The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 by McNeill William H

Author:McNeill, William H. [McNeill, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Global Repercussions

A striking discrepancy at once leaps to the eye when one turns attention from the European continent itself to the military experience of states and peoples in Africa and Asia during the period from 1840 to 1880. Larger and larger armies, built around a system of short-term conscription followed by a period of service in the reserves, came to dominate the scene on the continent of Europe. Such armies, however, were not for export. Asian and African rulers could not create mass armies of conscripts. They lacked the needful administrative structure, not to mention an officer corps, an arms supply, or even, in many cases, a citizenry which could be trusted not to attack its rulers if it had the chance. Only in Japan did the European pattern of a conscript army prove feasible—and that only after provoking a brief but brutal civil war in 1877.

Conversely, European governments could not readily use short-term conscripts for service overseas, since getting them to and from the scene of action would consume most of the conscript’s legal term of service. What Europeans needed for action at a distance were long-service troops. Great Britain maintained such an army in India until 1947, and in fact most of Britain’s military engagements in the nineteenth century were fought by troops of the Indian army.45 The other great imperial powers of the age, France and Russia, lacked such a distinct instrument as the Indian army gave to Great Britain; although the French, even after going over to a conscript short-term service army in 1889, maintained volunteer units in their African and Asian colonies, including the famed Foreign Legion.

An amazing fact of world history is that in the nineteenth century even small detachments of troops, equipped in up-to-date European fashion, could defeat African and Asian states with ease. As steamships and railroads supplemented animal packtrains, natural obstacles of geography and distance became increasingly trivial. European armies and navies therefore acquired the capacity to bring their resources to bear at will even in remote and previously impenetrable places. As this occurred, the drastic discrepancy between European and local organization for war became apparent in one part of the world after another.

The most important demonstration of the newly effective margin of armed superiority Europeans came to enjoy over other peoples occurred in 1839–42 on the coast of China, when small British detachments defeated the forces available to the Chinese Empire in the Opium War. Throughout Queen Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901) a series of similar wars—some almost unnoticed by the public in England—kept British arms almost continuously engaged.46 The resulting expansion of the British Empire, formal and informal, was matched by more sporadic but no less successful military action by France and Russia in Africa and Asia.

All three of the imperial powers found that armed actions along the periphery of their respective empires cost them next to nothing. For example, the Opium War, so fateful for China and Japan, lasted from November 1839 to August 1842. Yet British military appropriations

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