Racializing the Soldier

Gavin Schaffer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780415626170
• eBook ISBN: 9781134905409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Racializing the Soldier explores the impact of racial beliefs on the formation and development of modern armed forces and the ways in which these forces have been presented and historicized from a global perspective. With a wide geographical and temporal spread, the collection looks at the disparate ways that race has influenced military development. In particular, it explores the extent to which ideas of racial hierarchy and type have conditioned thinking about what kinds of soldiers should be used and in what roles.

This volume offers a highly original military, social and cultural history, questioning the borders both of racialization and of the military itself. It considers the extent to which discourses of gender, nationality and religion have informed racialization, and probes the influence of expert studies of soldiers as indicators of national population types. By focusing mostly, but not exclusively, on colonial and post-colonial states, the book considers how racialized militaries both shaped and reflected conflict in the modern world, ultimately explaining how the history of this idea has often underpinned modern military planning and thinking.

This book is based on a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice.

Racializing the soldier: an introduction

GAVIN SCHAFFER

The significance of racialization in social relations has been extensively and convincingly documented in international scholarship.¹ This body of research has emphasized that race, as an idea, has a clear historical specificity. While the construction and vision of group differences is age-old, it was in the post-Enlightenment world that race came into its own.² As a tool of, and obstacle to, nation-building, the idea of ‘race’ assumed a central place in the nineteenth century, as states increasingly began to identify and justify themselves as distinct according to a body of essential physical and psychological characteristics. Here, racialization played a core role in the ordering of the modern imperial world, a necessary mechanism to make sense of who We were, and who Others were.³ Thus, in The Living Races of Mankind, a turn-of-the-century British handbook of global racial characteristics, the authors explained that ‘if we are to maintain a great Imperial Policy and a lasting supremacy in trade, it must be through a better understanding of the needs and characteristics of the various peoples with whom we are brought into contact.’⁴ Of course, the entire colonial world was underpinned by an inequitable balance of military strength. Armies not only protected imperial interests, but often acted as broader conduits of imperial thinking. As Frantz Fanon observed: ‘In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.’⁵ In this way, the study of the military is crucial in the history of race and empire. Its role is cemented by the fact that not only did militaries act upon the imperial world, but the process was symbiotic. The imperial world, with its highly racialized modes of thinking, impacted substantially on the development of the military, leaving in its wake an enduring legacy.

This legacy relates to the racialization of modern armies. Racializing the Soldier analyses the elaborate processes whereby designated races were ascribed with a range of traits, encompassing their propensity and attitude towards war and soldiering. In the imperial world, these ascriptions were clear to see. For example, the racialized analysis of the ‘Shangallas’, a subdivision of ‘Abyssinian Negro races’, in The Living Races of Mankind, described ‘a fierce warlike race’ who fed on ‘meat and wild honey’.⁶ While such descriptions of African and Asian groups as warriors were fairly commonplace in the imperial imagination, they sat squarely within a broader discourse of primitivism that usually emphasized a lack of soldierly character alongside primitive strength. Thus, while ‘Negroes’ were presented as fierce, The Living Races of Mankind observed that ‘in cases of reverse they are liable to panic’.⁷ Ultimately, African and Asian soldiers were most often presented in colonial narratives as unreliable cowards. In J. H. Patterson’s famous tale of adventure and colonial railway building in Uganda, The Man Eaters of Tsavo, he outlined the crucial importance of choosing a ‘gun-bearer’ of the correct ‘race’. Most hunters, he stated, ‘prefer a Somali’, though he had heard that they were inclined ‘to be troublesome’. The alternative was ‘an equally good Swahili’. In Patterson’s racialized hierarchy, these groups stood out from the Wa Nyika, who were of a ‘low type’, and South Asian ‘coolies’, who were ‘never remarkable for bravery’.⁸ Here, a man’s mettle could be pre-determined, ascribed by his racial type, so that the colonial soldier needed to be an expert on ‘race’ alongside military matters. It was this deep belief in racialized soldierly qualities that later led Patterson to take on the leadership of the Zionist Mule Corps and the Jewish Legion in the First World War. Here he was leading men whose racial qualities he really believed in: Jews whose biblical exploits marked them out as men of ‘great personal bravery’.⁹

That Patterson and others constructed soldierly masculinities in this way will come as no surprise to scholars of imperialism. In imperial constructions of soldiering, the perceived superiority of Northern Europeans and variously dismissive accounts of the ‘native’ soldier can be taken as read in most cases, mitigated as they sometimes are by the persistent counter-myth of the noble and brave savage.¹⁰ However, in an atmosphere in which a soldier’s character could be inferred from his antecedents, the racial gaze permeated far beyond imperial peripheries, in the nineteenth century, to the very heart of European states. In the competitive and anxious environment of new imperialism, the racial stock of domestic armies became a matter of increasing introspection.¹¹ Amid fears of degeneration, European states thought hard about the suitability of their soldiers, frequently retreating into racialized rationales that disparaged potential recruits from various minority groups as well as from sections of the working classes. Immigrants and minorities were never passive recipients of this atmosphere of racialization. Anxious to prove their worth, they frequently saw the battlefield as an opportunity to display racial character through bravery and self-sacrifice. In a climate in which the lines between race and nation were awkwardly drawn and frequently disputed, this opportunity was extremely important and often invoked as a benchmark of belonging, a sign of racial desirability.

This collection focuses on the processes by which soldiers were racialized in different countries and contexts. In particular, it explores the extent to which ideas of racial hierarchy and type have conditioned social and political thinking about how different racial groups of soldiers should be used, and in which roles and environments. By focusing mostly on colonial and postcolonial states, the collection considers how racialized militaries both shaped and reflected conflict in the modern world. Given the broad timespan of the collection (which begins with Erica Charters’s analysis of the colonial soldier in the mid-eighteenth century and concludes in the aftermath of the Second World War), it also foregrounds change and continuity in racial thinking.

To uncover the nature and patterns of persistent racialized thinking about soldiering, the volume addresses a series of related themes. At its core are narratives that focus on the significance of blackness in the process of racialization by looking at the applications of this kind of racism and how it changed over time. To this end, Bobby Wintermute’s chapter on black soldiers in the American army considers the nature of colour discrimination, and its roots and evolution in the period leading up to (and then during) the First World War. His analysis paints a picture of relentless prejudice, an idea both revisited and problematized by Tony Kushner’s analysis of racial thinking in the British military in the twentieth century. Beginning where Wintermute leaves off, in the wake of the First World War, Kushner uses the prism of race science to examine changing attitudes towards black troops in the British armed forces. While both these chapters focus mostly on African-Caribbean troops, Kim Wagner and Gavin Rand examine the importance of British racial discrimination in the context of colonial India. Exploring colonial engagement with longer-standing discourses of military racial suitability, their chapter highlights the relationship between a racialized military and colonial power, focusing on the enduring idea of ‘martial races’ in South Asian populations. Key to all of these accounts is the role of the racial ‘expert’ in designating both races and racial qualities. In the colonial context, the relationship between bodies of scientific and medical expertise and grassroots military thinking became, early on, an important transfer point for racialized thinking, an issue addressed in this volume by Erica Charters’s analysis of colonial soldiering in Africa in the mid-eighteenth century.

Of course, the process of racialization did not only concern constructions of black and Asian soldiers. Instead, as the remaining chapters here collectively emphasize, white groups were frequently also racially classified and ranked across varying global contexts. In every case, racializing the soldier both served, and sometimes masked, broader political and ideological purposes. As Marius Turda shows in his study of Romania between 1914 and 1944, soldiers could be used as pawns to serve nationalist racial agendas. In the age of Total War, using race as a weapon of ideological warfare involved an ever-broader net of racialization.¹² In this context, Zoe Denness argues that the construction of enemy combatants in the Boer War entailed the racialization of civilian women as well as their male Boer soldier counterparts. Using race as a weapon of propaganda was not exclusively a tool of states. Minorities too harnessed racialized self-images in an attempt to ameliorate prejudice and fit into new host communities.¹³ Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of British Jewry, who, I argue, employed the concept of the ‘muscle Jew’ to convince fellow Britons of their military worth to the nation.

Finally, the volume hosts a series of chapters that explore the ways in which racialized images of soldiers have outlived conflicts and played out in post-war social memories. To this end, Tim Grady explores how the memory of German-Jewish soldiers in the First World War was the subject of continual renegotiation through the inter-war and post-war periods, set against the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Similarly, Jane McGaughey describes the erasure of Catholic soldiers after the First World War in an Irish society that increasingly saw the conflict within parameters that excluded the Catholic contribution. Again, the idea that minorities are as prone as states to the selective presentation of soldiers’ contributions is considered by Wendy Ugolini in her analysis of British Italian communal war memory, a memory that generally chose to emphasize internment histories and minimize contributions made to the British military in the Second World War.

Collectively, this body of scholarship foregrounds the historical importance of racialization in times of war and in its aftermath. Across continents, for hundreds of years, soldiers have repeatedly been selected and remembered racially, according to criteria whereby notions of type prefigured the realities of service and sacrifice. While, in the present day, race may well be on the retreat, the military preference for some ‘racial’ communities over others continues. Like other forms of racial discrimination, this racialization ultimately undermines the individual, and categorizes us as humans according to mystic and discredited notions of difference. While the inequities of racial thinking may well pale into insignificance amid the horror of modern warfare, the chapters here serve to show that the racialization of soldiers has been, and continues to be, a key concern of states and their citizens. In a period in which military service has often been linked to rights to citizenship, racializing the soldier has frequently enabled an entrenched layer of prejudice, fuelling contest and conflict at the borders of inclusion and belonging.

Notes

1 See D. T. Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford and Cambridge MA: Blackwell 1993), 3, where he argues: ‘Race is one of the central conceptual inventions of modernity.’ See also P. Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Penguin 2000), 53, which asserts that race may be ‘modernity’s most pernicious signature’.

2 See M. Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987).

3 The construction of racial Selves and Others was most famously discussed by Edward Said in Orientali...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Racializing the soldier: an introduction
• 2. Making bodies modern: race, medicine and the colonial soldier in the mid-eighteenth century
• 3. Recruiting the ‘martial races’: identities and military service in colonial India
• 4. Women and warfare at the start of the twentieth century: the racialization of the ‘enemy’ during the South African War (1899–1902)
• 5. ‘The Negro should not be used as a combat soldier’: reconfiguring racial identity in the United States Army, 1890–1918
• 6. The language of sacrifice: masculinities in Northern Ireland and the consequences of the Great War
• 7. Creating difference: the racialization of Germany’s Jewish soldiers after the First World War
• 8. In search of racial types: soldiers and the anthropological mapping of the Romanian nation, 1914–44
• 9. ‘Without intending any of the most undesirable features of a colour bar’: race science, Europeanness and the British armed forces during the twentieth century
• 10. Unmasking the ‘muscle Jew’: the Jewish soldier in British war service, 1899–1945
• 11. The embodiment of British Italian war memory? The curious marginalization of Dennis Donnini, VC
• Index