Life and work
1859–1928
Major-General Sir Charles Edward Callwell · KCB
Colonial campaigning made into a body of military argument.
Callwell asked what happened when a regular army fought opponents whose organisation, aims and methods differed from its own. Small Wars gathers the campaigns of empire into an attempt at practical theory.
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The edition restores the argument in its full historical setting, beyond the isolated maxims for which it is often remembered.
Green Series
Major-General Sir Charles Edward Callwell's 1920 biography of General Sir Stanley Maude, the British commander who rebuilt the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force after the disaster of Kut and captured Baghdad in March 1917.
Forthcoming · 27 October 2026
Explore the edition →Life and work
The book’s classifications belong to an imperial officer’s world. Its operational insight and its assumptions about conquest have to be read in the same passage.
Official style in the 1918 notice; no earlier award date inferred.
Artillery and staff service provided the professional setting of his writing. Experience and the comparative study of campaigns both fed the analysis.
His career extended into the First World War as Director of Military Operations. The contrast between colonial campaigns and industrial war gives the earlier work an additional historical perspective.
Small Wars proceeds through examples rather than a single narrative. Supply, terrain, intelligence, movement and the enemy’s purposes repeatedly unsettle an apparently simple balance of forces.
Callwell remains a revealing military thinker because he treated difference as an operational problem. His work also records the coercive ends to which that professional intelligence was directed.
Participant narrative and comparative theory offer different views of British campaigning in Africa; no personal influence is asserted.