This essay is going to eventually come back to the current war in Ukraine, but after a lengthy historical detour. Bear with me.
There’s two questions that used to be asked incessantly in the historiography of modern European imperialism: why did Britain, France, Germany, Portugal and Leopold II of Belgium pursue a major expansion of European imperial control over Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Oceania starting in the middle of the 19th Century (the U.S. expanded its existing imperial expansion across North America to outside the continent near the end of the 19th Century), and why were they able to conquer so much territory so quickly?
Both questions are a bit unfashionable now for good reason. They were a sign of a very European-centered body of scholarship that also saw nations as the coherent and deliberate agents who decided to pursue empire, with their reasoning or motives being the major focus of historical research. That encouraged dissenting interpretations: the Marxist view that the real agent, acting through European nations, was monopoly capitalism; the idea that it was actually European actors in the periphery who ‘caused’ imperialism by pursuing their own self-interest and committing the newly centralized institutions of nation-states to that purpose; the proposition that it was actually ideological and social transformations in metropolitan Europe that made modern imperialism thinkable and desirable; and that imperialism was the by-product of technological and material changes that conferred strong advantages on European states that had undergone industrialization.
That last conjecture was an answer to both questions: the technology was both the cause of imperial expansion and the explanation of its success. E.g., it was was presumed on some level that whatever was pushing Europe’s expansion after 1500 was structurally uniform and that wherever Europeans did not secure early modern imperial power was due to unfavorable or difficult environmental conditions that Europeans could not overcome or because of the relative technological and material equity between Western and many non-Western societies that blocked European advances. So, following Alfred Crosby’s argument, Europe initially expanded into “neo-Europes”, parts of the world where temperate environments were favorable to European crops, livestock, and people, and stopped wherever societies adapted to other environmental conditions mobilized their own resources to impede or limit European power, a capacity that was eroded by key technological and infrastructural advances at the end of the 19th Century.
If this entire discussion is a bit outmoded in current scholarship, that’s partly because there are solid, useful syntheses that have superceded some of the more monocausal or theoretically exclusive approaches common in older historiography. It seems a bit pointless to go on regarding this as a vigorous debate when the simple option is to draw on all of these interpretations in some measure. The other reason is that the more we know about the particular and local establishment of European imperial power (in both the early modern and modern eras) the less it seems like any overall theory about its causes fits the range of particular cases. And the more we know about the violence of European imperial power from its earliest beginnings to its latest manifestations, the more complicated our understandings of its efficacy—or lack thereof—need to be.
Just sticking to the “new imperalism” between 1860-1920 or so, the more detailed historiography observes that the initial violent phase of conquest was often strikingly detached from the establishment of administrative power. It may be that spectacular displays of military technology and capacity (as in Belloc’s poem, “we have the maxim gun and they have not”) were remembered or encoded in the gradual creeping expansion of European imperial administration into various non-Western societies but also in many cases, not so much. For one, the maxim gun and other high-end industrialized weapons mattered less than the size, mobility and logistical capacity of European forces (often drawn from other colonies as much as they were from the metropoles) deployed against non-Western resistance. For another, the destructive brutality of those forces mattered more than their material capabilities, particularly when they were operating in places where ideas of “total war” that had taken hold in Europe during the 19th Century were very far away from local approaches to warfare.
Still, I (like many other historians) accept that there was something about the relative technological and material balance of power between the West and much of the rest of the world that was substantially different at the end of the 19th Century than in any previous era of Europe’s rise to global power. The relative disparity between European material capacity and the capacity of many non-European societies in 1600 or 1750 was often very small or even in favor of non-European states and societies both small and large. Even where Europeans could draw semi-exclusively on access to an increasingly important global-scale economy of resources, labor and capital to finance the deployment of military power against various kinds of enemies or challengers, they faced sharp limits on what that power could accomplish on the battlefield and even sharper limits on the establishment of any system of territorial control following military success. The major exception to this involved the establishment of settler colonies that achieved administrative or territorial control through extermination of indigenous societies, mostly as noted in “neo-Europes” where settlers could deploy their own ecologies as well as weapons (and where their ecologies were weapons, as in the Americas in particular). Everywhere else, European groups in the 17th and 18th Centuries did not have dramatic force asymmetry, whether they were representatives of mercantile companies or the direct agents of absolutist monarchies.
In contrast, late 19th and early 20th Century industrialized militaries controlled by a handful of European nation-states, as well as more disorganized but similarly armed and equipped ‘private’ armies like Cecil Rhodes’ “pioneer column” or Leopold II’s chartered company forces, really did have significant “force asymmetry” that had a meaningful impact on their ability to subjugate existing populations and place them under administrative control (as opposed to the early modern settler societies that pursued strategies of organized murder). These forces still relied on genocidal violence, but they also called upon material asymmetry to make organized uprisings or revolts short-lived and futile. (Whereas early modern European settler colonies and slave societies lived with the real threat of revolt as well as successful organized resistance to their expansion at the fringes of their territorial control.)
The administrative authority of these empires once established after the crushing defeat of any revolts by those loyal to their former polities was often thin and tenuous, what the historian Sara Berry has called “hegemony on a shoestring”, which might have been as important for its survival as any military backing. E.g., colonial administrations in the early 20th Century described their power in grandiose and sweeping terms but on the ground they had considerably less authority in ordering everyday life. In practical terms, in many places, the “native officer” was performing a hollow kind of authority of the sort described by George Orwell in his famous “Shooting an Elephant” essay. If non-Western communities had generally risen against such administrators in a protracted and decentralized insurgency, there would have been no way for Western European states to sustain large-scale military occupations that would have allowed direct rule by decree—but neither could non-Western societies generally prevail through military-centered revolts against the forces that could be brought to bear on them. Even when those revolts were well-coordinated, well-planned and strongly motivated (as in the Indian Mutiny), they eventually were crushed by superior military capacity and then by extraordinary punitive violence to follow.
So you might ask at this point what this has to do with Ukraine. Many observers of the current war are, with various degrees of self-satisfaction, arguing that this demonstrates that Russia’s military is actually quite weak, that it has been hobbled by kleptocracy, that Russian strategy or tactics are flawed, and so on. Much of which may be true: I lack the expertise as well as confidence in the information available to make any judgment.
One thing I do feel confident is saying, however, is that this is further proof that the brief era of force asymmetry is well and truly over in terms of the capacity of one national territory to conquer, annex or control another. Observers who see the Russian military as distinctively weak or flawed are overlooking how much the United States and its allies have also failed at occupying territory with military force that then leads to administrative dominion (whether directly or through a proxy government). Ukrainian forces are doing as well as they are on the battlefield partly because of their determination to resist and material support from many sympathetic nations, but in particular they are making good use of portable anti-armor weaponry like the NLAW and the Javelin and portable anti-aircraft weaponry like the Stinger missile.
A small handful of nations and supranational alliances are the last potential “conventional” combatants in the terms of 19th and 20th Century wars between powerful nation-states, and in those cases the superiority or capacity of their large and expensive militaries doubtless still matters a great deal in terms of determining the outcome of possible direct conflicts between them. (Behind that, sadly, is the fact that nuclear weapons might well make any such outcome irrelevant.) Those militaries in other contexts are only useful to destroy, not to conquer or gain practical administrative control over a territory. All the major hardware that might be important to a direct conflict between major conventional armies is vulnerable to attack by small groups of infantry or by insurgent groups hiding among civilian populations from a wide variety of light but lethal weapons that include improvised explosives, shoulder-fired missiles, portable light artillery, and ubiquitous cheap automatic rifles as well as long-range sniper rifles—and now also from cheap suicide drones.
You can’t rule a country from tanks or planes, and you can’t rule a country from behind walls or protected bases. If there’s anywhere you and your proxies and translators can’t go safely, then that’s ungoverned territory, and if most of the territory is ungoverned (as it will be in time) then you control very little in a meaningful sense. The only thing you can do is kill lots of people and hope that pacifies a territory—but as long as you want to claim to be in control of such a territory for whatever reason (“nation-building”, securing it against the return of enemies, reunifying it with your own nation) that will be all you can do with all that power: bombard from the air, bombard from the ground, terrify and murder everyone you see. Your proxies will die the moment you leave—or at least turn against you in short order.
In this technological and economic era, the biggest and most sophisticated militaries in the world solve very few geopolitical problems. They may solve many domestic problems, whether that’s as an instrument of state repression internally, as an engine of employment and dispersal of government funding within patronage networks, or for whipping up nationalist fervor. But globally what they enable at best is punitive action or highly targeted strikes on a very limited set of strategically significant targets. Right now there is no maxim gun, metaphorically or otherwise, no weapon or capacity distinctive to rich or technologically sophisticated militaries that is a force multiplier to such an extent that people in various territories are almost universally prepared to suspend any resistance and comply with an occupying power’s administrative dictates. At best such asymmetry allows the maintenance of a stalemate or perhaps the slow and creeping advancement of settler annexation, as in the case of Israel in the West Bank.
Not that this seems to stop powerful autocrats or powerful leaders of putatively democratic nations from thinking they have the military tools to control territories outside their own national boundaries and thus resolve some situation that troubles their vision of national power. Why that should be is a question for another day, but it may be that the one brief historical moment where such an asymmetry enabled that kind of hegemony (however briefly) is a sort of phantom limb encoded into the sovereignties that still map themselves onto the world through those empires.