European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815-1960 (Fontana History of European War & Soc... Book

An unusual book on warfare and history, Kiernan's European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 1815-1960 traces the major wars that defined Europe's advance into Asia, Africa, and the Pacific – then to a discussion of the characteristics of the warfare that enabled it – and last to the subsequent collapse of these great colonial empires.

This anyway, describes the progress the book makes. The question all this history provokes is why? Why set this as the course for the book? What question does Kiernan search for in answer? What inquiry inspires the discussion? In full candor, the answer to this is unclear. Kiernan himself is ambivalent about his book’s purpose. It is not really a book about Europe's rise and fall. And it is not really a book that deliberates on the reason for Europe’s imperial expansion. Nor could the book be characterized as a summary of colonial warfare. Kiernan's book may possess qualities of each of these, but in the main it could not identify with any one.

If Kiernan's book has any main motif it is that of empire. It is only the seductions of empire that can explain the great marvel of European expansion during this time; that can distinguish the pattern of European expansion in the time before Napoleon from the time after; that gives credit and puts in proper perspective the great exertions of human effort and courage throughout the crucible of the wars of empire; that can account for the specimen of colonial warfare and the spectacle of national resistance and revolution that followed. For Kiernan, empire is the wonderful but terrible enchantress of powerful states. This, if there is any, is the lofty theme that inhabits the whole of the book.

European Empires then is a book about warfare, but only incidentally so. Kiernan traces these different wars, not so much because they illuminate the logic of the politics and history of the 19th and 20th century, but because they reveal a great hysteria that quietly had taken hold of the European imagination. The effects of empire and imperial hysteria were not necessarily bad. Nevertheless, the result was a terrific distortion of Europe’s politics and interests. If this basic understanding of Kiernan is right (and it may not be), it presents an interesting historical thesis; but one that essentially is borrowed from the school of Marx, and the like, who look on Europe's politics with a cynical, rather than a sympathetic, eye.

Whatever may be the best interpretation of Kiernan writ large, the details of his book can be described with more confidence. Britain, Russia, and France, are the looming characters in this book. They are the actors that occupy the stage of Europe’s imperial drama.

Each of the three—Britain, Russia, France—engages in wars early on that come to define the beginning of their empires. For the British, it was their conquest of India; for Russia, the advance into the Ottoman-Persian Caucus; and for France it was Louis Philippe's adventure into Algeria. All of these expeditions whet the appetite of imperial ambition, rather than satiate or upset it. Britain turned its armies then on Burma, the Punjab, and on China in the First Opium War; Russia moved its marauding armies onto the Kazakh steppe and began to confront the inner Asian khanates of Bokhara and Kokand; and France expanded its conquests in Algeria and supported the insubordinate Egyptian Pasha against the Sultan.

These were the first post Napoleonic experiments in empire. And after the Crimean War, the Second Opium War, and the Berlin Congress of 1885, Europe increasingly cast her energies outward, aggressively intruding into the once distant frontiers of Central Asia, China, and inner Africa. This was European empire at its height.

Of course, to advance these imperial goals, colonial warfare was the single most important means. Variety of innovations in technologies and military weapons helped maintain imperial combat superiority. Unlike the conquistadors in America three hundred years before, Asians and Africans were not awed by European weapons. Many of the Asiatic princes could draw on the same basic arsenal European armies could. But rapid changes in weaponry, along with European brilliance for adapting fighting doctrine, helped to maintain the European edge in material warfare. Things such as the rifle, expanding bullets, exploding ordinance, magazines, light artillery, the machine gun, innovations in field fortifications, railway, heliograph, balloons, development of field medicine, combined with important changes in tactical doctrine for fighting colonial campaigns all confirmed the advantage of imperial armies over local, indigenous forces.

But what distinguished colonial warfare from the more traditional, classic European, continental warfare were not so much the tangible changes, but those that were intangible. Kiernan says the most important difference was the total reliance on improvisation—recruiting troops and gathering supplies not as planned, but on the go—this was an essential characteristic of the campaigns of colonial warfare. But improvisation was not the only one. Long tours; dispersed, very remote, deployments; mixed composition of units, often with native enlistees and European officers; emphasis on an economy of force; contempt for the laws of war, such as: indiscriminate bombardment, no quarter, summary execution of prisoners, collective punishment, weapons that inflicted gratuitous suffering, severe reprisals, and universal practice of plunder and pillage—these were the features that distinguished colonial from continental warfare.

As the administration and politics of empire increased in importance, so did the effects back home in domestic, internal affairs. These colonial influences first appear with war reporting, the first occasion of which is said to have been the Crimean War. This opened a new dimension for domestic politics. Not only did public opinion take cognizance of colonial wars, but demagogues, dissidents, and other critics of government could seize on foreign affairs and exploit them for their own political advantage. As important, military officials returning from colonial campaigns began to enter into domestic politics, which tended to have the effect of militarizing issues. Spanish politics became more bellicose, more confrontational, as veterans and loyalists returned from America. In France, when Napoleon became President of the Second Republic, he relied on Algerian veterans to help him disband the French parliament and proclaim a second French Empire.

Probably the most significant political effect of imperial expansion was that it did not relax European rivalry, ultimately it accentuated it. Bismarck's peace at the Berlin Congress of 1878 seemed to recreate the halcyon peace of the Vienna Congress. But things were different now. Europeans had grown jealous of each other’s colonial possessions. In Tunis, Siam, Fashoda, Manchuria, and then Morocco, colonial disputes were expanded into European disputes. Russia turned its energies from east to west, and recommitted itself in the Balkans. Italy and Turkey skirmished over Libya and other remnants of the Ottoman Empire. These were the antecedents that set the stage for the First World War.

If one looks closely, the rot of European empire can be discerned before the First World War. But it was really after the War that the real erosion was apparent. Lenin proclaimed a revolution in Russia and disowned its imperial possessions (later to reclaim them); the Irish achieved independence from Britain, and to some extent so did the Egyptians; Nehru and his Congress party began to agitate for their own political rights. Perhaps most symbolic, Spain succumbed to civil war, in no insignificant part because returning veterans from Morocco supported the cause of General Franco against republican forces; foreshadowing events in France during the dark days of the Algerian War.

After the Second World War, Britain, Russia, and France adopted more extreme measures to suppress tumult. Britain immediately relinquished India, Palestine, Burma and Ceylon. Stalin responded differently, deporting resistant Caucus populations to Siberia en masse. France became ensnared in bloody guerilla wars in Indochina and then Algeria. Britain was more successful in Malaya and Kenya, but only slightly more, and conceded independence shortly thereafter. Even the Dutch and the Portuguese could not resist the change in temper, as their age-old colonies too were caught in the avalanche of collapsing empires. Indonesia won its independence; revolts began in Angola and Guinea. It appeared as though the great drama of European imperialism was in its final act.

In acclaim of European Empires, one can praise Kiernan's interesting, even contrarian, thesis. It is always refreshing to have a vigorously argued alternative to the conventional narrative of history. And with that comes the coverage that Kiernan gives to the wars and skirmishes that often only footnote history, rather than occupy center stage. Kiernan reverses this. The First and Second World Wars are sidelined. Instead the starring roles were given to the Burmese Wars, the Afghan Wars, the Caucasian Wars, the Zulu Wars, the Maori Wars, and so on. These conflicts are rarely given treatment, and even less so as events on to them self. It is an interesting change to see these wars elevated to the promontory of warfare. Added to this, Kiernan is able to combine great quotes and anecdotes to flavor the narrative. For example, a remark by Oliver Wendell Holmes in defense of British actions during the Sepoy Mutiny, arguing “that Delhi, like Carthage, deserved to be annihilated” (an echo of Cato the elder’s famous entreaties to Rome “delenda est carthago”). It is attributes like these that give the book charm.

All that said however, something essential in Kiernan's book is missing. It is hard to describe it. Crudely put: much of Kiernan's meaning is absent. It is as though he has supplied the brick and mortar of a building, and has even pretended at some construction of its assembly. But by the end of the book it is discovered, for all the show, nothing has been built. Reading Kiernan, the reader is left to do much of the work of making sense of the book them self. Kiernan gives account of many things that span a wide swath of history, but he has failed to explain what they all add up to. It is probably for that reason Kiernan's book is lost in obscurity. It is not because his history is bad, or because his thesis is absurd. Rather Kiernan spends no time to develop his meaning or refine his main points. When the author neglects their own treatment in such an essential way, it will inevitably offend the reader if they are left to do all the hard work them self. This is the great failure of Kiernan's book. He asks something of his reader, but requites them with nothing in return. It is almost a tease: Kiernan flirts with a lot of ideas, many of them interesting. But ultimately he pursues none of them.