Osprey Men-at-Arms 224 : Queen Victoria's Enemies (4) : Asia, Australasia and the Americas

Although India and Africa remained the largest areas of British military commitment during the Victorian period, the spread of British strategic and commercial interests throughout the 19th century meant that the Army was called upon to serve in a variety of theatres across the world. Some of this fighting was sever: when the Queen came to the throne Britain was poised to go to war with China over the dubious question of the opium trade, and the close of her reign saw Britain as part of an international force suppressing the Boxer Uprising. It took nearly 30 years of intermittent warfare to suppress Maori opposition to settler expansion in New Zealand. In other areas it amounted to little more than skirmishing, and incidents such as Brooke's campaign against the pirates of Borneo, or the Jamaican revolt of 1865, have largely been forgotten. Ian Knight exposes the variety of these 'small wars' and of the qualities of the disparate peoples who took to the field to oppose the spread of the British Empire, accompanied by illustrations by Richard Scollins.

Contents

• Introduction
• China
• Bhutan and Tibet
• Burma
• The East Indies
• New Zealand
• Australia
• The Americas