Early‐modern Colonial warfare and the campaign of Alcazarquivir, 1578

Abstract

The words 'colonial warfare' tend to conjure up extraordinary visual images which come, in the main from the world of cinema: of The Four Feathers and the thin red line confronting fuzzy-wuzzy; of Zulu Dawn and slaughter at Isandlwana, and of Zulu and victory against the odds at Rorke's Drift; of the Bengal Lancers and Gunga Din; of white-coated, blue-kepied French Foreign Legionnaires fighting cruel Arabs in Beau Geste and a hundred other such films. Others might recognise the struggle in the American West or in late nineteenth century China as examples of colonial warfare and think of Fifty-Five Days at Peking or their favourite Western. These are all familiar images and ones which most historians would be comfortable with as being in some sense 'colonial.' But were the Boxer Rebellion and the two Opium Wars which came much earlier, really examples of colonial warfare, or were they struggles with a regional power? What is the difference anyway, who is to define it and how? An obvious definition of a colonial war is to say that it is one involving a developed power against a technologicall y backward state or people. But then, although probably the majority of historians would say that Russia's wars with Turkey in the second half of the nineteenth century were not colonial campaigns, most would say that Britain's war against Arabi Pasha's Egypt in 1882 was. Yet the Egyptian forces were relatively well trained and equipped with modern artillery and so forth; for that matter, in some of the British campaigns in India in the first half of the nineteenth century, the supposedly backward peoples being conquered by the industrial power had rather more and more powerful artillery than did the supposedly advanced British, who often won their victories at the point of the bayonet, which is after all, when attached to a flintlock musket, basically just a short