Metanarratives in Asian Military History

Abstract

Asia, the largest of the continents, is not only vast in physical extent but also amazingly diverse, embracing cultures as different as those of China, India, Japan, and Iran, as well as the nations of Southeast Asia and (in part) the Arab world. As large as it looms for geographers, however, Asia has long been a sort of terra incognita for military historians writing in English and other Western languages. Most of what has been written focuses on just a few episodes defined primarily as conflicts between European or American protagonists and Asiatic opponents, from the Persian invasion of Greece, the Crusades, and the Mongol forays into eastern Europe to the building of the British Raj in India, the Boxer Rebellion in China, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The focus is usually on the Western side in the conflict, with Asians appearing most often in the role of the exotic Oriental ‘other’. The violence of Asians against other Asians, which accounts for the overwhelming majority of the continent’s martial past, has received much less attention. Apart from the obvious difficulty of mastering the languages and understanding the cultures, the relative neglect of Asian warfare may also be attributed to the persistence of impressions formed during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, when western militaries, endowed with all the advantages flowing from the industrial revolution and the social and political dynamism that accompanied it, ran roughshod over the forces of Asian states and empires. One of the legacies of the colonial era was that most Asian peoples were perceived as weak and militarily ineffectual, and their ways of war, consequently, were not considered worthy of serious study. This contemptuous attitude permeates the older literature touching on Asian military history. It can be seen, for example, in the 1924 edition of Sir Charles Oman’s classic survey of medieval warfare, in which that eminent British military historian casually dismissed the notion that the Chinese could possibly have been the inventors of gunpowder, and in Barbara Tuchman’s willingness to repeat – in her influential bestseller Stilwell and the American Experience in China – the old chestnut that Chinese warlord armies of the early twentieth century had the habit of suspending their battles to put up umbr-