use, exchanging information and developing into a remarkable vehicle of innovation—leading to the pinnacle of its military prowess in the nineteenth century.