The Qing Empire’s military drew from the traditions of bodyguards and booty warfare in North-East Asia (primarily what is now southern Jilin province) in the late sixteenth century. The foundations of imperial expansion were built during the long war with Ming China, from 1618 to 1644, which allowed the Qing to absorb the central features of Ming military technology. Patterns of human management and technology application established in this period persisted over the next forty years as the Qing completed their conquest of China and Taiwan. After 1685, Qing expansion spread out to Mongolia, Qinghai, Tibet, and what is now the province of Xinjiang. These wars, against less densely populated, sometimes nomadic zones, changed Qing campaigns significantly. By the nineteenth century, the century and a half of focus on the continental frontiers left the Qing poorly prepared for seaborne challenges, and from some technologies that the Qing had previously regarded as less relevant to their military needs.

The dominant interpretation of warfare in the Indian subcontinent before the establishment of British rule is that it was comprised of unorganised melees by forces of undisciplined militia. This stemmed from the fact that pre-British Indian states were weak polities with divisible sovereignty; they were – to use the terminology of Burton Stein – segmentary states, lacking any concept of frontiers and standing armies. The divisive caste system of India further debilitated the pre-British indigenous states and armies. The argument goes that the rise of British power in the second half of the eighteenth century resulted in a sea change in warfare. The British introduced a bureaucratic state with standing armies capable of waging decisive battles and conclusive sieges in India. This interpretation dates back to two nineteenth-century British scholars of colonial India. They argued that Indians were incapable of constructing stable states and structured armies due to their racial failings. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians may have substituted a racial analysis for a cultural one, but otherwise they argue along more or less the same lines, that the limited scale of organised inter-state violence reflected the constraints upon the states of pre-British India.