On 6 August 1914, two days after Britain entered the Great War, the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, concluded an address to parliament with a call to arms. ‘Let us now make sure that all the resources, not only of this United Kingdom’, Asquith urged, ‘but of the vast Empire of which it is the centre shall be thrown into the scale.’ The Prime Minister was sure that the Empire would rally around Britain in the war that followed, and subsequent events proved his confidence well founded. The dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand alone contributed expeditionary forces of more than 840 000 men to the conflict. The origins of such imperial military cooperation, however, pre-dated the war by decades. The physical manifestations of intra-Empire military cooperation might have unfolded on the shores of Gallipoli, the fields of France and the deserts of Palestine, but conceptions of how, or even whether, this situation was ever to come to pass had been the subject of tentative, halting thought and discussion since the late-Victorian era.

This book is a study of the military career of Lieutenant-General Sir Edward ‘Curley’ Hutton. Yet it is not a traditional biography. Rather, Hutton is a means by which to shed light on late-Victorian thinking on the ‘land’ defence of the British Empire and the embryonic structures of imperial (military) defence during this period. Developed in an era when traditional military mechanisms and assumptions in London were increasingly seen as inadequate to cope with rapidly changing global circumstances, these were issues concerned fundamentally with whether and how the white self-governing colonies could contribute to the collective security of the Empire at large. They were complex questions, which spoke to a wide range of issues beyond a narrow – and at times shallow – contemporary defence debate in Britain and at the edges of the Empire.