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This article stems from an informal inquiry into how military history was employed in British and North American centres for higher military education to prepare officers for deployment to Afghanistan. The discussions were conducted with professional military educators who were actively teaching in institutions tasked with educating middle and senior ranking officers. When questioned about course reading materials and texts, there was little commonality of approach between the three North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies. There was, however, a common working assumption that the only applicable military history lessons were those drawn from the three Anglo-Afghan Wars fought in 1839–1842, 1878–1880 and 1919 respectively.When asked about the linkages of Afghanistan to Pakistan and the wider South Asian region, there was a begrudging admission that the war in Afghanistan could not be fought in isolation and that any lasting peace had to be considered within a greater regional framework. Yet when it was posited that there may be benefit to a wider approach to the applicability of regional military history, those queried could see little to no benefit in considering any military history lessons but those derived from the three previously cited Anglo-Afghan Wars. This paper suggests that if military history has a useful role to play in contemporary conflict analysis and, more importantly, professional military education, then there is merit in considering a wider historic canvas and that the events of Hindustan's military past lend themselves to such an application. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a gendered perspective to British domination in India through the British Indian Army—which in many ways was central to their entire structure of economic and political domination in India. Locating its understanding drawn from the political economy of south-east Punjab, it argues that the designated martial castes and military recruitment structurally and ideologically identified with and privileged those trends of existing masculinities in this region which suited their power structure and empire building. It was a constellation of marital caste status, land ownership, dominant caste syndrome and good bodily physique or physical strength that ideologically came to connect and configure dominant masculinity in colonial Punjab. An Army profession fully supported it. During the two world wars it emerged as the militarized masculinity, amply supported by legal and administrative measures introduced or apparently adopted in deference to certain popular cultural practices. The associated economic and political privileges turned ‘loyalty’ into an inherent and special ingredient of ‘masculinity’ which the nationalists had to confront and deal with till such times that it came to be firmly linked with nationalism and patriotism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]