Introductionships, and not how to defeat the various indigenous armies somewhere
beyond the treeline behind the beaches.
European considerations of non-Western warfare were slow to rekin-
dle, but new confrontations with indigenous states and armies rapidly
escalated from about the 1820s. This was partly due to the effects of the
industrial revolution and political centralization in Europe and North
America that brought together both the need for resources and the abil-
ity in terms of military projection and lift that would prompt a new era
of Western warfare and colonial conquests abroad. The course of the
nineteenth century saw increasingly frequent, if inconsistent, signs that
Asian and African armies alike were competing with European forces
less favourably in the past. There were admittedly shocking setbacks
such as the Plains Indians’ defeat of Lt. Colonel George Armstrong
Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn (25–26 June 1876) and the defeat
of a large British formation by a Zulu force armed with iron spears and
cow-hide shields at the Battle of Isandlwana (22 January 1879). These
defeats, however, became opportunities to emphasize moral qualities
that Westerners attributed to themselves that legitimated their wars of
expansion. Western commanders who fought to the death were treated
less as military failures than as martyrs for the cause of the march of
civilization.
But serious Western interest in the indigenous warfare of other parts
of the world declined. Western military theorists were arguably self-
satisfied with colonial warfare doctrine, which for the French, to take
one example, had developed on the cumulative basis of experience in
North Africa, French Indochina, and Madagascar, as it had evolved by
the end of the nineteenth century. It was often assumed that Western ar-
mies were so far advanced militarily that indigenous forces would be un-
able to fight effectively against them. As Gayl D. Ness and William Stahl
(1977) have argued, two key advantages enjoyed by Western militaries
were state backing and their organizational flexibility. The first was most
significant when coupled with military and transportation technology
that enabled lift and power projection overseas and proto-bureaucratic
state institutions could come into play to support such efforts. Such
institutions while not absent in the non-Western world faced a steep
learning curve in their attempts to benefit from the resources afforded