A very good historical read on the history of the Zulu peoples.I would recommend this book to anyone who likes history on the Zulu wars.

This seems to be an exceptionally well researched book on a topic that is quite interesting. I am most familiar with British history through the perspective of my American lens. This war is not something I've ever learned about academically, but after visiting Namibia and South Africa I was rather interested to learn more about this on my own. Although this book can get a bit down into the weeds into the military history (that is what it's about, after all) it still presents an incredible amount of very interesting information on the subject. I learned quite a bit from it, though the amount of new and unfamiliar information was a bit overwhelming at times.

Keep in mind that this is a history of the British military's actions from a British perspective. It is published by Pen & Sword Military - a British publishing house focusing on military works. If you're looking for an account of this time period from the local perspective, or even balanced with contending perspectives, this isn't the book for you. But for what it is, it's an excellent book.

In-depth knowledge, well-researched, and a non-nonsense approach to this interesting subject. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject, and to the readers who already know something about this subject, since it gives such detailed information that it might be a bit too much if you are completely new to this subject. However, if you know the basics about this subject, this will be an excellent read for you, and you will gain a lot of new knowledge!

This is not what I thought it would be. It seems to focus on these by analysing the British general's actions instead of a history of the wars through the eyes of the indigenous Zulu and Xhosa people. I'm afraid to continue only to find out that it is another work that glorifies the actions of white men during their colonisation of Africa so I'm stopping right now. Even if not that, I don't care about the analysis of war through the academic lens, I don't care for dry writing.

I recently completed my reading of Dr. Stephen Manning"s "Britain Against the Xhosa and Zulu Peoples: Lord Chelmsford's South African Campaigns," graciously provided to me in ARC form by Pen and Sword Military. The rather cumbersome title does a good job of briefly summarizing the territory the book means to cover. This is an area in which I have read extensively, so I was quite comfortable with the author's subject matter. Dr. Manning does a good job of introducing a fairly complex topic to general readers. The work is far from comprehensive, but I don't believe that is its point. Rather, it is a primer on one of the most famous areas in Victorian military history. Most readers with any familiarity at all with the time and place will be familiar with the famous defeat inflicted on Imperial forces by the Zulus and the legendary defense of Rorke's Drift (indeed, I have a large painting of the battle at Rorke's Drift on my living room wall). There is a lot of material out there on this, and this book does a good job of summarizing the latest scholarship. The treatment of the rather controversial figure of Lord Chelmsford is balanced and fair without absolving him of any of his all too apparent shortcomings. Chelmsford provides a sort of nexus for the work. I would recommend it as a good jumping off place for a closer examination of the wars in South Africa and as a very useful overview of a military and diplomatic situation quite typical of those that occurred in the late nineteenth century British Empire as it evolved away from its earlier foundations.