Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1857-1859

by Benjamin Disraeli, John Alexander Wilson Gunn, Melvin George Wiebe

1982 · University of Toronto Press

Benjamin Disraeli was perhaps the most colourful Prime Minister in British history. This seventh volume of the highly acclaimed Benjamin Disraeli Letters edition shows also that he was a dedicated, resourceful, and farsighted statesman. It contains 670 letters written between 1857 and 1859. They address friends, family, political colleagues, and, not least, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. During this period, Disraeli shepherded a fragile Conservative government through the Indian Mutiny, the Second Opium War with China, the Orsini bomb plot, and the Franco-Austrian-Piedmontese War, only to fail at home over parliamentary reform. Day-by-day politics and behind-the-scenes strategy dominate, while lighter-hearted letters to friends and family reveal the private Disraeli's charm and wit. With an appendix of 115 newly found letters dating from 1825, as well as information on 219 unfound letters, full annotations to each letter, an exhaustive name-and-subject index and a comprehensive introduction, this volume will be a vital resource for new understanding of this enigmatic statesman.

Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam

by John Nagl

2002 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Armies are invariably accused of preparing to fight the last war. Nagl examines how armies learn during the course of conflicts for which they are initially unprepared in organization, training, and mindset. He compares the development of counterinsurgency doctrine and practice in the Malayan Emergency from 1948-1960 with that developed in the Vietnam Conflict from 1950-1975, through use of archival sources and interviews with participants in both conflicts. In examining these two events, he argues that organizational culture is the key variable in determining the success or failure of attempts to adapt to changing circumstances. Differences in organizational culture is the primary reason why the British Army learned to conduct counterinsurgency in Malaya while the American Army failed to learn in Vietnam. The American Army resisted any true attempt to learn how to fight an insurgency during the course of the Vietnam Conflict, preferring to treat the war as a conventional conflict in the tradition of the Korean War or World War II. The British Army, because of its traditional role as a colonial police force and the organizational characteristics that its history and the national culture created, was better able to quickly learn and apply the lessons of counterinsurgency during the course of the Malayan Emergency. This is the first study to apply organizational learning theory to cases in which armies were engaged in actual combat.

The Antislavery Debate

by John Ashworth, David Brion Davis, Thomas L. Haskell

1992 · Univ of California Press

"The marrow of the most important historiographical controversy since the 1970s."—Michael Johnson, University of California, Irvine "A debate of intellectual significance and power. The implications of these essays extend far beyond antislavery, important as that subject undoubtedly is. This will be of major importance to students of historical method as well as the history of ideas and reform movements."—Carl N. Degler, Stanford University