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Spiers proffers a critique of transcultural theory as applied to British colonial warfare. It argues that all rules of warfare were not abandoned in such wars and that the conditions under which the wars were fought had a greater bearing upon their conduct than racial feelings or the desires for revenge. Surrenders even after or during ferocious conflicts did occur (with massacres as at Isandlwana somewhat exceptional events), and the various belligerents took prisoners. Indeed surrenders served a range of political and deterrent purposes, with the payment of a price by the vanquished being understood as part of colonial interaction prior to the resumption of trade or service in British armies.

This chapter explores the impact of the two wars on ‘high’ and ‘low’ politics. The content and structure of politics were affected, with Whigs and Tories burying their differences and entering effectively into a political partnership at the height of the Seven Years War. The wider public was drawn in to act as participants in the political process in ways that challenged oligarchic control both in Britain and Ireland.

This chapter seeks to locate the political economy of conquest within a wider context of British politics in the age of transoceanic global conflict. The Second Anglo-Maratha War was both the most extensive project of military conquest as well as the least debated colonial misadventure. This war—the most ambitious project of military conquest of the long eighteenth century—was also a secret war. The orderly flow of information about a growing list of subjects—the financial health of the Company, political negotiations with Indian polities, military projects—had become a vital part of early colonial rule. Imperial governance relied on the availability of this information to such an extent that when its transmission was disrupted by/under Richard Wellesley, tectonic shifts in the EIC’s bid for hegemony could not be critically scrutinized. The structures that constituted a distinctive early colonial order—ideological privileging of the military over the civilian, elaborating a legal framework for conquest, nourishing a machine of war, restructuring the hierarchies of power, reconceptualization of land as territory yielding revenue—were animated in the war against the Marathas. The financial exhaustion wreaked by the war typified the political economy of conquest that created an early colonial order in South Asia.

This chapter introduces the themes and argument of this study. It highlights the ways in which disease shaped military policy and the amount of energy, time, and money devoted to troop welfare by officers and imperial administrators. Such war-time responses to disease reveal the role of the state in providing medical care and in promoting and directing medical research; they also illustrate that the state’s deployment of medical expertise and display of medical care were a means of establishing public support and legitimacy. This chapter explains the methodological approach to the study of disease and war, situates this study in the historiography of the Seven Years War, and examines the concept of expertise and its role in state formation. It points to the parallels between the global scope of the Seven Years War and the structure of the book, with each chapter focusing on a different theatre of operations and on a different challenge to troop health.

This chapter seeks to analyze the changing meaning of ‘peace’ under an early colonial regime which was perpetually at war. ‘Peace’ in early colonial South Asia no longer meant the absence of conflict, but rather a period when problems of war assumed an urgent significance. From paying soldier’s arrears incurred during military conflicts to disciplining them in times when the Company state was not formally at war—‘peace’ was no longer the opposite of war. Rather it was the fleeting opportunity to re-tool the apparatus of colonial war-making. Conquest did not occur in a legal vacuum. This chapter analyses debates about military law and its significance for the early colonial regime’s claims to sovereign authority. Jurisdictional jockeying between competing sources of law went well beyond the need to maintain military discipline. Examining these debates opens up an unexplored world in which we can understand important questions relating to the territoriality of early colonial rule, the legal personality of the Company state and efforts to compare Britain’s garrisoning of Ireland with the organization of coercive force in South Asia.

This chapter examines the role of disease and responses thereto during the 1759 campaigns against French-held Martinique and Guadeloupe and the 1762 campaign against Spanish-held Cuba. Contextualized by contemporary and modern medical understanding of tropical disease, this chapter shows that officials were aware of the dangers of disease in the West Indian climate and followed the advice of medical authorities concerning hot climates. Yet little could be done to prevent high rates of morbidity and mortality, particularly as a result of yellow fever. This serves as a reminder that rates of disease are not always an accurate way to assess medical care and adaptation to foreign environments, whether physical or cultural. The chapter concludes with an examination of the reports of disease in colonial American newspapers, tracing the role that disease played in the emerging colonial public sphere and its nascent imperial frustrations. In the broader context of imperial-colonial relations, disease in West Indian campaigns demonstrates the difficulties of colonial warfare and its potential for straining relations between Britain and its colonies.

This chapter examines the origins of a distinctive system of organizing military conquest in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. It seeks to de-centre the study of politics and military contestation by looking at the war against the Marathas (1778–82) from the vantage point of the region most directly affected by it—the western peninsular territory of the Bombay presidency. The advantage in shifting the focus away from the politically dominant Bengal presidency allows identification of a critical component in the political economy of conquest—the transfer of political authority from a civilian council to the commander of a military force. This shift in political power was essential to the success of the EIC regime of conquest even as it became a perennial source of conflict within the governing structures of the Company state. The debate and dissension that accompanied the deployment of military force both enabled the success of the machine of war and characterized the creation of a distinctive early colonial ideology of rule that subverted civilian control of the military.

While several historians have claimed that the genocidal war in German South West Africa was a direct expression of the will of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the evidence suggests that the primary responsibility for the genocide lies with the commander in the field, Lothar von Trotha, and, to a lesser extent, metropolitan military planners. It is certainly the case that the German emperor chose Trotha from a shortlist of candidates. However, the tactics and prosecution of the war were not overseen by the monarch. When confronted by the German chancellor with the war crimes occurring in German South West Africa, Wilhelm II agreed to have the commander in the field’s ‘order of annihilation’ rescinded and for him to be later recalled to Germany. That Wilhelm II did not personally direct the genocidal conduct of the war in no way alters the fact that the German state was directly responsible for the genocide, given that it was conducted by the royally appointed and legally competent German commander of military operations.

When Sultan Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar, died, the German state, including the German Kaiser, exerted diplomatic pressure on the new Sultan Khalifa to grant the German East African Company a long-term lease over an extensive territory that was in reality ruled by the sultan’s vassals. Outraged at not having been consulted, these local rulers launched a fierce uprising that brought into focus the clear inability of the German company to control the territory they had leased. The result of the rebellion was not to reconsider the territorial claims of the German company, but rather to suspect that Sultan Khalifa had betrayed the Germans and was abetting the rebelling local rulers. In Germany, the military campaign was disingenuously presented to the German Reichstag not as a question of contested sovereignty or economic overreach but rather as a principled campaign against slavery.