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The conclusions aim to bring together all these strands and show how the armed forces in nineteenth century Peru were integral to the development of an incipient State, with a bureaucratic structure that can be clearly witnessed through the lived experience of its members. It is a social history of an institution that developed despite intense instability to provide a safety net for its members. This institution developed through trial and error, building from the colonial legislation ensuring pensions were handed out to the infirm, to those who had served for many years as well as to some surviving family members. With time this relationship between the army, its members, former members and their families became the glue that bound society to the armed forces, which in contrast to what had been often asserted in the past was much more than a collection of armed men mobilized by local leaders known as caudillos.
In this book, Natalia Sobrevilla Perea reconstructs the history of the armed forces in nineteenth-century Peru and reveals what it meant to be a member. By centering the experiences of individuals, it demonstrates how the armed forces were an institution that created social provision, including social care for surviving family members, pensions for the elderly, and assistance for the infirm. Colonial militias transitioned into professional armies during the wars of independence to become the institution underpinning and sustaining the organization of the republic. To understand the emergence and weaknesses of nineteenth-century Peru, it is imperative to interrogate how men of the sword dominated post-independence politics.
This article looks at military history through a social lens, focusing on the identity and experiences of the Irish Catholics recruited for service in the British army during the American Revolution, a conflict which occurred before Catholics were legally permitted to serve, but during which significant numbers were recruited nonetheless. Using Irish Catholic recruitment and subsequent service in the 46th Regiment of Foot as a case study, this article will discuss the integration of this group into a regular regiment on the British establishment, arguing that despite contemporary anxieties to the contrary, the incorporation of Irish Catholics into the British army happened smoothly and without negative impact on regimental cohesion and discipline. They became well-integrated, and while their loyalty to the British state can never be definitively proven, they certainly became effective participants in its army and empire. This provides a compelling viewpoint from which to discuss the integration of ‘others’ into Britishness and the imperial apparatus during this period.
The Boer armies turned to guerrilla warfare in the second half of 1900 because they could not hold ground in the face of British military power, but were unwilling to give up their fight for independence. An emerging generation of Boer leaders – prominent among them Christiaan De Wet, Kroos de la Rey and Jan Smuts – recognised the tactical strengths of their commandos and the potential they had for continuing resistance. Using their superior mobility, knowledge of the countryside, and intelligence networks, commandos could identify when and where to strike before rapidly evading the British response. De Wet’s operations in mid-1900 demonstrated that such operations could rise above being mere irritations and seriously disrupt British operations. Gradually, a new path to victory emerged in Boer minds: by continuing to resist within the now annexed Republics and spreading the war to the Cape and Natal, the commandos could exhaust British willingness to continue and give the Republics an upper hand during any peace negotiations.
Charles Frederick Cox returned home from South Africa on 3 October 1902. That this was months after his own regiment, 3NSWMR was because Cox had been sent to London to participate in Coronation duties for King Edward VII. While there he was both permanently promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and made a Companion of the Order of the Bath. Just as he had done upon arrival in South Africa, on his return to Sydney Cox delivered some remarks to reporters waiting dockside. ‘Lieutenant Colonel Cox does not think there will be any more trouble in the Transvaal or Cape Colony’, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, ‘but if more fighting takes place he is ready for more either there or elsewhere.’
At the heart of the bushman-soldier myth was combat. The skills of the bush – riding, shooting, living off the land, the innate intelligence of ‘the colonial’ – were valuable because they could deliver success on the battlefield. The bushmen would ‘be able to meet stratagem by stratagem’, as civilian advocate H. S. Stockdale crowed, and be ‘just as likely to stalk “the Boer” as the Boers to stalk them.’ Like many civilian enthusiasts Stockdale conceived of the Australians as auxiliaries to a British regular force, serving as scouts and skirmishers on the fringes of the battle. Military men were under no such illusions: the Australian contingents would do everything mounted rifles were expected to, from ersatz cavalry work to seizing and holding ground. Both groups, however, shared a confidence in their ideas. ‘As Australians have shown themselves in the fields of sport,’ Stockdale declared, ‘so I feel will they prove themselves on the field of battle.’
The war that began in October 1899 was not the first time Britain and the Boer Republics had clashed. The Free State and the Transvaal Republic were the fruit of the great trek (Voortrek), the mass exodus of Boers from southern Africa’s coastal regions in the 1830s that was prompted by British conquest of the region 20 years earlier. In 1877 the British annexed the two states; in 1880 the burghers rebelled. Their victory in 1881 led to a negotiated treaty that restored Boer independence while giving Britain a degree of control over their external affairs. What followed was what Bill Nasson has characterised as a ‘nervous stability’, as both sides regarded each other with suspicion but worked to avoid a renewal of hostilities while balancing their own interests.
When Australians woke on the morning of 13 October 1899 to headlines announcing war had broken out in South Africa, it must have come as little surprise. Since the collapse of talks between the Transvaal and Britain in June, war had seemed increasingly likely. The failure of these talks had prompted discussion, both in London and Australia, of the possibility of Australian contingents being raised and sent to South Africa in the event of war. A meeting between the six colonial commandants in late September to mastermind the raising of a united Australian contingent force collapsed in intercolonial bickering, but this proved only a minor speed bump. By the time the Boer ultimatum that made war inevitable was delivered on October 9 four of the six colonies had already received requests from London for troops, and the proposition was being openly debated in colonial parliaments. While there was vocal opposition from a minority, all six colonies ultimately agreed to send contingents to South Africa. It would be a small commitment for what was expected to be a short war.
On the evening of 12 June 1901, Private C.A. Salmon of the 5th Victorian Mounted Rifles was making himself comfortable at the end of a long day’s trek. The left wing of 5VMR, part of a detachment under the command of Major Morris, had camped near a farm called Wilmansrust in the eastern Transvaal. Mail had arrived from home, fuel was readily available, and the rum ration had been dispensed. Spirits within the bivouac of the column were high. Yet, as Salmon lay down to read the newspapers sent from home, a shot rang out, followed closely by a series of volleys. Around 100 men from the Middelburg Commando had succeeded in moving past the camp’s outlying pickets undetected and were attacking. Salmon emerged into the darkness and was immediately wounded in the face; when he recovered he found himself face-to-face with one of the attackers, who called him a British cow and demanded he put his hands up. Salmon complied; so too did the survivors. Fourteen Victorians had been killed and 46 wounded, of whom a further four would eventually succumb. The entire engagement had lasted around 15 minutes.
Over 15,000 individual Australians served in contingents in South Africa and at least 600 died. While it was quickly overshadowed by the First World War, it was nonetheless an important part of Australia’s military history. Australian soldiers were sent in the belief that they possessed certain qualities that would make them valuable on the battlefield. It was an idea that, in various forms, would continue to surface throughout the first half of the twentieth century. What follows is an analysis that not just dispels this myth but shows what it can tell us about war more generally.
In early December 1900, the New South Wales Imperial Bushmen finished a day of marching in the western Transvaal and made camp. A storm was brewing, and just before midnight it broke. Troopers woke to a downpour that quickly soaked through their blankets, their uniforms and their food. The ground turned to mud and horses began to break their lines and escape. Exhausted from trekking and now unable to sleep, the New South Welshmen began to try and restore order in the camp. Amidst the confusion and misery, one helpful soldier began a sarcastic rendition of the song “Soldiers of the Queen.”’
Trying to destroy the commandos in the field was one half of Kitchener’s strategy. The other was the destruction of farms and the removal of civilian populations from rural areas to camps close to the British-controlled central railroad. This was designed to deny the commandos access to food and intelligence, but also to act as a threat: continued resistance meant denial of access to family and destruction of virtually everything a burgher owned.
It was not a radical departure from British practice but an evolution and consolidation of what had occurred over the previous 12 months. From the outset of the invasion of the two Republics, the British had considered forms of collective punishment valid for what they saw as illegitimate military actions. This policy had always been chaotically implemented, clashing as it did with a recognition that the conquered populations would have to be governed and so needed to be courted. Perhaps more importantly the shambolic state of British logistics meant during the invasion units lived off the land and rarely fulfilled their obligations to pay for what they took. By the end of 1900, the precedent for large-scale destruction as a tool of war had been well and truly set.
Soldiers and Bushmen: The Australian Army in the South Africa, 1899–1902 examines the commitment to what was expected to be a short war. It presents a thematic, analytical history of the birth of the Australian Army in South Africa, while exploring the Army's evolution from colonial units into a consolidated federal force. Soldiers and Bushmen investigates the establishment of the 'bushmen experiment' – the belief that the unique qualities of rural Australians would solve tactical problems on the veldt. This, in turn, influenced ideals around leadership, loyalty and traditional combat that fed the mythology of the Australians as natural soldiers. The book also examines the conduct of the war itself: how the Army adapted to the challenges of a battlefield transformed by technology, and the moral questions posed by the transition to fighting a counterinsurgency campaign.
This chapter enlightens the papal martial power through three different questions. It first focuses on the military geography of the Pontifical States (Central Italy, Comtat Venaissin, Avignon). Strongholds were key in the affirmation of pontifical political authority. Their locations and features testify to the great care taken in their construction and management. The chapter then investigates the structure of the troops involved in both offensive and defensive enterprises. Cardinals acting as legates or vicars as well as papal officers were expected to exert strong control over companies led by potentially troublesome condottieri and local warlords. At sea, the popes relied mostly on private and foreign contractors. Finally, this chapter describes the socio-cultural composition of armies, intended as micro-societies defined by rules they adopted or developed themselves. Since they served the papacy just like lay principalities, they kept up with commonly shared knightly aspirations and military practices found across Europe.
The total number of Japanese casualties in the Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945) is estimated to be around 3.1 million, with military fatalities accounting for 2.3 million. In contrast to the popular image in Japan of these war dead as “noble heroes” (eirei) who fought valiantly in service of the nation, however, the realities of war were quite different. Rather than being killed in combat, some sixty percent of soldiers (1.4 million) died away from the battlefield, succumbing to disease and starvation. Others suffered from the military's failure to secure dependable supply lines to provide food and equipment replenishments, resulting in a large number of otherwise preventable deaths. In this article, Professor Yoshida Yutaka focuses on the grim realities of war death as experienced by ordinary soldiers in the Imperial Japanese Army, a topic rarely touched upon by scholars. Combining a social historical approach with rigorous statistical analysis, Yoshida sheds light on the institutional issues and peculiarities of what was once proudly known as the “Emperor's military.”
A global lens on European military history exposes the racist foundations upon which European empires have gone to war around the world over centuries. The racisms and nationalisms embedded in the narration of Europe’s military past prevent it from fully making the global turn. The study of war and militarization without the global turn enables the continued avoidance of questions that inherently challenge the nationalist, patriotic, and frequently racist and misogynist foundations that have long shaped the field. Moreover, European military historiography tends to ignore the many wars of anti-colonial resistance fought against colonizing powers in the long nineteenth century. Yet they were as much a part of European military history as any other wars. To globalize European military history, scholars must include analysis of anti-colonial resistance within the standard approaches to “military history.” Situating European military history more firmly in the global unsettles assumed knowledge about European military dominance, opening new possibilities for historians to consider armed struggles against empire within the same field of study as the recognized staples of European military history.
This book uses the transnational story of a single regiment to examine how ordinary soldiers, military women, and officers negotiated their lives within the chaos and uncertainty of the seventeenth century. Raised in Saxony by Wolf von Mansfeld in spring 1625 in the service of the King of Spain, the Mansfeld Regiment fought for one and a half years in northern Italy before collapsing, leaving behind a trail of dead civilians, murder, internal lawsuits…and copious amounts of paperwork. Their story reveals the intricate social world of seventeenth-century mercenaries and how this influenced how they lived and fought. Through this rich microhistorical case study, Lucian Staiano-Daniels sheds new light on key seventeenth-century developments like the military revolution and the fiscal-military state, which is supported by statistical analysis drawn from hundreds of records from the Thirty Years War. This pathbreaking book unifies the study of war and conflict with social history.
The West India Regiments were an anomalous presence in the British Army. Raised in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean in an act of military desperation, their rank-and-file were overwhelmingly men of African descent, initially enslaved. As such, the regiments held a unique but ambiguous place in the British Army and British Empire until their disbandment in 1927. Soldiers of Uncertain Rank brings together the approaches of cultural, imperial and military history in new and illuminating ways to show how the image of these regiments really mattered. This image shaped perceptions in the Caribbean societies in which they were raised and impacted on how they were deployed there and in Africa. By examining the visual and textual representation of these soldiers, this book uncovers a complex, under-explored and illuminating figure that sat at the intersection of nineteenth-century debates about slavery and freedom; racial difference; Britishness; savagery and civilisation; military service and heroism.
This book explains the military and economic developments that engulfed the ancient Mediterranean in the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods from the perspective of labour history. It examines the changing nature of military service in the vast armies of Philip and Alexander, the Successors, and the early Hellenistic kingdoms and argues that the paid soldiers who staffed them were not just 'mercenaries', but rather the Greek world's first large-scale instance of wage labour. Using a wide range of sources, Charlotte Van Regenmortel not only offers a detailed social history of military service in these armies but also provides a novel explanation for the economic transformation of the Hellenistic age, positioning military wage-labourers as the driving force behind the period's nascent market economies. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
This article examines the various modes of conflict management used by the free city of Regensburg and the local nobleman Hans I Staufer of Ehrenfels during a prolonged dispute over revenues from 1413 to 1418. In the early years of this feud, both parties utilized nonviolent methods such as legal action and arbitration, which were occasionally accompanied by minor military interventions. In April 1417, however, the Regensburg councilors broke with convention and decided to escalate the conflict with their feud opponent by capturing his ancestral castle, Ehrenfels, near Beratzhausen in the Upper Palatinate region. Using both urban account books and documentary evidence, the case study investigates the reasons behind the councilors' decision to launch this ostentatious military attack, their objectives in seizing Ehrenfels castle, and the impact of their show of force on the ongoing conflict. It portrays late medieval Central European towns as potent military actors and argues for a more systematic integration of economic considerations and cost-benefit calculations into our picture of late medieval feuding.