Introduction

South Asia's population is characterized by ‘youth bulge’. Some 50 per cent of the population at present is aged less than twenty-five years. Frustrated, uneducated, poor youth are the cutting edge of the insurgent armies. The situation is not rosy for Pakistan. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, there were about 14,000 madrasas in Pakistan with about one million poor students. They provide free boarding to the students. These madrasas provide only rigid and intolerant Islamic religious education. The madrasa students can only become clerics in the mosques. Most of the madrasa students become foot soldiers of the tanzims. The literacy rate in Pakistan in the new millennium is only 48 per cent. During 1996–7, only 1.25 per cent of Nepal's labour force was engaged in industry. Some 71 per cent of the population was below the poverty line and 60 per cent of the population was illiterate. The high population of India results in low per capita income, unequal development and relative deprivation, which are the principal motivators behind armed uprisings in various parts of India. The linguistic, religious and ethnic diversity of South Asia's population have further added a dangerous dressing to the already troubled scenario. This chapter focusses on those insurgent groups which maintain ‘private armies’ that engage in both guerrilla campaigns and conduct terrorist attacks.

India

From its very independence, India has struggled to maintain ‘law and order’ in the north-east and north-west (Kashmir).

Within Ireland a variety of competing amateur military traditions can be identified. One of the major ones, especially in the 1860s, is what could be termed the Fenian or Republican tradition formed from those opposed to British rule in Ireland and bearing, in its social composition and social activities, a number of similarities to the Rifle Volunteer movement in Britain. However, as this volume is concerned with the British Imperial manifestations of the amateur military tradition, the Fenian movement will not form a major part of this study. Within auxiliary crown forces raised in Ireland two competing amateur military traditions can be identified. The first and possibly oldest is the Protestant volunteering tradition. This can be traced back to the plantations of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and later manifested itself in the Irish Volunteers (1775–92), the Irish Yeomanry (1796–1834), the Ulster Volunteer Force (1913–14) and arguably even in the Ulster Special Constabulary (1920–70) and Ulster Defence Regiment (1970–92). As with the volunteer tradition in Great Britain the origin of these forces lay in local initiatives and considerable private funding. The other loyal auxiliary tradition in Ireland is that of the militia, essentially an attempt to transplant an English military system into Ireland. Although some early examples of this have been identified in the late seventeenth century, it was to be 1793 before this system was fully implemented in Ireland on an English pattern. Interestingly this thirty-six years after the same system had been implemented in England and Wales but four years before it was implemented in Scotland.

1837 found Ireland with no amateur military forces in proper existence. The Irish Yeomanry, formed in 1796 had been disbanded in 1834 by the Whig government. The force was widely seen to be sectarian in nature and was certainly largely Protestant in composition. In any case, its functions as a part-time constabulary force had been rendered redundant both by the concentration of the yeomanry in Ulster, far removed from some of the worst ‘disturbed districts’, and the formation of the Irish Constabulary in 1822.

Previous chapters have claimed that the challenges of military medical practice in foreign climates were significant factors in the production of the belief that military medicine was specialized and distinct from civilian practice. This chapter will investigate that process through a detailed examination of the Egyptian campaign and its consequences in Britain.

The Egyptian campaign began in July 1798 when Napoleon and his ‘Army of the Orient’ arrived there with the intention of conquering the region and then making for British possessions in India. Although initially successful, a series of defeats in 1799 prevented the French army from achieving its goal. Unable to return to France after Nelson famously destroyed the French fleet at Abukir Bay, the army was abandoned by Napoleon who slipped back to Paris in August that year. Under General Kleber and (after Kleber's assassination) General Menou, the French army remained in Egypt for another two years. In 1801, the British sent Lt General Sir Ralph Abercrombie with 16,000 men to remove the threat presented to India by the remaining French troops in Egypt. Additional British and Indian troops were sent from India. After a series of engagements, during which Abercrombie was killed and Major General Hutchinson took charge of the British forces, the French surrendered and towards the end of 1801 both armies began their journeys home.

This campaign has been described by some historians as not only geographically, but also militarily, peripheral to the Wars.

As discussed in the previous chapter, in the aftermath of the battle of Nödlingen (1634) and the Treaty of Prague (1635) it appeared to most European powers that the forces of the Holy Roman Empire had delivered a decisive blow against the Swedes and their allies. Ferdinand believed that he had finally gained the upper hand against the various powers opposed to Habsburg hegemony. The Prague settlement led to the mass departure of former Swedish allies, most notably Elector Johan Georg of Saxony but soon followed by Duke Georg of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, resulting in the removal of at least six generals and several prominent colonels from pro-Swedish forces. Colonel William Vavasour, an English veteran, stated emphatically that Lüneburg's defection left him stranded in enemy territory and in great danger. Wounded, he was forced to retire to London and leave his remaining 300 men with colleagues; the English soldiers of his company were sent to the Scottish Colonel James Lumsden in Osnabrück, while the Germans were sent to Vavasour's countryman, Colonel Arthur Aston, in Nienburg. Other allies vacillated. When Landgrave Wilhelm of Hessen-Kassel provisionally accepted the treaty in November, Axel Oxenstierna was prompted to order Lieutenant General Peter Melander to prevent any demobilizing Hessen troops from joining the Imperialists.

The professional identity and medical practice of the medical officers of the British army had changed significantly between the outbreak of war in 1793 and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. This chapter will demonstrate that the military medicine they practised was a significant force in the development of British medicine more generally in the years following the Wars.

It is now clear that the emergence of hospital medicine in France owed much to military medicine. However, the transition to hospital medicine in Britain is generally acknowledged to have developed more gradually than on the Continent and to have been influenced by a wide variety of changes within a vibrant ‘medical marketplace’ where older models continued to exist alongside hospital medicine for a much longer period. The militarized medicine that had been embraced by British military medical officers shared many characteristics with hospital medicine, particularly the exertion of control over patients, the classification and segregation of different disease and surgical classes, and an ontological, lesion-based understanding of disease. As they flooded back into the civilian marketplace, British medical officers helped to bring this type of medicine to their patients and communities. At the same time, British medicine experienced the rise of the general practitioner, a professional identity that blurred the traditional line between physic and surgery that the military medical officer also advocated.

The benefits of military medicine to the general community were also advocated from within the AMD where McGrigor presided over the promotion of the discoveries and achievements of his medical officers.

The conquest of disease has long been considered vital to the expansion of the British Empire. Conversely, encounters with new disease environments in India, the West Indies and the Americas have been identified as catalysts for evolutions in the way disease, therapeutics and the British constitution were understood. One of the most significant of these periods of change was the early nineteenth century. This study has endeavoured to bridge the gap between histories establishing the effects of foreign service and the experience of war on British medical practitioners, and studies investigating the transition from older forms of knowledge, to ‘hospital’ or empirically-based medicine. With the exception of a handful of recently published works, the contribution of British army medical officers of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to that process has not been explored, despite the fact that those practitioners formed a significant proportion of the British medical community and were likely to have had some influence on the development of medical theory and practice.

Such recently published works have exploded traditional military medical histories that dismissed these practitioners as ill-educated butchers purveying a medicine based on misguided science. The successes of disease prevention during this period have also been shown to have been based on more than a fortuitous alignment of circumstance. Additionally, historians have begun to illuminate the ways in which new forms of medical evidence and reporting were constructed by these practitioners.

When the first European settlers arrived in New Zealand they encountered in the Maori a warlike, well-organized and increasingly well-armed people who were engaged in a series of bloody inter-tribal conflicts. The predominately British settlers brought with them a strong tradition of citizen soldiering that they drew upon in their new home. The inhabitants of Kororareka, the principal European settlement, were concerned during the 1830s both with the potential threat posed by Maori and by the lawless activities of other Europeans. In 1838 they established the Kororareka Association. Members of the association agreed to arm themselves and to act together under their elected president to maintain law and order and respond to threats to the community. When New Zealand became a British colony in February 1840, the new Governor, Captain William Hobson, immediately directed that the association cease its activities and also ordered the disbandment of the militia organized and armed by the New Zealand Company at its settlement of Wellington.

Unofficial volunteer units were established in the New Zealand Company settlements of Nelson and Wellington after twenty-two armed settlers and special constables were killed by Maori in what became known as the Wairou massacre in June 1843. There was, however, no further fighting and the governor, who was determined to pursue a conciliatory policy that would reduce the danger of racial conflict, ordered the disbandment of these units after a small detachment of British troops was sent to Wellington.

There was a widespread feeling among settlers after ‘the terrible affair at the Wairou’ that the colony's administration was failing in its duty to protect them. They pressed the governor and the Colonial Office for additional regular troops and for the establishment of a militia, which would be much more effective than hastily sworn in special constables. In response to a petition from settlers in Nelson, Lord Stanley reiterated the Colonial Office's view that the colony should take steps to ensure its own security by forming a militia. The Governor, Captain Robert FitzRoy was opposed to such an initiative, but nonetheless submitted a draft militia ordinance to the Legislative Council in September 1844.

Two traditions of citizen soldier service developed in nineteenth-century South Africa: the Boer commando and the British volunteer regiment. During conflicts with indigenous Khoisan in the 1700s, frontier Dutch settlers in the Cape organized voluntary local militias called ‘commandos’ that would mobilize when needed and then disband. Formed in the mid-1800s, the interior Boer republics relied exclusively on the commando system, which fielded highly mobile forces of skilled horsemen and marksmen but suffered unstable leadership, non-existent logistics and high rates of desertion. The nineteenth-century wars between the British ruled Cape Colony and the neighbouring Xhosa groups produced a number of volunteer and ad hoc colonial military units. Beginning in the mid-1850s, in the British territories of the Cape and Natal, around the same time that white settlers began to assume more political responsibility, mostly English-speaking whites formed permanent militia units based on the British regimental system. The discovery of minerals, diamonds in the Northern Cape in the late 1860s and gold in the Transvaal during the 1880s, renewed colonial conquest in the region. This process depended heavily on the participation of citizen soldiers from both the Boer republics and British colonies.

Commandos

Expanding east from the Cape Colony, Dutch-speaking frontier farmers called Trekboers organized mounted commandos that would mobilize for cattle and slave raids against indigenous Khoisan and to pursue stock thieves. Between around 1700 and 1715, the first commandos consisted mostly of Dutch East India Company employees and a few settler volunteers. Although the first entirely civilian commando was formed in 1715, these groups remained dependent upon the company for ammunition. In 1739 commando service became compulsory for all frontier male settlers who often brought along Khoisan servants or sent them as substitutes. Khoisan members, sometimes constituting the majority of a commando, were armed and received a share of captured livestock though less than white settlers. Commando leaders were not required to obtain permission to raise a force but simply had to submit a report upon completion of operations.

Christian IV of Denmark-Norway found himself in a disastrous military predicament by the spring of 1628. He had rashly decided to attack the empire without either fully consulting his allies or completing any kind of negotiation with his Swedish neighbour for mutual support. A confluence of circumstances altered this situation. At the time there was a prevailing belief that Stralsund's neutrality would not be respected by the Habsburgs. This resulted in frenetic Danish endeavours to bolster the Stralsund garrison, one of the last remaining allies they had. After all, the neighbouring duchy of Pomerania had yielded to the forces of the Holy Roman Empire after Albrecht von Wallenstein ordered the occupation of all ports and towns in October 1627. This forced Duke Bogislaw XIV to sign the Capitulation of Franzburg on 10 November. Wallenstein thereafter sought to secure the southern coastline of the Baltic Sea for Ferdinand II and establish a naval base from which the Imperialists could undertake operations against Denmark. Indeed, from then on Wallenstein revelled in his self-proclaimed title of ‘General of the Oceans and the Baltic Sea’. Stralsund, however, ignored Bogislaw's order to adhere to the capitulation and instead turned first to Denmark and then to Sweden for support.