The Design Dilemma: Ethnic Stacking and the Formation of Colonial Militaries

• In Event: External Interventions in State Militaries and Domestic Security Forces

Abstract

Colonizing powers often built militaries in the territories they colonized, but when they did so,they faced a dilemma: make the military too weak and the colony is defenseless, but make it too strong and the colony can rebel. Scholars have argued that, as a result, colonizers often relied on ethnic stacking (i.e., the recruitment from one religious or ethnic group and the exclusion of others) as a way to increase the size of their colonies’ militaries while avoiding unity between the military and general population. However, I argue that, in actuality, reliance on ethnic stacking varied both between colonizers and across a colonizer’s colonies. My paper shows that varying levels of direct competition over colonies and a colony’s proximity to broader conflict led to variation in how colonial powers designed their colonies’ militaries. I present an original dataset on the ethnic composition of both the officer corps and the rank-and-file in African colonies from 1925-1945, based on archival research.

Author

• Julia Raven, University of California, Berkeley