General editor’s introduction

The phrase 'Guardians of Empire' has a deliberately ambiguous ring.Guardians and wards have famously had relationships that run along the spectrum from the benevolent to the brutal.In the imperial setting, such terminology has sometimes been used to imply adulthood and tutelage according to some European notion of civilization or alleged economic development.From the standpoint of imperialists themselves, the concept of the guardian could be applied to administrators, to the intellectual apologists for Empire, even to missionaries and educators.Here, however, it is connected specifically to the armed forces that kept watch and ward both on the frontiers and in the heartlands of imperial territories.Colonial forces and campaigns which they fought, or sometimes imagined they fought, have a specially complex place in the history of imperialism.Almost all colonial armies were a mixture of expatriate troops and officers and local recruits of one sort or another.The recruitment, maintenance, interaction and deployment of both of these categories have to be interpreted not only in terms of the political, economic and military history of imperialism, but also in the context of the distinctive social, cultural, intellectual, medical and sometimes scientific formations of both metropolitan powers and colonial territories.Imperial forces were also at the centre of an intense propagandist, presentational and literary activity.Myths were central to the justification and bluffs of imperial rule and the myths of the military were among the most potent.This explains why, as James Belich has argued (The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Harmondsworth, 1988)), colonial campaigns were often as important for what both contemporaries and participants imagined had happened as for anything remotely resembling reality.The particular strengths of this volume lie in the range of empires, forces and topics covered.American, British, Dutch, French and German territories are all considered here.There can be little doubt that this kind of comparative approach needs to be developed yet further.A fuller understanding of the phenomenon of imperialism requires a recognition of the manner in which empires drew on each other's experiences, while still grappling with the specific complexities of many and diverse colonial territories.This was certainly as true of the military area as it was of the economic, administrative and legal.Similarly, when we move on to the era of decolonization, a combination of both international and local circumstances needs to be understood.Not least among these was the continuing effectiveness of colonial forces and the activities, or lack of them, of their demobilized colleagues.Some description and analysis of many of these issues, including the important theme of women and camp followers, can be found in this collection of essays by a group of international scholars in the field.

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