The dual impact of British Indias North-West frontier on the British imperial idea at the turn of the 20th century

The article presents the dual impact of British India's North-West Frontier on the British idea of empire. The Frontier was an imperial myth - the special interpretation of the past - which provided a pattern of behavior that should be followed by British imperial soldiers and officials. The myth itself was propagated by war correspondents and writers, such as Rudyard Kipling, but the Frontier also served as an "imperial laboratory" for a new generation of military technocrats (e.g. Charles Callwell) who could develop and describe their outlook on asymmetric warfare. The new approach to so-called small wars was a local variant of the general changes in military organization that occurred in the second half of the 19th century.