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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The New Art of Self Defence: How Bartitsu Reimagined "Antagonistics" in Edwardian England

The New Art of Self Defence: How Bartitsu Reimagined "Antagonistics" in Edwardian England

Wolf, Tony

Paperback

General World HistoryMartial Arts

ISBN13: 9798246288412
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 15 2026
Pages: 322
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.67 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Edwardian London was gripped by newspaper panics over hooligan street violence, a booming culture of athletic self-improvement and a growing fascination with Oriental arts and cultures. That combination created the perfect conditions for Bartitsu; a radical experiment in personal combat.

Created by engineer-adventurer Edward William Barton-Wright, Bartitsu combined Japanese jujutsu with English boxing, French savate and a unique method of walking-stick defence. For a few remarkable years, the Bartitsu School of Arms stood at the international crossroads of physical culture, self defence and spectacle, staging music-hall challenges, provoking public controversies and attracting an elite and eccentric clientele.

Then, in mid-1902, it disappeared almost without a trace.

The New Art of Self Defence: How Bartitsu Reimagined Antagonistics in Edwardian England tells the full story of this long-forgotten movement. Drawing on contemporary journalism and archival research, it vividly reconstructs the rise and fall of Barton-Wright's New Art. Bartitsu is thus revealed as a rare thing: an early, artisanal attempt to rethink personal combat for the modern age, decades before the world was ready.

This book is an expanded, updated and revised version of the long-form essay The Bartitsu Story, first published in The Bartitsu Compendium, Vol. III (2022).

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