Sublime

Before he set off to Hyderabad, Shore had briefed William Kirkpatrick to stick to the existing Triple Alliance, signed four years earlier in 1790, which bound the Marathas,

Cornwallis and his troops were holed up on the bluff of Yorktown village, which was set above the broad, gleaming expanse of the York River, with the town of Gloucester lying directly across the water. This bucolic spot was more salubrious than the low-lying swamps nearby. Most British troops stayed behind the main fortifications, but Cornwallis

For all that, the British and the Hessians suffered 276 casualties, or twice as many as the Americans. Once again General Howe dawdled after victory and bungled a major opportunity. In later testimony before Parliament, he traced his sluggish behavior to an aversion to unnecessary combat losses but also cited unnamed “political reasons”—perhaps his

Hybrid capabilities were most useful in converting conventional forces to the exigencies of irregular war, as against fighting a hybrid foe, which really were common only in the eighteenth century. For Britain, the normal problem in hybridity was in recalibrating forces from one task to another rather than in handling two competitions at once.

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and the Schutztruppe

France’s entry into the war would precipitate a radical shift in British strategy. Both empires controlled lucrative islands in the West Indies, whose vast sugar and cotton slave plantations had yielded considerable profits. When Clinton was ordered that spring to divert eight thousand men, or a third of his army, to reinforce the West Indies and

In the final war of this series, known as the French and Indian War (1754–1763), Robert Rogers organized and led a small group of frontiersmen, Rogers’ Rangers, against the French and their indigenous allies. The Rangers, who were paid by the British and supported British operations, worked from a camp near the edges of British settlement, from

Another supporting character who comes close to Churchill’s half-century-plus of involvement in irregular matters is Jan Smuts, who started out as a Boer insurgent but later ran the British East African campaign against von Lettow-Vorbeck during World War I. He reappears again during World War II as a bureaucratic thorn in the side of Britain’s