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Imperial European armies recruited heavily from ethnic minorities and colonized peoples

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tagsja-picks, xref, factual_claims, trade, corroborated, category/contrarian-or-surprising

3 min read

Imperial European armies recruited heavily from ethnic minorities and colonized peoples

Evidence

The nineteenth-century armies of imperialist Europe continued the tradition of relying on substantial recruitment among ethnic minorities, “riff-raff,” outcasts, aliens and the peasantry: to the million serfs of the Russian army were added the Asiatic Bashkirs and Kalmucks, Ingush and Ossietin; the Corsicans and Bretons of the French army were augmented by the Legion founded on Kabyle swordsmen, Swiss and other European mercenaries, but by mid-century the army itself had come to be dominated by West Africans; in the Philippines, the Spanish army was native, as was the Dutch army of the East Indies. In India, the East India Company and the Bengal army (1842) employed between them upward of 70,000 natives in their sepoy regiments. In Britain itself, in 1832, the Irish accounted for 42 percent of the army. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1520

  1. The nineteenth-century armies of imperialist Europe continued the tradition of relying on substantial recruitment among ethnic minorities, “riff-raff,” outcasts, aliens and the peasantry: to the million serfs of the Russian army were added the Asiatic Bashkirs and Kalmucks, Ingush and Ossietin; the Corsicans and Bretons of the French army were augmented by the Legion founded on Kabyle swordsmen, Swiss and other European mercenaries, but by mid-century the army itself had come to be dominated by West Africans; in the Philippines, the Spanish army was native, as was the Dutch army of the East Indies. In India, the East India Company and the Bengal army (1842) employed between them upward of 70,000 natives in their sepoy regiments. In Britain itself, in 1832, the Irish accounted for 42 percent of the army. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1520

Categorization

  • XREF: The colonial-soldier statistics speak directly to Robinson’s argument that Europe’s racial order relied on incorporating the ‘other’ into its own coercive apparatus. — connects to: A tiny network of merchants controlled all European commercial speculation; The Roman army acts as a primary vehicle for imperial cultural integration — Stephen Kershaw, A Brief History of the Roman Empire, 414; The War of the South recruited soldiers across racial lines on both sides (+7 more)
  • corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1520

Broader Connections

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