Imperial Warfare Research Articles

The Scottish Militia Issue and the Anxious Origins of Highlandism, 1759–62

This article re-evaluates the debates over a proposed Scottish militia that took place in the British public sphere at the height of the Seven Years War and French invasion and Jacobite rebellion scares, and locates within them the origins of the discourse of Highlandism. Accordingly, the real and imagined ethnic traditions and characteristics of Scottish Highlanders to some extent came to represent the entire Scottish nation, while concurrently rehabilitating and replacing former stereotypes of Highlanders as bellicose ‘savages’ and Jacobite ‘rebels.’ Further, the debates were not merely informed by domestic politics and intellectual agendas, as typically assumed in the historiography; they were also tied to the larger geopolitical and cultural entanglements of imperial warfare and continued threats from Franco-Jacobite fifth columns, as circulated in an anxious, mercantilist, wartime print culture. These discourses reveal that mid-century whiggish Britons continued to worry about French-instigated rebellion despite historiographical assumptions to the contrary, and experienced considerable uncertainty and concern for the intertwined problems of foreign enemies, overseas war and domestic politics. This context, the widespread doubts surrounding Scotland’s trustworthiness and relative status within the Union, and the defensive reactions among certain pro-militia ‘Scots’, show how commentators mobilised Highland soldiers in support of Scotland’s deservedness of political, institutional and cultural equality with England. This, however, was not an era of growing confidence, cumulative antigallican military service and a ‘long-eighteenth-century’ process of political and cultural consolidation, but rather a deeply uncertain time of burgeoning global conflict and entangled Scotto-Franco-British identity dynamics which must be more fully considered on their own problematic terms.

Caesar and Genocide: Confronting the Dark Side of Caesar’s Gallic Wars

Julius Caesar’s military achievements, described in his Gallic War, are monumental; so are the atrocities his army committed in slaughtering or enslaving entire nations. He stands accused of genocide. For today’s readers, including students and teachers, this poses problems. It raises questions, not least about Caesar’s place in the Latin curriculum. Applying modern definitions of “genocide,” is he guilty as accused? If so, is it justified to condemn him of a crime that was recognized as such only recently? Without condoning Caesar’s actions, this paper seeks fuller understanding by contextual analysis, placing them in the context of Roman—and ancient (if not almost universal)—customs of imperial warfare. It emphasizes the complexity of historical persons and events, juxtaposing Caesar the brutal conqueror to Caesar the clement victor, who established clemency among a ruler’s cardinal virtues.

“Hoy escribiré una carta”: The news of siege warfare in Calderón’s El sitio de Bredá

Ambrogio Spinola’s victory at the Siege of Breda (1624–1625) marked a high point in the imperial policies of Philip IV and his royal favorite, the Count-Duke of Olivares. Contemporary newsletters celebrated the achievement, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca followed these reports in commemorating the victory in his play El sitio de Bredá (1625). I find that in addition to the obvious praise of the triumphant Habsburg forces and monarchy, El sitio de Bredá cultivates a new vision of imperial siege warfare, one that is nurtured by a preoccupation with the burgeoning news industry. Cueing off contemporary reports, Calderón proposes a recently proven model in juxtaposition with those found in earlier siege plays, specifically El asalto de Mastrique por el Príncipe de Parma by Lope de Vega and Tragedia de Numancia by Miguel de Cervantes. When read alongside these works, Calderón’s play suggests an evolution in the depiction of Spanish warfare, redefining its technical and tactical aspects in light of the growing news industry and its rapid dissemination of knowledge.

Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic by John M. Murrin

Reviewed by: Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic by John M. Murrin Shira Lurie Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic. By John M. Murrin. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 424 pp. Notes. $34.95.) In the long-awaited Rethinking America: From Empire to Republic, readers are treated to a scintillating collection of eleven essays by John M. Murrin. Murrin’s vast knowledge, delightful storytelling, playful wit, and incisive analysis are all on full display in this volume, demonstrating why he is considered a master of the form. Most of all, readers will be struck by Murrin’s ability to simplify the complex while also complicating conventional wisdom. As a result, Rethinking America offers not only a compelling account of the causes and consequences of the American Revolution but also an example of historical writing at its finest. Murrin’s theory of “Anglicization” reverberates throughout the volume. First outlined in his 1966 dissertation, Murrin argues that imperial warfare and increased trade bolstered colonists’ sense of Britishness in the decades preceding [End Page 236] independence. Thus, the revolution grew out of colonists’ frustration at being denied the rights of Englishmen, not because of an emergent American identity. “The American Revolution was one of history’s greatest reversals,” he writes. “It ran against the prevailing momentum of change . . . toward greater imperial integration with the colonists as willing participants in the process” (304). The collection also demonstrates Murrin’s talents for playing with counterfactuals. For instance, in “No Awakening, No Revolution?” after confining George Whitefield to a Spanish dungeon, rendering Jonathan Edwards catatonic, and striking Gilbert Tennent with lightening, Murrin investigates whether eliminating the Great Awakening had an impact on the revolution and its aftermath. He concludes provocatively that “without the Great Awakening and its successors, there would have been a revolution in 1775, but in all probability, no Civil War in 1861” (111). In addition, the volume includes two new essays: “War, Revolution, and Nation-Making” compares national feeling during the American Revolution and Civil War. It argues persuasively, although somewhat unoriginally, that the Confederacy enjoyed a much stronger and coherent nationalism than did the newly independent United States. “Self-Immolation: Schools of Historiography and the Coming of the American Revolution” laments the lack of recent scholarship on the causes of the revolution and offers a remedy in focusing on “the perspective of ordinary households” (399). It is the reviewer’s privilege to quibble, even with exceptional work, and it is in this vein that I observe Murrin’s disproportionate reliance on white male scholars, even in his concluding 2007 historiographic essay. Indeed, it is regrettable that nowhere in this volume does he lend his keen insights to questions of race or gender. Still, readers will be rewarded with essay after essay of compelling prose and skillful argument. Rethinking America is a worthy monument to a titan of the field. Shira Lurie University of Toronto Copyright © 2020 Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France by Bronwen McShea

Reviewed by: Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France by Bronwen McShea Gabrielle Guillerm Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France. By Bronwen McShea . Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 378 pp. $60.00. Apostles of Empire: The Jesuits and New France . By Bronwen McShea. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 378 pp. $60.00. The Jesuits and their famous Jesuit Relations loom large in the historiography on New France, yet Bronwen McShea managed a tour de force by illuminating a forgotten facet of this history. Looking at the North American French Jesuit mission over almost two centuries (1611–1800), she argues that its 320 priests were enterprising empire builders advancing the transatlantic expansion of the "Most Christian Kingdom" (France). While the latest scholarship on New France Jesuits has primarily focused on North America, McShea adopts a French Atlantic approach that emphasizes how France's political, social, and cultural developments as well as the Jesuits' connections to the metropole shaped the North American Jesuit project. Apostles of Empire begins by analyzing the first four decades of the Canadian mission and its worldly ties and goals. French Jesuits made [End Page 85] their order's customarily special vow of obedience to the pope, but their mission was distinctly French. To work in France and its empire, the Jesuits must be French and take an oath of allegiance to the Crown. Even if securing the Crown's support for the French Catholic expansion proved challenging as rulers prioritized European diplomacy and costly warfare over New France, Henry IV and especially Louis XIII and Richelieu were instrumental sponsors of the Jesuits. Parisian benefactors, especially the influential printer Sébastien Cramoisy, also facilitated Jesuit imperial ambitions. One project was to import French charitable institutions (e.g., hospitals) that Jesuits regarded as the embodiment of their Catholic faith and a way to win indigenous converts; another (unsuccessful) one was to conquer Iroquois territory for France by defeating the Dutch-Iroquois alliance. McShea is at her best when exploring how layman Cramoisy and Jesuit Paul Le Jeune designed the yearly Jesuit Relations as a propaganda tool for empire. Reading each Relation in light of the events and developments unfolding in France and New France at the time of publication, she shows how the two Frenchmen carefully crafted the narrative to resonate with the French audience's concerns and experiences in order to secure military and financial support for French Catholic expansion. The book's second part demonstrates how North American Jesuits remained committed to the French imperial cause even as they increasingly lost the metropole's assistance after 1673. From the ending of the Jesuit Relations' publication (1673), to the Court and lay people's waning interest, and the concurrent 1763 fall of New France and French suppression of the order, the Jesuit enterprise in North America suffered a major reversal of fortune. But missionaries on the ground pushed further into new territories (the western Great Lakes, the Illinois Country, and the Gulf of Mexico), cultivated alliances with Natives by adapting to their ways, and contributed to imperial warfare by serving as ambassadors and military chaplains. North American Jesuits, McShea shows, tended to be more imperialist minded and hawkish than the Crown itself. A short review cannot do justice to McShea's fine analysis or the multiple sub-arguments she develops. The study's broad and inclusive framework is a feat and effectively illuminates how French Jesuits helped create an "untidy world of politics, social pressures, and war" over two centuries (xxvii). Rather than simply focusing on well-known Jesuit martyrs and explorers, the author recovers dozens of little-known Jesuits. We thus learn about Étienne Lauverjat, who circulated intelligence and arms, and cultivated pro-French sentiments among the Abenaki of Panouamské during the Anglo-Abenaki wars in 1720s Maine to the point that Boston set a price on his scalp. Unlike the much-studied [End Page 86] Sébastien Râle, who achieved the rank of martyr after his assassination during the same war was publicized in print, Lauverjat survived and went into oblivion. Further, only by weaving the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and looking beyond Canada to other North American Jesuit missions...

Има ли хероја у доба постхеројског ратовања?

The paper analyses the problems that have been undermining the US recruitment policy for the last two decades - which is aimed at providing soldiers for imperial disciplining wars waged on the planetary periphery - as a case study to test the validity of theoretical assumptions about the transition to the age of post-heroic warfare. The departing hypothesis is based on stance that the United States, being the only remained superpower, experience a gradual and less visible process of losing popular support for military conscription, which the author employs here as an ideal of national vitality and a pillar of modern citizenship, as well as a feature of masculinity and the realm for self-realisation. The analysis takes place primarily in the field of anthropology and sociology and employs theoretical positions of social constructivism to complement narrow theoretical and methodological approaches of political science which are typically applied in the study of international relations. The analysis focuses on the cracks and deformations in the construction of ideals of warfare and heroism, which emerge as a result of the interaction of man - both as an individual and a member of the political community - the public, and the US foreign policy decisions designed to meet the needs and requirements of successful disciplinary imperial warfare. The author concludes that theoretical assumptions about entering the age of post-heroic warfare are valid due to the recruitment crisis in the US military, the unpopularity of the military profession, the commodification of warfare and death, the transformation of war into an industrial process, and misleading media portrayals of dead and wounded soldiers.

Sizing Up the “Small Wars” of African Empire

Abstract This short essay makes the case that the theories and practices employed by European armies during the “small wars” of nineteenth-century imperialism were military innovations produced within the distinctly modern and global context of colonial conquest. Colonial military experiences spurred new tactics and strategies which were captured in treatises written by British and French military theorists at the same time that they transformed the nature of warfare in colonized spaces—often with devastating effects. Military approaches developed in response to these “small wars” have important legacies, both in shaping the contours of military operations within postcolonial Africa and contributing to worldwide “counterinsurgency” theories of the twenty-first century. Understanding the specific historical context in which colonial violence was produced can contribute to a fuller understanding of the meaning, impact and multiple legacies of imperial warfare.

Sideshows at the Center - British Campaigns in the Middle East during the Great War

This article places the Middle East campaigns at the heart of the effort to understand the First World War's cultural impact in Britain. By doing so, it shows that the effects typically attributed to the western front—loss of faith in technology and heroism—were mediated in important ways by lessons emerging from the Middle Eastern fronts in Palestine and Mesopotamia, where the British found their faith in technology strengthened. By incorporating that cultural legacy, we can better understand why Britons remained committed to the war and why they maintained their faith in industrial development and imperial warfare after the war had ended. The heroic image of T. E. Lawrence and of the infrastructural development undertaken by the British military in Mesopotamia bolstered faith in technology and imperialism just when the western front was revealing their darker side. The article begins with a study of the unique military tactics the British adopted in the region, shaped by particular cultural notions about a largely imaginary “Arabia”: deception, irregular warfare, and airpower were used to an unprecedented degree in these campaigns. It goes on to show how the British government strove to capitalize on the propaganda effects of these “sideshows” as they became successful. In particular, they stressed the notion that the empire could find redemption in the restoration of the ancient “cradle of civilization.” Such ideas sustained idealistic notions even as the western front unleashed a new kind of cynicism.

The Effect of Military Service on Indian Communities in Southern New England, 1740–1763

Military sources combined with existing ethnohistorical narratives about the experience of Algonquian groups living ‘behind the frontier’ in colonial southern New England provide insight into the impact of imperial warfare on Indian peoples. Virtually every indigenous male in the region after King Philip’s War served in the colonial military. Tribes used the service of their men as leverage in negotiations with colonial governments as they attempted to advance their own agendas and protect their sovereignty. Yet Indian soldiers died in large numbers, mainly from infectious disease. Death rates for Indian soldiers were so high that it affected tribal demographics and led to increasing intermarriage and intermixing between the region’s Indian and African populations. Other issues faced by Natives in the aftermath of the wars included the long-term injury and disability of veterans, the unresolved fate of men captured during the fighting, and the psychological impact of wartime trauma on veterans.

Topographies of Anticolonialism: The Ecopoetical Sublime in the Caucasus from Tolstoy to Mamakaev

Topographies of Anticolonialism: The Ecopoetical Sublime in the Caucasus from Tolstoy to Mamakaev

The Echo Chamber of Freedom: The Muslim Woman and the Pretext of Agency

This essay argues that notions of the subject, individualism, freedom, agency, change, and history (in other words, the ideas that are used to mark the boundaries of the West, and that generate the most sensitized aporias of modernity) have come to cluster around the figure of the Muslim woman (for whom the metonym is increasingly the veil): object of imperial rescue, justification for imperial warfare, Orientalist cipher, target of jihadist violence, and increasingly the discursive site upon which is worked out the central preoccupation of our time: How do you free yourself from freedom?

Making bodies modern: race, medicine and the colonial soldier in the mid-eighteenth century

ABSTRACT The expansion of British imperial warfare during the middle of the eighteenth century provided motivation and opportunity for observations on British and native forces. The nature of military medicine, with its use of regimental returns and empirical observations about mortality rates of large groups of anonymous individuals, encouraged generalizations about differences between native and European bodies. As foreign, colonial environments accentuated European deaths due to disease during war-time, and as early modern medicine advised the use of acclimatized, native labour, the physical experience of eighteenth-century colonial warfare encouraged the recruitment of native forces as menial labourers under the direction of professional British soldiers. Although not inherently racial, such practices buttressed emerging social and cultural prejudices. In contrast to the traditional focus on intellectual writings on race and science during the modern period of nineteenth-century imperialism, Charters's article examines the experience of common men—rank-and-file soldiers—during the early modern period, demonstrating the relationship between developing empirical and scientific observations and burgeoning racial theories.

Ploughshares into Swords? St. Augustine’s Ethics of Political Violence

AbstractSt. Augustine’s efforts to reconcile Christ’s teaching with the requirements of statecraft led him to became the founder of a theory of comparative justice we now call just war. Just war was designed to limit the nature and scope of imperial Roman warfare. Post‐Constantine Christian attitudes to the use of organised political violence have largely been interpreted and guided by this tradition. Over time the term just war has been expanded beyond its specifically Christian component to represent the dominant Western line of moral thinking on war. The key issue in this paper is to review the common conceptual vocabulary that unites just war theorists and claims Augustine as its key progenitor.

Ashley Jackson. Distant Drums: The Role of Colonies in British Imperial Warfare. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2010. Pp 368. $74.95 (cloth); $39.50 (paper).

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The Christianization of Usury in Early Modern Europe

In the early seventeenth century, the beginning of Europe's commercial revolution forced reconsiderations of the use of credit in long-distance trade. Unlike their Catholic competitors, Protestant regimes depended on the exchange of paper securities and other credit instruments. Protestant moralists developed rationalizations for usury as a concerted effort to protect the Protestant interest in the context of imperial warfare and colonial settlement. By the end of the seventeenth century, these moralists had made modern, market-oriented conceptions of usury commonplace in the Christian West.

Distant drums: the role of colonies in British imperial warfare

Distant drums: the role of colonies in British imperial warfare

Northern Exposure: Resistance to Naval Impressment in British North America, 1775–1815

Abstract: Focusing on resistance, this article examines naval impressment in British North America from 1775 to 1815. Although neglected in Canadian historiography, press gangs sparked urban unrest and political turmoil in seaports such as Halifax, St John's, and Quebec City. Impressment reached into most coastal areas of British North America by the early nineteenth century and its sailors and inhabitants employed a range of strategies to resist it. They also confronted it directly, sometimes with violent results. Press gang riots in St John's in 1794 and Halifax in 1805 led to a prohibition on impressment on shore for much of the Napoleonic Wars. Popular protest served as the catalyst for official resistance to the British Navy and had a lasting impact on civil–naval relations in the North Atlantic world. While the study of popular disturbances in Canadian history usually begins in the mid-nineteenth century, this paper shows that they were important in earlier generations as well. This was often the result of tensions caused by imperial warfare and quarrels with military personnel.

The Thug, the Barbarian, and the Work of Injury in Imperial Warfare

In the modern english lexicon, the curious wordthugis usually traced to Hindi. In the early days of the antithug military campaign in India, William Henry Sleeman, the British architect of the campaign, brought out a thug lexicon entitledRamaseeana; or, A Vocabulary of the Peculiar Language Used by the Thugsin 1836. This lexicon represents the first systematic attempt to identify who the thugs are and how they communicate with one another in secret society. It appears to provide hard linguistic evidence for a newly discovered threat to the British presence in India, cobbling together a large collection of predominantly Hindi words and phrases and building them into a coherent image of the thug that attests to the authenticity of Hindu thuggism. The graphic details of thugs' cold-blooded strangling of innocent travelers are as numerous as the amount of verbs and nouns that have found their way into the book and into subsequent embellishments by popular media. That the wordthugis of Hindi origin (thag, theg, orthak) seems sufficient to prove that thugs exist and pose a threat. (Echoes of this argument can be found in the justifications for the United States–led war against the terrorist network al-Qaeda.) But as Martine Van Woerkens and other scholars have shown, thuggism was actually invented by the British who tried to seize criminal jurisdiction in areas that had been in the hands of the Mogul rulers. In the course of extending their control over a mobile population, the British used the construction of thug monstrosity to lay the foundation of “a ritual of conjuration” in the play of mirrors between them and the colonized (Van Woerkens 292).

Another University is Possible: Academic Labor, the Ideology of Scarcity, and the Fight for Workplace Democracy

It is little exaggeration, then, to say that the whole world is watching what happens at institutions such as NYU, the University of California, and CUNY. Insurgent unions such as the GSOC and the PSC have an important role to play in challenging the global jargon of “excellence,” and in replacing prisons and imperial warfare with social justice and the democratization of higher education.

Imperial Warfare in the Naked City-Sociality as Critical Infrastructure

The Global War on Terror (GWOT), framed as conflict with groups and individuals determined to disrupt and destroy “critical infrastructures,” is heavily dependent on technological and psychological discourses and practices to find terrorists and their plots.[1][1] These methods seek to protect the material “backbone” of contemporary society and to detect those individuals whose capabilities might progress to action. Yet, the social nature of all action suggests that “critical infrastructure is people,” and that surveillance cannot, by itself, determine who might act and who will not. The ultimate purpose and effect of the GWOT is better understood as involving the transformation of individual mentalities, so that “heretical” thoughts and practices become impossible. [1]: #fn-1