15 results in Citizen Soldiers and the British Empire, 1837–1902
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Introduction
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- By Ian F. W. Beckett, University of Kent
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Summary
A Victorian traveller in the settled part of the British Empire at any time between the 1850s and the 1890s would have encountered much that was exotic and novel. On the other hand, there would be much that would be familiar from churches to clubs, and from railways to parks. One of a number of familiar institutions would be the high visibility of forces of citizen soldiers from Australia's Pinjarrah Mounted Volunteers, to Burma's Moulmein Volunteer Reserve Company, Canada's Victoria Rifles, India's Cossipore Artillery Volunteers, New Zealand's Coromandel Rifle Brigade and South Africa's Lang Kloof Cavalry. Victorians who stayed at home were equally familiar with colonial citizen soldiers, contingents or representatives taking part in the Queen's Jubilee procession on 22 June 1897 including the Canadian Highlanders, the South Australia Mounted Rifles, the Natal Carbineers, the Umvoti Mounted Rifles, the Ceylon Light Infantry Volunteers, the Otago Hussars, the Rhodesia Horse and the Royal Malta Regiment of Militia.
Such units fall clearly within the typology of colonial forces advanced by Karl Hack and Tobias Rettig, who have classified them as ‘a special case’ in being comprised of males who were locally born or resident but not indigenous. As Craig Wilcox has noted, within the empire, these citizen units ‘advertised a community's significance, maturity and cohesion’ and, compared with other local colonial organizations such as cricket clubs or fire brigades, ‘required as much or more initiative and commitment to create and maintain it’. But the citizen soldiers of the empire were neither simply another form of colonial unit, nor solely an expression of settler community. They also represented Britain's own long tradition of raising amateur citizen soldiers – militia, yeomanry and volunteers – for home defence, which is precisely why they would have been so familiar to an itinerant Victorian. By the end of the Queen's reign, there were not only over 360,000 citizen soldiers in Britain but also well over 100,000 more throughout the empire.
It was a model of citizen soldiers that had been widely emulated in British colonies and settlements in the Caribbean, North America and India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Notes
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4 - Canada
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- By James A. Wood, University of Victoria, British Columbia
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Summary
Of the many challenges Canada has faced since Confederation in 1867, none has involved such an expenditure of blood and treasure as its participation in overseas wars. Today, cenotaphs all across the country's 3,000-mile expanse commemorate the sacrifices its soldiers have made in foreign wars. From the South African veldt in 1899–1902 to Flanders Fields, Normandy, Korea and Afghanistan, so greatly has expeditionary warfare come to dominate the profession of arms in Canada that it almost completely overshadows the traditions of an earlier era when the country's wars were fought on its own soil.
Throughout the nineteenth century, British North Americans adhered to a model of amateur military service that was transplanted to the new world by English settlers, where it became a founding military tradition of both Canada and the United States. With its entire focus on home defence, the Canadian militia was a part-time force based on universal liability to military service and intended to act as an auxiliary to the British army. Provisions for a levée en masse had been set in place at the time of Upper Canada's founding in 1791, shortly after its Loyalist settlers arrived as refugees from the newly independent United States. Meanwhile, the militia traditions of French-speaking Lower Canada drew back even further to the French regime and the ancient obligation of habitant farmers to render military service in time of war. So while the precise form and organization of these amateur forces differed in each of the British North American colonies before Confederation, all were based upon an underlying principle of obligatory service for almost the entire adult male population. Though seldom resorted to, these powers of conscription would remain in the country's statutes until the revised National Defence Act of 1950.
Companies or regiments of embodied militia throughout the period 1837 to 1899 were nearly always organized around a single community or county. At the outset of the Victorian era, the nominal rolls of the Sedentary Militia included all able-bodied males between the ages of 16 to 60 in Lower Canada and 18 to 60 in the upper province.
5 - India
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- By Kaushik Roy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India
- Edited by Ian F. W. Beckett
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Summary
From the early eighteenth century, the East India Company (henceforth EIC) started spreading its tentacles from three centres in different parts of India: Madras in southern India, Bombay in western India and Calcutta in eastern India. In the course of the eighteenth century, these three centres were organized as three presidencies and each presidency maintained its separate military establishment. The Madras, Bombay and Bengal armies had both British and Indian personnel. The European military personnel were of two types: private military units maintained by the EIC and units of the British Army. After 1859, the private white army of the EIC was disbanded and all the British military personnel came under the ambit of the British Army. The bulk of the military personnel of the EIC (and after 1859 Crown Government in British-India) were Indians. This was because they were cheaper (three times compared to a British soldier), healthier and knew the terrain well in the Indian context.
During emergencies, the British Government in India (hereafter GOI, and also known as the Raj) raised auxiliary units or volunteer units. This chapter is mainly concerned with European volunteer units in British-India. Though part-time soldier is a more apt term, we will use the term volunteers because that is how the European civilians who undertook part-time soldiering in British-India described themselves. During the two world wars, the British male civilians, of course, were ordered to join the Indian Army (as officers) or the British territorial/auxiliary units. The GOI never resorted to conscription of its Indian citizens. All the Indian soldiers were long-term volunteers who willingly served the sahibs for social status and regular pay in cash. Unlike in West Europe, the Indians looked forward for thirty years’ service (reduced to twenty-one years in the late nineteenth century) because after that they became eligible for pensions in cash. In pre-British India, military service also resulted in upward social mobility. In the colonial context of economic underdevelopment and lack of opportunities in the civilian sector, military service under the Raj remained an attractive option for the small peasants of the countryside.
3 - Australia
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- By Bob Marmion, Fort Queenscliff
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Summary
In 1901, six previously independent Australian colonies, Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania federated to form the Commonwealth of Australia. One of the catalysts was the need for national defence as distinct from each colony providing for its own security. Strategic and technological developments meant that a national, coordinated approach to defending Australia was needed to counter rising European Imperialism and Asian nationalism. Federation had long been a desired outcome in British Imperial policy. Even though the six colonies shared a continent, they were, in effect, separate nations with their own defence forces, customs and border checks, laws and even differing local currency and railway gauges. This diversity was to greatly impact on their ability to work together for the ‘national good’ and, until Federation was achieved, it certainly hampered attempts to develop national defence.
The Australian colonies had all achieved self-government through a similar process during the second half of the nineteenth century. As noted by Lord Grey, a requirement was that each colony must develop a scheme of defence against external attack. This could be achieved either by raising citizen forces within the colony, paying for an Imperial garrison, hosting ships of the Royal Navy's Australia Station, or a combination of all three. Each colony also had the secondary task of maintaining law and order. In the absence of organized and effective police forces, this latter task traditionally fell upon the military.
Each of the Australian colonies had a British garrison of varying size and type until 1870; occasionally, they also played host to ships of the Royal Navy. Despite this Imperial presence, the number of redcoats was far too small to mount an effective defence of each colony from external attack while at the same time ensuring internal stability. Colonial governments, therefore, relied on raising units of local citizens acting in a voluntary capacity, to provide a measure of defence. To understand this important role, one needs an overview of colonial defence in Australia, how it evolved over time, and its links to the wider Imperial defence.
1 - Britain
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- By Ian F. W. Beckett, University of Kent
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Summary
During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), the nature of the ‘amateur military tradition’ in Britain took on new forms. The militia, organized on a systematic basis since the mid-sixteenth century, was supplemented by a revival of the volunteers – first legislated for in 1782 at the close of the American Revolutionary War (1775–83) – and by the first appearance of the mounted volunteers or yeomanry. At the time of the Queen's accession in 1837, however, the militia and volunteers were both in effective abeyance, and the yeomanry had been reduced in strength to just over 19,000 officers and men. That the triumvirate of militia, volunteers and yeomanry in Britain should number over 361,000 in 1903 was testament both to continuing anxieties concerning external and internal threats during the course of her reign but also to the continuing perception of the wider political, social and cultural utility of the auxiliary forces. They provided the essential point of contact between army and society in Britain when the regular army was limited in size and invariably serving overseas. Thus, the militia, yeomanry and volunteers continuously reflected and transmitted attitudes towards military participation. Ultimately, the popular response to the South African War also demonstrated the role of the auxiliaries in the growth of militarism in Victorian Britain.
The militia had been disembodied at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and training suspended, only the permanent staff being retained. A new militia ballot – the force had been liable to conscription since 1757 – was ordered in July 1816 but actual training suspended annually until 1820. Training was then held in both 1821 and 1825. Another ballot was ordered in 1828 but suspended in 1829. In 1830 yet another ballot was ordered in the wake of the domestic reform crisis, and the fall of the French Bourbon monarchy, it being intended to train the force in the summer of 1831. In the event, popular opposition to the ballot brought its suspension in July 1831. The militia also came close to losing its permanent staff altogether in 1834–5.
8 - The South African War, 1899–1902
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- By Stephen M. Miller, University of Maine
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Summary
On 11 October 1899, after a lengthy period of failed negotiations, explosive rhetoric, ‘penultimatums’, and ultimatums, war between Great Britain and its empire and the Boer republics of the Transvaal (South African Republic) and the Orange Free State began. This armed conflict, the South African War (also known as the Second Anglo-Boer War and Die Tweede Vryheidsoorlog), officially concluded on the last day of May 1902 with the combatants’ acceptance of the Treaty of Vereeniging. The South African War has been labelled by some historians as one of Great Britain's ‘small wars’, but in terms of cost, duration, strategy and tactics it was hardly a campaign reminiscent of the many imperial conflicts it waged in Africa and Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century. But more so than any of those above factors, what distinguished the South African War from the others was the stress and strain put on the manpower resources of Britain's Regular Army. Unable to cope with determined Boer resistance, let alone Boer offensives into the British colonies of Natal and the Cape Colony, the army and the government were forced to look elsewhere to raise sufficient numbers of able-bodied men to bring the war to its successful conclusion. It found the answer to its problems in the expansion and modification of its auxiliary services – the Militia, Yeomanry and volunteers. In calling on British and imperial subjects to volunteer for overseas service, Great Britain was able to amass the necessary numbers to overwhelm Boer resistance and bring the war to its successful conclusion.
The origins of the South African War remain hotly contested by historians to this day. They have been the subject of a number of fine monographs and only a brief summary will be provided here. British ambitions in Southern Africa changed dramatically in the last third of the nineteenth century. The discovery of diamonds in the Kimberley region (Griqualand West) stimulated large-scale capital investment in the 1870s. In order to procure cheap labour and stabilize the region politically, Great Britain annexed territory, crushed local African resistance, and thwarted the efforts of ‘freebooting’ Boers.
CONTENTS
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Index
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2 - Ireland
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- By Timothy Bowman, University of Kent, William Butler, University of Kent
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Summary
Within Ireland a variety of competing amateur military traditions can be identified. One of the major ones, especially in the 1860s, is what could be termed the Fenian or Republican tradition formed from those opposed to British rule in Ireland and bearing, in its social composition and social activities, a number of similarities to the Rifle Volunteer movement in Britain. However, as this volume is concerned with the British Imperial manifestations of the amateur military tradition, the Fenian movement will not form a major part of this study. Within auxiliary crown forces raised in Ireland two competing amateur military traditions can be identified. The first and possibly oldest is the Protestant volunteering tradition. This can be traced back to the plantations of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and later manifested itself in the Irish Volunteers (1775–92), the Irish Yeomanry (1796–1834), the Ulster Volunteer Force (1913–14) and arguably even in the Ulster Special Constabulary (1920–70) and Ulster Defence Regiment (1970–92). As with the volunteer tradition in Great Britain the origin of these forces lay in local initiatives and considerable private funding. The other loyal auxiliary tradition in Ireland is that of the militia, essentially an attempt to transplant an English military system into Ireland. Although some early examples of this have been identified in the late seventeenth century, it was to be 1793 before this system was fully implemented in Ireland on an English pattern. Interestingly this thirty-six years after the same system had been implemented in England and Wales but four years before it was implemented in Scotland.
1837 found Ireland with no amateur military forces in proper existence. The Irish Yeomanry, formed in 1796 had been disbanded in 1834 by the Whig government. The force was widely seen to be sectarian in nature and was certainly largely Protestant in composition. In any case, its functions as a part-time constabulary force had been rendered redundant both by the concentration of the yeomanry in Ulster, far removed from some of the worst ‘disturbed districts’, and the formation of the Irish Constabulary in 1822.
Frontmatter
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6 - New Zealand
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- By John Crawford, New Zealand Defence Force
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Summary
When the first European settlers arrived in New Zealand they encountered in the Maori a warlike, well-organized and increasingly well-armed people who were engaged in a series of bloody inter-tribal conflicts. The predominately British settlers brought with them a strong tradition of citizen soldiering that they drew upon in their new home. The inhabitants of Kororareka, the principal European settlement, were concerned during the 1830s both with the potential threat posed by Maori and by the lawless activities of other Europeans. In 1838 they established the Kororareka Association. Members of the association agreed to arm themselves and to act together under their elected president to maintain law and order and respond to threats to the community. When New Zealand became a British colony in February 1840, the new Governor, Captain William Hobson, immediately directed that the association cease its activities and also ordered the disbandment of the militia organized and armed by the New Zealand Company at its settlement of Wellington.
Unofficial volunteer units were established in the New Zealand Company settlements of Nelson and Wellington after twenty-two armed settlers and special constables were killed by Maori in what became known as the Wairou massacre in June 1843. There was, however, no further fighting and the governor, who was determined to pursue a conciliatory policy that would reduce the danger of racial conflict, ordered the disbandment of these units after a small detachment of British troops was sent to Wellington.
There was a widespread feeling among settlers after ‘the terrible affair at the Wairou’ that the colony's administration was failing in its duty to protect them. They pressed the governor and the Colonial Office for additional regular troops and for the establishment of a militia, which would be much more effective than hastily sworn in special constables. In response to a petition from settlers in Nelson, Lord Stanley reiterated the Colonial Office's view that the colony should take steps to ensure its own security by forming a militia. The Governor, Captain Robert FitzRoy was opposed to such an initiative, but nonetheless submitted a draft militia ordinance to the Legislative Council in September 1844.
7 - South Africa
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- By Tim Stapleton, Trent University, Canada
- Edited by Ian F. W. Beckett
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Summary
Two traditions of citizen soldier service developed in nineteenth-century South Africa: the Boer commando and the British volunteer regiment. During conflicts with indigenous Khoisan in the 1700s, frontier Dutch settlers in the Cape organized voluntary local militias called ‘commandos’ that would mobilize when needed and then disband. Formed in the mid-1800s, the interior Boer republics relied exclusively on the commando system, which fielded highly mobile forces of skilled horsemen and marksmen but suffered unstable leadership, non-existent logistics and high rates of desertion. The nineteenth-century wars between the British ruled Cape Colony and the neighbouring Xhosa groups produced a number of volunteer and ad hoc colonial military units. Beginning in the mid-1850s, in the British territories of the Cape and Natal, around the same time that white settlers began to assume more political responsibility, mostly English-speaking whites formed permanent militia units based on the British regimental system. The discovery of minerals, diamonds in the Northern Cape in the late 1860s and gold in the Transvaal during the 1880s, renewed colonial conquest in the region. This process depended heavily on the participation of citizen soldiers from both the Boer republics and British colonies.
Commandos
Expanding east from the Cape Colony, Dutch-speaking frontier farmers called Trekboers organized mounted commandos that would mobilize for cattle and slave raids against indigenous Khoisan and to pursue stock thieves. Between around 1700 and 1715, the first commandos consisted mostly of Dutch East India Company employees and a few settler volunteers. Although the first entirely civilian commando was formed in 1715, these groups remained dependent upon the company for ammunition. In 1739 commando service became compulsory for all frontier male settlers who often brought along Khoisan servants or sent them as substitutes. Khoisan members, sometimes constituting the majority of a commando, were armed and received a share of captured livestock though less than white settlers. Commando leaders were not required to obtain permission to raise a force but simply had to submit a report upon completion of operations.
List of Contributors
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