Warfare in early modern Africa, c.1450-c.1850

Book section : Chapter

Sub-Saharan Africa was on the threshold of a new and violent era in the second half of the fifteenth century. The ensuing four centuries would see innovative forms of military organisation, novel cultures of militarism underpinning such systems, and new wars, as well as new ways of fighting them. There were often different factors at work in different regions; the presence of external drivers was a key distinction between Atlantic Africa and the rest of the continent, for instance. However, warfare across early modern Africa had much in common, in terms of the aim to control factor endowments, to maximise population, and to construct enduring ideological systems, whether territorially or culturally defined. In some ways – certainly in terms of the underlying trends and broad contours of Africa’s military history – the existence or absence of external intrusion is a distraction, however significant it was in particular places at particular times. The outcome of the processes in motion between c. 1450 and c. 1850 was an expansion in military scale, the professionalisation of soldiery, the adoption of new weaponry, and the militarisation of the polity – whether ‘state-based’ or otherwise. The militarisation of African polities and societies was an ongoing process between the fifteenth and the nineteenth century, a period which in many ways witnessed the laying of the foundations of modern African political systems; this would culminate in a veritable military revolution in the nineteenth century, a transformation in the organisation and culture of violence, without which Europe’s later partition of the continent cannot properly be understood.

Authors: Reid, R

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Host title: The Cambridge History of War. Vol III: War and the Early Modern World
• Pages: 387-408
• Chapter number: 15
• Series: Cambridge History of War
• Series number: 3
• Place of publication: Cambridge
• Publication date: 2025-07-18
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.1017/9780511843136.017
• EISBN: 9780511843136
• ISBN: 9780521874281
• Language: English
• Keywords: militarism; ecology; state building; cavalry; firearms; slavery; logistics; military revolution; religion
• Subtype: Chapter