John P. Dunn

Clothes to Kill For: Uniforms and Politics in Ottoman Armies

Clothing and fashion, even down to colors or accessories, made it easy to visually judge status for subjects of the Ottoman Sultan. Green versus blue turban, hats, or high yellow boots were not simply a matter of personal taste but also a means of clearly stating religion, ethnicity, and class in the pre-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. Sumptuary laws provided centuries of support for a system that made it possible to visually judge status. This tradition also made change difficult, especially when military reformists sought to graft European-style uniforms onto Muslim soldiery. Violence, some up to the level of regime change, was one result. This article examines resistance to martial fashion in the Ottoman and Egyptian militaries, and also, why nearly a century later, what was once revolutionary chic, morphed into symbols of a reactionary past.

Americans in the Nineteenth Century Egyptian Army: A Selected Bibliography

EXPORTING American military talent is no recent phenomena. The nineteenth century abounds with examples in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Some were mercenary ventures, while others were vetted by the government, but whether crowned with success or failure, all provide interesting stories of encounters with “the other.”1 More than fifty Americans served as officers in the armed forces of Egypt’s Muhammad Ali Dynasty. Some were eccentric soldiers of fortune like George Bethune English, but most came from a semiofficial mission led by West Point graduate Charles Pomeroy Stone. A few published accounts of their adventures, but most simply left behind papers. Several cry out for a modern biographer, or could easily serve as a good topic for a master’s thesis or dissertation. America’s first military connection with Egypt dates from 1804, when “General” William Eaton landed at Alexandria and hired several hundred Arnauts to back up his Marines as they marched to “the shores of Tripoli.”2 Seventeen years later, Egyptian gold connected with a true

‘The November evening’: The Warsaw uprising of November 1830

Warsaws famous ‘November Evening’ of 1830 provides an interesting look at the tactics of early nineteenth century urban warfare. A success for Polish rebels, it also marked the start of the first Russo‐Polish war.

Muhammad: Islam's First Great General (review)

the Roman, Mauryan, and Ch’in empires were so much more successful that the contrast makes Alexander’s empire seem a conspicuous failure. The unified Macedonian empire actually lasted for only six years, 325-319 BC. After Alexander III, the Great, died in 323 the empire was held together by regents acting for the infant Alexander IV, first Perdikkas (assassinated 321), then Antipater (died 319). Over the next forty years there were repeated efforts by Macedonian generals to reunite the empire, but all failed. Grainger’s attempt to explain the failure is not entirely successful. It suffers from overdetermination: too many causes are listed with too little effort to prioritize. The author’s conclusion suggests that Alexander failed to give proper thought to Macedon and Greece, which should have been his primary responsibility (p. 190). He never returned to Macedon after he invaded Persia in 334, and he intended to make Mesopotamia the center of his empire. This left Macedon open to the invasions of the Gauls in 279. But Grainger also thinks that Macedon could never have been the base of a world empire; the last sentence of the book tells us that by the 270s the Macedonians had “effectively wrecked their own empire” (p. 193). If so, then Alexander showed good judgment in leaving Macedon as quickly as he could. Was Alexander or were the Macedonians responsible for the failure? Grainger never seems quite to decide. The trouble with Macedon was that it was not so much a state as an unusually anarchic chiefdom with no administrative infrastructure. It imploded in a succession crisis about once a generation; the Wars of the Successors that followed Alexander were just the usual succession crisis on a continental scale. The empire might have had a chance if it could have linked the military resources of Macedon to the economic resources of the eastern provinces, as Alexander had done. But the two families most interested in restoring the empire were the Antipatrids and the Antigonids; neither had gone east with Alexander and both had a narrowly Macedonian frame of reference. Alexander did marry and produce heirs at about the usual age, but he could not foresee that he would be dead at 32, nor that his trusted vizier Hephaistion would die shortly before him at about the same age. Grainger’s intriguing book may not make due allowance for the fact that both Alexander and the Macedonians were cursed with bad luck.

Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (review)

and which gave his studies, even when they concerned issues of detail, an inner coherence and strength, as well as a broader relevance and deeper meaning. Compare Verbruggen’s magisterial 1958 article on “Militaire dienst in het graafschap Vlaanderen” (Military Service in the County of Flanders) with Boffa’s attempt (pp. 201–6) to redefine the distinctions between various types of military service. Some of Verbruggen’s key assumptions may have become questionable in the light of the best, mostly French, and mostly nonmilitary, medieval historiography of the past forty years. His understanding of the art of war was a traditional one which underrated the critical role of peculiar normative and legal frameworks in regulating and guiding medieval warfare. But that does not diminish the importance of possessing a solid grand framework, especially since the most prominent new grand “theorising” by the “military revolution” adherents is conceptually so poor. Although Boffa—however much by accident—supplies ammunition for a counterattack, for one to succeed it must be part of a well-designed campaign that is informed by a conceptually rich and coherent framework for understanding medieval warfare.

A Black Corps d'Elite: An Egyptian Sudanese Conscript Battalion with the French Army in Mexico, 1863-1867, and Its Survivors in Subsequent African History.

For several years, the armies of Napoleon III deployed some 450 Muslim Sudanese slave soldiers in Veracruz, the port of Mexico City. As in the other case of Western hemisphere military slavery (the West India Regiments, a British unit in existence 1795-1815), the Sudanese were imported from Africa in the hopes that they would better survive the tropical diseases that so terribly afflicted European soldiers. In both cases, the Africans did indeed fulfill these expectations. The mixture of cultures embodied by this event has piqued the interest of several historians, so it is by no means unknown. Hill and Hogg provide a particularly thorough account of this exotic interlude, explaining its background, looking in detail at the battle record in Mexico, and figuring out who exactly made up the battalion. Much in their account is odd and interesting, for example, the Sudanese superiority to Austrian troops and their festive nine-day spree in Paris on the emperors tab. The authors also assess the episodes longer-term impact on the Sudan, showing that the veterans of Mexico, having learnt much from their extended exposure to French military practices, rose quickly in the ranks, then taught these methods to others.