shopping_cart
Ohio University Press · Swallow Press · www.ohioswallow.com

Making Martial Races
Gender, Society, and Warfare in Africa

Edited by Myles Osborne

A central organizing category in colonial Africa, “martial race” was a notion debated and negotiated between African men and women and the European officials who sought to control them.

European colonizers in Africa required the service of local soldiers and military auxiliaries to uphold their power. These African men were initially engaged by the expeditions of European surveyors and explorers during the late nineteenth century, then quickly pressed into service in the notorious campaigns of pacification. Two world wars further expanded both the numbers of African soldiers in European employ and the roles they played; many of these men would continue their jobs into the era of decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s.

Colonial administrators and military planners often chose their recruits based on the notion of “martial race”—a label that denoted peoples supposedly possessing an inborn aptitude for warfare and fighting. But the notion always obscured more than it revealed: few Europeans could agree on which “races”—or ethnic groups—were “martial,” and in any case, the identities of those groups changed continuously. Nevertheless, this belief remained a fundamental, guiding principle of the European presence in colonial Africa.

The concept of “martial race” remains an awkward and ill-fitting Eurocentric category until African contributions, perspectives, and agencies are considered. “Martial race” was never a label neatly affixed by European administrators; rather, African peoples both contested its terms and shaped its contours. This book therefore takes as its starting point the idea of martial race and recasts it as a zone in which African men and women negotiated with their European counterparts, as well as with one another.

The contributors to this volume take a broad approach to the topic, one that minimizes divisions between the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras, and thinks through how cultural practices and notions of warfare and martial traditions shifted and were transformed from one period into another. These scholars’ research touches on a wide variety of subjects, including

  • efforts to think about culture and martial race;
  • the intersection of ethnic identity and the creation of “tribes” with colonial martial race theory;
  • the connection between colonial ethnography and constructions of martial subjectivities;
  • the role of gender in shaping martial notions;
  • the contribution of women to creating or disputing martial identities;
  • the idea of martial race as it intersected with slavery;
  • warring traditions and economies of honor as avenues for staking claims to martial genealogies; and
  • claims to special status by veterans of anticolonial revolutionary wars.

Myles Osborne is an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Ethnicity and Empire in Kenya: Loyalty and Martial Race among the Kamba, c. 1800 to the Present, coauthor of Africans and Britons in the Age of Empires, 1660–1980, and editor of The Life and Times of General China: Mau Mau and the End of Empire in Kenya.   More info →

Order a print copy

Paperback · $27.96 ·
Pre-Order

Retail price: $34.95 · Save 20% ($27.96)

Hardcover · $64 ·
Pre-Order

Retail price: $80.00 · Save 20% ($64)

Cover of Making Martial Races

Share    Facebook icon  Email icon

Requests

Review Copy

This book is not yet available for desk or examination copy requests. Please check back soon.

Permission to reprint
Permission to photocopy or include in a course pack via Copyright Clearance Center

Formats

Paperback
978-0-8214-2618-0
Retail price: $34.95, S.
Release date: January 2024
12 illus. · 288 pages · 6 × 9 in.
Rights:  World

Hardcover
978-0-8214-2617-3
Retail price: $80.00, S.
Release date: January 2024
12 illus. · 288 pages · 6 × 9 in.
Rights:  World

Electronic
978-0-8214-2619-7
Release date: January 2024
12 illus. · 288 pages
Rights:  World

Related Titles

Cover of 'War and Society in Colonial Zambia, 1939–1953'

War and Society in Colonial Zambia, 1939–1953
By Alfred Tembo

The first major study of its kind, this book shows—from a Zambian perspective—how Northern Rhodesia, then a British colony, organized and deployed human, military, and natural resources during the Second World War. New research and oral histories further demonstrate the war’s social and industrial impact on Zambia in the immediate postwar period.

History | Africa | South | General · Political Science | Imperialism · World War II · Zambia · Eastern Africa · South Asia · Middle East · African Studies

Cover of 'Apartheid’s Black Soldiers'

Apartheid’s Black Soldiers
Un-national Wars and Militaries in Southern Africa
By Lennart Bolliger

Thousands of Black troops served in South Africa’s security forces in Namibia and Angola during apartheid. Bolliger’s new research leads him to reject their common depiction as “collaborators,” challenge the portrayal of the wars in which they fought as struggles for national liberation, and reveal the complexity of South Africa’s military culture.

History | Africa | South | General · Military History · Colonialism and Decolonization · African Studies · South Africa

Cover of 'Militarizing Marriage'

Militarizing Marriage
West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire
By Sarah J. Zimmerman

By prioritizing women and conjugality in the historiography of African colonial soldiers, Militarizing Marriage historicizes how the subjugation of women was indispensable to military conquest and colonial rule across French Empire.

History | Africa | West · Women’s Studies · Colonialism and Decolonization · Military History · Western Africa · Senegal · Algeria · Middle East · Syria · Madagascar · Vietnam · African Studies

Cover of 'Violent Intermediaries'

Violent Intermediaries
African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa
By Michelle R. Moyd

The askari, African soldiers recruited in the 1890s to fill the ranks of the German East African colonial army, occupy a unique space at the intersection of East African history, German colonial history, and military history.Lauded by Germans for their loyalty during the East Africa campaign of World War I, but reviled by Tanzanians for the violence they committed during the making of the colonial state between 1890 and 1918, the askari have been poorly understood as historical agents.

African History · African Studies · History · Military History · Germany · Western Europe · Europe · Africa