For a decent (but not great) book covering this period, check out “Chinese Warlord – the Career fo Feng Yu-Hsiang”.

Unfortunately it’s one of the few books out there dedicated to covering this period.

His rise to power – as an officer of artillery (if I recall he was a lower rank) he was asked by officials of Paris to quell the rioting of their “fellow citizens”. He used grapeshot to great effect.

The French Revolution had killed or forced so many elite to flee into exile that one result was a shortage of capable people. There must have been a shortage of higher ranking officers and administrators and this paved the way for the ambitious Bonaparte’s carer.

Thus into this vacuum will step the warlords, and although they might receive some angry letters from the UN or Amnesty International or something like that, they pretty much will have free reign to implement their “one micro-step above anarchy” program of gangster-ism.

Two ways of saying the same, though, right?

Globalization causes the gales to blow very hard. Weakly-founded states crumple.

China is currently massively “extending itself” in Africa. India has a lot of issues at home (Naxalite rebellion, Kashmir, Maoists next door in Nepal, Tamil insurgents and the LTTE next door in Sri Lanka, etc.), but it is extending naval power throughout the Indian Ocean region. Russia is pretty much stuck with its own mess at home, and in its “near abroad”. China is more likely to coopt warlords than to take them down, ala Kitchener taking down the Khalifa.

I think our current situation in Iraq is going to make the US less likely to intervene in the future and no one else is likely to extend themselves (ha ha not the UN) and the Chinese, Russians and Indian nations, that have local power, are likely to utilize it to put out fires in their own immediate backyard rather than to extend themselves.

Was Napoleon nothing more, or less, than the biggest opportunistic warlord of them all?

As historians and political scientist use the term, Napoleon would qualify as a warlord who succeeded in evolving into a legitimate sovereign. Stalin, on the other hand was not a warlord.

All rulers come to power by violence either done by themselves or by those from whom they inherit. Warlords differ in that they rise to power based on no previously existing social structure. A warlord’s power depends solely on the efficacy of his use of violence. They need no previous rank, title or other cultural standard of authority. If a warlord succeeds in creating a stable structure for those who succeed him then we often regard him as transforming into a legitimate sovereign.

Napoleon started out as a warlord in the classic model. He rose to power due to his military ability during a time of chaos. He ruled with absolute power based on a structure never seen before in his realm. Although he personally eventually failed to keep power, he did establish a lineage that inherited his mantle of moral authority so in the end he became a legitimate sovereign.

Stalin by contrast inherited his power from Lenin. Lenin doesn’t qualify as true warlord because he simply replaced the previous sovereign and inherited the structure already in place. That would qualify him as a revolutionary. Warlords create their own system of order after the collapse of the previous order.

Arguably, the domains of a warlord represent government stripped down to its ugly essentials. Such domains represents nothing more than an area of a force monopoly. Many of the world’s pre-industrial sovereign descended from warlord ancestors. Periods of social chaos open the way for merit advancement even if that merit is one of killing. People in a warlords domain may benefit by having only one brutal exploiter to deal with instead of the hundreds of random ones that chaos breeds. Self interest akin to that generated by private property leads successful warlords to systemize the ordering of their domains. This systemization eventually evolves into law and order enforced by custom. Descendants of such warlords always find themselves far more constrained in their actions than their forbearers.

Not exactly sure what that sentence means but warlords have been around forever. The last five centuries of globalization have merely connected warlords to the rest of the world just as it has connected everyone else. I think this will bring an end to warlord phenomenon. Warlords can only exist in areas without any other form of order. When warlords come to the attention of major powers they get wiped out. I think globalization will eventually spell the end to warlordism for just this reason. The great powers will be forced to extend law and order over their entire world just in self-defense.

I think Stalin would take that title. And he had the criminal connections to boot. Really, it’s quite wonderful how he took over the Communist party and purged all the old intellectuals that had surrounded Lenin. Masterful, really.

A thought occurs: Was Napoleon nothing more, or less, than the biggest opportunistic warlord of them all?