258 Chapter SevenThe fact was that army and navy detachments did not cost much more
when they went into the field than when they remained quietly in
garrison. Payrolls did not alter and the cost of supplies did not rise
much so long as only small detachments were engaged. Ammunition
expended scarcely made any difference, for powder did not store well
for long periods of time, and when not used in active combat had to be
discarded after a few years because of chemical deterioration. The loss
of a few European lives seemed of no great importance either in an age
of rapidly expanding populations, and when opportunities for heroism
in civil society were few and far between. Thus from the 1840s on
ward, far more drastically than in any earlier age, Europeans’ near
monopoly of strategic communication and transportation, together
with a rapidly evolving weaponry that remained always far in advance
of anything local fighting men could lay hands on, made imperial
expansion cheap—so cheap that the famous phrase to the effect that
Britain acquired its empire in a fit of absence of mind is a caricature
rather than a falsehood.^48
At the same time, there were real limits to European power. The
explicit policy and potential military might of the United States,
briefly apparent during and at the close of the Civil War, warned
European powers away from military adventure in the New World.
The French withdrawal from Mexico in 1867, and British deference to
American interests in such matters as the Alabama claims (1872) and
the Venezuelan (1895–99) and Alaskan (1903) boundary disputes,
demonstrated this fundamental fact. Without bothering to maintain an
army or navy of European scale, the United States still was able to stop
European imperial expansion in the Caribbean and Latin America.
Similarly, as soon as Japan proved capable of organizing an army and
navy of European type, that nation, too, carved out a sphere of in
fluence of its own within which European power could not prevail.
This, however, did not become evident until the very end of the
nineteenth century, and Japan had to show its might in war with
Russia, 1904–5, before this second limit upon European military su
periority was universally recognized.
In a sense, too, Russian withdrew within its own vast boundaries
after the Crimean War and constituted yet another separate world
within which western European industrial and military superiority
could not penetrate. Indeed, military failure against the West found
compensation in Central Asia, where Russian expeditionary forces
- Cf. Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in
the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981).