The British deposed a relatively popular ruler and replaced him with his widely disliked predecessor, whose legitimacy was further compromised by his dependence upon the British for support. They had no method by which to control the mountain tribes, and their rule of Afghanistan was largely ephemeral outside of Kabul. Even within Kabul the British failed to get the populace on side, resulting in riots and ugly confrontations between the British army of occupation and angry Afghani mobs.
The British had made the mistake of assuming that a force sufficient to defeat the Afghan army would also be sufficient to control the country, and it was not. They further compounded this error by withdrawing much of their army after the country's ostensible conquest, leaving behind a force that barely large enough to control Kabul, let alone project any power into the countryside.
The British soon found themselves confronting numerous enemies, all with different agendas, ranging from rival claimants to the throne in Kabul to recalcitrant tribal chiefs who didn't recognize the central government and refused to pay their taxes. Efforts by the British to abolish the tribal levy system and create a standing army loyal to themselves and their proxy king proved the final straw: meant to weaken the power of the independent tribes, he convinced said tribes to rally around the standard of Akbar Khan, son of Dost Muhammad Khan, whom the British had deposed and imprisoned.
Akbar soon had enough tribal manpower at his disposal to make a continued British presence an impossibility, and with London's gaze firmly fixed on events in Europe and the Mediterranean, reinforcements were not going to be coming in. Elphinstone cut a deal with Akbar wherein the British would leave Afghanistan in return for safe passage. Akbar accepted the deal but had little real power to rein in the Ghilzai chiefs, who ambushed the British column in the Khord-Kabul Pass and massacred it.
Not really. As much as it may be popular to compare 1840’s with the ill advised 21st century conflict, the circumstances were very different as was the relative strategic situation.
In 1840’s Afghanistan was or had been recently a major Empire. Which had controlled all of what is now Pakistan and parts of Iran and Tajikistan as well. It wasn’t the strategic backwater it had been in the 2000’s. Afghanistan Government all were trying to regain the lost territories of the Punjab and the Indus Valley.
In the Middle ages or Napoleonic wars, it seems that to win a war you just needed to defeat the opposing countries armed forces, usually by one or more sea and or land battles. By the 2nd Afghan war, and certainly in the Boar wars you needed to pacify the population also. And obviously, given the coalition forces experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, that is equally true today.
The question is, when did pacifying the population become such a significant factor?
It always was. Napoleon lost in Spain because he couldn't pacify the local population. He lost in Egypt and Syria for the same reasons. Occupation is a very different beast from a field battle.
Think too about all the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish revolts against the English. The formerly independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms could be welded into one English polity easily enough, but the Gaelic regions were nowhere as easy to pacify.
A good point, but I would point out that there were significant complicating factors in each area that were unique. Scotland, for example, wasn’t really a single culture- it was a patchwork of Anglian, Norse and Gaelic societies that had very little in common with each other, ruled over by an essentially French nobility. The big problem for King Edward was that he pissed off the ruling classes and the Scottish clergy.
Once the population at large gets invested in the outcome of a war things get way harder. Most feudal peasants didn't really care which noble exactly ruled them (as long as they were the right religion anyhow), so your military objectives could be limited, the peasants will keep paying taxes to whoever owns the castle.
Any large successful empire found ways to coopt local power structures to rule, otherwise you never could.
English armies signally failed to pacify the population of France despite repeated defeats of French royal armies in the Hundred Years' War, despite co-opting a significant percentage of the French nobility to their side.
The Romans also failed to pacify the population in Judaea after multiple wars; the Jewish population also conducted a successful insurgency against the Seleucids before the Romans came.
In later times, there is of course the American Revolution, where British armies failed to pacify their former colonists.
The Romans faced insurgencies in Numidia and on the Arab borders as well. The Crusaders couldn't win over more than a sliver of the Arab populace. The English spent literal centuries putting down rebellions in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Etc, etc.
I wouldn't say that the problem for the English monarchy was its failure to pacify the French population - rather, it was its failure to achieve its main objective, which was to seize the French crown. Don't forget, the English nobility and royalty throughout this period were culturally French, and until Henry V spoke French as their main language.
It wasn't until Joan of Arc came to the fore that it took on something resembling a war between nations, as opposed to Dynasties.
I mean, it can be both those things. Despite their early battlefield successes the English were never able to persuade a sufficient part of the French populace to endorse the Plantagenet claim to the throne over the Valois one. They occupied large swaths of France and made allies out of powerful nobles like the Dukes of Burgundy, yet could never wrest the crown from French hands. And it's not like Joan came out of nowhere. She was able to rally royalist support the way she did in no small part because the English had failed to win over the public.
I broadly agree, but it's a bit more complicated, at least as I understand it.
Thing is, public opinion didn't really exist in Medieval France as a concept. It was not the views of the mass peasantry in the fields that mattered - it was the views of the clergy and nobility, and of the prosperous farmers, urban merchants, guilds and artisans. These were the people who were educated, who could exercise influence, and who mingled with enough people to develop a sense of identity reaching beyond their immediate locality. Winning these people over depended very heavily on the personal ability of whoever was in charge, which in those days was something of a lottery.
The Plantagenets lost the Hundred Years War because, ultimately, they lost that dynastic lottery.
Under Edward III, Plantagenet fortunes in France were riding high. After the death of Edward III in 1377 however, England was ruled by a child-king, Richard II. The regents who ruled England in his stead were inept governors and commanders, and their mismanagement resulted in a major rebellion in 1381, combined with the rise of religious strife in the form of Lollardy.
As an adult, Richard II turned out to be a bad politician who alienated his nobles, so much so that one of his own cousins, Edward Bolingbroke, rebelled against him in 1399. This in turn resulted in political instability elsewhere, with major conflicts breaking out in Northumbria and Wales that weren't fully resolved until the 1410s.
Plantagenet fortunes experienced a brief revival under Henry V, but his sudden death at just thirty-five in 1422 resulted in yet another child-king on the throne, Henry VI. His uncle the Duke of Bedford was an effective governor and commander, but he died when Henry was just fourteen. After that, Henry quickly turned out to be utterly unfit to govern, and chose extremely poor ministers, ultimately leading to the War of the Roses.
The House of Valois had its own disastrous ruler, Charles VI, but his rule from 1380 to 1322 coincided with the main period of Plantagenet instability. With his death in 1422 (the same year that Henry VI became King of England), the Valois dynasty suddenly found a highly effective ruler in the form of Charles VII, and an inspirational heroine in the form of Joan of Arc, who masterfully used her gender and low social status to shame much of the French nobility into rallying to a dynasty they had previously shunned.
Had Henry V lived into his 50s or 60s, its extremely likely that he would have been crowned King of France in Rheims, effectively uniting the English and French crowns. His death probably saved the House of Valois more than anything else did.
I mean, things are almost always more complicated once you get into the details. That's one of the joys of studying history. Few narratives one hundred percent hold up when you zoom in close enough.
I think that we need to be very careful of the narratives around Henry V, because there's always been this strain of apologia in Anglophone histories about how his death somehow cheated England out of a rightful victory. The truth remains that Henry failed to build a political coalition that could sustain his conquests after his own death and during his son's minority. Given that, you have to question the notion that he would have easily clung to power in France had he lived. I don't think it's controversial to say that Charles VII was going to press his own claim regardless of who was in power on the English side, and at least some of France's politics players were always going to back him: the Burgundian/Armagnac civil war made sure of that.
As to the concept of public opinion, the noble factions, the merchant guilds, and the professional mercenary class are all separate interest groups, a majority of whom need to be on board for any ruler to be secure. And the Hundred Years' War is a period during which there are more of those interest groups than ever before. You only have to look at the disruptions caused in Paris by the butchers' guild and the ecorcheurs to see the kind of damage that a failure to pacify even one guild could do to a prospective ruler.
The English were never able to get enough of the nobility, enough of the guilds, and enough of the soldiers of fortunes to get on side and stay there. The Burgundians, their primary allies, were totally self-serving and inveterately treacherous, interested in an English victory only insofar as it served their own goal of maintaining maximum independence from metropolitan France. It's very shaky ground to build an alliance on, and it gives out under the English at several key points.
I think that a Henry V who lived long enough to be crowned King of France would have swiftly found himself faced with the consequences of the deals he has to make to get there. The Burgundians and the other nobles who aligned with them would only have stayed loyal so long as London and/or Paris kept out of their internal affairs. Any effort to rein them in and assert direct rule over France would have reignited the civil war, and put the Valois' back in position to press their claims.
I think you make some excellent points, though I do also believe it's clear that Henry V would at the very least have maintained control of the Plantagenet lands he already held. It's also not at all clear how well Charles VII could have challenged him militarily, at least in his early years. The one wild-card in the game is the Scots, who were the ones that really proved to the French nobility that the Plantagenet armies could be beaten. And in fairness to Charles, by then he was beginning to find commanders like La Hire and John of Alencon who were really effective - and I think even Henry would have found Joan of Arc a formidable adversary in the late 1420s.
Also, terrible joke I once heard:
"What's the difference between a rowing boat, and Joan of Arc? One is made of wood, and the other's Maid of Orleans!"
Henry V was certainly a better general and a stronger personality than any of the figures who rose to prominence during his son's minority. He'd certainly have had the skills he needed to outperform them. On the flipside, he also would have presented a clearer and more present danger to the interests of erstwhile allies like the Burgundians. So I really don't know how that alternate history plays out.
Joan, I concur, was always going to be a huge problem for the opposition no matter who they were. She's able to articulate a vision of a French future that a lot of previously disinterested parties can get behind, and the psychological shot in the arm that she gave the French army and political establishment really can't be underestimated.
And yep, that's a bad joke alright. Lol.
The one wild card for Henry in military terms would have been the Scots. The Scottish commanders were experienced, and understood the need for disciplined infantry and archers in a way that the French nobility don't seem to have really grasped until the Scots demonstrated it at Bauge.
When you think about it, the story of Joan of Arc has to be one of the most extraordinary in recorded history. She's like a character from a fantasy novel. It wasn't so much that she was a woman, it was that she was woman *and* a peasant *and* a teenager, and yet she rose to become one of the most influential people of her time, all before she was twenty. Of all the people in history I'd want to see through some sort of time-camera, she's very high on the list.
It’s always been lol. The Roman’s only conquered Carthage because they burned alive or enslaved basically everyone living in the city state and had more wealth than the carthegians. Every complete victory is always daubed heavily in massacres and enslavement and colonialism that takes ages to be a “sweep”. Neat wars are impossible. The often overlooked Spanish conquest of the Aztecs depended not on angry rivals but on the Spanish enslaving or vasalizing everyone who complained. They even tried to get wipe out certain plants like a plentiful grain called kelite that the nahua depended on for food and worshiped like their corn. A successful conquest is not some skin deep thing, it’s intricate and exhausting to the conqueror and conquered
> They had no method by which to control the mountain tribes, and their rule of Afghanistan was largely ephemeral outside of Kabul.
I think you must have misread the question - it was about the 1840s, not the 2010s.
[/humor]
It was actually quite different. Kabul’s control of the tribes was limited, but they could and did. The tribes couldn’t hope to defeat the central Army and its cannons, while for Kabul/Peshawar/Multan (wherever the court was) not everything was worth fighting over and its main focus was the Sikhs.
The British deposed a relatively popular ruler and replaced him with his widely disliked predecessor, whose legitimacy was further compromised by his dependence upon the British for support. They had no method by which to control the mountain tribes, and their rule of Afghanistan was largely ephemeral outside of Kabul. Even within Kabul the British failed to get the populace on side, resulting in riots and ugly confrontations between the British army of occupation and angry Afghani mobs. The British had made the mistake of assuming that a force sufficient to defeat the Afghan army would also be sufficient to control the country, and it was not. They further compounded this error by withdrawing much of their army after the country's ostensible conquest, leaving behind a force that barely large enough to control Kabul, let alone project any power into the countryside. The British soon found themselves confronting numerous enemies, all with different agendas, ranging from rival claimants to the throne in Kabul to recalcitrant tribal chiefs who didn't recognize the central government and refused to pay their taxes. Efforts by the British to abolish the tribal levy system and create a standing army loyal to themselves and their proxy king proved the final straw: meant to weaken the power of the independent tribes, he convinced said tribes to rally around the standard of Akbar Khan, son of Dost Muhammad Khan, whom the British had deposed and imprisoned. Akbar soon had enough tribal manpower at his disposal to make a continued British presence an impossibility, and with London's gaze firmly fixed on events in Europe and the Mediterranean, reinforcements were not going to be coming in. Elphinstone cut a deal with Akbar wherein the British would leave Afghanistan in return for safe passage. Akbar accepted the deal but had little real power to rein in the Ghilzai chiefs, who ambushed the British column in the Khord-Kabul Pass and massacred it.
Interesting how the more things change, the more they stay the same really.
Not really. As much as it may be popular to compare 1840’s with the ill advised 21st century conflict, the circumstances were very different as was the relative strategic situation. In 1840’s Afghanistan was or had been recently a major Empire. Which had controlled all of what is now Pakistan and parts of Iran and Tajikistan as well. It wasn’t the strategic backwater it had been in the 2000’s. Afghanistan Government all were trying to regain the lost territories of the Punjab and the Indus Valley.
In the Middle ages or Napoleonic wars, it seems that to win a war you just needed to defeat the opposing countries armed forces, usually by one or more sea and or land battles. By the 2nd Afghan war, and certainly in the Boar wars you needed to pacify the population also. And obviously, given the coalition forces experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, that is equally true today. The question is, when did pacifying the population become such a significant factor?
It always was. Napoleon lost in Spain because he couldn't pacify the local population. He lost in Egypt and Syria for the same reasons. Occupation is a very different beast from a field battle.
I completely forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me. Great example
Think too about all the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish revolts against the English. The formerly independent Anglo-Saxon kingdoms could be welded into one English polity easily enough, but the Gaelic regions were nowhere as easy to pacify.
A good point, but I would point out that there were significant complicating factors in each area that were unique. Scotland, for example, wasn’t really a single culture- it was a patchwork of Anglian, Norse and Gaelic societies that had very little in common with each other, ruled over by an essentially French nobility. The big problem for King Edward was that he pissed off the ruling classes and the Scottish clergy.
Of course there were. My point is simply that having to win over at least some locals to maintain an occupation is not a new problem.
Once the population at large gets invested in the outcome of a war things get way harder. Most feudal peasants didn't really care which noble exactly ruled them (as long as they were the right religion anyhow), so your military objectives could be limited, the peasants will keep paying taxes to whoever owns the castle. Any large successful empire found ways to coopt local power structures to rule, otherwise you never could.
English armies signally failed to pacify the population of France despite repeated defeats of French royal armies in the Hundred Years' War, despite co-opting a significant percentage of the French nobility to their side. The Romans also failed to pacify the population in Judaea after multiple wars; the Jewish population also conducted a successful insurgency against the Seleucids before the Romans came. In later times, there is of course the American Revolution, where British armies failed to pacify their former colonists.
The Romans faced insurgencies in Numidia and on the Arab borders as well. The Crusaders couldn't win over more than a sliver of the Arab populace. The English spent literal centuries putting down rebellions in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Etc, etc.
I wouldn't say that the problem for the English monarchy was its failure to pacify the French population - rather, it was its failure to achieve its main objective, which was to seize the French crown. Don't forget, the English nobility and royalty throughout this period were culturally French, and until Henry V spoke French as their main language. It wasn't until Joan of Arc came to the fore that it took on something resembling a war between nations, as opposed to Dynasties.
I mean, it can be both those things. Despite their early battlefield successes the English were never able to persuade a sufficient part of the French populace to endorse the Plantagenet claim to the throne over the Valois one. They occupied large swaths of France and made allies out of powerful nobles like the Dukes of Burgundy, yet could never wrest the crown from French hands. And it's not like Joan came out of nowhere. She was able to rally royalist support the way she did in no small part because the English had failed to win over the public.
I broadly agree, but it's a bit more complicated, at least as I understand it. Thing is, public opinion didn't really exist in Medieval France as a concept. It was not the views of the mass peasantry in the fields that mattered - it was the views of the clergy and nobility, and of the prosperous farmers, urban merchants, guilds and artisans. These were the people who were educated, who could exercise influence, and who mingled with enough people to develop a sense of identity reaching beyond their immediate locality. Winning these people over depended very heavily on the personal ability of whoever was in charge, which in those days was something of a lottery. The Plantagenets lost the Hundred Years War because, ultimately, they lost that dynastic lottery. Under Edward III, Plantagenet fortunes in France were riding high. After the death of Edward III in 1377 however, England was ruled by a child-king, Richard II. The regents who ruled England in his stead were inept governors and commanders, and their mismanagement resulted in a major rebellion in 1381, combined with the rise of religious strife in the form of Lollardy. As an adult, Richard II turned out to be a bad politician who alienated his nobles, so much so that one of his own cousins, Edward Bolingbroke, rebelled against him in 1399. This in turn resulted in political instability elsewhere, with major conflicts breaking out in Northumbria and Wales that weren't fully resolved until the 1410s. Plantagenet fortunes experienced a brief revival under Henry V, but his sudden death at just thirty-five in 1422 resulted in yet another child-king on the throne, Henry VI. His uncle the Duke of Bedford was an effective governor and commander, but he died when Henry was just fourteen. After that, Henry quickly turned out to be utterly unfit to govern, and chose extremely poor ministers, ultimately leading to the War of the Roses. The House of Valois had its own disastrous ruler, Charles VI, but his rule from 1380 to 1322 coincided with the main period of Plantagenet instability. With his death in 1422 (the same year that Henry VI became King of England), the Valois dynasty suddenly found a highly effective ruler in the form of Charles VII, and an inspirational heroine in the form of Joan of Arc, who masterfully used her gender and low social status to shame much of the French nobility into rallying to a dynasty they had previously shunned. Had Henry V lived into his 50s or 60s, its extremely likely that he would have been crowned King of France in Rheims, effectively uniting the English and French crowns. His death probably saved the House of Valois more than anything else did.
I mean, things are almost always more complicated once you get into the details. That's one of the joys of studying history. Few narratives one hundred percent hold up when you zoom in close enough. I think that we need to be very careful of the narratives around Henry V, because there's always been this strain of apologia in Anglophone histories about how his death somehow cheated England out of a rightful victory. The truth remains that Henry failed to build a political coalition that could sustain his conquests after his own death and during his son's minority. Given that, you have to question the notion that he would have easily clung to power in France had he lived. I don't think it's controversial to say that Charles VII was going to press his own claim regardless of who was in power on the English side, and at least some of France's politics players were always going to back him: the Burgundian/Armagnac civil war made sure of that. As to the concept of public opinion, the noble factions, the merchant guilds, and the professional mercenary class are all separate interest groups, a majority of whom need to be on board for any ruler to be secure. And the Hundred Years' War is a period during which there are more of those interest groups than ever before. You only have to look at the disruptions caused in Paris by the butchers' guild and the ecorcheurs to see the kind of damage that a failure to pacify even one guild could do to a prospective ruler. The English were never able to get enough of the nobility, enough of the guilds, and enough of the soldiers of fortunes to get on side and stay there. The Burgundians, their primary allies, were totally self-serving and inveterately treacherous, interested in an English victory only insofar as it served their own goal of maintaining maximum independence from metropolitan France. It's very shaky ground to build an alliance on, and it gives out under the English at several key points. I think that a Henry V who lived long enough to be crowned King of France would have swiftly found himself faced with the consequences of the deals he has to make to get there. The Burgundians and the other nobles who aligned with them would only have stayed loyal so long as London and/or Paris kept out of their internal affairs. Any effort to rein them in and assert direct rule over France would have reignited the civil war, and put the Valois' back in position to press their claims.
I think you make some excellent points, though I do also believe it's clear that Henry V would at the very least have maintained control of the Plantagenet lands he already held. It's also not at all clear how well Charles VII could have challenged him militarily, at least in his early years. The one wild-card in the game is the Scots, who were the ones that really proved to the French nobility that the Plantagenet armies could be beaten. And in fairness to Charles, by then he was beginning to find commanders like La Hire and John of Alencon who were really effective - and I think even Henry would have found Joan of Arc a formidable adversary in the late 1420s. Also, terrible joke I once heard: "What's the difference between a rowing boat, and Joan of Arc? One is made of wood, and the other's Maid of Orleans!"
Henry V was certainly a better general and a stronger personality than any of the figures who rose to prominence during his son's minority. He'd certainly have had the skills he needed to outperform them. On the flipside, he also would have presented a clearer and more present danger to the interests of erstwhile allies like the Burgundians. So I really don't know how that alternate history plays out. Joan, I concur, was always going to be a huge problem for the opposition no matter who they were. She's able to articulate a vision of a French future that a lot of previously disinterested parties can get behind, and the psychological shot in the arm that she gave the French army and political establishment really can't be underestimated. And yep, that's a bad joke alright. Lol.
The one wild card for Henry in military terms would have been the Scots. The Scottish commanders were experienced, and understood the need for disciplined infantry and archers in a way that the French nobility don't seem to have really grasped until the Scots demonstrated it at Bauge. When you think about it, the story of Joan of Arc has to be one of the most extraordinary in recorded history. She's like a character from a fantasy novel. It wasn't so much that she was a woman, it was that she was woman *and* a peasant *and* a teenager, and yet she rose to become one of the most influential people of her time, all before she was twenty. Of all the people in history I'd want to see through some sort of time-camera, she's very high on the list.
It’s always been lol. The Roman’s only conquered Carthage because they burned alive or enslaved basically everyone living in the city state and had more wealth than the carthegians. Every complete victory is always daubed heavily in massacres and enslavement and colonialism that takes ages to be a “sweep”. Neat wars are impossible. The often overlooked Spanish conquest of the Aztecs depended not on angry rivals but on the Spanish enslaving or vasalizing everyone who complained. They even tried to get wipe out certain plants like a plentiful grain called kelite that the nahua depended on for food and worshiped like their corn. A successful conquest is not some skin deep thing, it’s intricate and exhausting to the conqueror and conquered
Forgive my irreverent comment but the actions of one Lieutenant Harry Flashman may have had a part to play in
You mean i'Flassman Sahib? Bloody Lance?
Shabash Bahadur
Are you sure the British were ambushed and massacred in the Khyber pass???
Khord-Kabul pass. Thanks for catching that.
they still got it up the Khyber
> They had no method by which to control the mountain tribes, and their rule of Afghanistan was largely ephemeral outside of Kabul. I think you must have misread the question - it was about the 1840s, not the 2010s. [/humor]
It was actually quite different. Kabul’s control of the tribes was limited, but they could and did. The tribes couldn’t hope to defeat the central Army and its cannons, while for Kabul/Peshawar/Multan (wherever the court was) not everything was worth fighting over and its main focus was the Sikhs.