Imperialist Wargaming

Some of you, possibly, knowing my interest in the Thirty Years War may well be expecting something about that subject, but, no, that will have to wait for another occasion. I mentioned before that I had read Wolfgang Reinhard’s ‘A Short History of Colonialism’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), and that it was a fairly interesting book. I also noted that I had accused some wargaming of being neo-colonial, and so I suppose I had better at least assess what I might mean and what Reinhard, if he were interested in wargaming, might think about it.

Well, firstly, the idea of the book is to present the term ‘colonialism’ in a fairly neutral light. Some colonialism is better than other colonialism, obviously, but Reinhard’s view, I think, is that colonialism in some form is an almost inevitable fact of human existence. Far before the term was thought of, and long before it was used in a pejorative sense, the Greeks and Romans were setting up colonies. London, York and Colchester are among the colonies of Rome in the UK. Marseilles and Cadiz can trace their roots back to the Romans, Greeks and Carthaginians. Wherever international trade existed, there was the opportunity for colonialism, in the sense of what would be later termed ‘factories’, which amounted to trading stations and merchants from overseas.

As is fairly inevitable, a trading station can develop. The merchants get involved in local politics, and get involved with the population. Friction can ensure and military action follows. Further, of course, as the international scene becomes more active, rival merchants are driven out and British Empire, often said to have been acquired in a fir of absence of mind, in fact came about through a set of local initiatives seizing power in various places, and international conflict, mostly with France. It was not, in most senses, planned to become an empire on which the sun never set, it sort of happened.

Reinhard notes that the balance sheet for colonialism is mixed. Some people certainly suffered greatly from it, although some of the suffering was inadvertently inflicted, as with the epidemics that decimated the populations of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Other suffering was, in essence, racist, although that is rather a smaller element than might be expected. Mostly the driver was money. Europeans went to their colonies to make it, and usually had to harass the locals to provide it in some form. Of course, some of the locals were pleased to do this. Much colonialism was enabled by local elites seizing more power (or, in some cases, any power) in alliance with the colonials.

Colonialism did do some good things. Ultimately, many colonies were democratised and developed. Whether this was done deliberately is a bit of a moot point, but it did happen. On the other hand, there are in the world a sufficient number of basket case former colonies to make us wonder if a different development course might not have left better legacies. The colonial powers pulled out, in some cases, far too quickly for local democracy to have had much of a chance against the local, armed, strong men. Even now, in some places, the former colonial power has some sway and has intervened in some of the internal disputes.

Imperialism, however, is a bit of a different kettle of fish. The Scramble for Africa of the late nineteenth century was caused by great power rivalry. Bismarck is quoted as saying that the map of Africa ran through Europe. There was a lot of horse trading between the powers over trade routes and colonial stations. For example, all powers wanted coaling stations to their ships could reach their colonies without having to stop at other power’s ports. Thus, otherwise commercially rather unattractive places became subject to colonial powers.

There was also the requirement to be seen to be strong. Rebellion could not be countenanced. The Germans executed what, today, would be called genocide in Southern Africa. The British invented the concentration camp in the Boer War, although the deaths were caused mainly by disease rather than deliberate extermination. Few of the other colonial powers come out of this part of the story well. Imperialism was conducted, as Bismarck implied, with one eye on the other powers. He needs of the locals were ignored.

As for wargaming, of course, there are two issues. Firstly, do we really want to wargame, say, the fighting in New Zealand against the Maori? From earlier posts on this theme, the answer of some correspondents was broadly speaking ‘no’ because the game would be one sided and hence boring. Fair enough – there are certainly more interesting wargames to be had than one side setting up some machine guns and mowing down all comers.

The second issue, I submit, is the tendency of the opposition in colonial wargames  to be presented as some sort of sub-Europeans. By this I mean that the local population is represented by categories of troops, with outlooks, that are imposed upon them through European colonial-imperialist eyes. In a sense, it is just an extension of the dreaded ‘national characteristics’ that used to be so rife in rules. But in this context it does start to look rather like the imposition of a different standard of warfare and organisation onto a culture, rather like the imperial powers imposed on the slices of the world they acquired.

As an example, which hopefully is fairly neutral, the European settlers in North America complained about the locals, that they would not stand up and fight. They ambushed. They raided. They used cover, and essentially undertook what the Europeans called a ‘skulking way of war’. Now, I am aware that this is best covered by skirmish level wargames, but there are some “big battle” games which also cover the period. These latter make what we could call an imperialist assumption: that the locals stood up and fought in accordance with the European expectation. Actually, so far as I have read, they rarely did, at least in the seventeenth century.

I could, and I may well, go on, but I think sufficient has been said to justify a gentle accusation at wargaming: some of it is imperialist.