The Battle of Bunker’s Hill, June 17, 1775 by John Trumball in 1786

(17) WARS OF INDEPENDENCE & SUCCESSION

The archetypal wars of political states.

Admittedly wars of independence require a state to actually survive after it is subjugated by or subject to another state. Or rather, the concept of a people or nation to at least survive or remain intact – let alone emerge or aspire to its own state – when subjugated by or subject to another state. In modern parlance, the concept of national self-determination.

So you don’t see too many of them in pre-modern history, when states or peoples fought more for stakes of survival from being absorbed – or dismembered or destroyed altogether.

On occasion, there were peoples or nations approximating the modern concepts of national self-determination that rose up against the states that ruled them – although such pre-modern conflicts tend to be styled as rebellions or revolts rather than the more modern style of revolutions or wars of independence, not least because they tended to lose.

The Roman Empire offers the example par excellence – the various Jewish revolts, among the best known of their type because of their religious significance, particularly for Christianity as hints of it seeped into the New Testament. Also notable is the Iceni revolt led by Boudicea in Britain.

However, for your definitive war of independence – the one that both defined and started the wave of modern wars of independence – you have to go to none other than the American War of Independence. There were wars of independence before it, but without the same profile, influence or effect – although the Eighty Years War is an arguable close contender. It’s odd to think that before the Dutch war for independence, it was the Spanish Netherlands.

But as I said, the American War of Independence ushered in the various waves of modern wars of independence styled as such in name and effect. The first wave was in the same hemisphere, with the Haitian War of Independence following close behind it, and the various larger Latin American wars of independence in the early nineteenth century. But the other hemisphere soon followed, particularly with the various European wars of independence against the Ottoman Empire.

Of course, the high tide of wars of independence came with the wave of decolonisation in the European empires from the Second World War onwards.

On the other hand, wars of succession may well predate sophisticated political states or concepts of nationhood, perhaps back to rivals contending for prehistoric tribal chiefdoms, although the wars themselves may well lack the same depth or sophistication. More like palace coups – or duels.

But wars of succession certainly are a recurring feature upon the emergence of political states – namely political states of absolute monarchy, as a “war of succession is a war prompted by a succession crisis in which two or more individuals claim the right of successor to a deceased or deposed monarch”.

The insanely convoluted Wars of the Diadochi – or Wars of Alexander’s Successors – are some of the most famous wars of succession, and most of the endless Roman or Byzantine civil wars were essentially wars of succession.

Where wars of succession become more complicated is when foreign powers intervene, allying themselves with a faction. Such was the case in the heyday of wars of succession, the wars titled as such but that were effectively global conflicts between rival European powers, in early modern history – wars such as the War of the Spanish Succession or the War of the Austrian Succession.

My personal favorite, however, is the more metaphorical uses of the term, not for nations vying against each other for the successor to the throne of a nation, but as claimants in the vacuum or void left by the collapse or decline of a great power or multinational empire.

Herman Wouk’s duology of The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance, featured excerpts from the memoirs of fictional German general von Roon – who styled the Second World War as the War of British Succession, with Germany vying for world power from the decline of the British Empire, only of course to lose to the United States (and with the Soviet Union to expend so much blood only to transfer world power from one Anglo-Saxon power to another).

In a less fictional and more historical sense, historian J.M Roberts styled most Middle East wars as wars of Ottoman Succession, over national boundaries in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire – including the Arab-Israeli wars and the Gulf War prompted by Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Most recently, I’ve seen reference to a quite a few wars between and within the post-Soviet republics styled as wars of Soviet Succession.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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