The story of the British army, from its inception in the late seventeenth century to the present.

This new concise history by one of Britain's leading military historians explores the British army from the creation of a permanent standing army in the seventeenth century to the present. It sets the institutional development of the British army, and its often ambiguous relationship with state and society, as well as the army's wider political, social, economic, and cultural role within international, imperial, national, regional, and local contexts.

An army exists to fight, however, and the British army's story cannot be separated from those wars and conflicts that have punctuated its evolution. Consequently, attention is also paid to the army's commanders, operations, and battlefields from the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the seventeenth century to Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty-first.

Beckett traces the army's evolution through five chronological phases: the standing army of the seventeenth century and its antecedents, the national army of the eighteenth century, the imperial army of the nineteenth century, the people's army of the two world wars, the era of national service, and the return to a small professional army fulfilling a global role envisaged by successive governments in the twenty-first century at a time of rapidly changing social attitudes towards the utility of force, that pose a challenge to the army's traditional core values.

Ian F. W. Beckett

Professor Ian F. W. Beckett retired as Professor of Military History at the University of Kent in 2015. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is internationally known for his work on the history of the British Army in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and on the First World War. Previously, he held chairs in both the US and the UK, including as Major General Matthew C Horner Distinguished Professor of Military Theory at the US Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia. He was Chairman of the Council of the UK Army Records Society from 2001 to 2014. His previous publications include Rorke's Drift and Isandlwana (2019), also published by Oxford University Press.