The railways entered South Asia, as several historians have noted, with a distinctly strategic orientation. Urban historians in particular have highlighted the extent to which defense considerations shaped the railways in the early decades of crown rule, which was inaugurated in the immediate aftermath of the revolt of 1857. In his new book, Imperial Military Transportation in British Asia, Michael Charney turns his attention to a period that has featured far less prominently in the history of the railways in South Asia—the final years of colonial rule—in order to examine the role played by the railways in the region's defense during the Second World War. Charney's primary focus is on Burma and the First Burma Campaign, during which colonial forces retreated from Tenasserim to eastern India in the face of an unexpected and relentless Japanese assault. Despite its narrow focus on the campaign and the slow militarization of the railways in Burma, this is, in many ways, a book about late colonialism. It tells the story of an empire beginning to unravel as economic, political, and military pressures increasingly brought its fundamental contradictions to the surface.

Organized into eight short chapters, the book begins with a discussion about military transportation technique, a body of knowledge concerned with the mobilization of railway infrastructure during wartime. Charney shows that, this training, developed in Britain, was sought to be introduced in various parts of the empire and faced resistance from within the colonial establishment. Throughout the book, Charney attributes this resistance to two factors: the growing insularity of the colonial Burmese administration in the interwar years and the fears provoked by outside influence among white colonial officials who were already feeling threatened by the growing “Burmanization” of the service.

Believing in the importance of engaging with local conditions and their own expertise in these matters, colonial officials in Burma remained deeply suspicious of all imperial reforms and the personnel associated with them. Of the figures who provoked much initial hostility, Francis John Biddulph emerges in Charney's account as the most significant. Charney credits Biddulph with carrying military transportation across the empire, introducing it in Iraq before bringing it to India and Burma. As a result, much of the book understandably focuses on Biddulph and his role in propagating military transportation technique, first in Longmoor, where the training was developed, and subsequently in the colonies. While military historians have paid a fair amount of attention to the First Burma Campaign, the role of the transportation directorate during the course of the war, and that of Biddulph and others, associated with it have largely gone unnoticed. But Charney addresses this oversight using previously unaccessed material to reconstruct not only the ways in which military transportation was mobilized during the course of the campaign but also how it irrevocably changed in the process. In so doing, Charney contributes to our understanding of the co-production and circulation of knowledge in the empire and reveals the shortcomings of the traditional diffusionist and unidirectional model, in which knowledge always moves fully formed from the metropole to the colony.

Chapter 1 describes the training as it was developed and taught at Longmoor, where Biddulph served as an instructor in the years leading up to the Second World War. Charney shows how this training was geared toward railway operations in a British or even a European context with very little attention paid to the colonies. This, as Charney points out, created a significant knowledge gap that proved to be debilitating when the Japanese first began to threaten British possessions in Asia. As many scholars have observed, the Japanese attacks in Asia during the Second World War caught the British by surprise, and Charney captures this initial confusion well as British forces scrambled to defend Burma and India after the unexpected fall of Singapore. The first half of the book details the losses suffered by the British in Burma in the initial weeks and months of the Japanese assault. With its economic policies having concentrated the colony's infrastructure in a few port cities, which were swiftly captured by the Japanese and faced with the flight of labor, the colonial administrative machinery in Burma broke down during the course of the campaign. But the railways, as Charney points out, managed to last long enough in order to facilitate the British retreat at a time when all else failed. The second half of the book examines just how this was achieved. According to Charney, the deployment of transportation technique in Burma was partially successful despite the deteriorating conditions because of Biddulph's willingness to integrate imperial training with what he calls local colonial knowledge and to decentralize command in order to grant local officials sufficient operational autonomy. Though the British were unable to thwart the Japanese conquest of Burma in 1942, Charney shows how the lessons learned from the campaign, especially those relating to the militarization of railways would be used over the following years not just in India but across the empire, where the importance of engaging with local conditions was recognized.

In many ways, Imperial Military Transportation in British Asia is a conventional military history that details the twists and turns of the First Burma Campaign. At the same time, however, Charney is alert to the importance of interrogating these developments from a variety of perspectives. Apart from his interest, as noted, in tracking the circulation of knowledge across the empire, this is most apparent in his focus on the contemporaneous and retrospective narratives through which the campaign was memorialized and represented. Though such an attention to such narratives is visible throughout the book, it is most developed in chapter 8, where Charney discusses how the First Burma Campaign was represented as an unmitigated failure by its protagonists in order to facilitate reform. If this attentiveness to narrative forms is one of the strengths of this book, its main shortcoming is a failure to situate these developments in its wider political context. For readers who might not be familiar with Burmese history, more details about political developments in the colony would have definitely been useful. As it stands, some of the events discussed in the book can be hard to follow. Nevertheless, this is an important book for military historians and those interested in the history of Burma and the Second World War.