Introduction
Michael W. Charney and Kathryn Wellen
T
he historiography on European military encounters with the
Americas, Asia, and Africa has long overshadowed that on war-
fare between non-Western societies. Twentieth-century Western
military arrogance meant that in much scholarship non-Westerners were
viewed as culturally, technologically, and sometimes even physically, un-
equal to the challenge of modern warfare. Contradictory evidence, such
as the Vietnam War, was accounted for as examples of political betrayal
back home. Alternatively, the military victories of non-Westerners might
simply be ignored because they were incompatible with the reigning
European register of “racial conflict”, as James Belich (1986) has shown
in his analysis of the New Zealand Wars.^1 In more recent decades, the
great impact of Geoffrey Parker’s (1988) thesis on the military revolu-
tion that demonstrated why Europeans had succeeded in conquering the
globe over the course of the early modern period kept historiography
focused on the West.^2 Nevertheless, as contemporary scholarship is in-
creasingly de-centring world or global history away from Europe and the
North Atlantic, scholars who revisit earlier centuries of the non-Western
world find in the documents and archives of Europe and China that the
martial prowess of non-Western societies glorified in indigenous chroni-
cles, oral traditions, and even puppet theatre was taken very seriously by
Europeans before the late nineteenth century.
This recent academic interest is actually a revival of earlier interest
that had practical motivations. In the sixteenth century, Europeans were
- James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial
Conflict (Auckland: Penguin Books, 1986). - Geofrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West,
1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).