so the British used to continually deploy a bunch of military units with English or Irish soldiers in India and in sub-saharan Africa. Even without significant war losses these men must have been exposed to the tropical diseases that they were not genetically adapted to and modern medicine was clueless about.
Well, so what do we know about typical yearly casualties in these colonial troops? What did the British public itself know about it? Did they publish in the press body count articles along the lines of “this year so many died, which is big improvement from last year due to a bunch of sanitation reforms”? Or did the military keep it a state secret?
I’ll see if I can dig up some numbers and some cites, but back in those days it wasn’t uncommon to lose more soldiers to disease than battlefield wounds.
I haven’t found any good statistics yet about places like Africa or India, but I did find this, which is interesting. During the Napoleanic wars, the UK army lost 25,569 men in battle between 1804 and 1815. During the same time period, 193,851 died from disease.
There are lots of other statistics on that site you might find interesting. The listings are by wars though. They don’t give statistics for how many troops died while just stationed in a particular location.
I have no cites but could probably dig up some if you really started picking on me, but the British had an incredibly small amount of troops in India during the 19thc compared with the general population and even with the native warriors.
They seemed to keep control by showing (Not faked) supreme self confidence, moving around the sub continent a lot, and extreme aggression when attacked.
They were totally shocked when the Indians rebelled against them and (memories of Boudicas rebellion against the Romans )murdered British women and children, but god knows how managed to come back and beat the Mutineers.
Apparently the “Black Hole of Calcutta” is a myth.
I would be interested to learn how people from the sub continent have learned their history.
On a different thread I mentioned and caused some outrage by saying Indians/Pakistanis weren’t foreigners but Canadians were to Brits (Because we’ve got a lot of very valued Indian emigrants) but the fucking Canadians think that they’re too good to come to our country .
Bastards! .
Paging AK74.
That was true in about every war, up until WWII at least. Heck, just the influenza epidemic from the last year of WWI killed way more people than the 5 years of the war. Even in WWII it might be true.
The worst place to be sent on duty disease wise in the 18th and 19th Century British Army was the West Indies, not Africa or India.
In the sub-continent it was the weather which was the big issue, not diseases as such. The biggest diesases were Cholera and Malaria, which by that time were treatable.
AK84, why were West Indies worse than Africa? Did Africa have less tropical disease? Or did they basically not have anybody in the equatorial areas until very late in the century?
Certainly correct: before Yellow Fever was controlled (through the actions of Drs. Carlos Finlay and Walter Reed), deaths in the West Indies were overwhelmingly due to it.
For example, a major reason why the French effort to build the Panama Canal failed, was because most of the workers and manager dies within a year of getting to Panama.
Even places like Jamaica were deadly-I saw a cemetary there, where hundreds of British soldiers were buried-all from yellow fever.
French General LeClerc’s attempt to recapture Haiti was thwarted, when over 60% of his soldiers died.
WEst indies/Central America=death.
I heartily recommend a book entitled “Queen Victoria’s Little Wars”, which discusses this topic.
The author’s thesis seems to be, if I understand him correctly, that the major advantage the Brits possessed was its regimental military system. The effect of the system was to focus loyalty to an extreme degree to one’s regiment. It became a sort of military tribe, with its own history and traditions extending back hundreds of years in some cases and a considerable degree of interconnection with family life - people’s fathers, grandfathers etc. had all belonged to ‘the regiment’ - and a great success in creating a communial military philosophy (‘dying for the honour of the regiment’ was common and expected of all ranks).
The great success, though, was in using this structure to create military units out of peoples who had absolutely no love for the British (Irish, Scot Highlanders, Indians, Sikhs, Gurkhas, etc.). In this way the brits were able to make effective and fearsome soldiers out of the very peoples they were ruling over.
The big story of the Mutiny wasn’t that some of these units rebelled, it was that most of them did not: if all Indian ‘sepoy’ regiments had rebelled, the Brits would have been flushed out of India, no question.
The usual figure for the U.S. Civil War is that two died from disease for every one who died as a direct result of battlefield wounds, IIRC. And these were men who never left the same continent.
British rule in the Sub Continent can be divided into three phases, phase one Company Raj; 1757-1858, phase II, Crown Rule, 1818-1919, phase III greater self rule, 1919-1947; Independance.
The first phase was Company Rule in all its less than egalitarian manifestations, yet the biggest reason for success here was timing, the Mughal Empire was declining and had been devasted by a defeat to the Persians in 1736. The successor states were rising yet were not secure and the British were able to defeat them.
The second, post mutiny phase saw British rule being if not welcomed, accepted and even perfered, remember from about 1707, the death of the last Great Mughal, Aurangzeb, till 1858, the sub continent was almost continiously at war, if the British did anything, at the time they brought peace and with it its assorted prosperity (reletivly speaking). With the result, come 1914, the people of the Sub Continent were were supportive of the war effort. Of course the British establishments paranoia and more than overt racism managed to squander all the good will and withing 10 years of 1914, there was a major nationalistic movement going on.
No WWI, who know, I might have been posting from British India.