256 Chapter Seven
Krupp and Armstrong. By the 1880s this technical gap had become
glaring, and when the Royal Navy managed to break away from the
tutelage of the Board of Ordnance (1886), its procurement officers
embarked on a far more intimate alliance with private arms makers
than European armies and navies had ever been ready to contemplate
previously. But before exploring the intensified patterns of military-
industrial interdependence that this breakaway inaugurated, it seems
well to pause a moment to survey the global impact of the European
art of war as it had evolved by 1880 or thereabouts.
Global Repercussions
A striking discrepancy at once leaps to the eye when one turns atten
tion from the European continent itself to the military experience of
states and peoples in Africa and Asia during the period from 1840 to
- Larger and larger armies, built around a system of short-term
conscription followed by a period of service in the reserves, came to
dominate the scene on the continent of Europe. Such armies, how
ever, were not for export. Asian and African rulers could not create
mass armies of conscripts. They lacked the needful administrative
structure, not to mention an officer corps, an arms supply, or even, in
many cases, a citizenry which could be trusted not to attack its rulers if
it had the chance. Only in Japan did the European pattern of a con
script army prove feasible—and that only after provoking a brief but
brutal civil war in 1877.
Conversely, European governments could not readily use short
term conscripts for service overseas, since getting them to and from
the scene of action would consume most of the conscript’s legal term
of service. What Europeans needed for action at a distance were long-
service troops. Great Britain maintained such an army in India until
1947, and in fact most of Britain’s military engagements in the
nineteenth century were fought by troops of the Indian army.^45 The
other great imperial powers of the age, France and Russia, lacked such
a distinct instrument as the Indian army gave to Great Britain;
although the French, even after going over to a conscript short-term
- Cf. Brian Bond, ed., Victorian Military Campaigns (London, 1967), pp. 7–8;
Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An Account of the Indian Army, Its Officers and Men
(London, 1974). The Cardwell reforms of the British army, 1870–74, constituted a kind
of halfway house between the Old Regime patterns of long-term service that had
prevailed until that time and the continental conscript and reservist system that Prussia
had made de rigueur.
