British counterinsurgency has been the subject of renewed study during the past decade, driven in part by debate over the performance of British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Making use of declassified files at Britain's National Archives and documents in former colonies, a new generation of historians has challenged established views about the nature of Britain's colonial wars and the efficacy of its approach to counterinsurgency. Many of these studies have focused on specific campaigns, with Kenya drawing the most attention. While these authors have speculated that their conclusions might apply to a broad range of conflicts, there has been until now no comprehensive revisionist history of British counterinsurgency.

In The British Way in Counterinsurgency, David French provides such a comprehensive study, covering the period 1945 to 1967, from the beginning of the Zionist insurgency in Palestine to the end of the emergency in South Arabia. In addition to these two wars, French covers the campaigns in Suez, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Nyasaland, Oman, Borneo, and British Guiana. Rather than address these conflicts in chronological order, however, he provides a far more useful analytical schema, examining the structure of the colonial state, the nature of the threats it faced, the legal framework upon which operations were based, and various approaches to suppressing rebellion, including the use of torture. He then moves on to consider whether coercion or “winning hearts and minds” figured most prominently in the British approach. French concludes by examining how well the Colonial Office and the British army preserved and transmitted the lessons of past wars and by considering the sustainability of their strategy and tactics in the face of increased international and domestic scrutiny.

French rebuts the simplistic notion held by the British army that colonial campaigns conformed to the ideal model presented in Robert Thompson's classic, Defeating Communist Insurgency: The Lessons of Malaya and Vietnam (1966), and challenges the conclusion of scholars who argue that the British based their counterinsurgency strategy on winning hearts and minds. Coercion not conciliation, he concludes, was the core of the British approach. The British succeeded not only because they could protect the population from intimidation by the insurgents but also because “the civil population came to understand that the security forces and government could intimidate them more effectively than could the insurgents” (251). French also astutely concludes that the British became more conciliatory from the late 1950s on as they changed from seeing the empire as an advantage in the Cold War to considering it a liability. They also came to realize, however grudgingly, that nationalist insurgents had a legitimate desire for independence that their populations largely shared.

French makes a compelling argument, but it is subject to two important qualifications. As he freely admits at several points, the British were far less violent in their conduct of counterinsurgency than were the French and, probably as a result, more successful. A clear distinction must be made between coercion and lethality. The British were often coercive and sometimes even brutal, but compared to the French, the Belgians, or the Americans, they killed proportionally far fewer people. The level of force employed in counterinsurgency campaigns really does matter. The other qualification has to do with the outcomes of Britain's colonial wars. Although the British applied coercion in all cases, they succeeded only in those campaigns in which they could make genuine concessions to disaffected people. Even in Kenya, widely acknowledged as the most brutal counterinsurgency campaign, the British ended the emergency by rejecting white minority rule and granting the colony independence. When all they could do is coerce (Palestine, Suez, and South Arabia), they lost. Sticks work best when matched with carrots. Perhaps there is a middle ground between French and the scholars he challenges: coercion matters more at the outset of campaigns when the security forces are trying to gain the upper hand and destroy the insurgent organization, but winning hearts and minds is necessary to consolidate victory and prevent a resurgence of violence.

These qualifications notwithstanding, David French has written an excellent book. He makes creative use of a wide range of archival sources to argue convincingly that coercion mattered far more in British counterinsurgency than previous scholars have acknowledged. He also thoroughly discredits that argument of some officers that the British had found the magic formula for defeating insurgency captured in Robert Thompson's renowned work. The British Way in Counterinsurgency is a valuable addition to the literature of irregular warfare likely to be read for years to come.