Colonial Military History: A Research note

Abstract

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).