French authorities trained these Senegalese soldiers in the 1930s. Such troops were expected to help defend France’s claims to French West Africa against European rivals.

Tirailleurs Senegalais in World War I France.

The Tirailleurs Senegalais were West African Colonial Army troops who fought for the French during World War I, World War II, and in numerous conquest, police, and colonial counterinsurgency operations. Despite the name, the Tirailleurs Senegalais were composed of soldiers recruited and conscripted from throughout French West Africa and not just from Senegal. However, recruitment and casualty burdens for Senegalese soldiers often numbered among the highest of the Tirailleurs Senegalais.

The Tirailleurs Senegalais were created as the first permanent units of black African soldiers under French rule in 1857. From 1857 to 1905 the Tirailleurs Senegalais was primarily a mercenary force composed of slaves and Africans from low social ranks although a small group of well-born Africans ...

The battle of Adowa from an Ethiopian perspective.

A process of political centralization was clearly underway in Ethiopia on the eve of European penetration. To be more precise, what was being attempted, beginning with the reign of Emperor Tewodros II (1855–68), was a restoration of the Solomonic empire of the early Christian era. Ancient Ethiopia, centred on the holy city of Axum in the northern province of Tigray, its civilization a fertile blend of pre-Muslim South Arabian, Hebraic and Hellenistic influences, its Christianized emperors claiming descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, had been a major regional political and military power and a key participant in the three-cornered trading network linking India, East Africa and the Mediterranean basin. Over the succeeding centuries, however, the rising tide of Islam had forced the empire to retreat into the more remote central and southern portions of the Ethiopian highlands. Already ...

After investing Tuyen Quang with a belt of trenches anchored in several surrounding villages, the Black Flags assailed the French-held fort with intermittent mining, bombardment and direct assaults.

It was also a century ago that a mean little war took place in a distant and fetid place—called, by its own people, Vietnam.

By William F. Coffey

The men of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Regiment were excited. No more boring garrison duty at Sidi-bel¬Abbes, headquarters of the French Foreign Legion. They had been ordered to prepare for duty in Tonkin, some unknown land in the Far East. Action and adventure beck-med. The ceaseless drudgery of garrison life in North Africa vas over.

Since motorized vehicular transportation was unknown in 1883, the battalion, 600 strong, marched every step of the 60 lot dusty miles north to the Algerian port of Oran, each man heavily burdened with his equipment ...

A1940 Chevrolet WA is seen in the configuration developed by the LRDG for their operations in North Africa. The vehicle illustrated carries a Lewis gun behind the cab and a Browning .30 cal M1919 with AA barrel above the dashboard.

8 March 1941.

France had fallen, her empire in tatters, but her flag still flew from the isolated but strategically important ex-Italian fort of El Tag which dominated the Kufra oasis in Southern Libya. Free France had struck a blow, a beginning in the campaign to recapture France and defeat the Axis.

Colonel Leclerc and the intrepid Lt Col d’Ornano (commander of French Forces in Chad), on the orders of De Gaulle in London, were tasked with attacking Italian positions in Libya with the motley forces at their disposal in Chad which had declared for Free France. Kufra was the obvious target. The task of striking at the heavily ...

Ben Kiernan. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. x + 724 pp. $26.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-300-14425-3; $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-300-10098-3.

Reviewed by John M. Cox (Department of History, Florida Gulf Coast University)
Published on H-German (October, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

A Major, Provocative Contribution to Genocide Studies

With this monumental book, Ben F. Kiernan has made an immense contribution to the field of genocide studies--and to fields ranging beyond it. The result of extensive research and deep reflection, it challenges scholars of genocide with its bold theses; delivers a laudably inclusive inventory of genocidal violence spanning many centuries; and represents a powerful example of a well-synthesized world history, one that will be highly valuable for scholarly as well as non-academic audiences.

Rather than simply subjecting his readers to an oppressive account of human ...

For the Great War in Africa, although the product of European devices and desires, was fought principally by the Africans themselves. In all, somewhere over 2 million Africans served in the First World War as soldiers or labourers, and upwards of 200,000 of them died or were killed in action. By comparison with Europe such figures are low—the first represents between 1 and 2 per cent of the total population of Africa. But in a local context a comparison with twentieth-century industrialized nation states is inappropriate; never before in the history of Africa had manpower been mobilized on such a scale.

Both during the war and after it, British and French propaganda accused the Germans of militarizing Africa: they had, said Lloyd George on 24 January 1919, ‘raised native troops and encouraged these troops to behave in a manner that would even disgrace the Bolsheviks’. Such rhetoric was ...

Jagama Kello, middle, left home at just 15 to fight Italian invaders

By Martin Plaut
BBC Africa analyst

The 70th anniversary of World War II is being commemorated around the world, but the contribution of one group of soldiers is almost universally ignored. How many now recall the role of more than one million African troops?

Yet they fought in the deserts of North Africa, the jungles of Burma and over the skies of Germany. A shrinking band of veterans, many now living in poverty, bitterly resent being written out of history.

For Africa, World War II began not in 1939, but in 1935.

“ I greeted Gandhi with a military salute and asked him: 'What are you going to do for Africa now that India is going to be free?' ”
Marshal Kebby Nigerian soldier

Italian Fascist troops, backed by thousands of Eritrean colonial forces, invaded Ethiopia.

Emperor Haile Selassie was ...

H-Diplo Review Essays

http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/reviews/

Published on 17 September 2009

H-Diplo Review Essays Editor:  Diane N. Labrosse H-Diplo Review Essays Web Editor:  George Fujii Commissioned for H-Diplo by Jonathan Winkler

Martin Thomas.  Empires of Intelligence:  Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914.  Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2008. xii + 428pp.  Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.  $49.95 (cloth).  ISBN 978-0-520-25117-5.

Reviewed for H-Diplo by Peter John Brobst, Ohio University

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Nearly ten years ago, Malcolm Yapp called for a new look at the "Great Game" of empire in Asia and the Middle East.  The distinguished historian of the subject remarked on "how few books are written about what one may call imperial plumbing." And yet, he noted, "there were more policemen than soldiers in British India and it was on the policemen that the Raj ultimately rested."  Scholars had "somehow neglected the key element in how empires ...

The British used aircraft in the Third Afghan War in 1919, and with great success against an uprising in Iraq from 1922 onwards. The famed Handley Page V/1500 was called into action and ordered to bomb the royal Palace in Kabul. On 24 May 1919, a lone plane flown by Captain Robert "Jock" Halley appeared on the Kabul sky. After circling for a while it hovered above the royal palace and dropped its entire ammunition load that consisted of four large sized bombs. Although the bombing itself did little physical damage but it had a great psychological impact on the citizens - the women of the royal harem rushed on to the streets in terror - and in a few days King Amanullah had called a truce.

Thal Fort at the entrance to the Kurram Valley was besieged by the Afghan Army during the third Afghan War.

The Third Anglo-Afghan War ...

Ho Chi Minh (second from right) shakes hands with French Premier Georges Bidault (left), 1946.

For five years during World War II, Indochina was a French-administered possession of Japan. On Sept. 22, 1940, Jean Decoux, the French governor-general appointed by the Vichy government after the fall of France to the Nazis, concluded an agreement with the Japanese that permitted the stationing of 30,000 Japanese troops in Indochina and the use of all major Vietnamese airports by the Japanese military. The agreement made Indochina the most important staging area for all Japanese military operations in Southeast Asia during the war. The French administration cooperated with the Japanese occupation forces and was ousted only toward the end of the war (in March 1945), when the Japanese began to fear that the French forces might turn against them as defeat approached. After the French had been disarmed, Bao Dai, the last French ...

The Jameson Raid was an ill-fated attempt to support an uprising that would topple the Transvaal (South African Republic) Government to ensure foreign (mainly British) immigrants (uitlanders) were given full political rights. The raid was also intended to eliminate Transvaal resistance to plans to federate all of South Africa.

Uitlander grievances were subject to exploitation by British imperialists, such as Cecil J. Rhodes, the diamond and gold magnate. Rhodes stated that the uitlanders , “possessing more than half the land, nine - tenths of the wealth , and paying nineteen - twentieths of the taxes” (Hensman 1900, p. 1), should be allowed some voice in the government. He had earlier secured Bechuanaland (modern- day Botswana) as a British protectorate and the charter for the British South Africa Company in 1889. In the following year, Rhodes became prime minister of the Cape Colony and envisioned British imperial holdings stretching “from the Cape to Cairo,” with ...

Street fighting in the Congo. The weapons are surplus Second World War issue with which the world was still awash in the 1960s.

The Belgian Congo, which dissolved in a flood of political violence immediately upon obtaining independence in 1960. Belgium had done next to nothing to prepare its colony for self-rule. Its departure was simply a reflection of its own inability to continue bearing the burdens of colonial stewardship. When the Belgians left, political authority was vested in a hastily conceived parliamentary government headed by Patrice Lumumba, the leading figure of the Congolese National Movement. He immediately faced dissention within Congo's security forces, which rebelled against the Belgian officers left behind to train them. Most Europeans remaining in the country fled. A month later the southernmost of the country's six major provinces, Katanga (Shaba), seceded. Lumumba appealed to the Soviet Union and to the UN for assistance ...

Benjamin Claude Brower. A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France's Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844-1902. New York: Columbia University Press, c2009. xv + 417 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-15492-5; (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-51937-3.

Reviewed by Amal Ghazal (Assistant Professor, Department of History, Dalhousie University)
Published on H-Levant (June, 2010)
Commissioned by Amy A. Kallander

French Violence in the Algerian Sahara between the "Pénétration Pacifique" and the "Blue Legend"

A Desert Named Peace is a study of the different shapes and forms of violence perpetuated by the French, and in some cases violence inflicted on them, as they brought the Algerian Sahara under French control. After the conquest of the Tell, the French embarked on the process of colonizing the Algerian Sahara with the conquest of Biskra in 1844 and completed it with the massacres of the Kel Ahaggar Tuareg at Tit in 1902. This book explores French motivations ...

Japan’s colonial policies also were affected by the changing mood, as economic vitality replaced power and prestige as the prime goal. Shocked during the depression by the West’s economic nationalism and the unreliability of international markets, which had sent Manchurian exports into a tailspin, Japan’s leaders began talking about the need to make the empire self-sufficient economically. Independence from the Western powers; self-sufficiency within the empire; total Japanese dominance— these became the central goals.

The change was evident across the Tsushima Straits. The colonial government turned in a harsher direction in Korea in the 1930s; by decade’s end, families were being forced to adopt Japanese surnames, and students were allowed to use only Japanese in the classroom. By 1940, three-fourths of Korea’s capital investment was in Japanese hands. The movement toward a tightly controlled, Japan-oriented economy was clearer still in Manchuria, which now took central ...