1800–1914

2021 ◽  
pp. 27-36
Author(s):  
Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal

This sub-chapter provides a chronological overview of the nineteenth century development of Istanbul, Alexandria, and Thessaloniki. It summarizes how migration and demographic growth, infrastructural development, the establishment of municipal government, and development of urban planning contributed to the modern cities that British servicemen would encounter during the years under study, despite their insistence on characterising the region as ‘backward’. It then examines the expansion of British power in the eastern Mediterranean over the same period, highlighting how a series of political and economic developments had established a British presence in the region which would form a launchpad for the military campaigns beginning in 1914.

1971 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Meyer

THE Mexican Revolution was almost two and a half years old when General Victoriano Huerta captured the presidential chair. The chaotic period between November, 1910 and February, 1913 witnessed an ever-increasing militarization of the country which just a few years earlier had prided itself as the most stable republic and lucrative investment field in Latin America. When the military campaigns of the anti-Díaz movement began to assume serious proportions early in 1911, the government in Mexico City set out to increase at once the size and efficiency of the federal army and the rurales. Although Díaz efforts were for naught, the preparations themselves augured ominously for the immediate future. When the rebel general Pascual Orozco captured Ciudad Juárez in May of 1911, the die was cast. A small but effective revolutionary army, adept at guerrilla warfare, had humbled a professional fighting force schooled in the nineteenth-century German tradition.


Author(s):  
David G. Morgan-Owen

Historians have argued that the British Army was afflicted with an insular focus on home defence in the late nineteenth century and that this preoccupation was evidence of the paucity of military strategic thought and the lack of co-operation and dialogue between the two services. This chapter challenges that viewpoint and argues that the military leadership was, in fact, consistently much more interested in preparing for operations overseas than it was in planning to prevent an invasion. The military authorities were only deflected from this aim by differences of opinion with the Admiralty on the application of naval power and on the Navy’s inability to commit to the safe passage of troops by sea, disagreements which obliged the War Office to limit the scope of its strategic discourse. This had significant implications for both military and imperial policy, particularly the defence of India.


Author(s):  
Pratyay Nath

What can war tell us about empire? Climate of Conquest is built around this question. Pratyay Nath eschews the conventional way of writing about warfare primarily in terms of battles and technologies. Instead, he unravels the deep connections that Mughal war-making shared with the broader dynamics of society, culture, and politics. In the process, he offers a new analysis of the Mughal empire from the vantage point of war. Climate of Conquest closely studies the dynamics of the military campaigns that helped the Mughals conquer North India and project their power beyond it. In the first part, Nath argues that these campaigns unfolded in constant negotiation with the diverse natural environment of South Asia. The empire sought to discipline the environment and harness its resources to satisfy its own military needs. At the same time, environmental factors like climate, terrain, and ecology profoundly influenced Mughal military tactics, strategy, and deployment of technology. In the second part, Nath makes three main points. Firstly, he argues that Mughal military success owed a lot to the efficient management of military logistics and the labour of an enormous non-elite, non-combatant workforce. Secondly, he explores the making of imperial frontiers and highlights the roles of forts, routes, and local alliances in the process. Finally, he maps the cultural climate of war at the Mughal court and discusses how the empire legitimized war and conquest. In the process, what emerges is a fresh interpretation of Mughal empire-building as a highly adaptive, flexible, and accommodative process.


1987 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Félix D. Almaráz

In the twilight years of the eighteenth century, Spanish authorities of church and state resolved that the original Franciscan missions of Texas had achieved the goal of their early foundation, namely conversion of indigenous cultures to an Hispano-European lifestyle. Cognizant that the mission as a frontier agency had gained souls for the Catholic faith and citizens for the empire, Hispanic officials initiated secularization of the Texas establishments with the longest tenure, beginning with the missions along the upper San Antonio River. Less than a generation later, in the transition from Spanish dominion to Mexican rule in the nineteenth century, the Franciscan institutions, woefully in a condition of material neglect, engendered widespread secular avarice as numerous applicants with political contact in municipal government energetically competed to obtain land grants among the former mission temporalities.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carmen Ting ◽  
Thilo Rehren ◽  
Athanasios Vionis ◽  
Vasiliki Kassianidou

AbstractThis paper challenges the conventional characterisation of glazed ware productions in the eastern Mediterranean, especially the ones which did not feature the use of opaque or tin-glazed technology, as technologically stagnant and unsusceptible to broader socio-economic developments from the late medieval period onwards. Focusing on the Cypriot example, we devise a new approach that combines scientific analyses (thin-section petrography and SEM-EDS) and a full consideration of the chaîne opératoire in context to highlight the changes in technology and craft organisation of glazed ware productions concentrating in the Paphos, Famagusta and Lapithos region during the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries CE. Our results indicate that the Paphos production was short-lived, lasting from the establishment of Frankish rule in Cyprus in the thirteenth century to the aftermath of the fall of the Crusader campaigns in the fourteenth century. However, glazed ware production continued in Famagusta and Lapithos from the late thirteenth/fourteenth centuries through to the seventeenth century, using technical practices that were evidently different from the Paphos production. It is possible that these productions were set up to serve the new, local demands deriving from an intensification of commercial activities on the island. Further changes occurred to the technical practices of the Famagusta and Lapithos productions around the 16th/17th centuries, coinciding with the displacement of populations and socio-political organisation brought by the Ottoman rule.


STORIA URBANA ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 53-80
Author(s):  
Zsuzsa Ordasi

- Unlike other great cities of Europe, Budapest did not experience any significant urban development before the nineteenth century, especially before 1867, the year of the foundation of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. After that, the city became the second pole, after Vienna, of this important European state. The capital of the Kingdom of Hungary grew through the use of various types of urban architecture and especially through a "style" that was meant to express Hungarian national identity. Architects, engineers, and other professionals from Hungary and Austria contributed to this process of modernization as well as many foreigners from Germany, France and England. The city's master plan - modeled after Paris's - focused on the area crossed by the Viale Sugár [Boulevard of the Spoke] was set on the Parisian model and so covered only certain parts of the city. The Committee on Public Works (1870-1948) played a leading role in putting the plan approved in 1972 - into effect in all aspects of urban planning, architecture and infrastructure.


Author(s):  
Amin Tarzi

Since its inception as a separate political entity in 1747, Afghanistan has been embroiled in almost perpetual warfare, but it has never been ruled directly by the military. From initial expansionist military campaigns to involvement in defensive, civil, and internal consolidation campaigns, the Afghan military until the mid-19th century remained mainly a combination of tribal forces and smaller organized units. The central government, however, could only gain tenuous monopoly over the use of violence throughout the country by the end of the 19th century. The military as well as Afghan society remained largely illiterate and generally isolated from the prevailing global political and ideological trends until the middle of the 20th century. Politicization of Afghanistan’s military began in very small numbers after World War II with Soviet-inspired communism gaining the largest foothold. Officers associated with the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan were instrumental in two successful coup d’états in the country. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, ending the country’s sovereignty and ushering a period of conflict that continues to the second decade of the 21st century in varying degrees. In 2001, the United States led an international invasion of the country, catalyzing efforts at reorganization of the smaller professional Afghan national defense forces that have remained largely apolitical and also the country’s most effective and trusted governmental institution.


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