Small Wars, Big Box Office, Little Impact? Colonial Conflicts Between 1878 and 1885

Western powers have been engaged in counterinsurgency operations at least since the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula. The requirement to occupy the Western Hemisphere from 1492 – and later the Indian subcontinent, East Asia, and Africa – involved Western powers in armed conflict with local populations, much of it irregular warfare. Contemporary US COIN doctrine in its twenty-first-century form is an outgrowth of the belief, common in nineteenth-century France and Britain, that military action provided the mechanism for the dissemination of modern, Western values and attitudes as a foundation for indigenous governance and social, political, and economic transformation of pivotal regions. The nineteenth century witnessed the establishment of small wars as a discrete category of warfare in France and Britain, one that required a special doctrine, an uncommon type of officer with a mindset and outlook distinct from those who prepared for and fought continental conflicts. Not only must colonial warriors prove to be excellent tacticians, but also they must prepare to engage non-Western populations on a political and cultural level. Because irregular or “small wars” were associated with imperial expansion, colonial soldiers had also to assemble a cast of influential supporters among journalists, geographic societies, army and navy leagues, and politicians to sell what was in effect a political project. The bid for the recognition of small wars as a separate category of service came about for several reasons, the increasing professionalization and industrialization of continental warfare most prominent among them. Intensifying democratization of the political systems in these countries in an era of mass politics before 1914 also stimulated advocates of strategic superiority via small wars to fashion their own professional and doctrinal universe. In both Britain and France, demands for increased civilian control of the military that grew with the approach of the Great War joined with concerns about the barbarity of small war tactics and operations and questions about the risks and utility of imperial expansion.

Acknowledgements Introduction - Hew Strachan Between the South African War and the First World War, 1902-14 - Edward M. Spiers Big Wars and Small Wars between the Wars, 1919-39 - David French Learning new lessons: the British Army and the Strategic Debate, 1945-50 - Paul Cornish Lost and Found in the Jungle: the Indian and British Army Jungle Warfare Doctrines for Burma, 1943-45, and the Malayan Emergency, 1948-60 - Daniel Marston Aden to Northern Ireland, 1966-76 - David Benest The Unchanging Lessons of Battle: the British Army and the Falklands War, 1982 - Simon Ball The Gulf War 1990-91 - Colin McInnes

Infectious and tropical diseases have been a problem for British expeditionary forces ever since the Crusades. Outbreaks were especially common on Navy ships from the 16th to 18th centuries due...

This paper focuses on charges of match-fixing in April 2001 by Indian police against Hansie Cronje, cricket captain of South Africa, and the Commission of Inquiry that followed in order to probe the construction and persistence of race stereotypes in South Africa. It examines the historic construction of boundaries between Indians and Whites, their reactions to Hansiegate and the implications for the ‘rainbow nation’ project. White prejudices against Indians during this affair are documented and it is argued that these reveal the fragmented nature of post-apartheid South African society Hansiegate indicates that race remains the hidden arbiter in popular consciousness in post-apartheid South Africa in circumstances where race identities are sustained by new dynamics. The paper suggests that the historical, social, economic and cultural legacy of South Africa's conflicting pasts, as well as post-apartheid discrepancies in economic and social conditions, are perpetuating and creating separatist identities, and making it difficult to forge a collective South African identity.

Purpose – There exists no detailed account of the 40 Australian women teachers employed within the “concentration camps” established by British forces in the Orange River and Transvaal colonies during the Boer War. The purpose of this paper is to critically respond to this dearth in historiography. Design/methodology/approach – A large corpus of newspaper accounts represents the richest, most accessible and relatively idiosyncratic source of data concerning this contingent of women. The research paper therefore interprets concomitant print-based media reports of the period as a resource for educational and historiographical data. Findings – Towards the end of the Boer War in South Africa (1899-1902) a total of 40 Australian female teachers – four from Queensland, six from South Australia, 14 from Victoria and 16 from New South Wales – successfully answered the imperial call conscripting educators for schools within “concentration camps” established by British forces in the Orange River and Transvaal colonies. Women’s exclusive participation in this initiative, while ostensibly to teach the Boer children detained within these camps, also exerted an influential effect on the popular consciousness in reimagining cultural ideals about female teachers’ professionalism in ideological terms. Research limitations/implications – One limitation of the study relates to the dearth in official records about Australian women teachers in concentration camps given that; not only are Boer War-related records generally difficult to source; but also that even the existent data is incomplete with many chapters missing completely from record. Therefore, while the data about these women is far from complete, the account in terms of newspaper reports relies on the existent accounts of them typically in cases where their school and community observe their contributions to this military campaign and thus credit them with media publicity. Originality/value – The paper’s originality lies in recovering the involvement of a previously underrepresented contingent of Australian women teachers while simultaneously offering a primary reading of the ideological work this involvement played in influencing the political narrative of Australia’s educational involvement in the Boer War.

German Jews’ involvement in the colonial venture of the Kaiserreich has remained almost untouched by historical research. While it has affirmed the dominance of the nation-state in outlining the Jews’ civic status and identity, historiography has overlooked the implications of colonization on Jews’ self-perception as Germans. This essay inquires into this perception by focusing on the Jews’ ambiguous posture towards the colonial war in South West Africa and the massacre it inflicted on the Herero and the Nama. Jews objected to the excessive violence used against the indigenous population by the German army and responded vigorously against racist theories that imposed inferior racial status on black people in the colonies, and consequently on Jews in general. At the same time, when accused of lack of patriotism and of evading military service in the colonies—thus challenging their German national belonging—Jews presented the opposite position. They used concepts of difference to confirm their national German identity, as reflected by the purported disparity between them, as Germans and Europeans, and the local population in the colony. Moreover, Jews reasserted their participation in colonial conflicts, especially in the war against the Herero, the same war that brought about the locals’ destruction. The objects of a strategy of difference on behalf of Germans, Jews themselves applied the same approach in relation to the Africans. The colonial episode therefore appears to be a test case for the formation of German Jews’ identity.

Medical Legacy of Gandhi: Demystifying Human Diseases.

Directing O'Neill: <i>Mourning Becomes Electra, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Desire Under the Elms, Days Without End</i>

The embodiment of inequality: AIDS as a social condition and the historical experience in South Africa

God Save the Boer: Irish American Catholics and the South African War, 1899-1902 Charles T. Strauss They tell us the Boers must be defeated in the interests of civilization, that they are an uncivilized race. Why is that said of them? Is it because they carry on an effective government at the lowest rate of taxation known? Is it because in their country, education is universal ; drunkedness is unknown; divorce doesn’t exist; and every man lives with his own wife? I can understand a country owning a smart set thinking that nation uncivilized which doesn’t support a divorce court. I would not deny to that set the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of smartness; but I would have them see that though the Boers have not evening dress, they have evening prayers, and though they fear God, the fear of man is not in them.1 W. Bourke Cockran is the greatest American orator that no one remembers today. A respected politician, a skilled diplomat, a devout and well-connected Catholic, and an accomplished speechmaker, Cockran has been overshadowed by other eloquent orators in the crowded pantheon of political giants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the great causes of Cockran’s political life, anti-imperialism and U.S. support for the Boer Republics during the South African War (1899-1902) in particular, is also a little remembered aspect of Gilded Age and Progressive Era history. And yet Cockran’s speech, which he delivered at New York’s Academy of Music on 4 March 1900, and the South African War, an imperial conflict between the British Empire and the descendents of Dutch settlers in southern Africa, provides rare insight into the transnational dimensions of American ethnic politics as the U.S. made its debut as a serious international player. 1 I am grateful to Margaret Abruzzo, Jay Dolan, Donal Lowry, John McGreevy, David O’Brien, Eamonn O’Ciardha, Edward O’Donnell, and Ellen Skerrett for reading various incarnations of my research on the impact of the South African War on ethnic politics in the United States. I am particularly indebted to David O’Brien and Edward O’Donnell for advising me in the early stages of my research and to participants of the seventh annual GRIAN Conference on Irish Studies at New York University, 4-6 March 2005. 1. W. Bourke Cockran, Irish World, 10 March 1900; revised and reprinted in its entirety in the Irish World, 17 March 1900. Cockran was by all accounts the national spokesperson for the pro-Boer movement in the United States.2 The people of New York elected the Irish-born lawyer to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives eight times between 1887 and his death in 1923.3 Dutch Americans, who had initially lobbied for U.S. mediation in the early stages of the South African War, asked Cockran to help them to raise funds for Boer relief and to petition his friends in Washington on the Boers’ behalf.4 Cockran supported the Boer cause mainly through passionate speechmaking, such as his dramatic defense of the Boers at New York’s Academy of Music in March 1900. Clan-an-Gael, a militant Irish nationalist organization, hosted the event and the Irish Americans in attendance filled the Academy’s main hall and all of its galleries. Cockran began by honoring the memory of Robert Emmet, Ireland’s preeminent nationalist leader of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, on the 122nd anniversary of his birth. He praised the Irish leader for his commitment to the universal principles of justice and liberty. However, Cockran devoted most of his speech to a commendation of a people from South Africa whom he praised for defending these principles in his own day. Cockran contrasted the God-fearing Boer with the British people and their “smart set,” which controlled two other provinces in South Africa and were engaged in an imperial war over the Boers’ mineral-rich land. The Boers, according to Cockran, deserved the admiration and support of patriotic Americans and liberty-loving people everywhere and the U.S. should have intervened to stop Britain’s...

Reviewed by: From Cochise to Geronimo: The Chiricahua Apaches, 1874–1886 Janne Lahti From Cochise to Geronimo: The Chiricahua Apaches, 1874–1886. By Edwin R. Sweeney. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010. Pp. 640. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780806141503, $39.95 cloth.) In his latest book, Edwin R. Sweeney, an authority on Apache history, takes the reader once more to the deserts and mountains of the Southwest borderlands. This time he has tackled what is arguably one of the most captivating episodes in the history of U.S.-indigenous conflicts, the last Apache Wars. Chronologically organized, the chapters start with the last years and death of the influential Chiricahua leader Cochise and end with the famous surrender of Geronimo and the forced removal of all Chiricahuas to Florida as prisoners of war in 1886. The epilogue briefly describes the further sufferings of the imprisoned Chiricahuas. In all, this is a story of conquest, resistance, and survival. The Chiricahuas lost their homelands and approximately half of their population in a matter of few years after the federal government’s concentration policy in the mid-1870s forced them to the hated San Carlos, to which many refused to go and others declined to stay. Together with the long-lasting conflict between the Chiricahuas and Mexicans, Apache suspicions towards Anglos born from past wrongs, and white racial prejudice, this disastrous policy—and subsequent government inflexibility—fuelled a cycle of violence. The Southwest witnessed a series of Apache outbreaks, raiding, U.S. offensives —including the army’s invasion into the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico in 1883—and often failed Chiricahua attempts at reservation life. This book is clearly a sequel to Sweeney’s previous works Cochise: Chiricahua Apache Chief (University of Oklahoma Press, 1991) and Mangas Coloradas: Chief of the Chiricahua Apaches (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). Taken together, Sweeney’s trilogy constitutes a first-class political and military history of the Chiricahua Apaches and their conflicts with Mexico and the United States during the nineteenth century. Much like in his earlier studies, Sweeney again delivers a skilful narrative filled with details and based on thorough knowledge of archival sources. The author has combed through an impressive stack of original sources, including oral materials, government documents, and manuscript collections from numerous archives. Although the writing is often passionate and fluent, and the author’s command of his subject is apparent on every page, the book is not without its problems. For one, the text, at 581 pages, could have benefited from some trimming. On one hand, so many pages bring value to the book as the author has been able to dig deep into his topic; to show how complex sequences of events unfolded and to uncover the choices of different players (civilian agents, military men, Apache leaders). On the other hand, the habit of describing how events unfolded and what people did on a day-to-day basis can make for an engaging story, but too many unnecessary details can confuse the casual reader and leave the academic reader yearning for more analysis. While the author’s focus is very thorough, it is [End Page 315] also unfortunately rather narrow. There is little effort to connect the U.S./Mexico-Chiricahua wars to their global context, meaning other colonial conflicts around the world, or to explain local social and political developments in the borderlands between 1874 and 1886. The railroads, the Tombstone mining boom, and the rapid expansion of cattle ranching on Arizona ranges connected the area to the industrialized global market economy and had multiple impacts on the U.S.-Chiricahua wars. Despite its shortcomings, this book is a must for anyone interested in Apache history, the frontier army, U.S.-indigenous wars, and the history of the Southwest. It is most appealing to those who like their history chronologically organized, action-packed, detailed, and filled with interesting characters. Janne Lahti Espoo, Finland Copyright © 2012 The Texas State Historical Association

'South Africa' has long meant different things to different people. As a discursive construction, the term has traded on – and been influenced by – contending representations and performances across a range of media, the reception of which, both within the region and 'abroad', has necessarily had an effect on what this label is taken to name. Reception is always interested, influenced by ideological or psychological imperatives, whether by apologists for or subjects of empire, members of anti-colonial or anti-apartheid movements, exiles and émigrés, or by only apparently disinterested outsiders for whom the region's vicarious rewards have been – and are – many. Thus 'South Africa', once no more than a descriptive geographical term of convenience, has served for disaggregated global communities of interest variously to signify a site of adventure, sport or recuperation, a space marked by vitality or cruelty, reconciliation and redemption, and been mediated or contested as a kind of home. During the second Anglo-Boer or South African War, it named the location of one of imperial Britain's most serious moments of crisis, while simultaneously providing occasion for transnational identifications by such diverse groups as Irish nationalists and aristocratic tsarist Russians, who shared little with the proto-Afrikaner Boers besides opposition to the British Empire. For much of the second half of the twentieth century it served in a global imaginary largely as the domain of a white nationalist regime whose policies propelled the word 'apartheid' into the global lexicon.

This book outlines the interwoven story of music, careerism, reform, the transformation of American culture, and one of the greatest musical acts in American history. Following the Hutchinson Family Singers through the nineteenth century as they explored and shaped new openings in American society, it unveils the centrality of political allegiance to artistic creation in the antebellum era. The book further tells how the Hutchinsons fought against many of the barriers that later generations of cultural reformers would face. It did not hurt that for a long time the Hutchinsons were also held in high regard in popular consciousness; twenty-four years after John Hutchinson died, his name topped a 1932 Washington Post list. As grandchildren of the Revolutionary War generation, the Hutchinson Family Singers were integral players in bringing American reform from the enlightenment offering of Tom Paine's “Common Sense” to the brand of Romantic activism found in their music and in the writings of such authors as Harriet Beecher Stowe. From New Hampshire to New York, from temperance to antislavery, from revivals to political parades to parlors, and from an aspiring musical trio to a wealthy quartet, the Hutchinson Family Singers shepherded in one of the great nineteenth-century phenomena.

The Franco-British rivalry over Siam in the last decades of the nineteenth century was one of the most serious of the world wide colonial conflicts between the two Powers after 1875 resolved by the Entente Cordiale agreements of 1904. Like the other colonial conflicts along the Niger and the Nile, in Morocco and Madagascar, and over the Newfoundland fisheries, the rivalry in Siam complicated and strained Franco-British relations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and made diplomatic cooperation in European affairs very difficult, if not at times impossible.

Zones of Occult Instability: The Birth of the Novel in Africa