Spanish authorities used two agencies to occupy and control California as a royal province from 1769 to 1821: the church and the army. While the story of the missions and the missionaries has been thoroughly chronicled, little attention has been focused on the men who comprised Spain's military forces. This thesis examines the experience of the royal soldier in California to determine his significance in the Golden State's Spanish colonial era. The journals, diaries, and correspondence of the soldiers, missionaries, explorers, traders, and foreign rivals who visited or occupied the province comprise a major part' of the source material. The variety of viewpoints represented by these · documents facilitated examination from several perspectives. Another valuable primary source was the Spanish frontier regulations, which provided the royal perspective on the military enterprise. Published materials based on documents in the major archival repositories such as those in Mexico, Spain, and the Bancroft Library in California were accessible through works in the Portland State University Library and the Oregon Historical Society which supplied sources pertinent to this investigation. Secondary works by historians provided both a historical background and data on specific aspects of a soldier's life. Cited periodical articles concentrated more specifically on the military experience both in California and the Spanish northern frontier.

This thesis examines the experience of Malawian soldiers serving in Britain's colonial army between 1891 and 1964. Until recently, the experience of East African colonial soldiers in particular has been largely overlooked, and African soldiers in general have been perceived either as collaborators in the machinery of colonial oppression or, conversely, as victims at the hands of the military authorities. However, little attempt has been made to unify these two views of military service. Using Malawi as a case study, this thesis investigates social relations within the colonial army and examines perceptions of their often-violent role within wider colonial society. Developing and expanding upon previous scholarship, this thesis provides the first sustained and unified study of the colonial army in Malawi. The project is based principally upon archival sources in Britain and Malawi, but also draws upon interviews with British and Malawian veterans. Chapter one provides an overview of the institutional history of the Malawian forces. Chapter two outlines the development of recruitment policy, with special reference to the concept of 'martial races', and examines the motivations behind Malawian enlistment. Chapters three and four investigate the reactions of African soldiers to the formal military environment and to barrack life. Chapter five examines perceptions of soldiers' roles in warfare and internal security, and contrasts this with the place of soldiers in their own communities. The thesis highlights the extent to which Malawian soldiers were successfully co-opted by the military authorities, but also stresses the capacity of soldiers to influence the conditions under which they served. This, combined with the unusually long association which many Malawians had with the army, fed into a growing perception of the colonial army as a Malawian institution.

In 1917, a mere thirty years before India gained independence from Britain, Indians were alIowed into the officer corps of the colonial Indian Army, thus initiating its " Indianization ". Yet, as an issue of British military policy, Indianization had been debated for a hundred years before 1917. This thesis delineates the contours of that debate, the myriad schemes for Indianization that it engendered, the reasons for the faHure of each of these, as weIl as the reasons why the bar on Indians in the Indian Army's officer corps was finally broken. In analysing the debate, attention will be paid to factors that influenced and channelled the discussions. The most important of these were: Anglo-Indian strategies of Imperial politics, such as the need to seek out and collaborate with certain sections of Indian society as a means of holding India to the Empire; British ideological and intellectual formulations, such as the "Gentleman-Ideal" and the Martial Races theory; and Indian political developments, such as the emergence of Indian public opinion and nationalism .

No description available.

Between 1870 and 1901, seventeen officers from the British army were appointed by the governments of the Australian colonies and New Zealand as commanders of their colonial military forces. There has been considerable speculation about the roles of these officers as imperial agents, developing colonial forces as a wartime reserve to imperial forces, but little in depth research. This thesis examines the role of the imperial commandants with an embryonic system of imperial defence and their contribution to the development of the colonial military forces. It is therefore a topic in British imperial history as much as Australian and New Zealand military history. British officers were appointed by colonial governments to overcome a shortfall in professional military expertise but increasingly came to be viewed by successive British administrations as a means of fulfilling an imperial defence agenda. The commandants as ???men-on-the-spot???, however, viewed themselves as independent reformers and got offside with both the imperial and colonial governments. This fact reveals that the commandants occupied a difficult position between the aspirations of London and the reality of the colonies. They certainly brought an imperial perspective to their commands and looked forward to the colonies playing a role on the imperial stage but generally did so in terms of a personal agenda rather than one set by London. This assessment is best demonstrated in the commandants??? independent stance at the outset of the South African War. The practice of appointing British commandants in Australasia was fraught with problems because of an inherent conflict in the goals of the commandants and their colonial governments. It resembles the Canadian experience of the British officers which reveals that the system of imperials military appointments as a whole was flawed. The problem remained that until a sufficient number of colonial officers had the prerequisite professional expertise for high command there was no alternative. The commandants were therefore the beginning rather than the end of a traditional reliance upon British military expertise. The lasting legacy of the commandants for the military forces of Australia and New Zealand was the development of colonial officers, transference of British military traditions, and the encouragement of a colonial military identity premised on the expectation of future participation in defence of the empire. The study provides a major revision to the existing historiography of imperial officers in the colonies, one which concludes that far from being ???imperial agents??? they were largely marching to their own drum.

No description available.

Between 1870 and 1901, seventeen officers from the British army were appointed by the governments of the Australian colonies and New Zealand as commanders of their colonial military forces. There has been considerable speculation about the roles of these officers as imperial agents, developing colonial forces as a wartime reserve to imperial forces, but little in depth research. This thesis examines the role of the imperial commandants with an embryonic system of imperial defence and their contribution to the development of the colonial military forces. It is therefore a topic in British imperial history as much as Australian and New Zealand military history. British officers were appointed by colonial governments to overcome a shortfall in professional military expertise but increasingly came to be viewed by successive British administrations as a means of fulfilling an imperial defence agenda. The commandants as ???men-on-the-spot???, however, viewed themselves as independent reformers and got offside with both the imperial and colonial governments. This fact reveals that the commandants occupied a difficult position between the aspirations of London and the reality of the colonies. They certainly brought an imperial perspective to their commands and looked forward to the colonies playing a role on the imperial stage but generally did so in terms of a personal agenda rather than one set by London. This assessment is best demonstrated in the commandants??? independent stance at the outset of the South African War. The practice of appointing British commandants in Australasia was fraught with problems because of an inherent conflict in the goals of the commandants and their colonial governments. It resembles the Canadian experience of the British officers which reveals that the system of imperials military appointments as a whole was flawed. The problem remained that until a sufficient number of colonial officers had the prerequisite professional expertise for high command there was no alternative. The commandants were therefore the beginning rather than the end of a traditional reliance upon British military expertise. The lasting legacy of the commandants for the military forces of Australia and New Zealand was the development of colonial officers, transference of British military traditions, and the encouragement of a colonial military identity premised on the expectation of future participation in defence of the empire. The study provides a major revision to the existing historiography of imperial officers in the colonies, one which concludes that far from being ???imperial agents??? they were largely marching to their own drum.

[Truncated abstract] The senior Imperial officers who took part in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 are comparatively well known and their service in that brief period has been well documented, as indeed has that of many of their junior colleagues. Much less, however, is known about the officers who served as commandants of the Natal Native Contingent, although more than half of them were Imperial officers on special service duties. Most of the rest were British ex-officers who lived in South Africa, while one of the remaining two was an adventurer and mercenary. Many of them had already found service with the South African force during the Ninth Cape Border War against the Ngqika and Gcaleka which had only ended in mid-1878. According to official documents, the Natal Native Contingent initially numbered more than 8,000 native troops, in three regiments, under the command of European officers and non-commissioned officers. At the time of the invasion of Zululand in January, 1879, the contingent therefore made up about 62% of the invading force. This bald statistic, as so often, hides the true story. The thesis examines each of the commandants, and the extent to which their abilities and personalities were reflected in the performance of the native troops under their command, while at the same time revealing the evolution of the Contingent itself as an arm of the invading force under Lieutenant General Lord Chelmsford ... The haste with which the regiments were assembled, their often inhuman treatment by their officers, the minimal or non-existent training they received and the way they were armed and dressed all combined to qualify their subsequent performance in the field. A comparison of the NNC is drawn with the performances of the Native Mounted Contingent, and the men of Colonel, later Brigadier General, Evelyn Wood?s Irregulars. The conclusion of the thesis is that the commandants did indeed have a profound effect on the quality and performance of the Africans who served under them. In general, the units under serving British officers performed best, while the colonial officers did less well. The mercenary officer was almost certainly the worst, but by only a slim margin.

No description available.