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Colonial Military History: A Research note

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Roger N. Buckley
Roger N. Buckley
Affiliation:
University of Hartford
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Extract

European presence overseas almost immediately led to the creation of colonial armies, dichotomous organisms composed of European units and European-led corps of native peoples. Impromptu and ad hoc at first, these organizations quickly evolved into standing professional military formations and became the major underpinning of European colonialism. Local reaction to this intrusion, swift and hostile, simultaneously resulted in armed struggle, colonial wars. Like all standing armies, permanent colonial military forces had a high societal profile as a consequence of their vast and complex economic and social infrastructures. Sprawling British cantonments in colonial India, sustained by a motley mix of money lenders-creditors, swarms of attendants, merchants and (of course) prostitutes, nestled by towns and villages. And military communities, composed of disbanded native troops and their families dotted the landscape in parts of, for example, Trinidad, Sierra Leone and British Honduras, now Belize. Nor were these settlements static and isolated from the surrounding population. On the contrary, they were designed to continue as an imperial control mechanism, and produced as expected ‘local elites’, to use current parlance. As Samson Ukpabi has shown, military service was directly linked to social mobility in British West Africa during the nineteenth century (1).

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 68 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1981

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References

Notes

1. ‘Military Recruitment and Social Mobility in Nineteenth Century British West Africa’. Journal of African Studies 2 (Spring 1975): 87–107.Google Scholar

2. Bond, Brian and Roy, Ian, eds. War and Society: A Yearbook of Military History, 2 vols. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977), 2–33.Google Scholar

3. Strategy (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), pp. 107, 111, 147, 162 and passim.

4. Higman, Robin, ed., A Guide to the Sources of British Military History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 298–9.Google Scholar

5. More recent is (Major) G. Tlyden's ‘The West India Regiments, 1795 to 1927, and from 1958, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 40 (March, 1962). 42–49.

6. Higman p. 299.

7. Millis, Walter, Arms and Men: A Study of American Military History (New York: Mentor Books, 1958), v–vi.Google Scholar

8. Higman, pp. 301–2.

9. Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (London: Stationery Office 1896). This label has endured. See, for instance, ‘A Half-Century of Small Wars’ in Cyril Fall's A Hundred Years of War: 1850–1950 (New York: Collier Books, 1967), pp. 130–148.

10. Donald R. Morris, The Washing of the Spears: A History of the Rise of the Zulu Nation under Shaka and Its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), pp. 35, 313. Although an interesting account, academics will be mined by this study since it is without notes.

11. Slaves in Red Coats: The British West India Regiments, 1795–1815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

12. Stanley L. Engerman's forthcoming review in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

13. Price, Karen, et al, History and Archaeology/Histoire et Archéologie, no. 15 (Ottawa: Parks Canada, 1977) pp. 165, 209.Google Scholar

14. Johnson, John J., ed., The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries (Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Lefever, Ernest W., Spear and Scepter: Army, Police, and Politics in Tropical Africa (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1970) pp. vii, 20–1.Google Scholar

16. A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), passim.

17. Ibid., pp. 543–8.

18. India: A Modern History (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 269. For Hibbert see The Great Mutiny: India 1857 (New York: Viking Press, 1978), pp. 392–3.

19. Lefever, p. 18.

20. Fisher, Allan C., ‘Rhodesia, A House Divided’, National Geographic 147 (05 1975): 654.Google Scholar

21. ‘Bugeaud, Gallieni, Lyautey: The Development of French Colonial Warfare’, in Earle, Edward Mead, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 234–5.Google Scholar

22. Itinerario, 1979–2, pp. 9–11.