Warfare

Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate this tendency is to note that Europeans established forts and other fixed positions to serve as a defensible position from which they could launch military initiatives. In Africa, this meant that Europeans were forced to remain closely tied to their forts around the coast. Not only was the African interior well-defended by armies equal or superior to European forces, but European armies had no biological defense against malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases. Until the mass manufacture of quinine, which provided a defense against malaria, and the advent of the machine gun, the interior of Africa remained forbidden territory to European armies.

Siege warfare was an unknown tactic in many of the areas encountered by Europeans during their voyages of exploration. Because indigenous populations fought primarily to obtain labor or to secure a tribute from the defeated party, rather than to capture territory or acquire strategic bases, it was believed that the best defense against an attack was either immediate surrender or temporary flight. For example, the last Muslim leader of the port city of Malacca was not terribly concerned with the arrival of a small Portuguese squadron in 1511. After some initial resistance to the Portuguese attack, the Muslim leader withdrew from the city to roughly a day's journey inland thinking that the Portuguese wanted to loot the city and then leave. Instead, the Portuguese remained and built the fort known as A Famosa, which was constructed on the ruins of the Great Mosque with stones gathered from the sacred hill where the sultan's ancestors were buried. Upon completion of the fort, the walls that surrounded Portuguese Malacca stretched two kilometres and withstood ten different sieges.

There was only one other fully fortified city that could compare to Malacca during this initial period of European expansion and that was Manila in the Philippines. Prior to the arrival of the Spaniards in the 1560's, Muslims from Borneo and the Moluccas brought with them the art of fortification to the Philippine islands. These particular fortifications, however, were built from wood that could not resist Spanish artillery and attack. As a matter of survival, a few local rulers began to follow the European lead and began building brick or stone walls in the sixteenth century. Despite these attempts to incorporate European military architecture into Manila's defenses, Manila was captured by Spanish forces and the keys to the long-distance trade of East Asia switched to European hands. Manila was an advantageous port for the transpacific line with North America, and Malacca and Batavia ensured commerce with India. All three remained in Western hands (although not always the same hands) until 1942.

It can be concluded that the indigenous populations of Africa, the Americas, and the Philippines lost their independence largely because Western military technology and tactics gave the Europeans an advantage. In the aforementioned areas, emphasis was not placed on defensive fortifications, which, when they existed, were made only of wood and proved no match for the firepower of the Europeans. The same cannot be said of the peoples of East Asia. Europeans were kept at bay during the initial period of expansion because the East Asians employed many of the same practices as the Europeans. Firearms, fortresses, large standing armies, and warships were part of the military tradition of China, Korea, and Japan. Indeed, bronze and iron artillery were fully developed in China before the technology spread westward to Europe in the fourteenth century. As contact between the two diminished, the evolution of firearms took a different course in the two regions. By the sixteenth century, the iron and bronze guns manufactured in the West were both more powerful and more mobile than those made in the East, but European weapons were studied closely and imitated when they were brought into the region during the 1520's.

The differences in military technology between Europe and Asia are perhaps best illustrated by the following example. European armies believed what limited the effectiveness of firearms was the length of time it took for a soldier to reload his weapon. The Japanese, on the other hand, believed it was more important for the soldier firing the weapon to be accurate with his shot. Therefore, while Europeans sought to improve loading times, Japanese manuals from the mid-sixteenth century onwards placed greater emphasis on developing skills to improve accuracy. Once this was achieved, energy was then devoted to improving the rate of fire from a given unit, and developing more effective offensive positions and formations (e.g. the practice of drawing up musketeers to fire in ranks). One Japanese warlord, Oda Nobunaga, experimented with musketry salvoes in the 1560's - twenty years before Maurice of Nassau and the army of the Dutch Republic used the technique, and seventy years before it became standard practice in European armies.

Heavier European weapons, like siege guns, brought about a change in Japanese fortifications. Prior to the introduction of heavy artillery, it was more important for a fortress to have high walls in order to prevent an attacker from gaining access. The larger artillery pieces used by Europeans meant that high walls were no longer as important as walls that could withstand significant bombardment. As a result of the pressure brought by European technology, a new defensive fortification soon emerged in Japan that was designed to create a solid mass of rock and soil. The prototype of this defensive arrangement was built between 1576 and 1579 beside Lake Biwa at Azuchi. Hilltops and thick stone walls were incorporated to produce a solid foundation that was surrounded by a seven-story castle.

Although the Japanese were prepared to take Western innovations and adapt them to local conditions, early modern China did not need to study and adapt Western technology in order to survive. China had invented gunpowder as early as the ninth century (whereas gunpowder was first produced in Europe in 1267) and had improved it over the course of centuries. During the later years of the thirteenth century, the Chinese invented cannons, using gunpowder to fire projectiles from metal barrels. As a result of this knowledge, their massive fortifications were designed to resist both artillery bombardment and mining. The Chinese did not build castles or fortifications. Instead they chose to fortify entire towns by surrounding them with massive stone walls that were fifteen meters thick in places. Not only did theses walls withstand bombardment in the sixteenth century, they did so until the nineteenth century. The ultimate result of fortifications in East Asia meant that siege guns were all but useless.

It is important to remember that the European way of waging war overseas was completely different from the manner in which wars were conducted in Europe. For the most part, wars in Europe were normally the product of limited aims and were settled with the capture of small portions of territory and assets. Those fought abroad were completely different in terms of both their scope and ultimate objectives. As Geoffrey Parker has pointed out, in lands encountered by European explorers, the goal was the permanent destruction of indigenous political systems, the subjugation of the enemy population, and the conquest and exploitation of enemy resources. The limiting factor in wars fought outside Europe lay not in European objectives but rather, the number of men and the amount of materiel deployed to fight these battles. However, the use of ships allowed Spanish forces to choose their points of access in the Americas, and mobilize reinforcements and supplies. In fact, relatively few soldiers and resources were needed to win what European commanders called the "small wars" of the sixteenth century. Indeed, consider that Cort's had at his disposal approximately 500 troops when he defeated the Aztecs, and Pizarro defeated the Inca Empire with less than 200 soldiers. The entire Portuguese overseas empire, from Japan to southern Africa, was administered and defended by fewer than 10,000 Europeans. In the case of the Incas and Aztecs, however, the "small war" explanation completely ignored the Spanish exploitation of indigenous rebellions and European diseases that ravaged local populations.

From their ships, Europeans, aided by their advanced military technology, had the upper hand. On land, however, the advantage granted by technology was sometimes lessened or eliminated altogether. Firearms could be rendered useless by environmental conditions that could dampen gunpowder. Philosophical differences also served to frustrate European armies fighting abroad. Trained to mass their forces and attack at a decisive point, European armies were frustrated by the lack of fixed targets. Without a city or a fort available to draw opponents into a fixed battle, campaigns in the Americas often forced Europeans to adopt guerrilla tactics to suppress their enemies. The result was a prolonged and frustrating campaign of minor skirmishes that either ended in stalemate between the two forces or in a limited victory for the Europeans.