Industrialization of War, 1840–84 257service army in 1889, maintained volunteer units in their African and
Asian colonies, including the famed Foreign Legion.
An amazing fact of world history is that in the nineteenth century
even small detachments of troops, equipped in up-to-date European
fashion, could defeat African and Asian states with ease. As steam
ships and railroads supplemented animal packtrains, natural obstacles
of geography and distance became increasingly trivial. European ar
mies and navies therefore acquired the capacity to bring their re
sources to bear at will even in remote and previously impenetrable
places. As this occurred, the drastic discrepancy between European
and local organization for war became apparent in one part of the
world after another.
The most important demonstration of the newly effective margin of
armed superiority Europeans came to enjoy over other peoples oc
curred in 1839–42 on the coast of China, when small British detach
ments defeated the forces available to the Chinese Empire in the
Opium War. Throughout Queen Victoria’s long reign (1837–1901) a
series of similar wars—some almost unnoticed by the public in
England—kept British arms almost continuously engaged.^46 The re
sulting expansion of the British Empire, formal and informal, was
matched by more sporadic but no less successful military action by
France and Russia in Africa and Asia.
All three of the imperial powers found that armed actions along the
periphery of their respective empires cost them next to nothing. For
example, the Opium War, so fateful for China and Japan, lasted from
November 1839 to August 1842. Yet British military appropriations
actually decreased in 1841 below prewar levels, as the following
figures (in millions) show:^47
Year Army and Ordnance Navy Total
1838 £8.0 £4.8 £12.8
1839 8.2 4.4 12.6
1840 8.5 5.3 13.8
1841 8.5 3.9 12.3
1842 8.2 6.2 14.4
1843 8.2 6.2 14.4- Bond, Victorian Military Campaigns. pp. 309–11, counts no fewer than
seventy-two separate British campaigns during Victoria’s reign, or more than one per
year. - B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1971), pp.
396–97.