Rebels and Regimes

Rebels and Regimes presents a global view of the nature of violent resistance throughout the nineteenth century. The volume’s breadth and scope reveal commonalities and differences among regimes and insurgents in their different contexts, offering a view that the participants themselves never had. The collection is composed of ten essays, each focused on a specific conflict or period of colonial overreach: imperialist efforts against Caribbean maroons, the Peninsular War, the Second Seminole War, the Taiping Rebellion, the American Civil War, Russian imperial expansion, British imperial expansion in both India and South Africa, the War of the Triple Alliance, and the Dutch-Aceh War.

Using a comparative approach to show how established regimes fought rebels, the volume emphasizes the importance of race, political rhetoric, and historians’ paradigms in understanding nineteenth-century violence. As the collection demonstrates, comparing violence and histories of violence at a global level provides significant historiographic value. Case studies of two or three conflicts abound, but the increasing web of connections—economic, cultural, political, and military—across national communities in this era demands a more comprehensive framing.

At an analytical level, the volume lays bare the usefulness and limitations of traditional concepts used to study war, from Eastern and Western ways of war to regular and irregular fighting methods to symmetric and asymmetric warfare. A comparative approach at this scale drives home the characteristic savagery of established regimes, the intentionality in guerrilla violence, and the historian’s need to keep the present and the past in view. The essays also remind us of the importance of military thought and violence as one of the axes of globalization in the nineteenth century, something that scholars of globalization have rarely recognized.

Andrew Fialka and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, “Military History, Global History, and the Mid-Nineteenth Century”

Marcus Nevius, “Little Wars and the Imperial Competition for Sovereignty in the Maroon Caribbean During the Age of Revolutions”

Charles Esdaile, “‘War to the Knife?’: Spanish Guerrillas Reappraised”

Samuel Watson, “The Complex Character of the Second Seminole War”

Zhenman Ye, “On the March to Victory: Irregular Warfare and the Taiping Rebellion, 1851–1864”

Joseph Beilein, “The Word Is Not the Thing: A Short Biography of ‘Irregular Warfare’ in the American Civil War”

Ian Campbell, “Colonial Warfare as Irregular Warfare: Conflict on the Imperial Russian Borderlands During the Nineteenth Century”

Gavin Rand, “‘The Surf That Marks the Edge and Advance of Civilization’: Frontier Wars in Colonial South Asia”

Vitor Izecksohn, “The Campaign of Cordilleras in the War of the Triple Alliance, 1869–1870: Resistance or Suicide?”

Jacob Ivey, “‘A Pretorian Guard of Savages’: African Troops and the Implementation of Formal and Informal Order in Nineteenth-Century Natal”

Josh Gedeacht, “Harnessing Mobility for Colonial Counterinsurgency: The Case of the Dutch-Aceh War in Southeast Asia, 1873–1904”