Food for Thought

Week 9: Thursday, March 25

1) What questions does Douglas Porch wish to answer in his article about imperial wars?

2) What does Porch say were the constraints and difficulties that impeded imperial expansion?

3) How did Europeans attempt to surmount the difficulties associated with fighting non-Europeans? Were there problems with any of these attempts?

4) What are the three types of warfare that Callwell discusses? What is his most important message in the first section?

5) Why does Callwell assert that Europeans labor under a strategic disadvantage when dealing with less "civilized" peoples who fight more or less as guerrillas? What must European armies do to get the guerrillas to fight?

Questions Concerning Breaker Morant

1) How does Breaker Morant illustrate the principles and ideas highlighted in the reading?

2) How does this movie show the fundamental difficulties of fighting a guerrilla war? What are these difficulties?

Other Questions to Consider

1) What problems and limitations did non-Western peoples suffer from as they attempted to halt the European imperial assault?

2) Why does Porch think the future looked bleak for imperial powers even after they had conquered large regions of the non-Western world?