War and imperial expansion

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is not to rehearse the history of the European and European-American colonial wars in the nineteenth century. Just giving the highlights of Britain’s more than four hundred battles in some sixty colonial campaigns from 1837 to 1901 would fill a large volume. The aim of what follows is, rather, to explore the dynamics of colonial warfare in relationship to two grand, related themes in western military history during the long nineteenth century. These are the “second military revolution,” a martial corollary of the still unfolding Industrial Revolution, and the related “totalization” of war, as whole populations were mobilized for conflict and became willing to accept that people in enemy lands, along with their economies and societies, had become legitimate targets of destruction. For the purposes of this chapter, [T]otal war, at least theoretically, consists of total mobilization of all the nation’s resources by a highly organized and centralized state for a military conflict with unlimited war aims (such as the complete conquest and subjugation of the enemy) and unrestricted use of force (against the enemy’s armies and civil population alike, going so far as the complete destruction of the home front, extermination and genocide). The first segment of the chapter will weigh the impact of the new weaponry and technologies, which were made available by industrialization, on imperial expansion in Africa, Asia, and America, with particular emphasis on innovations in communications and transportation. Assessing the extent to which colonial war approximated “total war” will be the task of the second part of the chapter. A final section will sketch out the profile of colonial warfare as practiced by western armies from roughly 1850 to 1914.