Colonial Military Research Articles

(Post-)Colonial Violence: Ripper Street and Moral Injury

The period crime drama Ripper Street (BBC/multiple production partners, 2012–2016) engages in a variety of postcolonial sociocultural critiques. One of these areas of critique includes the moral injury/-ies suffered by Sergeant (later Inspector) Bennet Drake (played by Jerome Flynn), who served in Sudan and Egypt as part of the colonial military before becoming a police officer. Often called upon to engage in what would now be considered police brutality, Drake’s increasingly ambivalent relationship to violence, those who command (or have commanded) him, and the expressions of shame and self-harm he exhibits make him a clear victim of moral injury. This article will explore how Drake is represented, and also how he is representative of returning soldiers, contextualised in both colonial (contemporary to the period in which the series is set) and postcolonial (contemporary to the period in which it was filmed) critique.

People, State, and War under the French Regime in Canada

Examining the period from the founding of New France in the early seventeenth century to the conquest of 1760, People, State, and War presents a study of colonial warriors and warfare that surveys the exercise of state military power and its effects on ordinary people. Resisting the pervasive and overgeneralizing stereotype of “Canadians” as a warrior people, Louise Dechêne draws readers’ attention to the overlapping and all-encompassing reality of perpetual warfare in New France and the uneven and varied demands of war on the diverse members of colonial society, effectively illustrating the relationship between “Canadian” colonists and the ancien régime administration.Published posthumously, People, State, and War represents a lifetime of research. The book is separated into twelve chapters, tracing the events that led to the creation of the colonial militia in 1669 through the militia’s participation in different colonial, imperial, and inter-Indigenous conflicts, including French offensives against the Haudenosaunee in the late seventeenth century, culminating in what Dechêne terms “the Sixteen Year War,” which ended with the conquest of New France. There are immense details about administrative structures, hierarchies, and specific individuals, included in the chapters (2, 3, 4, and 8) that examine moments of conflict, which expertly reconstruct the varied conditions and composition of colonial military forces, that included members of the dispatched Carginan-Salières regiment, and later the Troupes de la Marine, the militia, colonial volunteers, and regular troops, and the crucially important Indigenous allies of the French empire. However, Dechêne also turns her attention in the intersecting chapters to the experiences and attitudes of the habitants and small urban populations who were equally affected by the exigencies of perpetual conflict through policing, forced labor requisitions, and taxation (chapters 6 and 7). In this still fragile colonial world, the military prowess and effectiveness of colonial military men, regardless of imperial objectives and frequently arbitrary measures, relied heavily on French alliances with different and powerful Indigenous allies, who usually outnumbered colonial troops and provided invaluable support in defense of the colony, on the forced labor of colonial peasants who constructed fortifications throughout the Saint Lawrence Valley, and on itinerant fur traders and coureurs de bois, whose familiarity with the pays d’en haut and Ohio Valley proved crucial to the success of French defense strategies. Rather than the well-worn image of an entire “Canadian” population of natural and enthusiastic soldiers, Dechêne emphasizes the diversity of social and individual circumstances among colonists in New France to highlight how different peoples reacted to, participated in, and came to grips with the reality of warfare in New France.Over her entire career, Dechêne recorded unimaginable details, using official correspondence, memoirs, military campaign journals, taxation records, local parish records, and visual sources, including maps, which offer a window into administrative, social, military, diplomatic, religious, and demographic patterns in New France and draw attention to the sometimes conflicting or disconnected but always enduring relationship between the colony and the metropole. Although People, State, and War examines in depth the experiences of French colonists, the constant presence and the invaluable and indisputable role of France’s Indigenous allies in military campaigns and in the colony’s defense and survival remains constant throughout Dechêne’s analysis. Contributing to the ongoing movement away from past scholarly conclusions that have overlooked or underacknowledged the role of Indigenous peoples in the growth, development, and protection of France’s overseas colonies, Dechêne situates the Indigenous inhabitants of North America as the principal military force of New France (118). Presenting a combined examination of government and societal structures, military hierarchies, and colonial conflicts, interwoven with tantalizing details about diverse peoples, specific military campaigns, diplomatic negotiations, and individual reactions and responses to changing imperial regulations, demands, and objectives in the colony, People, State, and War is an indispensable resource for scholars of New France.

„I Die, but I Thank You…!“ Leipzig Mission at Akeri 1896, Squeezed between Its African Addressees and German Colonial Military

The following case study clarifies how these three different functions of mission are discursively entangled with one another. Mission as a bridge-builder (between people, cultures, and religions of different origin), as a traitor (cooperating with corrupt colonial and imperial powers), and as a victim (finding misery and death on the mission field). Each of these three terms (bridge-builder, traitor, victim) is, to an extent, applicable to the events that took place during the night of 19–20 October 1896 in Akeri on the slopes of Mount Meru (former German East Africa, today Tanzania). Using the concept of entanglement history, I will analyze the death of two young German missionaries of the Lutheran Leipzig Mission, “caught in the crossfire” between the African community to be outreached and the German colonial military. We will see how various symbolic systems collide in the year 1896 at Akeri. The systems are represented by: (1) German Lutheran missions activities; (2) A German colonial and military expedition; and (3) The resistance of African Maasai societies’ leadership. “Akeri 1896” (I will continue to refer to this event specifically as “Akeri 1896” throughout the article) had become in the following 100 years a complex entanglement of metaphoric meanings. The same event can be a placeholder for victory, for defeat, for disaster, for martyrdom, for Christ-centredness (of the missionaries in their own perception), as well as for evil-centredness (the Africans in their perception of the Western foreigners).

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

Land Planning, Property Rights and Management of Built Heritage: Some Hong Kong Observations of Colonial Military Buildings

There has been much confusion in property rights inquiry into real (immovable) property (i.e., land) between open access and common property, and between public property and common property because that is often also open access. This paper argues that the property rights and access control are two distinct dimensions of land resource management. Access control involves the exercise of exclusionary power relevant to the management of the immovable property (property management) for its optimal use. A review of the literature shows that definitions of property management tend to be too narrow but point towards the need to articulate issues within the property rights paradigm. As a contribution to sustainable resource use as a dimension of land planning, this paper points out and discusses the probable sources of the confusion between land property rights and property management. A “Land Property Rights and Management Matrix” (LPRMM) is developed as a theoretical tool for clarifying the confusion and the relationships amongst relevant concepts. The LPRMM is theoretically informed by Barzel’s not entirely correct distinction between legal (de jure) and economic (de facto) rights and enriched by relevant literature on property rights and property management. Practical use of the LPRMM is illustrated by its application to analyze the issues pertaining to the actual resource-use phenomena in colonial military buildings erected on both private and public land in Hong Kong. The results show that heritage buildings on land under public ownership as private property can be neglected or intensively managed. The LPRMM is not only a useful theoretical tool for precisely assessing the actual affairs of resource use but also a practical tool for identifying issues of property management in its widest sense. The LPRMM offered is a proper interpretation of Barzel’s distinction between legal and economic rights and contributes to systematically re-interpreting property management as town planning writ large in terms of de jure property rights and de facto access.

French colonial publications and their situated re-presentations of native Algerian leadership (late 1840s–1860s)

ABSTRACT This article explores new ways to fruitfully investigate French colonial expedition diaries and memoirs, and help deconstruct what their authors framed as ‘historically accurate’ accounts of ‘pacification’ during the violent French military colonization of Algeria. How can we use such problematic sources in the absence of subaltern voices to counter the master narratives of these mid-nineteenth-century publications? As a way of reading them against the grain, this article proposes to shift the focus from their discursive representations of the colonized Other to the authors’ situated re-presentations of native Algerian chiefs and the embodied performance of their leadership. Such a performance-oriented approach with attention to acoustics is presented here as a perspective that may help differentiate between the colonial writers’ socio-cultural habitus and their political strategy when it comes to their misinterpretations of native Algerian expressions of loyalty and resistance. As (former) high-ranking officers and officials attached to the French army’s administrative sister institution (the bureaux arabes), or as novelists and interpreters joining the military campaigns, these authors claimed to rely on their own ear- and eyewitness accounts when describing what (a)political Arab or Berber leadership looked and sounded like. By exploring their representations of speech, silence, and performance during these encounters, we can trace the mechanisms by which they artificially separated spiritual and political authority, and ultimately failed to grasp how power worked in the colony.

Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire

Militarizing Marriage: West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire

Insurgent law: Bengal Regulation III and the Chin-Lushai expeditions (1872–1898)

AbstractThis article studies the adjudicatory practices deployed by colonial military and police forces during a series of punitive British expeditions in the eastern frontiers of British India and the northern reaches of British Burma, specifically the Lushai and Chin Hills in the late nineteenth century. It magnifies the lives, deaths, and afterlives of two ‘tribal’ chiefs of Lushai Hills. Among others, these figures were held responsible for a series of raids carried out in the settled British territories of the northeastern frontiers in the 1890s. After a few inconclusive skirmishes with the British expeditionary force, they were apprehended and imprisoned in a jail in Hazaribagh under the preventive detention act of Bengal Regulation III of 1818, which was reserved and designed to arrest political dissidents of the empire. After a few months, two of them, Liengpunga and Khalkam, were found hanging from the windows of their prison latrine. The British administration labelled these deaths as suicides and closed the cases. The article opens them up. In doing so, it narrates an oblique history of the Scheduled District Act of 1874 which removed hill districts from the jurisdictions of regular courts. By focusing on the historical imbrication of Bengal Regulation III of 1818 in the Scheduled District Act, the article highlights the punitive techniques embedded in the seeming protectionist impulse of the colonial state, something that persists in India's administration of the Northeast region. Closer to the concerns of this issue, it reflects on a legal genealogy of tribal subjects in South Asia.

«Құпия» белгісі қойылған ядролық сынақ полигондары: кеше және бүгін

The article describes nuclear test sites in the countries of the world. The authors focus on a brief history of nuclear test sites. In particular, the article considers the Semey nuclear test site in Kazakhstan, which operated under the “secret” designation. Its history tells about the “special relations” between the representatives of the military industry, who completely controlled the nuclear test site, and the local residents of the test site areas. According to the authors, this is a clear manifestation of the policies of tyranny, “military colonialism”, and “nuclear colonialism” carried out by Moscow on the Kazakh land. Various data and scientific studies showthat the social, ecological, and economic consequences of nuclear tests, as well as ways to deal with them, have survived to the present day. Even at that time, despite the “secret” label, it provided information about the danger of radiation spread from the Semey nuclear test site. The results of the “secret” monitoring of the local population’s health are reported. To reveal the content of the article, the authors were guided by the method of objective position, general scientific, and special methods of methodology

Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment

Armed Citizens maps two roads to the Second Amendment. The first road is a history of ideas from Livy to Niccolò Machiavelli to English reformers such as Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun and John Trenchard. They all drew the same lessons from the history of the Roman Republic and the rise of Caesar: citizens made for more committed and reliable soldiers than professional troops; militia service made citizens strong, disciplined, and virtuous; a powerful military leader and a standing army undermined civilian authority and doomed any free society. The second road is a history of militias in England and the American colonies from the seventeenth century to the American Revolution. Noah Shusterman highlights the stark contrast between idealized depictions of militias and their unimpressive military performance. The American colonies adopted militias purely out of financial necessity. Colonial militias served to establish and defend the dominance of white settlers over Native Americans and enslaved African Americans. At times, as during Bacon's Rebellion (1676), militias turned on their superiors, who had no other means to defend themselves. The two roads, the intellectual and the institutional histories, run parallel, until they converge during the American Revolution. Shusterman maintains that the confluence of the promilitia ideology and the long tradition of colonial militias made the Second Amendment inevitable.

BDS: Nonviolent, Globalized Palestinian Resistance to Israel’s Settler Colonialism and Apartheid

Despite its military, diplomatic, and economic power, Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler colonialism, and apartheid still views the nonviolent, Palestinian-led global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as a “strategic threat” to its system of injustice, waging a protracted war against the movement accordingly. This essay aims to contextualize Israel’s war on BDS by examining the movement’s origins, principles, impact, and theory of change. It analyzes the most critical challenges BDS is facing and its most promising strengths, especially its balancing of ethical principles with strategic effectiveness and its intersectional approach to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice, and equality.

Kolonialisme dan Dikotomi Pendidikan di Indonesia

It is well known that Indonesia is a vast area and is very rich with various natural resources, including spices. These spices became the initial attraction for European nations to come to Indonesia, because they really needed them. The arrival of European nations (especially the Portuguese, Dutch and British) since the 9/15 century to trade which later developed into political and military colonization. The Dutch colonial occupation had very complex motives and goals with three major themes, which were often referred to as 3G: Gold (Gold), Glory (Power), and Gospel (Religion / Gospel), namely Economy, politics and religion. In relation to these interests, the drafters of the concept of education seemed unable to separate themselves from the socio-economic and political conditions of the Dutch central government, and their relation to the political interests of the Dutch East Indies. Thus every policy implemented in the field of education tended to be related to the interests of Dutch colonial politics in Indonesia. So that Islamic education itself is difficult to develop and its development is very limited and not given free space.

Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry by Patrick J. Charles

Reviewed by: Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry by Patrick J. Charles Andrew J. B. Fagal Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry. Patrick J. Charles. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1-63388-13-0. 539 pp., cloth, $28.00. In the aftermath of District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Supreme Court case finding that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to keep a handgun within the home, historians have produced a number of books, peer-reviewed articles, and law reviews reinvestigating the origins of the Second Amendment and the broader place of firearms in American history. Patrick J. Charles's Armed in America joins this recent trend by providing an intellectual history of gun rights in the American imagination from the colonial period to today. In detailing the changing history of how Americans thought about firearms, and their role in society, Charles makes several important contributions to this ongoing discussion. First, Charles gives historians and legal scholars a broad understanding of how thinking about firearms changed over time in American society. In this, he agrees with most other historians of the Second Amendment, who understand it as protecting a right that was associated with militia service and not "armed preparatory carriage" or the "castle doctrine." Second, and most notably for the significance of his book, Charles makes an important historiographical intervention by locating the emergence of modern gun rights theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians of gun rights and gun regulation have argued that the individual rights theory of the Second Amendment was a recent invention, which largely dated to the 1960s and then, oddly enough, was most forcefully articulated in the public sphere by members of the Black Power movement. According to this account, the National Rifle Association (NRA) was a group that for most of its history was primarily interested promoting gun safety and target shooting. It was only Harlan Carter's 1977 "Cleveland Revolt" that turned the organization into a political advocacy group. With this new emphasis, the group was in favor of "law abiding citizens" carrying arms (concealed or otherwise) for their own protection. By the 1980s, a number of prominent law school professors agreed that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to use arms for self-defense. Thus, from a confluence of interest group organization and legal academic reasoning, our current "golden age" of gun rights was born. Not exactly, Charles conclusively demonstrates. The actual emergence of gun rights tied to self-defense was located in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early on, the NRA, and a competing organization, the United States Revolver Association (USRA), organized against Progressive Era legislation designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. New York State's Sullivan Act (1911), which requires the issuance of a license to own a handgun, was met with active opposition by the NRA and the USRA. These groups argued, in what would [End Page 309] become a standard rallying cry, that the act's passage would only serve to prevent law-abiding citizens from bearing arms. Once guns were "banned," only criminals would have guns. This rhetorical strategy of firearms organizations was only refined during the 1930s when the Roosevelt administration sought additional firearms regulations. Following the Kennedy and King assassinations of the 1960s, the NRA again mobilized to prevent additional firearms laws. Although unsuccessful in their ultimate goal of preventing passage in the 1930s and 1960s, the group was successful in limiting the effects of these laws. If intellectual history should show people thinking, and not just thought, then Armed in America is quite uneven. Compare Charles's excellent discussion of Timothy Pickering, and his late-eighteenth-century ideas of what a well-regulated militia ought to be, with the depiction of the emergence of modern gun rights ideology in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. We can clearly see the importance of the militia for republican political systems in Pickering's thinking. What we do not get as good a glimpse into is the thought process behind the early proponents of...

GREEKS IN ODESSA (END OF THE 18TH - BEGINNING OF THE 20th CENTURY): HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DIMENSION

The article has studied and systematized a set of major scientific papers on the ethnic history of the Greeks in Odessa, has identified and argued the stages of development of the historiographical tradition of the problem, has conducted the comparative analysis of directions and priorities of research on the Greeks in Odessa and has traced their evolution in accordance with changes in socio-political context. Historiographical work on the problem has been classified by chronological criteria. It is noted that during the imperial era, research did not go beyond clarifying certain issues of resettlement in the context of the colonization policy of the Russian government. In the research of Soviet historians in the general history of colonization by the Greeks of Odessa, military colonization stands out. At the same time, the socio-economic aspects of the functioning of the Greek community deserved special attention of Soviet historiography. The expansion of the range of research, inclusion of issues of commercial and social activities of Greeks occurs at the present stage of studying the problem and is connected with the intensification of Greek studies in Ukraine. It is proved that the lack of legal autonomy of the Odessa Greek community, the mobility of its representatives did not contribute to the scientific awareness of the Greeks in Odessa (unlike in Nizhyn and Azov) as a separate community with a whole set of distinctive features. Therefore, their history was considered within the context of the history of the foundation and development of the city. Despite the recent appearance of interesting articles on charitable, trade, commercial, cultural and educational activities of the Greek community of Odessa, it is still waiting for an ordered and comprehensive study.

Key Approaches to the Study of History of Altai in 18th Century in Modern Russian Historiography

The article is devoted to a comprehensive examination of theoretical approaches to the study of the history of Altai in the 18th century, developed by Russian specialists over the past three decades. The relevance of the study is associated with the emerging trend in domestic science towards a holistic understanding of the retrospective of individual regions, including through understanding the interdependent role of various social and administrative factors in the colonization process. Special attention is paid to the conceptual assessment of the nature of the initial development of Altai. The methodological grounds for applying the theories of military colonization, frontier, frontier modernization to the history of the region are outlined. The authors state the presence in the scientific literature of two non-identical approaches to the characterization of the Russian border in the south of Western Siberia. The authors demonstrate the obvious desire of historians to carry out comprehensive studies of regional and local levels of civil and mining management, which has emerged against the background of the preservation of the heuristic significance of microhistorical analysis of the role of individual fortified (fortresses, forts) or production facilities (factories). The diversity and conceptual heterogeneity of modern Russian historiography of the history of Altai in the 18th century is summarized. Some forecasts of the development of the historiographic situation are formulated.

Colonial Military Garrisons as Labor‐Market Shocks: Quebec City and Boston, 1760–1775

AbstractThe military occupation of Boston in 1768 shocked the city's labor market. The soldiers, who were expected to supplement their pay by working for local businesses, constituted an influx equal to 12.5 percent of greater Boston's population. To assess the importance of this shock, we use the case of Quebec City, which experienced the reverse process (i.e., a reduction in the British military presence from close to 18 percent of the region's population to less than 1 percent). We argue that, in Boston, the combination of the large influx of soldiers and a heavy tax on the local population in the form of the billeting system caused an important wage reduction, while the lighter billeting system of Quebec City and the winding down of the garrison pushed wages up. We tie these experiences to political developments in the 1770s.

Creating environmental subjects: Conservation as counter-insurgency in Aceh, Indonesia, 1925–1940

This article examines the creation of Gunung Leuser Wildlife Reserve in the highlands of Aceh, Indonesia within the context of the Dutch-Aceh War in the early twentieth century, arguing that conservation was used as a form of counter-insurgency. While the agendas of the colonial military and conservationists diverged at times, they overlapped in their goals to secure Leuser from resident communities, whom they viewed as a threat to colonial order and the ecologies of the region. This article draws together the discourses of militarized conservation with their material implications. It does so by examining the nexus of military and conservation discourses, the historical context of park creation, and the processes by which colonial actors stole rights to land and created new laws and regulations dictating the people's relationships with and access to land. Scholars have shown that conservation discourses continue to normalize human rights abuses, Indigenous dispossession and displacement, and deadly violence against local peoples. These discursive tactics frame expertise and responsibility as residing in the hands of white elites who are tasked with saving imperiled environments from the people who depend on them for subsistence. I suggest that the military and conservation agendas were both operating within overlapping, constructed frameworks of crisis and emergency that constituted the resident communities as anti-environmental subjects. Discourses of environmental crisis in Leuser held a power that justified militarization while concealing the violence from international constituencies at a historical moment when an ideology of Western responsibility for threatened species around the world was growing. Moreover, the history of Leuser as viewed through the analytical framework of militarized conservation helps us rethink the history of Aceh. Through this framework, it becomes evident that the Dutch-Aceh War did not end in 1913, as many historians suggest, but instead continued throughout the colonial period.

Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley by Rob Harper

Reviewed by: Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley by Rob Harper Matthew Ward (bio) Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley. By Rob Harper. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 250. Cloth, $45.00.) In Unsettling the West, Rob Harper offers a new and persuasive interpretation of the forces that drove state-building in the early American West. The work directly challenges many of the assumptions of existing historiography. It demonstrates that violence occurred most often not when government was too weak to impose order and justice on the region, but rather when government had the power to interpose itself in the West. Drawing upon a wide range of published and unpublished records, travel accounts, personal papers, newspapers, and government records, Harper demonstrates that left to themselves colonists—as Harper calls the new Anglo American residents of the West—and Native Americans were able to survive in a tense but not blood-soaked coexistence. It was the intervention of government that fueled interracial violence, either directly, through the organization of expeditions and military campaigns, or indirectly by the provision of ammunition and organizational structures. These interventions created the circumstances that allowed violence to take place. Harper directly links the ebb and flow of frontier violence to the fluctuating power and influence of the government: "by organizing, arming, and deploying hundreds of colonial militia, revolutionary governments enabled Indian haters to kill" (100–101). It was not just violence that was driven by the power of government but, most importantly, the very settlement and development of the West. Harper concludes that it was the government's interest in acquiring western lands, not colonists' desire for independence, which drove westward [End Page 588] settlement. Ultimately, "Anglo-American colonialism took hold in the Ohio Valley largely because governments offered both incentives to move and resources to kill" (178). Harper also explains the disputes and divisions amongst colonists in this light. Colonists jockeyed for patronage and ultimately chose to back the faction that they felt offered the best long-term prospects. In particular, they sought security for their land titles, selecting whichever faction, state, or polity offered the best potential to secure their titles. Similar forces also shaped Native American alliances, and Harper's interpretation of Native American actions and diplomacy is one of the work's greatest strengths. He provides a clear and detailed narrative of the negotiations between Native Americans and Euro Americans in the upper Ohio Valley and succinctly details how different bands of Ohio villagers, and numerous Native American leaders, competed for influence and survival, maneuvering between colonial and imperial powers; between colonists, military officers, and government administrators; and perhaps most importantly between each other. As the relative strengths of neighboring polities shifted, like their colonist opponents, native peoples assessed which faction might offer them the best opportunity for securing their aims. Harper argues that the modern hindsight that Native American peoples were ultimately dispossessed of their lands all too often makes their diplomacy and alliance-making seem self-defeating. Instead, he shows how native leaders such as White Eyes, Cornstalk, and Guyasuta successfully maneuvered within a complex and shifting network of alliances and affiliations. As the tide of war and power changed, as different officers and administrators made new pronouncements, so Native American allegiances shifted. However, Native leaders consistently pursued recognition of their political and territorial sovereignty and sought improved trade and diplomatic relationships. They also sought to maintain peace with their Native American neighbors, whether they both sought alliances with the same side or not. Unsettling the West speaks very directly to a large body of scholarship on the early American West, including Eric Hinderaker's Elusive Empires and Stephen Aron's How the West Was Lost.1 More importantly, [End Page 589] the book challenges many of the assumptions in works such as Patrick Griffin's American Leviathan.2 Harper makes numerous allusions throughout the book to Griffin's work and the "Hobbesian dystopia" that Griffin portrays, but engages in no discussion of this historiography. This omission seems strange because Harper's work is such a corrective to so much existing scholarship. Harper's argument is most...

Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam by David Biggs

Reviewed by: Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam by David Biggs Miles Powell Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam. By david biggs. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. xix + 250 pp. ISBN 978-0-295-74386-8. $34.95 (hardcover). Following up on the prize-winning Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta (University of Washington Press, 2011), David Biggs’s Footprints of War sustains the lofty expectations that we have come to anticipate from him. Shifting from the Mekong Delta to central Vietnam, especially the region around the city of Huê, Biggs explores how layers of militarized landscapes have shaped the nation’s history from the early modern period through the present. The book grew out of an applied environmental history project in which Biggs [End Page 652] used American archival sources to assist the Vietnamese government in locating chemical hotspots resulting from U.S. troops’ storage and deployment of chemicals, including weapons. The project is thus one of those rare works that combines practical benefits with broad scholarly significance. Extending his temporal gaze backwards and forwards from the conflict that Vietnamese people call the American War, Biggs contends that the geography of central Vietnam, by channeling generations of combatants into particular areas, gave rise to layered militarized landscapes that shaped subsequent conflicts and nation building through to today. In assembling this argument, Biggs provides important insights into the history of war, landscape, and nation building that will be relevant far beyond Vietnam’s borders. Footprints of War bears an intellectual debt to Annales School historian Fernand Braudel’s notion of the longue durée, but where Braudel fell back on geographical determinism in attributing the Mediterranean world’s physical features for engendering historical trends, Biggs offers a more complex causal relationship. He highlights the “geologic facts” of the central coast—a narrow strip linking more populous regions and bordered by hilly highlands on one side and the sea on the other—for rendering it a conflict zone (p. 23), and notes that geography made certain sites strategically significant, encouraging repeated generations of soldiers to occupy these sites. Biggs never loses sight of human agency, however. He shows how recurrent military campaigns transformed the landscape, leaving successive “footprints of war” that affected the challenges and opportunities of subsequent combatants and nation builders. Biggs levers this history of serial military colonization to probe the concept of creative destruction. We usually associate this idea with the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, who contended in the 1940s that dismantling prior systems was a necessary precursor to capitalist innovation. Biggs reminds us, however, that the idea has a much longer history. German historians and economists used it to explore how warfare facilitated advancement by clearing away the old order even before the First World War. Biggs illustrates how creative destruction reshaped Vietnam as well. Since the early modern period, sites cleared by warfare have been repurposed as towns, tree nurseries, and industrial parks. Conversely, Biggs shows how war’s legacies limited the types of development that could occur on sites scarred by destruction, including the herbicides that threatened plants and humans alike. Biggs also considers how competing landscape perspectives shaped conflicts. He notes how the aerial, geometric perspective adopted by French and then American soldiers contrasted with the landmark-based [End Page 653] orienteering preferred by communist soldiers. According to Biggs, “What led [politicians in] France and the United States to continue this war was not a lack of knowledge on the ground but an overwhelming faith in their global, aerial perspective” (p. 100). This perhaps overstates the case, but Biggs effectively demonstrates the significance of the Western military’s 40,000-foot view of Vietnam. By pioneering methods of aerial photography and, later, satellite imagery to comprehend terrain, and then by dropping Agent Orange and other herbicides to expose the land to their buzzard’s-eye gaze, American officials made aerial perspectives a key war objective. Conversely, communist soldiers navigated via place names and vernacular landmarks. This made geolocating them difficult even when opposing forces intercepted communications. Linking this to his discussion of creative destruction, Biggs contends that American policymakers’ reliance on aerial perspectives coalesced with the military’s...

Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry

Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry