European colonial soldiers in the nineteenth century: their role in white global migration and patterns of colonial settlement

Abstract

AbstractMore than six million European soldiers were involved in nineteenth-century empire-building and a substantial number of them stayed behind in the colonies. Throughout history, soldiers have been priming the pump for settler colonies, being a reliable force in difficult pioneering circumstances with high mortality rates. In the age of European mass migration, however, these colonial soldiers were consistently excluded from migration statistics. This article argues that there is a nexus between the beginning of the age of mass migration and the exclusion of colonial soldiers from migration history. Their status as un-free labourers developed into an anomaly at a time when free labour and free European migration increasingly became the norm. An important implication of including these colonial soldiers in the purview of migration history would be a revisiting of nineteenth-century European emigration history. It would require a broader comparative perspective on coercive labour conditions among nineteenth-century European migrants (military and non-military). This effort could be part of an ongoing revision of the perception of the age of European mass migration as overwhelmingly free.