Why a nineteenth-century study?

The term ‘guerrilla’ tends to evoke twentieth-century rather than nineteenth-century connotations. The First World War witnessed insurgent challenges to imperial rule in Europe and Asia, guerrilla revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries in Latin America. The postwar era witnessed a brutalisation of counter-insurgency doctrines along with the brutalisation of politics, especially in China and the Soviet Union. The Second World War witnessed an intensification of counter-insurgency, especially at the hands of the exterminatory Japanese and German empires. The post-1945 era ushered in perhaps the most complex and diverse insurgency environment, as anti-colonial insurgencies were reinforced by communist, nationalistic and Maoist ideologies, which were countered with mixed success by metropolitan counter-insurgency strategies. ‘People’s war’ thus conjured up images of Mao and Che Guevara, of revolutionary warfare, far removed from the supposedly state-centric armies and strategies of the nineteenth century. Even when the ideological certainties of the Cold War fell away from 1990, insurgencies diversified along civil war, religious and technological lines.¹

Yet insurgency is both the oldest form of warfare and the variety with the greatest opportunities for development. Insurgency, guerrilla, partisans, and ‘people’s war’ are nuances of the universal and immemorial phenomenon of irregular combatants waging war against formally constituted power. Military historians identify three types of ‘people’s war’: guerrilla warfare, militia warfare, and conscription armies.² The former two are analysed in this volume. Strategy expert, Beatrice Heuser, describes insurgent warfare as follows; ‘wars fought between parties that are fundamentally unequal, one side possessing authority, a recognised claim to a monopoly of power and a state apparatus in some form, often including armed forces’.³ Recent research has demonstrated the diversity both of the guerrilla and of counter-insurgency throughout history. In the past three years the Small Wars and Insurgencies journal has published two special issues on the historical origins and contemporary impact of guerrilla warfare respectively.⁴ The nineteenth century offers particular opportunity for a fresh study of global insurgency and counter-insurgency. The military history of this century reveals much more than the symmetrical warfare of Napoleon, Grant and Moltke. It also reveals well-known and less well-known insurgencies, of links between guerrilla movements and nationalism, and of complex motivations and strategies driving both insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. Contemporary strategists were much more impressed by the burden and appeal of guerrilla warfare than a cursory glance at the military academies would reveal. Even the great exponent of interstate war, Carl von Clausewitz, had a complex understanding of guerrilla warfare that has often passed unremarked by scholars studying the post-Westphalian overtones in his On War.⁵

Thus the nineteenth-century deserves a bespoke study, on a global scale. A global history of insurgency in this century presents us with a similar paradox as nineteenth-century global history more widely. Global empires became more antagonistic to each other even though their similarities, connections and linkages proliferated. Equally, patterns of insurgency and counter-insurgency showed increasing similarities to each other as the nineteenth century progressed, as the chapters in the following study demonstrate. Thus it is insufficient to view insurgency warfare only in a local, regional or even national context. Even such continental qualifiers as ‘European’ or ‘American’ history cannot provide a diverse understanding of insurgencies. Far-flung imperial warfare reverberated back onto the metropolis, just as metropolitan preconceptions conditioned counter-insurgency strategy. A global understanding of insurgency is all the more necessary considering how such factors as ecology, epidemiology, diasporas, and the ‘informal empire’ phenomenon of outsiders enjoying privileges over natives, all cut across regional, national and even continental divisions.⁶ And local, asymmetrical wars after the late eighteenth century tended to become ‘catastrophised’ by a new political climate in national and international affairs.

This double special issue sheds new light on global insurgency and counter-insurgency in the nineteenth century. Bringing together both distinguished and rising scholars from Europe, North and South America, this issue provides new insights into an under-researched topic. It exposes some insurgencies unknown to most scholars, explores the links between insurgencies and nationalism, and studies the extent to which we can identify evolving patterns between reactive and progressive insurgency, along with learning curves and emulation in counter-insurgency.

A bespoke study of nineteenth-century asymmetric warfare presents us with many challenges. One of the features of modernity in the advanced polities of Europe and North America was what sociologist, Max Weber, called the monopoly on ‘legitimate’ violence owned by the state, as the ‘private’ violence related to serfdom and slavery disappeared. Administrative and judicial reforms, policing, and economic and demographic recovery, all set the trend for a reduction in the use of violence in internal affairs.⁷ The onset of European war in 1792 accelerated the growth of states on the one hand whilst producing wartime strains on the other hand which promoted the phenomenon of both insurgency and counter-insurgency. Moreover, irregular campaigns took place in a context in which political discourse to some extent exaggerated violence, driving a wedge between the ‘legitimate’ and often ideologically promoted violence of the forces of the state and the victimhood of ‘illegitimate’ violence of rebel communities.⁸

The growing employment of state violence against ‘enemies’ rather than for internal law and order helped ‘totalise’ warfare, influencing ‘total war’ strategies and transforming the strategic landscape until the end of the Second World War. Thus what space is there for a study of war aims which in being asymmetrical, were also often limited rather than ‘total’? Even before the era of Revolutionary and Napoleonic warfare (and some fifty years before Clausewitz’s famous musings on the subject) the Comte de Guibert understood the differences between limited war and total war. The latter was made possible, Guibert thought, by the creation of mass citizens’ armies.⁹ Another challenge lies in the growth of nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe, the continent which set the tone for most military evolution in this century and imbued a growing culture of militarism. Ascendant militarism between the end of the French Wars and the start of the First World War was reflected in most military strategists themselves being military officers, especially after the era of Moltke the Elder. Yet despite the growth of nationalism alongside militarism, these thinkers tended to read the works of thinkers in other countries.¹⁰ Military strategists thought globally, and this is reflected in the global reach of this volume.

These nineteenth-century strategists grew ever more aggressive in their calculations. Unlike eighteenth-century strategists, who could not reach consensus about whether offensive or defensive war was stronger (both seemed to have their role), nineteenth-century strategists were more offensively minded. Napoleon and his legacy up to 1914 witnessed strategists almost universally believing in the ‘cult of the offensive’. Even the small wars expert, Callwell, judged pre-emptive offensives by regular forces to be the best war-winning tactic.¹¹ The advancing abilities of states to mobilise troops and (especially from from mid-century) implement new weapons and logistical technology led Western strategists to privilege recent historical lessons. Neither Jomini (1779–1869), Clausewitz (1780–1831) nor Auguste de Marmont (1774–1852) spent significant time learning the lessons of ancient warfare, focusing instead on Frederick the Great and, especially, Napoleon, as the godfathers of military modernity. The nineteenth century thus produced an era in lessons from living memory, even if thinkers (especially Jomini) proved slow at making sense of the technological revolution in warfare evident from the mid-nineteenth century.¹²

As the nineteenth century progressed, military thinkers grew ever more convinced that the coming war would be a war of mass and movement. Attention to guerrilla warfare could not keep up with military revolution, even though the 1815–1914 era actually witnessed relatively few major wars and relatively many guerrilla wars. Even such classically symmetrical wars as the American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War involved partisan operations, and these were of a different order to the ‘partisans’ attached to regular armies as scouts before the Napoleonic Wars. Before 1810 irregular warfare was considered the preserve of special forces (‘partisans’, or ‘parties’) operating behind enemy lines in support of regular forces. Yet 1810 witnessed the leap from ‘partisan war’ to ‘people’s war’, owing to the ironic emulation of the French Revolutionary example in both Patriot Spain and Prussia.¹³ Sibylle Scheipers suggests that ‘the irregular initially emerged from the state, and not in opposition to the state,’ but by the time of the Napoleonic wars irregular forces would be seen as ‘an intolerable challenge to the “norm” of regular warfare’.¹⁴ The legitimate monopoly on violence owned by the forces of the state was now threatened in ways which reached far beyond the military impact of insurgency. In the words of the counterinsurgent theorist, David Galula, ‘the insurgent needs so little to achieve so much whereas the counterinsurgent needs so much to achieve so little’.¹⁵ The nineteenth-century, thanks to the of the French and Napoleonic Wars, recast insurgencies as threats to the state, not as an adjunct to state power as during the Early Modern era. Thus irregular forces would, in the words of Sibylle Scheipers, pose ‘an intolerable challenge to the “norm” of regular warfare’.¹⁶ The theme of the following articles comprises the conflict of ‘anti-state’ forces waging war against formally constituted power.

Counterinsurgency strategy

The legacy of legitimate state violence, combined with army honour codes, did not commend irregular warfare for study. Despite persistent guerrilla struggles, there was a repeated refusal of major armies to recognise guerrilla warfare as ‘real’ war. Academy-trained officers viewed guerrilla fighters as rebels and bandits, which was completely at odds with the romanticisation of such supposedly popular struggles as the Spanish and Russian ‘people’ against Napoleon. Nineteenth-century Europe witnessed a marked acceleration in ruthlessness as a consequence of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The French response to irregular resistance was in many cases brutal and oppressive, utilising ‘flying columns’ developed during the insurrection in the Vendée to mount reprisal attacks against villages thought to be collaborating with guerrillas. The French branded the irregulars universally as ‘brigands’ in order to strip the guerrillas of their political legitimacy, And, since ‘brigands’ did not have any political legitimacy, but were fuelled by criminal motives, the customs of war did not apply to them. Hence, the French forces were allowed to shoot them without trial.¹⁷ Scheipers argues that the revolutionary state’s harsh response to these early risings ‘helped shape the emergence of the concept of the ‘brigand’ as the predominant label for the irregular fighters.¹⁸

For what the counterinsurgency condemned as brigandage the insurgency celebrated as heroism. Robin Hood loomed large as a template to bestow upon nineteenth-century guerrillas a mystique. Su Sanniang, female Robin-Hood-style gangleader of the Taiping rebellion, acted initially to avenge the death of her husband but soon became a charismatic leader in her own right.¹⁹ Even as the romanticised insurgent of the nineteenth century evolved into the ideological freedom-fighter of the twentieth, military academies remained remarkably unreflective. In the extreme case of the USA, only conventional and intensive warfare was seen as ‘worthy’ of study and doctrine. As one US general remarked in 1970 regarding the US military’s failed strategy in Vietnam: ‘I’ll be damned if I permit the US army, its institutions, its doctrine and its traditions, to be destroyed just to win this lousy war’.²⁰ US officer academies today will generally not engage with military history before the Second World War, because US military doctrine is so wedded to the centrality of technology.²¹ There was an appealing ‘Whiggishness’ to this obsession with military modernity. Whereas Early Modern and Modern European ‘state-building’ wars had many positive side-effects (extension of state machine/protection, enhanced popular participation in the state, technological innovations), the twentieth-century era of ‘privatised’ wars, especially those after 1945, were only destructive (not even productive economically given the reliance often on imported weapons).²² There was little emotional appeal to engage with factional and intra-state wars from a purely military perspective.

Such intransigence is remarkable considering that the USA like other Western powers developed counter-insurgency experience over the course of the nineteenth century. The American Civil War, the subject of Susan-Mary Grant’s contribution to this special issue, resulted in US military law for the first time codifying the treatment of captured partisans. Women and children were usually spared direct reprisals by both Confederates and Unionists during the American Civil War – as long as they were white (not black or Indian) – captured irregulars were frequently submitted to summary justice. Even though the Lieber Code stipulated that even captured partisans were entitled to military trial, in several campaigns Union commanders, often in reprisal for Confederate ruthlessness, ordered summary shootings of irregulars.²³ Nor did US counterinsurgency experience end there. During the awkward task of cutting off civilian support for enemy insurgents, the US armed forces matched other Great Powers in adopting ‘reconcentration’ tactics, such as in post-Spanish Cuba and post-Spanish Philippines. Similar tactics had been employed by the Spanish themselves, who during their last colonial counterinsurgency in Cuba during 1895–98 reconcentrated civilians in the loyalist west of the island, often in response to the ‘deconcentration’ strategy of the Cuban Liberation Army.²⁴ The British turned the chaotic Spanish counterinsurgency model into a ‘camp’ system, less bloody than the Spanish-Cuban precedent but appalling (and well publicised) all the same. Blockhouses and wire intercepted Boer guerrillas while civilian support for the insurgency was curtailed by the forced relocation of civilians into ‘concentration camps’. The Americans in the Philippines used similar ruthlessness, albeit matched with a ‘civic action’ programme (of using the presence of military bases to ‘civilise’ relocated populations). The French in Morocco under General Lyautey had their own version of ‘civic action’ called the ‘oil slick’ strategy.²⁵

National traditions of counterinsurgency had clearly emerged by the end of the nineteenth century. Yet as this volume shows, these traditions were not hermetic. Strategists read beyond their national literatures and the counterinsurgency strategy of nations actually overlapped with and informed each other. The Belgian-officered Force Públique in the Congo Free State, as Mario Draper explains, borrowed strategy from French and British precedents during its 1892–94 Congo-Arab War, Belgium possessing as yet little military tradition of its own. Little-known Belgian concepts of counter-insurgency appealed to universal – and flexible – laws of war as much as such better-known theorists as Callwell and Lyautey. Alexander Morrison’s study explains how Callwell’s cultural preconceptions limited his understanding of Russian counter-insurgency operations in Central Asia. His information was second-hand and he was all too inclined to support interpretations which matched his own model. On the one hand Callwell was recognisable in a Victorian sense in underestimating the sophistication of Russia’s ‘savage’ enemies, in their fortress systems, for example, even equating the conquest of unyielding natural terrain with an unyielding ‘character’ of non-European opposition. On the other hand he was refreshingly matter-of-fact in his acceptance of atrocities and killings of civilians, and did not stand upon this as a faux moral issues by which inaccurately to distinguish Russian imperialism from British: indeed Callwell’s coverage of Russian actions in Central Asia understood the ‘Great Game’ to be militarily complementary.

Mobility and pursuit

Despite the absence of railways in Europe and the USA for much of the nineteenth century, and even longer in the cases of Latin America, Africa and China, regular armies accelerated their mobility. The advent of the French levée en masse, perfected by Napoleon, led to greater mobility of armies in Europe. Napoleon prided himself on his mobility: marching fast and divided on multiple roads certainly eased the efficiency with which the French lived off the land.²⁶ One of the paradoxes of the creeping modernisation caused by railways, factories and more sophisticated weaponry, was that it led to mass armies and less mobility than during the pre-twentieth century times of rapid movement on threadbare logistics and living off the land. Martin van Creveld argued that Europe’s Western Front from 1915 ushered in a new era of static wafare, which persisted amidst the mass armies of the Second World War, and the logistically complex successive generations of weapons technology since the Cold War.²⁷ Thus our period of study in many ways represented a high point in regular armies’ mobility. As a consequence nineteenth-century guerrillas in turn proved at their most successful when operating in coordination with regular forces.²⁸

Accelerated mobility led to the overhaul of ‘cabinet warfare’ norms by regular armies on the one hand, and their revitalisation by insurgents on the other. In Europe the French Revolutionary abandonment of fortifications as centres of supplies propelled more living off the land.²⁹ But fortifications retained their importance as bases for insurgents throughout the nineteenth century, in Iberia, southern Italy, the Tyrol, Central Asia, China and Mexico. Yingcong Dai’s study of the White Lotus rebellion shows how mountaintop forts were refuges both for insurgents and civilans trying to stay out of harm’s way. Fortified topography also featured in irregular warfare in Mexico, Spain, Portugal, and Central Asia, as the articles by Nathaniel Morris, Mark Lawrence, Charles Esdaile and Alexander Morrison respectively show.

As for nineteenth-century irregular warfare, mobility was more mixed. In most instances insurgents continued the patterns of high mobility within local regions only. Natalia Sobrevilla and Alejandro Rabinovich show how ‘intermittent’ mobilisation by local volunteers in South America tended to be militarily superior to the ‘permanent’ mobilisation of the indoctrinated and expedited levies of the state. Localism is also a feature of Charles Esdaile’s study of Portugal’s locally-organised militia (ordenança) which proved effective in harassing and ambushing longer-ranged French invasion forces. ‘Intermittent’ and militia forces, according to Archer Jones, pursued one side of the coin of western strategy since ancient times: ‘raiding’. Raiders were unable to occupy territory or populations for extended periods of time. Instead ‘persistent’ forces faced this task, including in counter-insurgency campaigns.³⁰ Mark Lawrence’s study of the Carlist insurgency of the 1830s shows how raiding was dictated by longer-term political as well as shorter-term military considerations. Population centres deemed ‘Carlist’ were ‘liberated’ by raids and treated with a view to shoring up political support, whereas hostile populations were pillaged for short-term military benefit.

Raiders, militia and ‘intermittent’ soldiers usually resented the growing claims of states to impose militarisation. Giacomo Macola’s and Luke Hogan’s study shows how pre-colonial African politics were undergoing militarisation in traditional ways. The Katanga region witnessed hit-and-run tactics, and static and siege warfare fuelled by the Sanga insurgency enjoying local knowledge of terrain and support networks. Warlords (garenganze) were all-important, and not all were able to survive European penetration in the late century. The Yeke managed to survive by reinventing themselves as a rapid deployment force in order to meet the threat posed by the Sanga, eventually defeating the Sanga. The Yeke tribe survived thanks to their core of armed gunmen, and became agents of the Congo Free State, whilst the Sanga were eventually crushed. The prospects for tribal autonomy under European conquest were thus partly dictated by pre-contact factors.

Even sophisticated imperial societies offering advanced constitutional and legal safeguards were prone to draconian policing, albeit seldom on the scale witnessed during the French Revolution, mid-century China, or colonial Africa. Nineteenth-century Ireland produced a recurrent insurgent nationalism, stemming from its subordinate position to London, the grudging emancipation of the island’s majority Catholic population, and the subsequent inability for any elite in Dublin to cut across political divisions by appealing to the ‘constitution’, as elites in neighbouring Great Britain often did with success.³¹ After 1800, despite being formally integrated into a ‘United’ Kingdom and the British composite monarchy, Ireland was ruled by a series of special rules with colonial overtones of counterinsurgency. As Tim Bowman argues in this volume, the Irish Constabulary, whose origins dated back to 1822, was much more of a continental-style gendarmerie than the ‘servant of the citizen’ local police beloved of Great Britain; indeed, only the Dublin Metropolitan Police operated in conditions deemed ‘safe’ enough to be routinely unarmed on the classic British model. Yet the Constabulary’s varied civic duties and uneven distribution seldom gave them the appearance of a colonial occupation force except in moments of insurgency crisis, such as 1848 and 1867. Even though the Ribbonmen and Fenian insurgencies of 1848 and 1867 paled into insignificance compared to the mass risings of 1798 and 1916, Bowman’s study uncovers the anxieties of the Protestant Ascendancy. The threat of Fenian infiltration into the substantial Irish elements in the British Army, along with the Irish militia, dominated the security concerns of the Dublin Castle administration and led to a series of projected countermeasures (such as there demolition of houses close to Dublin Castle, plans to use infrastructure to link isolated police ‘barracks’ in there countryside, and the creation of flying columns besides).

As the century progressed metropolitan public opinion became a factor in opposition to colonial powers applying brutalised counter-insurgency. Ian Beckett’s study shows how British counterinsurgency efforts in the 1880s Third Burma War were dictated by topographical and climate challenges, notions of collaborating hill tribes like the Karen being ‘martial races’, and a concern that the excessive imbalance in casualties in the British favour be kept secret from the press as much as possible. Beckett also shows how villagers found themselves between two fires: rapacious bandits (dacoits) and foreign imperialists in equal measure, but that part of the British success was in convincing many villagers that less pillage and more protection was to be found at British hands. The British used flying columns like in the Vendee, and a similar incremental garrisoning of villages. Despite the significant effort and casualties expended, the campaign of the ‘lost footsteps’ never got appropriate recognition.

Equally, irregular resistance to Russian conquest in Central Asia, as well as British expansion in Burma, was manifest in highly mobile but also highly localised armed groups, as Alexander Morrison’s and Ian Becket’s articles show. But whereas the French, British and Russians counterinsurgencies tended to offer cohesive fronts, other armies were more fragmented, increasing the appeal of longer-range operations for insurgents. Nathaniel Morris shows how Manuel Lozada’s long-standing campaign against the Mexican state ranged across several states. Mark Lawrence shows how Carlists in the 1830s exploited the internal political disintegration of a nominally more powerful Spanish state by launching expeditions across Spain in 1836 and 1837. Most strikingly, the White Lotus insurgents at the turn of the century performed long-range marches from Hubei which eerily anticipated Mao’s ideologically very different ‘Long March’ of the 1930s.

Episodes such as those of Poland in 1793, 1831 and 1863, as well as the struggle of the Garibaldini, demonstrated the hybrid nature of guerrilla warfare and the growing tendency of insurgents to militarise themselves formally.³² The French call for a ‘chouan’ people’s war during the Franco-Prussian War after Sedan showed the limits of irregular war in the age of the revolution in military affairs. Small tactical successes aside, the war was only indirectly impacted by French partisans, and civilians proved lukewarm to support such a struggle. For a long time, episodes of brutality by the occupying Prussian-led armies in France led historians to discern a peculiarly German preponderance for atrocity which linked the Franco-Prussian War, to exterminatory colonial policing in Germany’s African colonies, to the ‘Rape of Belgium’ in 1914, and ultimately to the unprecedented horrors of the Nazi empire in Europe.³³ But Matteo Scianna in this volume reappraises this view with his study of German counter-insurgency during the Franco-Prussian War. Scianna shows that German responses to real and imagined francs-tireurs were not exceptional. Combat stresses would have led to outrages being committed by any army, and given that soldiers found guilty of committing atrocities were consistently subjected to courts martial.

Scianna shows how ideological perceptions linking the levée en masse with civilian resistance in 1871 distorted what was a ‘normal’ symmetrical war. Equally twentieth-century perceptions of Geman brutality retrospectively shaped understanding of Prussia’s nineteenth-century militarism. A more sympathetic view of Prussian history has emerged only recently.³⁴ Prussia after 1945 was remembered as the villain, its progressive heritage being selectively forgotten. Patterns of how wars were remembered, and equally how and why they were forgotten, form a major theme in this volume. In some instances they are of a largely operational nature, such as Charles Esdaile’s article explaining the failure of the Napoleonic empire to learn the lessons of the 1762 ‘Guerra Fantástica’ in relation to Portugal’s fierce topography, fortresses and capacity for guerrilla warfare.

In other instances they help to address enduring misconceptions about the role played by military history in national identity. Late-imperial China has usually been viewed as an ‘amilitary’ or ‘demilitarised’ culture, largely as a consequence of centuries of Confucianism leading to an inward-looking, bureaucratic dynasty which proved all the more vulnerable to Western military encroachments. This view has now been revised.³⁵ The articles by Yingcong Dai and Kenneth Swope, on insurgency and counter-insurgency respectively in the Xing dynasty, revise the old orthodoxy further, complicating and enhancing our understanding in the studies of ‘White Lotus’ insurgency and General Zuo’s counter-insurgency. Kenneth Swope’s study places counterinsurgency at the heart of the Xing dynasty’s survival during the internal and external threats of the mid-nineteenth century. Zuo imposed opium bans and reindustrialisation strategies as a means of winning over ‘hearts and minds’, managing to suppress numerous overlapping rebellions. In a different vein of remembering and forgetting, Richard Reid’s article explains how post-independence African elites, themselves forged by anti-colonial guerrilla struggles, proved to be selective about how they remembered nineteenth-century pre-colonial warfare. As Africans’ resistance to the European ‘Scramble’ for their continent offered the Africans little military glory, post-independent states preferred to remember anti-colonial independence struggles of the twentieth century. Pre-colonial insurgencies, by contrast, were selectively remembered, usually with twentieth-century calculations in mind. Reid’s study of Uganda explains the thriving pre-nineteenth century traditions of African kingdoms expanding and centralising the power of kingdoms via tightened control of professional armies. Mirambo (Miyela Kasanda, 1840–1884), a military genius who militarised the Nyamwezi tribe, was selectively remembered by twentieth-century African leaders, including by Idi Amin who needed to discover legitimacy in pre-colonial African militarism as a figleaf legitimising his own coup.

Towards total warfare

This nineteenth century, at least from a Western perspective, lies at the heart of a period in history in which strategies for waging war became ‘total’. From a strategic perspective, 1945 marked the end of an era since the French Revolution during which military strategy was dominated by the desire to seek the unconditional surrender of the enemy (and often of his political institutions). Such aims had proved to be high stakes indeed whenever ‘hearts and minds’ did not accept regime change. At the same time, even though post-1945 strategy fundamentally shifted towards limited war once more (given the mushroom-shaped cloud), there was a growing realisation that the absence of war did not necessarily mean peace. The Cold War prospect of nuclear Armageddon made warring parties more likely to settle for less than the all-out imposition of their will in the Clausewitzian sense, meaning that post-1945 history has witnessed the logical resurrection of ‘limited war’ strategies.³⁶

The development of the rifle, and its ability to be mass-produced and disseminated throughout the armies, resulted in a tactics being reformed. The increase in rate of fire, range, and accuracy meant that the rifle eclipsed the artillery as the monster on the battlefield, and that battlefield became ever more lethal – as a result, the way troops moved and organised themselves underwent a gradual but substantial change. It became ever more fruitless and devastating to attempt a frontal assault against such firepower, and so armies began to abandon the traditional massed frontal attacks in favour of flanking manoeuvres, and mostly abandoned the bayonet in reaction to the increased range of combat.³⁷ Simultaneously, the new lethality meant that the way troops attacked had to be altered: the eighteenth-century organisation of massed regiments of men became inadequate, and a new system of advance had to be created. Troops began to disperse into skirmishing lines instead of standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and as a result the system of volley fire was abandoned; smaller units were created and instead a new system of fire and manoeuvre was invented by Moltke during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, leading every tactical group to remain on the offensive, and to attack, manoeuvre, and pause under cover of fire from another unit.³⁸ Simultaneously, fighting standing erect was abandoned and earth- or stone- works were increasingly introduced after the American Civil War. Concealment was another way of surviving, and the fashionable old, bright uniforms were gradually replaced in favour of duller, camouflaging colours like feldgrau, khaki, and horizon blue. The introduction of smokeless powder near the end of the century favoured skirmishing lines instead of the columns of the eighteenth century. The ability of a man to hide himself behind an earthwork meant that troops could extend themselves in longer lines than before and still project an appearance of defensive strength – meaning that the concentration of men per metre dropped from 1 every 10 metres in the eighteenth century down to 1 every 25 in the American Civil War and 1 in 250 metres in the Great War.³⁹

The mid-century counter-insurgencies addressed in this volume witnessed accelerated innovation in weapons and logistical technology, especially in the case of the American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War. Total war was accompanied by total poltical strategies, as the price of defeat – such as the abolition of slavery in the Confederacy – promised to overturn the social order. Yet even ‘total’ wars were experienced in an emotional manner recognisable to veterans of pre-industrial wars. Susan-Mary Grant’s study of a future Supreme Court Justice’s (Oliver Wendell Holmes) experiences fighting against the Confederacy applies the concepts of morale and emotion developed in John Keegan’s seminal Face of Battle. Grant makes the case for an ‘emotional revolution’ in relation to counter-insurgent warfare, as Holmes’s experiences fighting are a coming-of-age progression from boyhood to manhood, from civilian to military. Studying Holmes’ campaign letters, Grant reveals his emotional strain, his jadededness with the progressive Unionist ideas over the course of campaigning, and ultimately how the experience of fighting insurgents forged in Holmes a new identity of a ‘warrior’, which never left him even as he progressed in a distinguished career later in life.

Against the context of the relentless modernisation of symmetrical warfare, the role of the insurgent seemed to be increasingly outdated. Given that nineteenth-century insurgencies tended to be reactionary responses to revolutions rather than the reverse, it is unsurprising that Engels, Marx, Lenin and Trotsky downplayed guerrilla warfare. That said, from the mid-nineteenth-century there were some thinkers in Poland and Italy who identified a link between guerrilla warfare and revolutions (Mazzini being the most distinguished). The Mazzinian model of achieving democratic revolution via guerrilla warfare became more radicalised by the later part of the century. From the 1880s, the revolutionary German Socialist (SPD), Johann Most, coined the term ‘propaganda by deed’.⁴⁰ But there were some dissenters. Jean de Bloch at the end of the nineteenth century was one such figure whose War of the Future argued that the individualistic potential, range and precision of the rifle made guerrilla war the war of the future instead of close-order infantry combat.

But an abiding model of nineteenth-century guerrilla is the civil war revolt against modernity. Arguably, reactionary and religious-inspired guerrilla movements in the nineteenth century were most likely to start in response to sudden political change, as the 1833 onset of the First Carlist War (the subject of Mark Lawrence’s article) and the 1890s Canudo revolt in Brazil showed. Carlists and Canudos were anti-liberal and anti-republican respectively, and their revolts had religious overtones. A second model is liberationist and anti-colonial, such as in Latin America during 1810–1824, Haiti, 1860s Mexico, Cuban independence revolts in the 1868–78 and 1895–98 periods, and also Garibaldi’s Italy and Poland. A third model is in response to new colonial campaigns penetrating from the outside, such as Shamil’s famous resistance ot Russian campaigning in the Caucasus, Maori Land Wars, Native Americans in the US frontier wars, Zulus, Boers, and resistance to Dutch expansion in Sumatra and French expansion in North Africa, Madagascar, Tonkin, and that of the USA in the Philippines.⁴¹ But for most of the nineteenth century huge areas of Africa were immune to European conquest. Just as in Asia in the Early Modern Era whites at African ports were seen as traders looking to barter, not posing much of a military threat to Muslim and Animist empires throughout the continent.⁴² Even amidst the late-nineteenth-century ‘Scramble’ African insurgencies were conditioned for reasons which had very little to do with encroaching European imperialism, as the article by Giacomo Macola and Jack Hogan attests.

Thus this volume views nineteenth-century insurgency and counter-insurgency on a global scale. It shows the commonalities of responses more than their differences, and refracts these through themes which crop up repeatedly in different times places. These themes include common problems and common solutions; the challenge of commanding local intelligence networks; public opinion; millenarianism, magic and religion; technology; ‘hearts and minds’; the legal framework of state violence; racial stereotypes; and patterns of forgetting and remembering guerrilla conflicts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-insurgencies.

2. Förster and Nagler (eds.), On the Road to Total War, 6.

3. Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy, 387.

4. Heuser (ed.), Small Wars and Insurgencies in Theory and Practice; and Marks and Rich, “Back to the Future.”

5. Daase, “Clausewitz and Small Wars,” 192–194.

6. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 1–3.

7. Mark Hewitson, Absolute War, 129.

8. David Bell makes this case in a forthright manner (Bell, First Total War).

9. Heuser, Strategy before Clausewitz, 167–72.

10. Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy, 120.

11. Ibid., 146–152.

12. Heuser, Strategy before Clausewitz, 62–63.

13. Ibid., 187–188.

14. Scheipers, Unlawful Combatants, 33–34.

15. Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy, 389.

16. See note 14 above.

17. Scheipers, Unlawful Combatants, 61.

18. Ibid., 54.

19. Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare, 93–98.

20. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-insurgencies, 24–27.

21. Black, Rethinking Military History, 6.

22. Muenkler, “Clausewitz and the Privatisation of War,” 226–227.

23. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-insurgencies, 30–31.

24. Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 54–58.

25. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-insurgencies, 30–41.

26. Esdaile, Wars of Napoleon, 41–42.

27. van Creveld, Supplying War, 17–26.

28. Porch, Counterinsurgency, 13; and Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare, 50–52.

29. Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy, 80.

30. Jones, The art of war in the western world, 662–716.

31. Gillen, “Ascendancy Ireland, 1660-1800,” 48–73.

32. Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare, 65–69.

33. E.g. Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction; and Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare, 83–88.

34. Especially, Clark, Iron Kingdom.

35. E.g. di Cosmo (ed.), Military Culture in Imperial China, 1–22.

36. Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy, 17–26.

37. Fuller, The Conduct of War 1789–1961, 104.

38. Ibid., 120.

39. Creveld, Technology and War, 172.

40. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-insurgencies, 14–15.

41. Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare, 53–99.

42. Vandervort, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830–1914, 26–27.