Technology, Tactics and Military Transfer in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In European historiography, there is a school of thought which attributes an important role to the military in the process of state formation. Starting in the early modern period, the introduction of gunpowder weapon technology is thought to have conferred a decisive edge to rulers in Europe, allowing them to consolidate their power against competing aristocratic interests and leading to centralisation of state power. The military demands of unrelenting warfare in Europe are also supposed to have accelerated this process of state formation, spurred on by a “coercion-extraction cycle”, eventually leading to the fiscal military state. This is seen by some scholars as a veritable juggernaut of centralised armed might, which gave European polities a definitive edge over their Asian counterparts from the late eighteenth century onwards (di Cosmo 2001: 119, 134; Parker 1996; Tilly 1992). For the still-independent Asian polities at this time, European military technology and organisation were their most visible markers of strength, and processes of transfer in the military sector were undertaken to defend against external imperialistic pressures. But, just as important in the context of the historiographical school of thought mentioned above, these processes helped Asian polities in the consolidation of central rule against internal enemies (Horowitz 2005: 458). This was perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in late Qing China (1644–1911), where many rebellions raged in the mid-nineteenth century. The Chinese had also been faced with the strength of European armies in two Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860), and the combination of internal and external threats led a group of reform-minded officials, many of whom had risen to important positions during these upheavals, to initiate the first steps in what would become a process of transfer in the military field between Europe and China (Horowitz 2002: 154–155). This process is interesting to examine in detail, because it allows us to study transfer in the military sector at a time when a clear technological asymmetry existed in favour of Europe, after centuries of a relatively stable military equilibrium. I will argue here that this process constituted not a simple transplantation of European military technology and tactics to a Chinese context, but was mediated by a complex process of ideological negotiation and appropriation, channelled by institutional factors with the occasional aid of European personnel. I understand transfer here in the way Matthias Middell has defined it, as “an integration of foreign cultural elements into a culture defined as native” (Middell 2000: 26). Adopting his approach, I opt to focus on the people who were the carriers of transfer processes, the transferred technology, and the Chinese systems of thought legitimising the transfer, as the three main entry points to study this transcultural encounter, which produced hybrid armies incorporating aspects of both European and Chinese military origin. The Sino-French War (1884–1885), the first war China fought with a European power since the start of the transfer process, will be used to illustrate the characteristics of these hybrid armies in action on the battlefields of Tonkin, in the north of present-day Vietnam. This way, the extent and nature of the transfer can be highlighted, relying mainly on accounts by French soldiers and other eye-witnesses, whose familiarity with European techniques of warfare gives us the opportunity to view Chinese armies as seen through contemporary French eyes. However, in order to explicate the transfer process, I deem it necessary first to start with a consideration of the changes which accrued to European warfare, at home and abroad, because of technological developments in the nineteenth century. These changes will have an impact on my analysis of the performance of the Chinese armies during the Sino-French War, further highlighting what the consequences of hybridity were in the context of late nineteenth-century warfare.