mrw311 - Anthology

Introduction

       The Maxim machine gun. The Gatling gun. Torpedoes and Battleships. The bolt-action rifle. The cartridge. All well-known implements and forefathers of the weapons of war fielded in the 21st century, with many of the aforementioned technologies still in use today. In the decades preceding the 20th century, the world saw the development and production of weapons and mechanisms that would change the face of war forever. The British Empire, beginning to feel its power wane as a result of rebellions and advancements of rival nations, reluctantly loosened its grip on tradition and began adopting the implements of war invented by other industrial civilizations.  Great Britain romantically clung to the weapons upon which she forged her great empire: matchlock muskets and wooden sailing ships conquered both land and sea - and it was this growth that implanted an arrogance of effectiveness within the British military. As wars and conflicts raged on in other nations, subsequently spurning the growth of military technologies, the British Empire expended time and energy maintaining its holdings, often at the cost of refusing to adopt rival inventions. It was not till the 19th century that Britain began to feel the negative impacts of "sticking to their guns" - the Crimean War placed the British against the growing Russian Empire to defend the Ottomans, a move that accentuated the ineffectiveness of traditional wooden warships against fortified positions. In 1857, the Indian Rebellion dissolved company rule of the East India Company and forced the British Crown to take direct control of the subcontinent as a result. The Boer Wars exposed the British to weapons of rival imperial powers such as the German Mauser rifle and the American lever-action being used by a tactically superior and adaptive enemy. Additionally, the antiquated firing exercises and formations of the British soldiers made them easy targets for the guerilla fighting Boers.
        This anthology of periodicals, schematics, and images serves as but a portion of the developments, discussions, and anxieties created as a result of the increasing technological militarism within Victorian England. With the growing industrialism of the United States and other empires, the British military became acutely aware of the impotence of its arms, tactics, and overall capacity for waging war. With the widespread adoption of the battleship, British naval supremacy was in significant decline and several colonial holdings began to rebel with varying levels of success, forcing Her Majesty's army to re-evaluate their tactics and weapons of war. After seeing the effectiveness of the technologies and weapons being fielded by other competing nations, the latter half of the 19th century saw Britain finally lay down her Brown Bess and pick up the Maxim machine gun, allowing her armies to adapt to 19th century conflicts and create the foundation for the force that would, within two decades of Victoria’s death, fight against the Central Powers in World War I. 
     This anthology begins with chapters concerning the development of military technologies: beginning with Gatling and machine guns, it moves into small arms. These entries are concerned purely with the implementation, development, and operation of these new weapons. The transition from smooth-bore, single-shot rifles into cartridge firing, magazine-fed rifles was uncomfortable for the British, but these struggles would produce the venerable Lee-Enfield No. 4 Mk. I, regarded as one of the smoothest and most accurate rifles of World War I and II.  These opening chapters are followed by a discussion of larger technologies, namely the battleship and torpedo - two technologies that would change the face of Britain's navy for decades to come. After experiencing difficulties against the Russians in the Crimean War, the British began thinking about fully armored ships capable of withstanding the increased fire from fortified land targets. These brief and generally objective overviews of some of the weapons developed during the latter half of the 19th century provide the background necessary to move forward towards the reactionary chapters. After their defeat in the First Boer War, the British army began to rethink its strategies for dealing with the, from the British perspective, surprisingly advanced Boer commandos. A feeling of impotence and technological stagnation began to permeate the British army after the First Boer War which drove the movement towards the adoption of newer, more effective technologies and tactics. 
These adoptions, however, were not without their flaws - the British nation was torn three ways: Those who urged for the newer technologies, those who felt the current technology was sufficient, and those that feared the potential for war as a result of these new technologies. Chapter 6 encapsulates these feelings, using the previously addressed technologies in other chapters as a basis for critique and discussion. The anthology concludes with a movement from the real world to imagined worlds, as several of the authors at the time of this transitional period within the British military and society provided their own fictitious imaginings of worlds and lands where military prowess yields, on one hand, weapons of absolute destruction while on another hand, a society that abandons all technology to preserve its integrity. These selected entries serve, I hope, to show an authorship screaming in vain to stop the technological and social inertia that would culminate in the outbreak and subsequent destruction of the Great War. 

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