Reviews for Colonial conscripts

The average rating for Colonial conscripts based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-02-26 00:00:00 Robert Schelkun In Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857-1960 author Myron Echenberg presents a New Military history, or social history, of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais from their creation to their dissolution when French West Africa gained independence. Echenberg aims to explore who the Tirailleurs were, how they lived, and most importantly how they “responded to their ambiguous and often contradictory position within the colonial social formation” (Echenberg, 1). Through this micro-history approach, Echenberg is also able to explore the macro picture, demonstrating how the Tirailleurs Sénégalais evolved as a military force. The text is divided into four sections that chronologically trace this evolution. The first section covers 1857 to 1905 in which the Tirailleurs operated as an army of conquest. Echenberg focuses on Tirailleur recruiting patterns, demonstrating that the majority of its members were drawn from the lowest social ranks of society, often slaves chosen for their alleged martial traits, while he also charts the Tirailleurs’ significant growth from a paltry force of five hundred soldiers to a substantial one of nine thousand in 1904. In the second section, 1905 to 1919, the Tirailleurs evolved into an army of occupation with the creation of the French West African Federation, and experienced dramatic growth once again, more than quadrupling in membership during this period. Pre-World War I, this growth can be summed up by the axiom that “it takes more men to hold territory than to conquer it”, as the French had wrapped up their colonial conquests, save in Morocco, by this time. But perhaps the most important development of this period was the 1912 Conscription Law that changed the Tirailleurs forever. Indeed, the 1912 Conscription Law transformed the Tirailleurs “into a mass army recruited from every level of West African society” (Echenberg, 46). This law represented only partial conscription, targeting males between twenty and twenty-eight years of age, but it was used to supply the massive wartime levies that France would demand from West Africa, and it was a very important first step toward the universal conscription that would prevail in 1919. Appropriately, the third section, 1919 to 1945, casts the Tirailleurs as a conscript army and thus concentrates on how conscription was carried out in West Africa and its consequences, the most significant of which was the vast displacement of people and the break up of families that altered aspects of traditional West African society. Echenberg also examines the effects of World War II on the Tirailleurs, specifically how events such as the “whitening” of the Free French forces and the protest at Thiaroye solidified the group consciousness of the Tirailleurs veterans and spurred the creation of veterans’ organizations that would fight to gain equal benefits to metropolitan veterans. The last section covers 1945 to 1960. Echenberg examines the new military conditions for active Tirailleurs, demonstrating that there were increasing opportunities for promotion and education to be found within its ranks. The semi-professionalization of the Tirailleurs was also reflected in the higher number of soldiers who possessed trade skills. In addition, Echenberg looks at the veterans of the Tirailleurs, both their attempt to reintegrate into society and as a force in West African electoral politics. Echenberg’s effort at a comprehensive social history is limited though. In particular, the periods of the Tirailleurs as an army of conquest and occupation make up only two relatively short chapters, most likely due to the paucity of sources during these periods. Indeed, probably through no fault of Echenberg’s, the text is heavily weighted towards the period after World War I. In fact, Echenberg states that topics such as the sex lives, the family lives, and the political affiliations of Tirailleurs are not treated in-depth because the surviving sources touch only briefly on these subjects. Furthermore, after mentioning that the Tirailleurs served in Indochina in his Acknowledgements section, Echenberg fails to broach the subject further in his main text. This is because the available sources limited his work: at the time of writing, the archives containing information on the late colonial counterinsurgency operations in Indochina, and North Africa as well, remained closed (Echenberg, 2). Thus, Colonial Conscripts is truly a product of its sources. Another criticism of Echenberg’s work is that it does not give adequate attention to the social experiences of Tirailleurs in their countless military and police operations. In the first two sections of his book Echenberg describes the Tirailleurs as a conquest and an occupying army, yet he largely ignores the combat experiences of the Tirailleurs and the effects of combat on the social lives of Tirailleurs troops. Despite touching on the role of the Tirailleurs in World War I and II, it is easy to get the overall impression that the Tirailleurs were not involved in many conflicts at all. Understandably, Colonial Conscripts is primarily a social history and Echenberg does point out that the combat experience of the Tirailleurs has been written about elsewhere; yet combat is as much a social experience as anything else he describes in this book and I believe that some discussion of the Tirailleurs’ combat experiences would have been a valuable addition to his work. Moreover, it is not as if Echenberg was pushed for space. Colonial Conscripts is only one hundred and seventy pages long, so, unless the editors of the Social History of Africa series set a limit on length, he could have easily included more about the Tirailleurs’ combat experiences. An increased book length would have allowed Echenberg to expand further, if possible, on the Tirailleurs’ early social history too. Although Echenberg admits that his text “represents only the beginning of an effort to understand how the African military lived” and despite its niggling faults, Colonial Conscripts stands out in the field of African social history as a foundational text on the Tirailleurs Sénégalais (Echenberg, 1). At the time it was released, it was by far the most comprehensive treatment of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais and, at present, remains an integral text to their study.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-01-06 00:00:00 Jonathan Hopkins A very useful and thorough account of the tirailleurs sénégalais; extremely well researched and detail driven. It’s been a useful introduction, guide, and reference in my own research.