Ian Knight (born 1956) is a British military historian, author, battlefield guide and specialist in the nineteenth-century Zulu kingdom and the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879. He studied Afro-Caribbean Studies at the University of Kent and has spent several decades researching southern African history in archives, on the battlefields themselves and through Zulu oral traditions. He is an Honorary Research Associate of the KwaZulu-Natal Museum and a founder member of the Victorian Military Society, and has advised on or appeared in numerous television documentaries about the Zulus and Victorian warfare. Knight has received the Anglo-Zulu War Historical Society’s lifetime achievement award, while The National Army Museum Book of the Zulu War shared the Royal United Services Institute prize for best military history.
Knight has written extensively about both sides of the Anglo-Zulu War. His major narrative history, Zulu Rising: The Epic Story of iSandlwana and Rorke’s Drift, reconstructs the catastrophic British defeat at Isandlwana and the subsequent defence of Rorke’s Drift, drawing on British records, Zulu testimony, archaeology and battlefield research. Other important works include Brave Men’s Blood: The Anatomy of the Zulu Army, The National Army Museum Book of the Zulu War, Rorke’s Drift, Companion to the Anglo-Zulu War and his biographical studies of participants in the conflict. He has also written many shorter Osprey histories covering Isandlwana 1879, Rorke’s Drift 1879, British Forces in Zululand 1879 and the wider history of the Zulu military system. Beyond Zululand, Knight has written about the Boer Wars, the New Zealand Wars, the Mahdist campaigns and Victorian colonial warfare more generally; Warriors in Scarlet examines the British Army during the final decades in which the red-coated infantryman became an emblem of imperial warfare.
