In this event Professor Yasmin Khan (University of Oxford) presented his lecture on ‘Mars and Britannia: the British Imperial Way of Warfare’. The lecture took place on Friday 12 September 2025 and was hosted by the Royal Historical Society, UK.

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About this lecture

British military power around the world was dependent on non-European people for two hundred years. This lecture will demonstrate just how extensively British military history has relied on non-British people over continents and centuries.

This is a global story, rich in characters and untold stories, and covers locations from the deserts of North Africa to the islands of the Pacific and jungles of East Asia. It has the potential to revise understandings of our national history in profound ways.

About our speaker

Yasmin Khan is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford where she teaches Global and Imperial history. She was born in London, educated at Oxford, and has taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and London. She is the author of The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale, 2007) and The Raj at War (Bodley Head, 2015).

Yasmin has been long-listed for prizes including the Orwell Prize, the Authors’ Club of Great Britain First Novel Prize, the PEN Hesell-Tiltman, and has won the Gladstone Prize for history and a Royal Television society award. She is an editor of History Workshop Journal. She has worked with part-time students at Oxford since 2012 and has a particular interest in working with lifelong learners.