The Transformation of the World (106 page)

Second
. In every civilization, technical know-how has manifested itself above all in relation to warfare, where “software” and “hardware” should always be seen as a single whole. Before the great innovations of the nineteenth century, the armies of Napoleon and Suvorov still fought essentially with an early modern weapons technology, and in general the armed forces of the Napoleonic age had many lines of continuity with the eighteenth century.
⁵²
In military history too, it was a veritable bridge period. The superiority of these armies, especially the French forces, was due less to a technological lead over the enemy than to greater speed, smaller and more flexible units, and a new way of integrating artillery into the course of battle. The bayonet—that is, the firearm as spear—still played a highly important role, since infantry firepower was not effective at close quarters and was sensitive to weather conditions.

The great technological innovations made themselves felt only from midcentury on: the rifle, invented in 1848 by the French officer Claude-Etienne Minié, was adopted by all European armies in the 1850s, when it replaced the older musket as the standard issue for infantrymen.
⁵³
Improving in accuracy and velocity as the century wore on, it also became easier to handle and generated less gun smoke. Meanwhile the average caliber of artillery increased, as did its power, mobility, and backfire safety. The naval corps of various powers profited from developments in ship-borne artillery, which permitted the deployment of calibers on board that were almost impossible to control ashore. Warships became larger with the advances in iron and steel, but also lighter and more maneuverable. In the course of the nineteenth century, “an industrial weapons complex developed out of the former semi-state arms depot economy.”
⁵⁴
This happened in a number of countries, which began to compete with one another in military clout and battle readiness. From midcentury on,
quantitative
differences in weaponry gained a determining effect on the course of wars. Arms races now became a permanent feature of international relations.
⁵⁵

Third
. The fact that advanced weaponry could now be produced only at the cutting edge of industry, and therefore by only a few countries, did not prevent the global spread of newly developed infantry equipment. In some cases industrial potential translated directly into military superiority—for example, during the American Civil War, when the Confederacy often had tactical superiority over the North but could not keep pace with it industrially. Otherwise, the international arms trade was there to meet the requirements of any government in the world that could muster the financial wherewithal. Firms such as Krupp in Germany and Armstrong in England conducted a worldwide business. Already in the early modern period, Portuguese, German, and other producers had kept Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and many others supplied with muskets and cannons; the Ottoman Empire systematically went out of its way to acquire European-style weapons and related technology.
⁵⁶
This global diffusion continued and grew in the nineteenth century.

A gap in military technology opened only slowly between the West and the rest of the world. The Chinese, seen by Europeans as having an “operetta army” since their defeat in the Opium War of 1842, proved able to construct port defenses that caused the British and French major problems in 1858. The French Lebel rifle, the first rapid-loading magazine rifle, went into mass production in 1886, soon followed by its German rival, the “Mauser.” In the early 1890s, Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia, an erstwhile Italian protégé and dedicated modernizer, purchased 100,000 units and two million rounds of ammunition. With the help of his long-serving adviser, the Swiss engineer Alfred Ilg, he also started up production in Ethiopia itself. Thus, when Italy set out to realize its dream of a colonial empire in East Africa, Menelik inflicted—at Adwa on March 1, 1896—the worst defeat that a European power ever suffered in a war of colonial
conquest. In a single day, his artillery killed more Italian soldiers than were lost throughout the Italian independence wars of 1859 to 1861.
⁵⁷

In 1900, experienced Afrikaner troops were so well supplied with Mausers and machine guns that they caused the British unexpectedly high losses. In the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78, the Ottoman side was by no means inferior technologically and proved outstanding at trench construction.
⁵⁸
In the Manchurian theater of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5, the Russian Goliath was confronted with a Japanese David sporting the latest equipment and an army trained and organized along European lines. In many respects Japan was the more “Western” and more “civilized” country, and it was seen as such by international public opinion; it is therefore too simple to regard the Russo-Japanese War as a clash between Europe and Asia.
⁵⁹
As for China, the darling of the Western public in the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, it paid a high price for many years of military neglect. The two main Chinese warships did not even have shells for their Krupp guns or powder for their Armstrong cannons. Nor did Beijing make any effort to develop an army medical corps, whereas the Japanese one was exemplary. The competence of Chinese officers was generally very poor, there was no unified command structure, and the wretched treatment of rank-and-file soldiers made low battlefield morale inevitable.
⁶⁰
As early as the 1860s, leading Chinese statesmen had recognized the need for military modernization and even embarked on a national armaments program. But the acquisition of weapons was only part of the story; they also had to be handled properly.

Colonial Wars, Guerrilla Fighting

Fourth
. Even at the height of the new conquests, imperialism did not mean that Europeans enjoyed a walkover against defenseless savages. Rather, as in the early modern period, they obtained
local
military advantages and proved adept at exploiting them. What the balance sheet shows beyond doubt, however, is that (except in relation to Japan and Ethiopia) Europeans were in the long run victorious. All in all, the age of colonial wars—a species practiced worldwide, including against the North American Indians—rained disaster on the heads of non-Europeans. The wars were also catastrophic for European soldiers who endured, and often fell victim to, hostile climes. Despite being, historically speaking, on the victor's side, in actual practice they had to contend with tropical diseases, appalling food, the misery of barracks life, prolonged tours of duty, and uncertainty about their return home.

Colonial war is not easy to define.
⁶¹
The boundary with other uses of force, such as police operations, was already unclear in the literature of the time; and it became even more blurred as colonial police forces gained in importance after the First World War. At first sight, colonial wars would seem to have the purpose of subjugating “foreign” territories. But was that not true of Napoleon's wars or the Franco-Prussian War, which ended in German control of Alsace-Lorraine? In their
result
many colonial wars led to the insertion of new areas
into the world economy, but that was rarely the chief
motive
behind their conquest. Military force cannot simply pry open markets; one does not gain customers by killing them. Before 1914 wars were not often fought over industrially useful raw materials, and those that were mostly took place between sovereign nation-states, such as the Saltpeter War (1879–83) between Chile on one side and Peru and Bolivia on the other. Some of the largest territories in which colonial wars broke out—Afghanistan and Sudan, for instance—were of very little economic interest. There must be a further criterion: colonial wars were “extra-systemic;” they occurred outside the European system of states, with no reference to the “balance of power” and little or none to the sparse rules of international humanitarian law that existed at the time. In colonial wars no prisoners were taken—and the few exceptions could not look forward to a rosy future. That had already been the case in the
guerres sauvages
of early modernity (as well as in still earlier times): for example, the eighteenth-century Indian wars in North America, in which no distinction was made between combatants and noncombatants. As a repertoire of racist categories took shape in the nineteenth century, colonial wars were readily ideologized as wars against inferior races: that is, in practice, as wars that Europeans expected to win but were also ready to wage with greater cruelty than the “savages” employed.
⁶²

All the more traumatic was the occasional dashing of white troops' expectations: in 1879, when more British officers were killed at Isandlwana in Zululand than at the Battle of Waterloo; in 1876, when General Custer's cavalry was defeated by the Sioux at Little Big Horn; or in 1896, when the Italians at Adwa came under Ethiopian machine-gun fire and lost half their troops. Nor was racist ideology of much avail when the other side consisted of whites, so that the colonial war served not to conquer new territory but to avert or reverse a secession. This was the case not only in the Boer War but also, immediately before, on the island of Cuba, where the Creoles (locally born people of Spanish extraction) waged a revolutionary struggle for something like dominion status within the Spanish Empire. Since there was no provision for such an outcome in the Spanish Constitution, and since Madrid persisted with a hard line, a full-scale war broke out in 1895. At its height in 1897, a Spanish army 200,000 strong was engaged against a much smaller number of insurgents—a disproportion, incidentally, that proved ruinous for the Spanish budget.

The wars in South Africa and Cuba exhibit many parallels. First, the cruelty meted out against the (mostly white) adversaries was typical of colonial warfare. In 1896–97 the famous captain-general of Cuba, Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, an admirer of General Sherman's campaign of devastation through Georgia in 1864 and a pioneer of anti-guerrilla warfare in the Philippines, herded the Cuban population of all races into
campos de concentración
, in which more than 100,000 died of undernourishment and neglect.
⁶³
Shortly afterward, concentration camps holding 116,000 members of the Afrikaner nation and many of their black helpers, as well as the shooting of prisoners and hostages, were used by
the British to break the morale of their South African adversaries.
⁶⁴
A young journalist by the name of Winston Spencer Churchill, soon after his return from a trip to South Africa, counseled the Americans to use similar methods in the Philippines—which is what they did (not only because of Churchill's advice).
⁶⁵
The Germans, for their part, followed suit after 1904 in the wars against the Herero and Nama peoples in South West Africa. The novelty in all this was the idea of the concentration camp, not the utter brutality of the operations. In the Zulu War of 1879, for instance, the British “man on the spot,” the High Commissioner for South Africa Sir Bartle Frere, set out to free Zululand from the “tyrant” Ketchwayo, to disarm the Zulus, and to rule them indirectly through pliant chieftains under a British resident—in short, on the Indian model.
⁶⁶
The military chances seemed fairly even, but this was no noble contest between warrior castes. When the British were staring defeat in the face, they answered Zulu atrocities by killing prisoners, burning down their kraals, confiscating livestock, and threatening the very basis of their existence.
⁶⁷

A “racial” interpretation alone cannot explain the brutality of the colonial wars. What happened between whites in the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 was no less horrific. Prisoners of war enjoyed no immunity, and terror was systematically employed for the purposes of ethnic homogenization. The conflicts around the turn of the century in Cuba, South Africa, Atjeh, and the Philippines, and the earlier ones in Algeria, Zululand, and the Caucasus, were not “small wars.” Yet the notion persisted that every colonial war was in essence no more than a punitive expedition. Between 1869 and 1902, the British alone conducted a total of forty colonial wars and “punitive expeditions,” most of them unprovoked attacks and a few operations to free hostages (as in Ethiopia in 1868).
⁶⁸
Especially in Africa, the technical superiority of the invaders was overwhelming. It became dramatically evident on September 2, 1898, at the Battle of Omdurman, when Herbert Kitchener's Anglo-Egyptian forces suffered 49 dead and 382 wounded, whereas their heroic Mahdi enemy, unable to cope with their eight Krupp artillery pieces and numerous machine guns, ended up with losses of 11,000 to 16,000. (The British marched away from the battlefield, not bothering about the dying and wounded Sudanese.
⁶⁹
) It was not always the case that the latest technology produced the greatest success. In the French conquest of large parts of West Africa, rapid cavalry movement and bayonet charges were decisive factors; the machine gun played no role, unlike in Britain's African wars or its invasion of Tibet in 1904 (the Younghusband Mission).
⁷⁰
Colonial wars were embedded in a wider logistical context—steamship transport, railroads, telegraphic communications, tropical medicine—which made it easier to achieve results. Sometimes a railroad might be built purely for the sake of troop movements, as in Sudan or on the North-West Frontier. Two elements, in particular, favored the Europeans and North Americans in most of their colonial wars: better logistics and the use of local auxiliary troops (the
sepoy
principle).

Fifth
. In many cases the weapon of the weaker side was guerrilla warfare. Here there were no major differences between Europe and elsewhere. As far back as
1592 the Koreans waged a guerrilla campaign against Hideyoshi's samurai.
⁷¹
The spiral of violence associated with such wars rarely ended in a stable civil order or in a lasting stalemate. In Spain in 1808–13, the prototypical guerrilla war, partisans also turned bandit-like on the civil population that by legend they would have been expected to protect.
⁷²
Regular troops allied themselves only reluctantly with such forces. Military professionals distrusted freebooters on land or sea, even if—as with Spanish partisans and the British—they were fighting for the same cause. From the civilian point of view, there was not much to choose from between the two, since soldiers of any kind took whatever they wanted by force. Partisans are often hard to distinguish from what Eric Hobsbawm, in an influential book, called “primitive rebels.”
⁷³
The Robin Hood type of bandit is defined by his aims and his supporters, and the “small war” involving ambushes and other uncoordinated surprises is one of his characteristic ways of operating. Nearly all social rebels use such methods, but not all guerrilla fighters are social rebels or even social bandits. The two were closely associated in the Nian rebellion, which between 1851 and 1868 took control of several provinces of northern China away from the Qing government. The spear-wielding infantry and horseback swordsmen of the Nian made them one of the most effective guerrilla forces of the nineteenth century, and it took the Qing great effort, after the end of the Taiping Revolution of 1864, to crush this unrelated enemy too. Meeting the Nian cavalry with canals and ditches—a tactic that the Spanish would repeat on a large scale in Cuba in 1895–98—the Qing commanders also treated villagers well in an attempt to win them away from the rebels. As in many European wars in Africa, however, it was the technological gap between the two sides that decided the outcome in the end. The high-ranking official Li Hongzhang, who was eventually put in charge of the campaign and used it as a stepping stone for his career as China's premier statesman, deployed brand-new gunboats—not a weapon to be deployed by Europeans alone—from the West on the waterways of northern China and trained a well-paid elite corps that was superior in loyalty and motivation to the Qing conventional army.
⁷⁴
A few years later, partisans appeared in Europe who were not social rebels but fighters for national defense: the
francs-tireurs
in the Franco-Prussian War, scarcely a formidable military force.
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